The Usage of Landscape in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
When reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, I was struck by how Mary makes use of the landscape to parallel Victor Frankenstein's shifting mental condition. In the story, Victor Frankenstein is an overly ambitious scientist whose curious tinkling with alchemy leads him to create a giant monster and ultimately compromised Frankenstein's own destruction. After Frankenstein created his monster and witnessed the horror that was his own making, he is traumatized in a "painful state of mind," which leads him to isolate himself from the outside world. Frankenstein's power to create life from dead body parts proves to be so extreme and so immoral that nothing in society seems to be able to encompass such an enormous feat, not even Frankenstein himself after he finished his creation. Thus, because of his inability to accept the fact that he has successfully brought something so grotesque to life, Frankenstein takes his dark secret and retreats within himself. Frankenstein's self-discovered power is so great that it successfully disassociates him from all the things he has once held dear in his life, such as family and the beautiful familiar landscapes. From here on, Frankenstein can only identify with big, immense, sublime landscapes because these are the only landscapes extreme enough to communicate what Victor is feeling inside.
From the time Frankenstein created his monster, he finds little comfort in the beauty of nature. One passage that I find particularly striking was when Victor exclaimed, "Dear mountains! My own beautiful lake! How do you welcome your wanderer? Your summits are clear; the sky and lake are blue and placid. Is this to prognosticate peace, or to mock at my unhappiness?" (106). It is as if Victor is offended by the beauty and calmness of the landscape simply because it conflicts with the inner turmoil he is feeling inside. He continues through the story to "pass through many beautiful and majestic scenes [with] eyes fixed and unobserving" and "shunn[ing] the face of man; all sounds of joy or complacency [being] torturous to [him]; solitude [being his] only consolation -- deep, dark, death-like solitude" (210). One probable reason why he finds beautiful, peaceful scenes offensive can be found in the passage where Victor laments, "Nothing is more painful to the human mind, than, after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows, and deprives the soul both of hope and fear" (127).
By attempting to create life and messing with the natural order of the world, Victor loses his connection to the earth and eventually ends up as a shell of what he once was. No matter how hard he tried to redeem himself, he could no longer be one with nature. The creature that Victor creates by using the malicious techniques of science actually starts out to nature than Victor himself. The Creature recognizes the wonders of nature and finds temporary happiness in his closeness to the world. He turns away the peace given to him by nature just to satisfy his desire for revenge, and becomes a broken being. Mary Shelley demonstrates in Frankenstein what happens if someone strays too far from nature. Shelley purposely shows the destructive nature of science in her novel to highlight the strife that her society was going through. Her society, disillusioned by war and the devastation that new technologies caused, wanted to go back to their roots in nature, and her novel pushes at that idea. Shelley’s example of Victor’s and the Creature’s downfall warns us of the dangers and temptations of science. Even now, people are constantly enraptured by the possibilities that science and technology offer, while neglecting their duties towards nature and the
I was a poor, helpless, miserable wretch; I know, and could distinguish, no thing; but feeling pain invade me on all sides, I sat down and wept,” (Shelley 73-74). The use of organic imagery in the quotation is to incite empathetic emotion in the audience. The monster’s use of organic imagery is a second important factor in his persuasion of Victor Frankenstein because he too could express empathetic emotion toward the monster and if Victor Frankenstein has empathy toward his monster, he could be prone, to a large extent, to fulfill the task he was asked to do.
Frankenstein, a novel by Mary Shelley, illustrates the trials including Victor Frankenstein's triumphs, a character who owned a lovely with memorable life experiences that shaped the independent college student he became. Despite Victor growing up in a welcoming setting, he struggled to find the intellectual purpose of acquiring a college education in his physical science interest to generate the likelihood of reviving a dead corpse with electricity to acquire the comfortability to feel like God. Mary Shelley used diction and imagery to convey shifts in mood that supported the plot of chapters one through five in Frankenstein to inundate the reader with the feelings the characters of the story were facing.
Victor stated in the novel, “a new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. I might in process of time, renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption” (pg. 52). This quote portrays the reason why Frankenstein created the monster. At first, Victor views his monster as a beautiful creation but later when he first lays eyes on the monster he starts to fear and rejects the monster and no longer took interest in the
Analysis of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Analyzing a book can be a killer. Especially when it contains tons of subtle little messages and hints that are not picked up unless one really dissects the material. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a prime example.
The symbols that are presented within the writings of Mary Shelley’s story are able to go hand in hand with the dominant theme of isolationism. One of the most common symbols that is used is snow. A field of snow can be pictured as being wide and plain; Nothing can be seen at all. It is that loneliness that snow represents when mentioned in the plot. For, when snow is brought up in the reading, it directly correlates with the theme of isolationism. The mountains also have another meaning planted within them. Victor Frankenstein climbs up the mountains to discover the creature in the book (69). The mountains always seemed so far away to Victor. The mountains represents the society of which Victor never fully joined. To the creature, they are marked as a home for a desolate and abandoned monster. Another object that had a deeper meaning was the water that was seen throughout the book was water. Victor says at one point in the story “I was tempted to plunge into the silent lake,” (63). The water is death in a disguise. Victor wishes to end everything including his life in water. Death is the ultimate isolationism. With water representing a permanent form of loneliness, it supports the theme of
As a tragic hero, Victor’s tragedies begin with his overly obsessive thirst for knowledge. Throughout his life, Victor has always been looking for new things to learn in the areas of science and philosophy. He goes so far with his knowledge that he ends up creating a living creature. Victor has extremely high expectations for his creation but is highly disappointed with the outcome. He says, “I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (Shelley 35). Frankenstein neglects the creature because of his horrifying looks, which spark the beginning of numerous conflicts and tragedies. At this point, the creature becomes a monster because of Victor’s neglect and irresponsibility. The monster is forced to learn to survive on his own, without anyone or anything to guide him along the way. Plus, the monster’s ugly looks cause society to turn against him, ad...
Victor Frankenstein Turns in to his real passion which was science and he’s swamped with creating he's creature,“For this I had deprived myself of rest and health” (p.59). Victor Frankenstein is violent, ambition, stupid and out of control because he has more knowledge than the society can accept,”Do you share my madness?”(p.20). This is one of his 1st words as he recovered from his illness, he starts to be more irresponsible and this has been illustrated in his actions and feelings when he ran away from his creature when he didn't wanted to be face to face with the person that is created by him.
So, when he created Frankenstein “the monster” he turned out to be this grotesque and unnatural creature which was different from what Victor had imagined. However, at the site of looking at his creation, Victor is now spooked by his appearance and immediately turned off by his own creation. For example, in chapter 5 Victor says, “I had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room, continued a long time traversing my bed chamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep.” (Page 35). Again, we can see Shelley’s use of Gothic elements infused with the monstrous theme. However, this causes Victor to immediately stray away from the monster because he views his creation as repulsive and upsetting. Which marks the first sign of abandonment that Victor places on his creation. This doesn’t do any justice for Victor because now the monster is trying to assert himself into Victor’s life but yet feels more and more neglected from the absence of love that Victor doesn’t want to give in terms of having a relationship with
So it is only fitting that his first relief from this spell of paralyzing fear is an encounter with the beauty of nature. Directly after Victor 's creation of the monster Shelley perfectly encapsulates the acute horror, and painful realization that brings about his illness in the following quote. Shelley writes, "I passed the night wretchedly. Sometimes my pulse beat so quickly and hardly that I felt the palpitation of every artery; at others, I nearly sink to the ground through languor and extreme weakness. Mingled with this horror I felt the bitterness of disappointment; dreams that have been my food and pleasant rest for so long a space were now become a hell to me; and the change was so rapid, the overthrow so complete!" (Shelley, 16). Shelley illustrates just how heavily the consequences of what Victor did weigh down on his conscience. She does this by combining the description of Victors physical symptoms of panic like his racing pulse, and faintness, with a description of his mental anguish to express a deeper message from a ever more true to life Frankenstein that the reader can empathize with as he realizes the gravity of what he has done to unbalance the natural
Given the deep ties to nature that Mary Shelley explores within Frankenstein, the principles and methodology of ecocriticism can be applied in many different ways. The interaction of humanity and nature is a concept explored throughout the novel, relating directly to a core tenet of ecocriticism, "directly relat[ing] who we are as human beings to the environment" (Bressler 231). Being as there is no "single, dominant methodology" (235) within ecocriticism, the extent to which we can use ecocriticism to interact with Frankenstein contains considerable depth. However, I will look to a few main methodologies of ecocriticism to look at Frankenstein in detail to uncover how the novel deals with the changing attitudes of humanity and nature in early 19th century England.
Mary Shelley, with her brilliant tale of mankind's obsession with two opposing forces: creation and science, continues to draw readers with Frankenstein's many meanings and effect on society. Frankenstein has had a major influence across literature and pop culture and was one of the major contributors to a completely new genre of horror. Frankenstein is most famous for being arguably considered the first fully-realized science fiction novel. In Frankenstein, some of the main concepts behind the literary movement of Romanticism can be found. Mary Shelley was a colleague of many Romantic poets such as her husband Percy Shelley, and their friends William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge, even though the themes within Frankenstein are darker than their brighter subjects and poems. Still, she was very influenced by Romantics and the Romantic Period, and readers can find many examples of Romanticism in this book. Some people actually argue that Frankenstein “initiates a rethinking of romantic rhetoric”1, or is a more cultured novel than the writings of other Romantics. Shelley questions and interacts with the classic Romantic tropes, causing this rethink of a novel that goes deeper into societal history than it appears. For example, the introduction of Gothic ideas to Frankenstein challenges the typical stereotyped assumptions of Romanticism, giving new meaning and context to the novel. Mary Shelley challenges Romanticism by highlighting certain aspects of the movement while questioning and interacting with the Romantic movement through her writing.
Victor Frankenstein and his creation are alike in several ways, one of them being their appreciation of nature. Victor embraces the nature for the quick moment that he escapes the creature as it “filled me with a sublime ecstasy that gave wings to the soul and allowed it to soar from the obscure world to light and joy” (Shelley 84). Vict...
Nature is a key element in romanticism as the early romantics stressed the divine beauty they saw in nature. Mary Shelley uses the elements of nature to further the emotions of her characters and create a safe place for them to think. She also goes into the aspects of science and nature, "[Scientists] penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding-places” (Shelley 33). In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley creates a novel based around science overreaching to boundaries. Many scientific experiments of the early 1800s make an excellent base in history for Frankenstein. Trials such as biomedical trials that began during along with the continuing studies into human anatomy and the natural world. Weather is an important element of nature which is commonly used to reflect and supplement human emotions. After William’s death, whilst Victor is returning to Geneva to talk to his father “the heavens were clouded, and [soon] the rain was coming slowly in large drops” (Shelley 62). Therefore, the storm reflects Victor’s mournful attitude and as the storm p...
Gothic literature can be defined as stories that combine elements of romanticism and horror. Frankenstein does so almost seamlessly. Traits of romanticism that the novel possesses include the power of nature over human works and the individual vs. society. When Victor Frankenstein was in the presence of rage and fear due to his creation of the monster Frankenstein; the serenity of the Appalachian mountains is what kept victor sane and provided him with a sense of peace. When the monster Frankenstein made his appearance in society, he receives a highly negative reaction, so he goes to nature to immerse himself in the quietness of nature to calm him. On page 76. Of Frankenstein he says... “Dear mountains! My own beautiful lake!” Frankenstein's negative emotions begins to