Please finish reading the novel and compose a four paragraph blog response using ALL FOUR of the questions in your response.
1. Mary Shelley is careful to outline the progression of the Monster's awareness, beginning with his earliest sense impressions, and this progression seems to duplicate the stages of infant, child, and general human development. Does this account tell us anything important about what it means to be human?
2. Frankenstein may seem to endorse the common modem sociological premise that antisocial or criminal behavior is conditioned by rage, which in turn is induced by society's rejection of its marginal members. Does the novel give clear support to this sociological premise?
3. After Frankenstein's decision not to create a female mate for the Monster, the latter vows to avenge himself on Frankenstein on his wedding day. Through all the long months during which Frankenstein broods over this threat, it never occurs to him that Elizabeth, and not he himself may be the intended victim. What do you make of his rather incredible lapse of imagination?
4. Even though the monster seems to learn compassion and reason from the cottagers, he still--in the end--vows to make humans suffer. Why? What prevents the monster from developing a sense of ethics?
Blog response:
ReplyDelete1
The development of the daemon demonstrated the importance of the early stages of a person’s life to their maturation; it is the improper nurturing of the fiend that turns him to evil. Frankenstein initially imbues his creation with compassion, intelligence, and goodwill. From a very young age, the devil is inspired by the tales of heroes and chivalry, and is disgusted by the chronicles of human tragedy. Whenever he tells the story from his perspective the monster appears to feel remorse for his evil deeds. According to his recount, there is a clear cause to his wrongdoing: loneliness and abuse. His first interaction with the human race was met with horror and pain. His de facto family, the De Lacys, who taught him the art of language, rejected him, attacking him because of his appearance, spending no time to discern his true nature. Even his own creator, Frankenstein, wished upon him death. It is only after these rejections that he endeavors to destroy the human race. Even so, he tells Walton that his torture of Frankenstein brought him no joy, and even asserts that it caused him more despair than his creator. He still recognizes the heroes of his “childhood” as his role models, and knows that he has become morally corrupt. Such a gentle creature, so full of intelligence and goodwill, did not turn upon his path willingly; it is his early development, full of rejection and despair, that made him that way.
2.
The creature is conditioned by rage and rejection to become a killer. He was created to feel compassion, and learned goodness and ethics from his education. It is only after his constant rejection that he endeavors to bring death to human kind. What differentiates serial killers from regular homicides is that serial killers tend to kill strangers. The creature was a stranger to the whole human race because of rejection.
3.
On one hand, Frankenstein was a kind of a mess by the end of the novel. He suffered periodical bouts of sickness, loss many family members and friends, and was burdened by the knowledge that his creation was constantly following him, waiting for the right moment to strike. This would obviously lead to a broken mental state, which would make him less receptive, and could have caused the lapse in thought that led to the murder of Elizabeth. On the other hand, Frankenstein was becoming extremely paranoid, and for someone of his intellect to not even consider harm to his beloved Elizabeth, well, it does seem like kind of a stretch. It was necessary to kill Elizabeth for the plot of the novel, though, so she must have felt it necessary. Looking at the contemporary reviews of Frankenstein, this tendency for Shelly to rely so much on suspension of disbelief was a primary critique of the novel.
4.
Questions 1, 3, and 4 seem very similar to me, so the answer for this question is pretty much the same. Childhood development is very important to development. By rejection he was conditioned to hate the human race, and made to dwell in despair. This is what caused to to want to kill humans. He did develop a code of ethics from his education, but his loneliness overcame that, and turned him into a killer
ReplyDeleteThe Creation’s awareness certainly shows us how important family and caregivers are important to human development. He goes through the first stages of his life alone, with no one to teach or protect him, and once he gains self awareness he realizes not having any family, at this time, was very strange. It left him lonely, separating him from humanity. He asks Frankenstein, “[W]here were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses (86).” He knows that not having any family and not growing up normally makes him different, and that he never experienced the care that they give.
In the novel, the Creation acts as a monster because of his rage and the rejections he has faced. He tells Frankenstein, “I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?... I will revenge my injuries: if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear (104).” He explains to his creator this many times, that he has turned to crime and destruction because it is all that is left to him. Shelley is telling us that people can turn to atrocities if they are not accepted, because it is all they have after rejection, but she also shows in the end that these people are still human, and may change or feel regret for their actions. The monster does feel bad after killing in rage, and he feels remorse when Victor dies. Through the monster’s reaction, Shelley expresses her opinion that even people driven by rejection and rage can change.
I think that Victor is rather self centered. To most readers, it is obvious that the monster intends to harm Elizabeth, because he has to this point only gone after Victor’s loved ones. He even tells him that he will kill them to make them suffer. However, he thinks the monster is coming to kill him because he is so focused on his mistakes and decisions that he overlooks past actions and threats. He also would probably found it easier to die than to see Elizabeth killed, so he automatically jumps to a more acceptable fate.
The Creature learns compassion from the family, but he never has anyone to care for or anyone to care for him. He also has no one to talk to that could teach him personally that violence and suffering will not solve his problems. The family certainly showed him that killing was deplorable, but when he thought he was a monster, he believed that he should be doing those terrible things. Not having Victor or any other companion telling him that he was not an irredeemable monster left him thinking that he was one, so he decided he would act like one.
1.The monster developed the importance of family and friends when it was growing up. He saw how the the people in the cabin loved and cared for each other and the monster wanted the same feeling. He wanted humans to love him and care for him as much as humans so for others. But knowing that he doesn't know who his parents are and where he comes from makes him feel very lonely inside and doesn't know what to do. He feels lost and shut out of the world because no human would accept him for what he looks like. All this loneliness turns into rage and violence which is what he turns out to be. He has no one too look up to, no one to guide him, no one to tell him what's the right and wrong thing to do in a situation.
ReplyDelete2. I believe that the novel gave a clear support to this sociological premise because the Monster was suppose to be smarter and braver than any other human. But the only problem was that it just looked ugly and did not please the humans eye of being normal. Humans rejected him one after another even when the monster understood human life. He was all confident to talk to the old man in the cabin but got rejected by Felix from an unexpected visit. All this rejection just caused him to want to kill and be violent towards humans because of how much pain they caused him.
3. Victor would have expected that the monster would have been coming after Elizabeth, Victor’s wife. But I feel like the audience would put the puzzle pieces together and feel like Elizabeth was the target because when Frankenstein decides not to create a female mate for the monster and later vows to avenge himself on frankenstein on his wedding day like the monster was aiming for something very valuable to him and it was his newly wedded wife. You could tell that Victor was very ill after being convicted of the being the murder of William his brother. But later remember that if he had a wedding day that the monster would come after him. So this caused Victor to not tell the truth to Elizabeth which made Elizabeth believe that he is having an affair because he was nervous, panicky, and anxious.
4. Even though the monster learned compassion, the monster still had the verge of making the humans suffer because of how the humans treated the monster. The people were scared of him and saw him as a threat to society and didn’t want to accept someone so different into the world. The monster was very ugly and unattractive but it doesn't mean he should be treated any differently with the rest of society. Yes, the monster will stand out alot but making the humans suffer would have ended if no one discriminated on the monster. Humans could not see anything beyond the surface. They could see what the monster really wanted in society was the be accepted. If humans accepted him for wanting to learn about the world and that not everything has to start with killing then the monster would be loving and caring. But he turns out the opposite because the humans influenced the monster to be mean, and scary
Mary Shelley attempts to be deeply philosophical in her writing of Frankenstein. To do so, she spends a good portion of the text detailing the creature’s life from creation to meeting Frankenstein. At the beginning, the creature knows nothing and cannot distinguish one sense from the other, similar to infants. As time goes on, he distinguishes between the senses and learns the native tongue of the land, as a child would. Then, the creature begins to use the knowledge he gains to create his own perspective on life, which is where Mary Shelley is able to most infuse her own thoughts into the novel. The creature’s tale is really just Mary Shelley trying to convey her own philosophical views to a broader audience, and thus the account does not express much importance to me, for the tale is fictional and a hypothesis of how a creature would respond given the circumstances of its creation.
ReplyDeleteThe modern sociological argument that when society rejects an individual, the individual responds with anger and develops antisocial or criminal behavior is touched upon throughout the tale more so in the form of Frankenstein’s creature versus Frankenstein himself. Frankenstein himself was not rejected by society, but he instead isolated himself due to his intense curiosity and wish to concentrate on his work. He created any form of rejection he felt. On the other hand, Frankenstein’s creature could support this premise, for he was rejected due to his grotesque appearance. He responded to this with anger, which led to the creature murdering humans, a criminal act.
Frankenstein was a very self-absorbed being. He cared only for his own interests and his own feelings, disregarding what anyone else felt, for he argued that no one could know the misery he experienced. In this way, he turned inwardly instead of confiding in anyone or relieving some of his burden, causing him to focus solely on himself. When his creation threatened him regarding his wedding day, Frankenstein was so self-conscious, almost seeming to forget that marriage involves two people and not just himself, that he automatically assumed he was the target. Never once did the thought cross his mind that Elizabeth could be the one his creation referenced. I’m not quite sure how Elizabeth could have still wanted to marry this man, one who was so preoccupied with himself and his own problems that he thought not of the one he was marrying, but only insured his own safety.
The monster gains head knowledge alone from the cottagers; he says he learns what compassion and reason is from them. However, he does not put these into practice, showing that the knowledge did not affect his actions. In this way, it is not surprising that he vowed to make humans suffer, for he only knew the concepts of ethics but did not desire to put them into action. Instead, he went straight to violence. For the creature, it is easier to act on his fleshly instincts than to live an upright, moral life. Though that is in part Frankenstein’s own fault, as he did not raise the creature to live out his morals, the creature had a part to play in choosing the easier path of causing chaos and havoc instead of peace.
The Monster’s awareness following the stages of human development, I think, says something about the development of intelligence. Among the animal kingdom, human babies are notable for being incredibly helpless as babies, while in other species infants are up and running or similar in an hour. The development of intelligence and sentience, of self awareness, seems to both our case and in that of the monster, take time and experiences. The monster is very much shaped by his formative experiences, that of being shunned and treated as monstrous, and by seeing the love and kindness of a family. This could be taken as a statement of the development of intelligence, it is impossible to have something truly sentient ‘right out of the box’ so to speak, that self-awareness cannot exist without some level of experiences. This can also be seen in AI research, where the frontier of the field has become not simply creating something intelligent upfront, but something with a capacity to learn, which you then aid.
ReplyDeleteFrankenstein does seem to support the premise that criminal behavior is caused by rage and rejection by society. The monster doesn’t act cruelly until after he is abandoned by his creator, rejected by society, and then spurned by the family he had hoped to win the affections of. When the monster first kills as well, his thoughts are not of cruelty for its own sake, but “I too can create desolation, my enemy is not invulnerable; this death will carry despair to him”(102) He acts out of a desire to avenge his own misery and isolation, to make Frankenstein suffer as he has. The monster gives us some insight into his own thought processes, and it’s always focused on vengeance, vengeance as the only thing left to it. “You can blast my other passions, but revenge remains!”(123)
Frankenstein misses something obvious in the monster’s threat- The monster’s goal was to make his creator suffer as he has, and so he sets out to deprive Frankenstein of that which he refused to grant him. Frankenstein doesn’t even consider the possibility of this, perhaps because he doesn’t truly understand the monster’s motivations, which are not simply to kill and torment, but to repay suffering in kind. The monster hints at this in his speech to Victor after Victor refuses to work on his mate. “Shall each man...find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone?...Soon the bolt will fall which must ravish you from your happiness forever”.(122) The monster specifically wishes to deny Victor happiness, and takes from Victor the very reason for happiness he requested Victor bestow. Victor misses the monster’s true target because he never truly considered the monster’s perspective or reasoning, treating the monster like a rage-filled beast instead of a clever opponent. He calls the monster “an enemy… whose joy it was to shed their blood, and revel in their groans”(136).
The monster can learn of ethics secondhand from stories and books, but that is the extent of his knowledge. The monster never got to participate in society, society never applied ethics onto him, For the monster, ethics must seem like yet one more thing he has been shut out of- everyone responds to him with cruelty and fury regardless of any justification, and he responds in kind. The monster is only ever exposed to cruelty, and as I have stated above, the development of sentient beings seems to hinge on experiences, and the monster never gets to experience kindness or mercy, so shows none to others.
Mary Shelley demonstrates how the monster develops during the course of the book. This course of development from the monster are important because it shows how important it is to nurture a child during his or her development. Mary demonstrates how the monster develops by describing how the monster feels when it sees the outside world, so human relationships. He sees how family members care for each other and the monster envy's the humans because he can’t connect with them due to his gruesome looks. The monster later in the book learns very quickly and is shown to be very intelligent, but none of that matters because the monster is neglected and therefore leads to the way that he is at the end of the book. This shows that caring for a child when they are developing is very important and to be a human, you have to nurture your loved ones.
ReplyDeleteFrankenstein endorses the common sociological premise that rage leads to criminal behavior. Constant enduring of rejection from humans and built up rage lead to the killer mindset that Frankenstein receives at the end of the book. Because no one is taking care of Frankenstein, that leaves him miserable and with no hope.
Towards the end of the book, we see that Victor becomes very egotistical. He is so caught up with all his mistakes and past decisions that he can’t see the fact that Frankenstein is aiming towards Elizabeth. Frankenstein has told Victor multiple times that he would cause harm to his loved ones in order to make him suffer, but Victor became too self absorbed by the end.
The monster never gets to develop of a sense of ethics because he was isolated. No one was ever there to teach him how to apply ethics to society. Anyone can learn ethics, but to be able to apply them to life is another step. Because he never was able to apply ethics to society, he never learns that killing people is wrong, leading to his bloodlust for humans to suffer. Ethics is like a software, you have to boot it up and make sure to configure it properly, that something being the community. Knowing what is right and wrong is useless until someone teaches you how to apply it.
1. This period of The Monster’s life is extremely important to what it means to be human, showcasing how different/poor upbrings change people. We see The Monster turn from a (possibly) benevolent creature to a revenge seeking killer over the course of what consisted of his “childhood.”
ReplyDelete2. The novel gives several ways in which this claim is supported. Quite literally, The Monster is outcast by Frankenstein when he realizes how horrifyingly grotesques his creation is, which is just the beginning of this marginalization. Then, a member of the society he wishes to be apart of, the old man, screams in terror and runs away when he sees him. The icing on the cake is when the Felix and Safie abruptly returns home to find The Monster talking to De Lacey, and violently shun him away. This enrages The Monster as he blames Frankenstein for creating him, leading to the criminal behavior of the murder of William.
3. I think this massive leap is due to his general mental state at the time. Being paranoid for several months in general probably lead to his lack of imagination that Elizabeth could be killed. I think it should have occured to Frankenstein due to the earlier murders of his friend Henry and his brother William, both cases where The Monster wants revenge on Frankenstein but does not directly attack him. In hindsight, Frankenstein definitely should have seen it coming.
4. I think that The Monster became the outcast and killer that he is because of total rejection from human society and because of Victor’s lack of “parenting”. However, I do not think that the societal rejection would change even if given a childhood.
-Matthew Hebert
1.Frankenstein shows the effects of nature vs nurture and its effects on human development. This topic is very widely debated among scientific communities and philosophical communities, their consensuses being nature and nurture respectively. Science argues that a person’s personality and mental traits are inherited from parents, however philosophical communities argue that personality and traits are instead inherited from caretakers during early life. Mary Shelley goes the philosophical route and develops Frankenstein as an innocent child as first and being slowly corrupted by others throughout its lifespan. I think that this tells us that being human is more a collection of experiences and not something defined by science or genetic factors. It tells how even something as inhuman as the Monster can begin as innocent as some random human child.
ReplyDelete2.Yes, the book supports the idea that antisocial and criminal behavior is conditioned through the rage caused by rejection through society. The novel clearly illustrates this by showing the gradual change and maturation of Frankenstein’s Monster from a “child” into an “adult”. It is only after the constant rejection from society that the Monster wants to eradicate humans.
3.I think that Victor didn’t think that Elizabeth would be targeted because he was only thinking about himself. He was the one who created Frankenstein, thus he blamed himself and thought that he would be the one killed. However, the one thing that Victor forgot was that he was the only one who could create another Monster, so Frankenstein’s monster couldn’t kill him without also killing the possibility of having a partner.
4.Even though the Monster learned compassion and reason the Monster still wants to make humans suffer because in his mind he is correct. Looking through his perspective humans have pretty much only caused him pain and suffering from being rejected besides the cottagers. He also never got the opportunity to apply ethics to society because he was never given the chance to before being judged as a monster because of his outer appearance.
The Monster’s awareness seems to go from in the beginning hopefully like a child. Than when he started killing people it was like his rebellious teenage phase. When he asks for a girlfriend he is using logic like an about and when Victor died he seemed to understand what he had done with maturity.
ReplyDeleteI think it does partially supported the Idea because the creacher did like people and wanted to help them until they rejected him
Frankenstein probably didn't think about Elizabeth being killed bc he really didn’t want her to die so he exiled it from his brain.
He learned that people had comasion and reason but the people shows no compassion for him so probably found them hypocritical.
1. The monsters self awareness throughout the book becomes increasingly more noticeable, and as the creature understands what it means to be human, it misses out on what it’s like growing up as a human, as a human’s childhood greatly affects that person's life. Because the creature did not have much of a childhood and was neglected and viewed as an ugly being in the early part of its life, we see the monster become an evil killer.
ReplyDelete2. The novel does give clear support to the sociological premise that antisocial or criminal behavior is conditioned by rage, which in turn is induced by society’s rejection of it’s marginal members. This can be seen throughout the book as the creature is rejected by everyone including its own creator, which results in its outbursts of rage and killings. The creature was often rejected for being so horribly ugly and grotesque. However, the monster does feel remorse after its killings and Victor’s death.
3. I think it should have been more obvious to Frankenstein that he himself as well as Elizabeth could be in danger as the creature killed his brother William along with Henry. Victor definitely should have seen an attack on Elizabeth coming, as the creature had been indirectly attacking him by killing his loved ones.
4. I feel that question 4 is directly related to questions 1 and 2, as they explain the creatures’ hardships. Rejected by society and by his creator for being an ugly monster, the creature made humans suffer. These outbursts of rage were a direct result of being rejected and were part of the reason that the creature did not have any compassion at the end. Along with that, the creatures’ lack of a loving, nurturing childhood, caused it to become an angry, revenge-seeking killing beast, which prevents it from developing a sense of ethics and vows to make humans suffer.
1.This tells us that it is important that we as humans learn things and try to change and adapt our way of living over time. It is a metaphor for scientific progression since science is always constantly changing and adapting much like humans do across their lifetimes. However this is ironic because despite coming from science, the monster is unable to experience what every human experiences as a full, changing life. This may mean that the monster, despite being made of completely human parts, is in fact not human.
ReplyDelete2.This novel does give clear support to this view because the monster was treated with utter disrespect and contempt by anyone he met and that caused him to make very violent and terrible decisions despite initially being a good hearted person.
3.The monster has his “love” taken away from him by Victor so he swears revenge and ends up killing Victor’s love, Elizabeth. This is a textbook example of eye for an eye revenge on the monsters part. I feel like Victor not expecting this just goes to show how self centered he is as a person. In every decision he makes he only thinks of himself and never even paid attention to the monster’s feelings or anyone elses.
4.He has been neglected and treated poorly by every single human so he does not feel the need to treat them well if they do not treat him well at all. I can see how the monster develops this lack of empathy and compassion for humans after all he has had to suffer through. The rage from being treated poorly for his entire life has caused him to be blinded to things like empathy.
1)The creature, as a characterization of progress and creation, as well as the juxtaposition of humanity versus inhumanity, is made to learn about humanity as an unknowing observer. As he is born and grows throughout the novel he develops from what he experiences and also from what he learns he hasn't experienced. The creature is human to some degree, being of the same mentality and flesh as humans, but he is also a sort of “other” and will never be accepted by humanity. In this way, by showing the creatures experiences through his development, Mary Shelley gives a different perspective to life and the world, as we see when the creature hears about the sadnesses of the world from Felix's history book. Through the creature’s humanity, we are shown our own humanity in its unseen truth, removing the filter one often sees their own life through.
ReplyDelete2)The creature should not be seen as a representation of crime or of the antisocial, as he isn’t necessarily either, nor is he, by any means, a good representation of a mentally stable and developed person, being literally only a few years old. However, in the perspective of crime, the creature shows how the alienation and stigmatization of people causes them to sink to the level of others opinions. The creature wanted to have human interaction and to have intimacy with people, but because of others fear he felt that there was no point in trying to be better than what others thought, thus, becoming the monster people saw in him. If anything, the novel shows how criminals aren’t born criminals, but made criminals by the expectation of others to be criminals.
3)Personally, I hate Victor as a character and as a person. He’s a total idiot and, honestly, less compassionate than the creature himself. He’s so removed from life that he doesn’t even live it and blames himself created misery from the cause. He’s selfish and only thinks of the facts of science and not that which science is for, the betterment of humanity. His stupidity is mistaken for curiosity and is a curse to humanity. Overall, after the creature distinctly said he would not kill Victor only make his life a living hell if he were to not concede, the fact that Victor thought that the creature was going to kill him and not Elizabeth then he is a complete imbecile.
4)It’s not that the creature was necessarily unable to develop ethics, more that he was never given a good example as to build a sense of ethics. He tried to reach out both to the cottagers and to Victor for compassion, but they both looked at him as a monster and not as a lost soul seeking refuge and guidance. We see the creature develop emotions for the cottagers and even Victor which are the only thing necessary for one to be ethical. However, because the humans saw the creature as the monster he became, not a monster, but a vindicator in his own truth. In actuality, the creature did develop ethics, only that those ethics were that humanity was cruel and thus he must harm it. Humanity was the creature’s monster, thus, like Victor, he sought to destroy it. If one creates a monster, is it the monsters fault that it is what is was created to be? Who is truly the monster?
-eileen o
1) The creature's progression symbolizes how a loss of innocence, as well as cruel treatment, can change us. In the beginning of the novel, the creature is shown to be somewhat undeveloped and unknowledgeable of the world. He starts almost as an infant, ignorant to what mankind is like and seemingly hopeful of his future. However, once the creature is exposed to cruelty of society, and begins to develop a new perspective of himself based on the perspectives of others, he loses his innocence. Additionally, once he begins to learn new languages and grow an understanding for human nature, he thinks for himself. Conclusively, a mixture of his terrible "childhood" (which involved Victor abandoning him) and the inhumane treatment he received from others made him realize his purpose. In his "adult stages", the creature decided that he must behave how people expect him to; as a murderous, bloodthirsty monster.
ReplyDelete2) Next, the creature does illustrate that antisocial or criminal behavior is conditioned by rage. As previously stated, he developed a sense of understanding, as well as anger, for the world after facing countless rejections. Though he started off seemingly innocent and kindhearted, the punishments he received on account of his monstrous looks led to his demise.
3) Honestly, it was surprising that Victor didn't even consider Elizabeth to be the victim. It makes sense given the context behind why the creature wanted to kill her. In a way, her murder reflected Victor's refusal to make the creature a wife. While the creature's hope and desperation for love was killed, after Elizabeth's death, so was Victor's. Additionally, the creature seemed to target people that Victor cared for. This was so that Victor would understand the creature's pain, dooming him to a life of loneliness and abandonment.
4) As mentioned before, the creature does not develop a sense of ethics due to how others treated him. While he tried showing compassion and respect to everyone, the feelings were not returned; instead, they treated him inhumanely. Victor's abandonment was also impactful in destroying the morals of the creature. In addition, the creature could not even attain love when he asked for it. Later on in the book, his desperation for love and acceptance slowly turned into desperation to treat others as unfairly as he was treated. In a way, the creature is trying to teach society a lesson; if you treat others unfairly based on their looks, you're bound to be treated even worse later on.
-Jill Schuck
Mary Shelley portrays the stages of life through the monster in various different underlined ways. As the creature understands what it means to be human, it misses out on what it’s like growing up as a human. When he is in the “child” phase he is wondering around helplessly. And then he shifts over to different stages such as him being very curious about life and then realizing how he looks during his “teenager” phase. Finally, he finishes in his adult phase, realizing he needs to fill in his role and realize he is a monster so he decides to kill and be himself.
ReplyDeleteI think the novel did show a clear sociological premise because the monster is made in the thought that it will be able to follow commands and perhaps be superhuman and smart. By going around and learning who he actually is portrayed he slowly becomes more violent. But as we learn and so does the monster he is ugly and just a bloodthirsty monster afterall.
I think this massive leap is due to his general mental state at the time. Victor definitely should have seen an attack on Elizabeth coming, as the creature had been indirectly attacking him by killing his loved ones.
I think the reason why he decides to kill and make the humans “suffer” is because everyone throughout his journey has been straight up with him and told him who he truly is. This is all due to Victor Frankenstein’s laziness towards parenting the monster.
Zach Mola
Human development is greatly influenced by your environment and those that surround you. The creature had known the importance of relationships with others, but had never known them, yearned for them. While he knows what it is to be human from his outside perspective of life, he misses out on key components of normal human development like parents, teachers, relationships, childhood, school, even a name. He learned to do things like speak and read, but his loneliness turns to anger and rage without anyone to guide him. The various negative effects of his “childhood” are shown later in his life. Shelley incorporates an argument for nature vs. nurture, as the creature had initially been a good person, but his interactions with others and the rejection from them turned him into a true monster, supporting “nurture”. His self awareness becomes more noticeable as he grows older, realizing no one will take to him because of his appearance.
ReplyDeleteShelley does give clear support to that sociological premise, in which the creature is conditioned to be a killer by his rage and society’s constant rejection of him. All he has after rejection is to hurt those who have wronged him and dwell on rage towards them. The constant rejection caused his antisocial behavior, festering rage. He had been rejected his creator, an old man, and Safie and Felix after having hope in forming a relationship with De Lacey. He blames Frankenstein for creating him and having to go through this.
Frankenstein is arrogant, egotistical, conceited. He doesn’t realize that the creature had already killed someone who mattered to him, William, rather than himself and had it killed him, it wouldn’t be able to change his mind. The creature knows it would benefit more to kill Elizabeth, rather than Frankenstein, as it would be more painful. Obviously he was also not in his right mind, as he was very sick, and became extremely paranoid as well.
The creature is alone, and feels as though everyone hates him. He realizes he can never be like other people after the cottagers have rejected him although he had hope for their acceptance. He had developed a sense of ethics but his rage and despair overpowered that, as he was marginalized from society. His loneliness left him to watch what he could never have and dwell in his despair.