Guilt Theme In Frankenstein

Considering Mary Shelley has experienced a childhood without much influence from her parents, it is understandable that she does not recognize the proper ways to cope with guilt. As a result, her main character in Frankenstein, Victor, depicts her confusion of encountering guilt. Even if it is not known if Mary Shelley had negative occurrences resulting from unsettled guilt, she depicts the psychological effects of unresolved guilt through Victor in Frankenstein.

Guilt is a self-conscious emotion that a person feels after carrying out a wrong type of behavior. The emotion is felt after executing a wrongdoing, “It provides a painful consequence for actions that would weaken the groups that you belong to” (Markman sec. 1). The normal reaction

of experiencing guilt would be to apologize for the behavior that had caused the feeling, “Guilty people want to do something to help people” (Markman sec. 7). However, if left unresolved, guilt could potentially cause irreversible damage to an individual.
There are different reasons why a person experiences guilt, “the most obvious reason to feel guilty is that you actually did something wrong”, which can be from either physical or psychological pain (Whitbourne, sec.

7). Mary Shelley uses various dictions in order to portray the way Victor felt after he had finished constructing the monster and putting life into it, “The beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (Shelley 51). When he realized he had worked so hard, sacrificing his social, psychological, and physical state (Shelley 51), he possessed guilt that the monster was not worth the efforts that he had spent all these years. There are several ways to cope with guilt, which for one, he could have first started out with obtaining the reason to why he had felt that guilt and after, “Accept the fact that this happened…and then figure out how to avoid committing the same act in the future” (Whitbourne, sec. 8). Yet instead, he ran away, trying to settle in as far away from the monster as possible, which he chose to, “refuge in the courtyard belonging to the house which” he inhabited where he remained during the rest of the night (Shelley 52). Mary Shelley’s purpose in this situation was to present Victor’s inability to resolve the guilt that would lead the emotion to, “…turn into shame, a feeling of worthlessness and a negative sense of self" (Smith, sec. 3). Likewise, Victor repeatedly rehashes the process of rejecting the cause and the displaying of his

guilt.
When an individual may visualize something infelicitous, they may experience guilt that is strikingly similar to guilt from actually committing the act, "Thinking about committing an act in which you deviate from your own moral code or engage in behavior that is dishonest, unfaithful, or illegal" (Whitbourne, sec. 9). The violation of one’s moral code is very guilt provoking, which compels a person to undergo the same level of guilt as committing the act (Whitbourne, sec. 9). Mary Shelley depicts this psychological effect through Victor when Justine “tried to comfort others and herself” (Shelley 78). He felt this horrible pain in his mind when he knew that in a way he was the true murderer (Shelley 78) because he was "…catastrophizing (making the very worst of a bad situation) or overgeneralizing (believing that if one bad thing happened, many more must have as well) " (Whitbourne, sec. 4) about indirectly killing Justine rather than thinking about what genuinely happened to this situation. After the monster killed Justine and Victor felt guilt, he could have thought about confessing the truth in order to lessen the weight of guilt on his mind. Yet, his mind did not indicate the fact that even thinking of professing could abate his guilt.
There are other reasons to why a person experiences guilt, one being that an individual believes that they committed a wrongdoing, “If you think you did something wrong, you can experience almost as much guilt as if you actually committed the act — or even more" (Whitbourne, sec. 11). This kind of guilt may even lead to confusion in the individual’s mentality, which could advance to, “Have done nothing wrong at all but to misremember and think that you did” (Whitnbourne, sec. 11). Mary Shelley uses diction to establish Victor’s self-accusation of being the indirect murderer, “Not in deed, but in effect… the true murderer" (Shelley 82), which led to him accusing himself as the murderer of all his friends and family that died (Shelley 157). Even the mindset that someone caused a wrongdoing can worsen his or her psychological state.
When the unresolved guilt piled up in Victor’s mind, “the messages your guilty feelings convey are often inaccurate and misleading" (Winch, sec. 3). Victor could not process the guilt properly and prevent one, simple guilt from ruining his life to a point where "I saw around me nothing but a dense and frightful darkness, penetrated by no light but the glimmer of two eyes that glared upon me" (Shelley 161). If the cause of guilt was shared by someone so that it can be resolved, “Guilt can heal and be resolved with compassion and time. It lessens when shared out in the open and with understanding” (Smith sec. 4). However, Victor’s mistake of unsettling guilt in his life led to the loss of all the relationships he had with the world.
Even if it is one simple feeling, guilt becomes the base of most of the plots in Frankestein. Ostensibly, Mary Shelley put Victor to experience the painful consequence of leaving guilt unresolved to depict her confusion of the time she first encountered guilt, when she did not know the correct ways to cope with the emotion. She uses diversified diction to convey the different ways guilt can affect the mind of an individual. Through Victor, different types of guilt and the causes of it are presented as well as how the emotion affects the psychological mind of an individual.