Shelley's Frankenstein The Monster's Meaning Essay

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Frankenstein

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was a gothic work of literature written during the height of the Romantic Era—a period in the 19th century when her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friends Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron were writing classic poetry full of passion that spurned the conventional doctrines of the Old World and rejected the over-emphasis on Reason of the Enlightenment. As E. Michael Jones, has noted, however, their orientation was still rooted in a faithless and naturalistic approach to life. They had no interest in the salvation story of the Old World or its religion. Perhaps not coincidentally, they literally left a string of bodies in their wake, as Janet Todd has pointed out: Percy’s first wife drowned herself after he left her to run away with the 17-year-old Mary (daughter of the authoress of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman). Mary’s half-sister killed herself. Two of their children then died at a young age. Mary Shelley was deeply depressed and her husband was essentially a libertine masking his license in Romanticism. From this perspective, Shelley’s gothic horror fiction Frankenstein seems at least somewhat semi-autobiographical. Her husband could be said to be represented by Victor Frankenstein in the novel and the monster could be said to be the personification of all his machinations and the death and misery that his commitment to passion and Romance ultimately brought about.

What is Frankenstein’s monster after all? It is a rejected, mutilated, pieced-together, re-animated corpse of all the fragments of various bodies of the past—with breathed new life in it and with a desire to know his creator.

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When his creator spurns him and rejects him because he is hideous, the superficiality of the creator is seen: the creator was not creating out of love but rather out of narcissism. When the creature manifested proved to truly be made in the image and likeness of the creator (his spiritual superficiality reflected in the physical deformities of the creature), the creator reacted with personal revulsion: it was like Dorian Gray seeing the portrait of his own soul for the first time. The creature’s heart is wounded and his innocence suffers as he strives to find a being with whom he can come into contact in human sympathy. He reads Milton’s Paradise Lost and feels like Satan who is rejected by God. Just like Milton’s poem was a rebuke against the Puritanical God of the Protestant Reformation—a God Who created willy-nilly to save some and reject others, the monster is a rebuke against Romanticism, which essentially sprang from the same head as the Reformation—just later on down the line. Neither was rooted in the traditional values and norms of the Old World doctrines that had brought stability for centuries during the Middle Ages.

Shelley’s Victor is like her husband Percy, in his….....

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