In the modern world we rely heavily upon John Locke’s perspective of nurture v.s. nature, swaying towards nature to an extreme. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein comments on the role of nurturing human development are at the forefront of the novel’s arguments. In Frankenstein a young man named Victor Frankenstein devotes his time to creating a human-like monster, however once finished, he realizes his mistake and runs from his creation. Victor and his creation then spend the rest of their lives retaliating against each other for their wrongdoings, committing murder, and getting caught up in other violent crimes. Victor Frankenstein and his creation, the monster, are alike in their nature, yet completely different in their nurtured backgrounds.
The monster and Victor have very different childhoods. Victor has a joyous childhood while the monster is abandoned and left to fend for himself. The monster is neglected in
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Victor is very obsessive in nature, just as the monster is, a prime example being his attitude towards his sister, Elizabeth. He treats Elizabeth as a treasure, saying, “I… looked upon Elizabeth as mine–mine to protect, love, and cherish.” (Shelley, 21). Showcasing his obsession with his sister, even at a young age, Victor eventually marries Elizabeth–this illustrates the true form of his obsession. Victor also spends two years creating the monster, purely to prove those who did not believe him wrong. Calling himself, “...engaged, heart and soul…” (Shelley, 36) in his work . This obsession affects his relations with his family, as he does not pay any visit to them during this time. “The monster’s obsessiveness is exhibited when he retaliates against Victor for destroying the companion he agreed to make, saying, “I will be with you on your wedding night,” (Shelley 156) and killing Victor’s friend, Henry Clerval (Shelley, 164). This reveals the monster’s obsession with making Victor’s life a living
As Halloween is coming around the corner, ghosts, monsters, and witches come to mind. Watching classic scary movies and reading books like, Frankenstein and Edward Scissorhands, is a great way to get into the spirit of the season. These two stories have different plots, but their themes and meanings parallel each other and have connections to modern society. Although, Frankenstein’s creature and Edward Scissorhands have vastly different lives, they both experience a struggle for acceptance that is also shared by contemporary homosexuals due to societal influences that attempt to apply a predetermined characterization towards these individuals. This is evidenced by how the characters and gay people are outcasts and want to be loved.
“I now hasten to the more moving part of my story. I shall relate events that impressed me with feelings which, from what I was, have made me what I am” (Shelley 92). Frankenstein’s Creature presents these lines as it transitions from a being that merely observes its surroundings to something that gains knowledge from the occurrences around it. The Creature learns about humanity from “the perfect forms of [his] cottagers” (90). Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein offers compelling insights into the everlasting nature versus nurture argument. Her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote, “Treat a person ill, and he will become wicked.” Shelley believes that the nurture of someone, or something, in the Creature’s case, forms them into who they become and what actions they take. While this is true for Frankenstein’s Creature, the same cannot be said about Victor Frankenstein.
Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein is book about the importance of human relationships and treating everyone with dignity and respect. The main character of the book is Victor Frankenstein who is a very intelligent man with a desire to create life in another being. After he completes his creation, he is horrified to find that what he has created is a monster. The monster is the ugliest, most disgusting creature that he has ever seen. Victor being sickened by his creation allows the monster to run off and become all alone in the world. Throughout Frankenstein, Mary Shelley uses the theme of human relationships to illustrate the bond that man has with other beings and the need for love and affection. The importance of human relationships is shown throughout the book in many ways. Victor’s mother says to him, “I have a pretty present for my Victor—tomorrow he shall have it”(18).Victor is very excited that he has such a precious gift that will always be his. They become very close and refer to each other as cousins. However, there is a deeper a relationship between the two, and Victor vows to always protect and take of the girl whose name is Elizabeth. Mary Shelley uses this quote to explain how special Elizabeth is to Victor and that she is gift sent to him. Victor’s mother reinforces this again when she says to Victor and Elizabeth, “My children, my firmest hopes of future happiness were placed on the prospect of your union. This expectation will now be the consolation of your father. Elizabeth, my love, you must supply my place to my younger children. Alas! I regret that I am taken from you; and, happy and beloved as I have been, is it not hard to quit you all? But these are not thoughts befitting me; I will endeavour to resign...
After his creation, Frankenstein’s monster is left in isolation, cursed to endure people’s hatred towards him. This revulsion met by onlookers is merely based on the creature’s hideous looks. The monster is not actually a monster at all. He displays more humanity than many other characters in Frankenstein. The ultimate irony is that the prejudicial belief is what caused the reanimated human to become a monster. In the nature versus nurture debate, proponents of the nature theory believe that a person is unchanging and that one’s experiences do not affect that person’s behavior. If this were true, the monster would not change as a result of his interactions with humans. It is undeniable that the creature does immoral things, but when Frankenstein’s monster saves a little girl from drowning, Mary Shelley takes a clear stance that the creature was naturally noble but became monstrous as a result of interactions with humans.
The monster does not resemble Victor physically; instead, they share the same personalities. For example, Victor and the monster are both loving beings. Both of them want to help others and want what is best for others. Victor and the monster try to help the people that surround them. Victor tries to console his family at their losses, and the monster assists the people living in the cottage by performing helpful tasks. However, Victor and the monster do not reflect loving people. The evil that evolves in Victor’s heart is also present in the monster.
Count Dracula versus Frankenstein’s monster; the two beasts seem very different, yet also show similarities. Although Dracula is a thousands of years old vampire and Victor’s creation was merely born when he awoke, both monsters are the main part of their perspective story. The roles of these monsters are vital to their tales because without them, their separate protagonists would have nothing to fight; the two sagas would be nothing more than journal entries about boring everyday living.
The monster is created like no other person, and his appearance is especially horrific to all of mankind. He becomes increasingly lonely throughout the novel when he realizes that he will never be able to make anyone be his companion since every human is afraid of him. The monster recognizes he was inherently good by saying “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend”, but he loses that goodness after being repeatedly rejected by multiple humans (Shelley 87). The monster becomes so isolated that he begins to become corrupt, and the corruption leads to a sense of jealousy. He has the desire for something that he does not have which is a companion, and becomes obsessed with the fact that he will never have one. This obsession makes him evil, and makes him lose any sense of innocence he once had. On the other hand, Victor is blessed with an abundance of family and friends. Sadly, the monster kills almost all of Victor’s family which leaves him in a depressed state from the loss of his loved ones. Victor feels alone without his family and explains how he goes crazy by saying “For they had called me mad, and during many months, as I understood, a solitary cell had been my habitation” (Shelley 189). He loses all human connection when he loses his family, and this inability to be with someone he can relate to makes him
Nature vs. Nurture is the lead debate in the Mary Shelley novel Frankenstein. One of the main characters, the monster, has an intuitive nature that makes up his personality and way of life but is condemned to a very different nurturing style. The author Mary Shelley makes it clear that the creature is not born a monster, but that society makes him one by the way he gets treated.
Similar to Victor, the monster lives in a revengeful life. He blames Victor for bringing him alive and suffers in loneliness and betrayal. Victor is the monster’s only connection to the world and the only one who understands him. Betrayal and abandonment from Victor have turned him to a true monster without moral and humanity. Later in the story, the rage exceeds the monster’s limit. He decides to take revenge on his creator. This is the time when immorality takes over the monster’s mentality. The monster states that I continued for the remainder of the day in my hovel in a state of utter and stupid despair. For the first time the feelings of revenge and hatred filled my bosom, and I did not strive to control them, but allowing myself to be borne away by the stream (Shelly, 16). The monster in the story is a round character. His mentality changes after each event. He first changes from a naïve and compassionate to revengeful and finally to sympathetic again. After Victor destroys the monster’s female companion, he says to Victor, “It is well. I go; but remember, I shall be with you on your wedding-night” (shelly, 19). When the last hope for companionship is destroyed, the monster is angry and furious. He hopes Victor to understand his desperate situation, but once again, Victor betrays the monster. Therefore, he decides to revenge. Although in everyone’s opinion, the monster is violent and brutal, he sometimes is actually compassionate and
Victor, the main character in the story develop an obsession with recreating lives from death, causing heartbreak by creating the monster and as Mary Shelley writes “deeply smitten with the thirst for knowledge” (Shelley 20). With this obsession comes his first creation of a monster. Victor comes to reject the monster profusely and they have a difficult relationship. Victor is deeply loved by his family and friends and has a clear mind in nature. He had many friends and close family members and the use of nature to describe Victor’s feelings is prominent in this novel. Victor has a very prized childhood with a great deal of attention given to him from his loving parents. The monster that Victor creates kills his brother which takes a big toll on Victor’s life. Victor was very close with his family and friends but also had heartbreak intervene with their relationships and it
Nature versus nurture is an age-old controversy that is used in psychology to help answer what makes us who we are when it comes to personality and behavior. Nature refers to the personality traits we inherit or are genetically predisposed to. And nurture refers to all the environmental influences that we experience throughout the developmental stages of life. Francis Galton first framed this concept of nature versus nurture in the late 19th century. Galton once said, "Nature is all that a man brings with himself into the world; nurture is every influence from without that affects him after his birth” (Galton 12). Mary Shelley asks the question of nature versus nurture in her novel, Frankenstein: are children genetically predisposed to behave a certain way or is the environment they are brought up in responsible for their behavior? Victor gives life to his creation and then abandons him at birth. Therefore, was the monster born evil, or did his forced isolation and abandonment by Victor cause him to become evil?
“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.” Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley’s novel, “Frankenstein” depicts the life of a man named Victor Frankenstein. Frankenstein is highly intelligent but has many downsides to his persona. Victor Frankenstein creates a monster that will eventually be the cause of his demise, which,could have been avoided if Frankenstein had not abandoned his monster in the first place. The film Victor Frankenstein portrays a man named Victor Von Frankenstein. Frankenstein is also highly intelligent, he however rescues a hunchback from the circus to be his partner. The hunchback (whose name is Igor) is also very intelligent, and does not actually have
In the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, a man driven by the desire to create something bigger than mankind with the use of science ends up creating a creature he, as well as others, perceive as a monster. Even after two hundred years since the day it was published, Frankenstein still plays a major role in English literature today and incorporates a theme that is still very frequent in today’s society, nature versus nurture. The nature versus nurture dispute is over whether a being’s conduct is based off their environment, such as parental guidance, during their life, or if it is determined by genetics. Mary Shelley addresses this theme by allowing the reader to choose who is responsible for the wrongdoing done by the creature’s hands, Frankenstein
The unexplainable creatures with human like features in the stories Frankenstein and Dracula are sadistic beings who cause devastation and distress for the main characters until the time of their downfall. These two classic horror monsters have similar character types which dissimilarity in many ways. Each story includes a hero and villain that draw the reader in to wanting to understand the monster and Dracula more. In Frankenstein, the monster was never given a name by Victor Frankenstein who was his creator. Victor created him for selfish reasoning without thinking of the consequences. When Victor achieved the creation of the monster he took one great look at him; he was disappointed and horrified of what was before him.
It is not so easily seen that the two share a human instinct that is the need for love. This parallel is drawn from Victor and the monster through their feelings of desperation in their search for love and how they feel greatly misunderstood. Victor has been provided with the opportunity for love, yet puts himself in an isolated state, which ultimately leads to his downfall. “I, who had ever been surrounded by amiable companions, continually engaged in endeavouring to bestow mutual pleasure, I was now alone.” (32) Through Victor rejecting love and creating a self-imposed seclusion, he does not treat the creature with care once it is brought to life\. Victor had once known what it is like to be cared for, although the monster never once feels what it is like to be loved. “I am alone and miserable: man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species and have the same defects. This being you must create.” (129) Victors loneliness was put upon himself, similarly, the monster’s loneliness was also due to Victor through his neglect. The monster is craving that sense of security brought by a family who will show him love while Victor is leaving his. These two situations are contradictory, but it is what brings them to their