To be considered a human being I would have to say that one has to be able to feel emotionally and physically. Human beings have to have the mental capacity to know right from wrong. I think human beings have the need to always want to be accepted by someone. They have to be able to accept others’ feelings just as they want to be accepted. To be a human being is pretty much the definition of humanity itself. In Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, the Creature shows all the characteristics of being considered a human being from compassion to revenge, and even being accepted by someone.
To begin with, the Creature shows compassion towards other human beings, even after being rejected multiple times. This was even evident after being rejected by his own father/creator Victor. The Creature first shows compassion towards the cottagers when he realizes they sometimes were unhappy because they were poor. They did not have the money for a lot of food, and he had been taking part of what they had for himself. He realized this was hurting the family and causing them to not have to eat so he quit taking their food. To compensate for all the things he had taken
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from them, he would collect firewood in the middle of the night and stack it up outside their home for them (135-136). Later on at the end of the story the Creature shows compassion towards his creator, Victor, who dies. The Creature is found crying over Victor’s dead body, and he admits that now his creator is dead he has no more purpose in life. Even though his creator had rejected him and was trying to kill him, he still felt a sentimental connection to him. The Creature knew the things he had done to Victor were wrong, and therefore he felt as punishment he should no longer live either (265-270). Secondly, the Creature, like any human being could not hold back his feelings of revenge after being rejected over and over again by society. The creature longed for some kind of companionship in his life, but was continuously rejected by others because of the way he looked. For example, when he decides to finally reveal himself to the cottagers, they completely freak out and are horrified by him. This event makes him declare war on humans because he was expecting to be accepted by them, but instead they were disgusted by him (164-165). Another reason he feels the need for revenge is because Victor broke the promise, to make a female creature, that he had made with the Creature. The Creature felt betrayed and hurt that his own creator would do that to him, so he decides to take revenge on Victor. He vowed to make Victor’s life miserable by taking away everything and everyone he holds dear to him (204-205). As a final point, the Creature feels the need to be accepted.
He wants other human beings to like him and to be his friends. The Creature feels lonely and isolated all the time because he has no one who accepts him for who he is. After months of watching the cottagers and seeing how nice and caring they are towards each other he wants to be a part of that. He wants to be accepted by them and for them to be his friends (164). Another example of him being hurt by humans instead of being praised and accepted was when he saved the life of a young girl and everyone thought he was attacking her. The young girl was running in the woods from someone and lost her footing. This caused her to fall into the rapid stream, where she was almost swept away. The Creature pulled her out and was in turn shot by the boy the girl was with
(171). To put it briefly, the Creature was human because he felt lonely and sought out companionship. But, he was never able to find this because of his outward appearance. All he sought was friendship, but instead all he found was fear. This causes him to become vengeful towards the human race, and he ends up wanting to cause destruction. The Creature blames Victor for making him hideous, and for destroying the companion he was making for him. So this in turn causes the Creature to kill Victor’s loved ones. So this tells us as a society we should be careful and judge people for what they have going on in the inside, and not by how they look on the inside.
His character showed a longing for an absolute meaning of love and happiness. In order to find the absolute meaning, the creature experienced sufferings. I think that he was able to realize what is true love, and what is real happiness because of Karloff’s advice: “Underwater, my friend. Water is your natural milieu” (Bailey). Because the Creature is similar to a human, I can understand his feelings which made me feel that I am part of the story.
Tiffany Solorzano Professor Garrow LIT232-Sect.03 March 2, 2014 Essay #1: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Mary Shelley states towards the end of Volume 2, Chapter 5, “Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? 83)”. The. In the context of Volumes 1-2, the narrator is asking this question because the question revolved around Victor Frankenstein and his creation of the monster due to his admiration of the relationship between nature and knowledge.
Throughout the book, the creature doesn’t show emotions that lead towards being a monster. Animals do show emotions, for example, I watched a video about a mother seal who had a miscarriage and she did not understand why her baby was not moving, it resulted in her having real tears. In the beginning, we see the first emotion that the creature has, which is a sense of belonging. After the creature was forced to fend for himself, he finds a family in the woods that he starts to observe and want a place of belonging in their family. . The creature knows that he is ugly and doesn’t look like a human, but he still wants to belong. To belong to a family and feel wanted, he wants to be beautiful. This is a human desire. He shows how much his looks
Have you ever wondered why there are heartless people in society? And what makes them behave that way? Well, if a person is isolated, mistreated and excluded from society what we could expect from them. The novel “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley gives an example of how humanity itself is the cause of creating heartless and malicious people. Victor Frankenstein, whose obsession with playing god and his ambition to be glorified by humanity leads him to use natural powers. Like a mother, he brings a new life into the world, basically making him the father of the creature. However, disgusted and scared, he runs away from his “son”, illustrating the event of when a mother abort her child”. Victor immediately assumes his creature is an evil beast,
In any novel the author is free to create and shape their characters in whatever way they see fit. In Frankenstein, Shelley does an excellent job of shaping her characters, be it however minute their part in the story, so that the reader gets a clear picture of Shelley's creations. It seems that each character in Shelley's Frankenstein is created by Shelley to give the reader a certain impression of the character. By doing this Shelley creates the characters the way she wants us to see them. She tells us certain things about them and gives them certain traits so that they will fit into the story the way she wants them to. In particular I will examine the characters of the monster, Elizabeth, and old man De Lacey.
Like a child longs for a mother’s love, the monster longs for the love of his creator. When the monster was first created, Victor says that the monster looked at him “while a grin wrinkled his cheeks.” The monster looks at Victor with love and instead of receiving love in return, he receives complete rejection. The monster cannot understand why his own creator does not love him like God loved Adam. The monster believes he should be like Adam but is “rather the fallen angel.” God made man in his own image and loved Adam even with his flaws. Yet, victor made “a monster so hideous that [Victor] turned from [his creation] in disgust.” This rejection from Victor makes the monster angry and
He approaches Victor and demands him to explain why he destroyed the creation. Victor then begins to attack the Creature verbally, calling him wicked and deformed. The Creature responds to Victor saying “Slave, I before reasoned with you, but you have proved yourself unworthy of my condescension. Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master;-obey!” (131). By calling Victor a slave, the Creature is positioning himself higher than his own creator. He continues on, saying Victor is unworthy to him, and that he can make Victor’s life miserable to the point where it seems like everything is against him. In the last line, he calls Victor his creator, but calls himself the master of the relationship. The Creature is calling himself master because he is ultimately in control of Victor’s life as mentioned above. He then tells Victor “Are you to be happy, while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness?... I may die; but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery… I will watch with the willingness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom... I go; but remember, I shall be with you on your wedding-night” (131). In this excerpt, the Creature is expressing his feelings towards Victor. He believes that it is unfair for his creator
... human he has known or loved has rejected the creature he decides to isolate himself. But as he retreats to his desolation he saves a girl from drowning in river. This concern for human life in addition to his love toward the family is evidence to his humanity.
The literary critic Harold Bloom, in his Afterward in the Signet Edition of Frankenstein states that, “The monster is at once more intellectual and more emotional than his creator.” Bloom continues to say that the creature is more human, more lovable, and more to be pitied than Doctor Frankenstein (292). Throughout the novel Frankenstein, the monster portrays more human qualities than his creator Dr. Frankenstein. Dr. Frankenstein appears less human than his creation because he rejects his own creation and he fails to plan for the results of his experiment. As the monster wanders through the novel searching for companionship and acceptance, Dr. Frankenstein refuses to provide the support expected of a parent or creator. While the monster appears human in his attempts to socialize with his peers, Dr. Frankenstein represents the monstrosity that occurs when humans tamper with life.
His personality and self grew into knowing that he was ugly and hated by humans making him a hateful individual due to a life event. He went from being a caring individual towards more hateful and cautious around man because of this event, it crafted his adolescent mind to know to be fearful and to avoid normal human individuals and later another life event would change him even further into being a completely hateful monster of a person. Later in the story after having yet another bad encounter with humans, he goes and finds a child hoping to be able to sway the naive child into liking him and being his companion believing if young enough the child would ignore the looks of himself and trust only the loving caring nature of the being. The creature finds a child and captures him but the child does not look past physical features and then screams,
The creature is born into the world with a fully functional brain; however, he has no knowledge of anything. As the story progresses, the creature quickly learns the language, culture, and customs of the world he lives in. Since he is horribly ugly, he is rejected by the people of his society, this is the motivation behind his need and desire to learn about himself and the society he lives in. As the creature obtains more and more knowledge, he finally discovers his origins and birth from Victor. As a result, the Creature becomes a wretched monster, who now has no sympathy for anyone or anything. The Creature becomes fixed on the idea of needing a companion, and due to this obsession, he turns Victor’s life upside down. The Creature is able to torment Victor by killing his family members, then quickly vanishing so Victor can not tell who or what he saw. The Creature and Victor finally meet again and the Creature tells Victor of his stories and struggles. Throughout the novel, the Creature remains in the same state of being, he persistently harasses Victor and maintains a watchful eye on him. At the beginning of the novel, the Creature is an innocent being, made purely for science. In the end of the novel the reader sees what the Creature truly becomes when Victor has died and the Creature is having his last words, he says: “I felt the cheering warmth of summer, and heard the rustling of the leaves and the warbling of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation”(pg. 166). This explains how the Creature is aware of how he has changed from start to beginning. The society that he lived in, causes him to shift from an innocent and loving creature, to a hopeless and wretched
Everywhere the Creature goes he is met with hatred, but through the hate he still tries to help others. After, "The whole village was roused; some fled, some attacked me, until, grievously bruised by stones and many other kinds of missile weapons, I escaped . . . ." (67). The Creature finds himself in the woods near the De Lacey home. Remaining kind in spirit the Creature tells that, "I often took his tools, the use of which I quickly discovered, and brought home firing sufficient for the consumption of several days" (71). Though his first contact with humans is awful, the Creature’s benevolence leads him to help and learn from the De Lacey family.
One can imagine that being rejected due to their looks is extremely discouraging. The creature in this novel was pieced together out of other dead people 's body parts, making his appearance extremely frightening. The moment the creature came to life he was immediately rejected by his maker due to looking like a monster. Victor had woken up, the creature was standing in his room "He might
Sigmund Freud's studies in psychoanalysis are uncannily fore-grounded in the late romantic period. The works of William Wordsworth, Percy B. Shelley, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley, all function as poetic preludes to Freud's 18th century field. Particularly, it is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein that creates a fictional rendering for psychoanalyst. In Frankenstein, Victor's rejection of the Monster metaphorically represents the ego's rejection of the unconscious. Following from this metaphorical paradigm, Freud's theories on narcissism, the libido theory, the doppelganger, neurosis, and the Oedipus-complex all resonate in the pages of Frankenstein. After a brief introduction to narcissism and the libido theory, a psychoanalytic character study of Victor and the monster will be preformed. Finally, the romantic works of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Wordsworth will further demonstrate the Freudian phenomenon.
As soon as he went back to the cottage he realized the family had moved out, and that he would never see the family again. The creature felt fury in him and would destroy the objects around him. Soon his fury made him burn the cottage “ The wind fanned the fire, and the cottage was quickly enveloped by the flames” (Shelley 60). All the creature wanted was to be accepted by the family but the rejection of the family and the way they treated him turned into madness and fury. In the story it is also mentioned how he wants to educate a child he saw, and become his friend, so he won't be lonely throughout his life. “If, therefore, I could seize him and educate him as my companion and friend, I should not be so desolate in this peopled earth” ( Shelley 61). His attempt to convincing the child to go with him failed. His idea was of no harm he was trying to live happily with the child, but as soon as the kid rejected and named who his father was the creature killed three child. “The child still struggled and loaded me with epithets which carried despair to my heart; I grasped his throat to silence him, and in a moment he lay dead at my feet” (Shelley