Isolation Depicted In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

The true evil in Frankenstein is not Victor or the monster, but isolation. Victor studies causes him to be separated completely from society. This strips him of all social responsibilities and causes him to be oblivious of his wrong doings. It is simply the engulfing isolation that the monster experiences that triggers it to do all the unforgiveable things it does, not because it was made 'evil'. The monster is young and aims to make victor as isolated as it is by the horrendous things he does. This is the monsters form of vengeance. Shelley makes it clear that the hatred and violence is all caused by Victor's isolation from family and society. Very much like the French revolution, the monster is trying to counter play Frankenstein's evil decisions. Victor abandons the monster after seeing his

This is also the firsts sign of Shelley using the motif of isolation to be conveyed at destructive. We see the monster suffering negatively from the isolation, and this recurring idea has symbolic presence in the novel. For example, we can see that captain Robert Walton also suffers from isolation, which affects him in a bad way. He is a bit like the monster in that he is lonely: 'I desire the company of a man who could sympathise with me, whose eyes would reply to mine … I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans', merely depicting the distraught he goes through of being lonely and isolated. Like the monster, he's self-educated as he is 'twenty-eight and am in reality more illiterate than many schoolboys of fifteen', suggesting that he knows he is less fortunate than other characters in the book, and that this might be a cause of the isolation. Shelley uses setting in the novel to illustrate many ideas, but one main theme is isolation. Robert Walton is set in the Arctic, which is a very desolate, uninhabited