Frankenstein
I had to study the unabridged version of Frankenstein written by Mary Shelley and published in 1818 for our English Literature class. It’s the story that’s also known as the ‘Modern Prometheus’ and tells the tale of Victor Frankenstein (who is the creator of a “monster” unlike the common misconception that Frankenstein is the “monster” so often displayed as being green with bolts in it’s neck) who in his search for knowledge about the key to life, creates a being using electricity and various other techniques and succeeds in creating life. However the horror of his actions haunts him and the story becomes a tale of the exchanges between both the creator and the created and the events that unfold following the birthing of this experiment.
This essay is just one of three assignments and the many notes that we have to do for each topic and seeing as I know how helpful it is to use other people’s perspectives and ideas to realise just how much you don’t agree or what you actually think in the first place, I figured I would publish this so that in the event that some other poor sod has to write something along the same lines, then they have a crappy essay to resource to. But remember kids don’t do drugs! No I’m only kidding. But in honesty, don’t plagiarise please, because it doesn’t actually get you anywhere other than being a fool.
Without further adue here is the essay:
“Analyse how the attitudes and values of a society are conveyed through narrative point of view in the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley?”
Frankenstein, a novel by Mary Shelley, analyses the values and attitudes of the Enlightenment society through using three narrative points of view. The reader is given three different narrators, each with a different view for the reader to consider and each of them criticising the Enlightenment movement and ideals. Through the creation of Robert Walton, a daring explorer, Victor Frankenstein, an overly ambitious young man in the quest for knowledge, and the creature, a poor mistreated creation made and abandoned by Frankenstein, Shelley presents certain changes that she thought were negative and were happening at the time in her own society. Each different narration brings to the book a different look at society and family and the way one lives. The enlightenment movement was an intellectual movement during the late 17th and 18th centuries emphasising reason and individualism rather than reason. Science and exploration saw rapid progression during this time period. Some of the major thinkers of the time that influenced societies were Newton and Descartes as philosophers and its exponents Goethe, Voltaire and Rousseau. Each of these names went in search for the answers to many things and looked for glory that could be gained from new discoveries. Shelley undermines this quest for knowledge and the glory associated with it, which was taken up by many ambitious men who gave up everything for the pursuit of this knowledge and glory, through using each of the three narrators and their different character perspectives. Shelley also uses an epistolary technique throughout the book with the whole of Walton’s narrations being through letters to his sister and with Frankenstein’s letters being dotted with letters from his father Alphonse Frankenstein, his best friend Clerval and his dearly beloved Elizabeth. This technique of using letters allows the story to be seen as more truthful and leaves less room for falsities as they are like historical evidence of the events.
Robert Walton is the first character in the book who Shelley gives a voice to, with the book opening with his letters to his sister, Mrs Saville, in England. This is how the entirety of Walton’s writing is set up – as letters to his sister in which the reader first gains insight to his explorations and obvious belief in discovery and all the glory that comes with it, at one point even considering to continue on the voyage despite the imminent threat of mutiny of his own crew and considers that even if he should die in the pursuit for knowledge, the legacy he would leave behind would be enough to effect generations to come and that would be worth dying for in the pursuit of knowledge. In terms of the whole story though, Walton’s narration is fairly unimportant which is made obvious by the small amount written about him and the largest part being dedicated to the story of Frankenstein, but despite this Walton’s framing narration, which begins and sums up the tale, helps to show another level of moral and thinking. However the anti-Enlightenment stance that he take at the end of the book when he decided that the creature should be allowed to live despite Victor’s please for the good of man kind, show a juxtaposition to the views that he held in the beginning frame of the story and becomes one of the main points where Shelley uses the narrators voice to go against the Enlightenment ideals. At the beginning of the book, Walton had talked about how good Victor was and written to Mrs Saville saying that he was an ‘admirable being’, but when Victor asks Walton to finish what he had started by killing the created, and Walton meets which the created, he decided not to do what he promised his most ‘admirable’ friend. Walton retells his sister in London, “Never did I behold a vision so horrible as in his face, of such loathsome, yet appalling hideousness. Once Walton talks to the created, however, and hears the ‘eloquence’ and ‘benevolence’ of the creatures mind, he cannot kill it as Victor asked. His change of mind signifies that he has seen the wrong doing in his Enlightenment ideas and Mary Shelley seems to use this to show the reader and in particular aiming at her society at the time that the Enlightenment ideals are outdated and unhealthy for man kind. It also helps Mary Shelley to try and reach the reader (mostly applying to her society, but also to a modern day one to some extent) to say that you shouldn’t judge those around you by an outdated view.
The Enlightenment era showed the glory of discovery and as a result discovering ‘heroes’ emerged from that time period – people (and mostly only men) who thought of new ideas – they were ‘scientific-heroes’. The next narrator in the story is Victor Frankenstein, who plays the main character and who the majority of the book is written about and he is shown by the end of the book as simply being a weak character who despite attempting to be the ‘scientific-hero’, is actually just a whining coward who didn’t take proper responsibility for his actions. His attitude and the way Shelley creates him, best shows a reflection of the society at the time when Shelley wrote Frankenstein. He surrounds himself with the ideas of other people (such as his professors) and in particular Enlightenment ideals and attitudes that he will gain ultimate glory out of his research, so he dedicates himself to the ‘studies of natural philosophy’ until he became ‘emaciated with confinement’. (You better not be plagiarising this!) Victor Frankenstein attempts to push the boundaries of knowledge and do what no man has done before, while he is in his confinement – he tries to break the secrets of life and push the limits of human knowledge. Only through these horrid images and descriptions that Shelley uses can the reader gain a full understanding of the negative side and the horror of these obsessive studies. Mary Shelley uses techniques inside his narration that convey the attitudes and values of a society. We can see this in the story, where Frankenstein leaves the creation that he had “brought to life” and brought into this world. He instead of taking responsibility for his actions and his (what could be called a) child, he instead abandons the creation in disgust and horror. The society at the time would not have seen the initial abandonment as odd on Frankenstein’s behalf, however he doesn’t turn the creation over to the care of another, which is what was generally done in those societies. People would have children and it was not uncommon to either give them into the care of another family or to have them grow up in either a boarding school style situation or with a nursemaid/nanny and carer. Mary Shelley herself did this as well with Elena Shelley who was left with foster parents. Their society considered it acceptable to give a child to another to look after and not the real parents. When Shelley uses Frankenstein to first mention the abandonment, the reader can see that his values and attitudes at first accept this lack of responsibility to his creation, but by the end of the novel the reader can see that Frankenstein regrets these decisions, which were Enlightenment attitudes.
The third and final narrator is the Creation itself. This is the innermost frame of the narration. He is displayed as a newborn child might be, however because this topic and idea was so out of Mary Shelley’s time, she was able to create the creature so that it developed at what some would call lightening fast speed. The Creation experiences the society of Victor with a new child’s eyes – one of wonderment and learning at first. However it develops quickly when it discovers how horrid it’s creator had made it and how that made the society to react to it when man was usually created so beautifully. He develops and learns how to control himself in the space of a few months when it would take (a normal human being) years to learn these sorts of basics. He then, upon discovering the DeLacy’s, teaches himself things that some people don’t even grasp properly over a whole life span. However throughout his learning’s, the reader is positioned to once again see the negative side of the Enlightenment society and it’s ideals as it shuns the creation, which the reader can’t help but feel sorry for, given the modern day society that frowns upon abandonment. The reader also finds themselves looking at the question as to whether the person they become is a product of nature or nurture – a debate that has been going on since Mary Shelley’s times and is displayed through the narration of the Creation about how he was treated, abandoned and raised himself. The Creature becomes his own parent and teaches itself about society through watching the DeLacy’s which can be seen as the best form of society in the book despite shunning and rejecting the creature when he reveals himself. The DeLacy’s are like the creature more figures of the Romantic era than the Enlightenment, which is also what Mary Shelley was – a prominent Romantic writer despite her Enlightenment upbringing from her parents. The DeLacy’s breaking away from the rest of the society (because they were sent into exile) allows them to hold different ideals and morals to the rest of the society displayed in the book and so the reader naturally holds them above the other society when the Creation describes them for the reader. Through this learning, the Creation becomes and eloquent and speaker and this encourages the reader to doubt the established social attitudes and values towards outward appearance. The creation reacts to these ideals in society as he explains that he changed his mind with ‘the feelings of kindness and gentleness, which (he) had entertained but a few moments before, gave place to hellish rage’. When the creature and Frankenstein meet, the values of the enlightenment society are further shown as being negative by Mary Shelley as she represents the Enlightenmnet ideals in Victor who gets abusive and has fits of ‘rage’ and ‘fury’; and the Romantic ideals in the creation who is civilised and calm for the most part and who refuses to fight Victor despite being abused, threatened and inteimidated. The narration of the creation allows the reader to gain a deeper inside view of how the creature feels and how it had been created by society to be able to allow violence and murder out of hatred and contempt. Before this innermost narration, the reader only hears of the creation and it’s feelings through what Walton suspects of the creature and has only heard second hand from Victor who also describes it from his own account.
The interesting thing about the set up of the book is that the first half where we see the first narrations of Walton and Frankenstein shows the reader the flaws and horrors or atrocities of the isolation and abandonment involved in the quest for glory through discovery. Shelley uses these narrations to show just how an Enlightenment society acts in these parts from an enlightenment point of view. However once we reach the created’s narration and his story of the DeLacy’s, who are about the purest characters in the book, the reader begins to see the horrors of this society described very clearly and on the majority the society is disliked. From the middle of the book and working back out through the frames of narration, Shelley describes first Frankenstein and then Walton discovering that this society is flawed and that with the quest for glory and knowledge often the road is littered with loss and sorrow. This can be seen through Frankenstein’s realisation of the wrong he was doing when he eventually scraps the female he was creating and the losses of his family and loved ones that he suffers at the hands of the created; and also through Walton’s realisation that the created is not as much of a wretch as his immediate description disfigurement and horror might suggest. This technique of using the narrator frames and within them, changing the views from one half of the book to the other half of the book, allows the reader to gain a deeper understanding of the society and the negative side of the Enlightenment Era displayed in Victor, Walton and society in general, and the positive side of the Romantic Era displayed in the DeLacy’s, with the consequences shown in the second half of the book.
Walton’s narration and story helps to show the extremity of the discoverers ideal and the ‘dare to know’ mindset – he abandons all family, civilisation and risks the life of not only himself but his crew as well in his quest for knowledge – ‘to make a huge discovery and, map some unknown territory’. Frankenstein’s character and narration helps to emphasise the extremity with his extreme seclusion and confinement while he obsessively works to create his being. Although Frankenstein reaches his goal after his quest for the knowledge to the secret of life, once he has created his ‘being’ he realises the wrong he has done and tries to rectify it and at the same time tries to protect his family and the world from it (despite how pathetically he does that). Then the reader gets to the most inner narration of the creature, who is unloved, despised and rejected by society as well as his creator. (copyright www.leeliStreet.wordpress.com) The creature also goes on a quest for knowledge, except unlike the other enlightenment figures in the story, the creatures quest is for the things we learn as a child – how to understand our senses, emotions, how to control our bodies and most of all, how to fit in with our society. The last part, the creature is unable to gain because society rejects him and through his narration the reader sees that he is cast out and that makes him the creature he becomes at one stage – violent and revenge driven and somewhat like a ‘monster’ as some of the modern movies based on Frankenstein portray him to be. With each different narrator and the way that they tell the story, the reader gains a new perspective of the story as well as the society in which it is based and gains deeper understandings of each of the characters as well. Through the narrative points of view in Frankenstein, Mary Shelley shows the established attitudes and values of the Enlightenment society and allows the reader to question them. Each character has a different story to tell and a different outlook on the values, attitudes and ideals of the Enlightenment society and we hear each different prospect through Mary Shelley’s technique of using three different narrator points of view.
Tags: Books, Frankenstein, Literature
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