Vengeance In Frankenstein Research Paper

The theme of vengeance is incredibly prevalent throughout Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Vengeance drives the creature to commit the actions he does, and the plot revolves around the creature and how he affects Frankenstein. The story begins with Victor, an incredibly talented young man who, ever since childhood, has had a fascination with science. This leads to him traveling to Ingolstadt to study at a university, where he takes an interest in chemistry, which eventually leads to him becoming obsessed with life, more specifically how it is created. Victor tries and succeeds to create a living thing, which he immediately dismisses as nothing but an evil savage due to its repulsive appearance. Although the creature doesn’t physically grow, he

ages mentally. Throughout what one could call the creature’s childhood, he gets rejected time and time again, causing his childish hopes and worldview to be brutally crushed due to direct action against him. The creature loses his childish innocence and happiness and is thrust into the reality of the world around him, and the speed of which this happens, which is due mostly to the creature’s lack of parenting and guidance from anyone, especially Victor, is in direct correlation to how much he abhores society and desires revenge upon them.

The sad tale of the creature begins with its creation. As soon as the creature opened his eyes for the first time, Victor was taken aback in horror and disgust. Victor fled to his room and threw himself on his bed, hoping to forget about the creature, if even for a little bit. When Victor woke up, he saw this: “He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped and rushed downstairs.” (44). This shows just how ignorant Victor truly was to the fact that this creature was even a living being, let alone a humanlike being. The creature later says that he has trouble remembering his very early moments of being, although there is no doubt that this event left some sort of

psychological impact, with him being abandoned by his creator. This event was the first of many mental scars that would be left on the creature’s brain, as it would scar any child’s brain to be abandoned by their parents. The next incident with society that the newborn creature stumbled into was rather small, and only involved one other person. Shortly after being rejected by Victor, the creature wandered out to the woods, and eventually stumbled upon a hut with an old man eating breakfast in it. The creature said “He turned on hearing a noise, and perceiving me, shrieked loudly, and quitting the hut, ran across the fields with a speed of which his debilitated form hardly appeared capable. His appearance, different from any I had ever before seen, and his flight somewhat surprised me.” (93). This was the first time that the creature was rejected when he was fully aware of his surroundings, although he was to preoccupied with his extreme need for food and shelter to care all that much about it. Although this event isn’t particularly impactful to the creature, it does very clearly foreshadow how pretty much everyone will react to the creature upon first sight. Later on, the creature stumbles into a village. Upon entering a building, “the children shrieked, and one of the women fainted. The whole village was roused; some fled, some attacked me, until, grievously bruised by stones and many other kinds of missile weapons, I escaped to the open country and fearfully took refuge in a low hovel.” (94). This is the first truly fearful encounter the creature has with society, and it is very apparent that society doesn’t appreciate him in any sense of the word. This doesn’t lead to a mutual hatred, as the creature is still quite young, but rather it leads to a childlike fear, although he does say that the hovel provided him a shelter from the “barbarity of man,” (94) which could be a sort of foreshadowing to some future beliefs the creature would hold.
Although all previous events may have caused not much more other than a fearful reaction in the creature, that wouldn’t remain the case for much longer. It just so happens that the little hovel that the creature took refuge in was very close to a cottage that housed an old man named De Lacey, a boy named Felix, and a girl named Agatha. It’s these three people, as well as the later addition of a woman named Safie, that the creature learns a lot of basic things from, such as language and history, through observation from a distance. He sees how kind these people are, and how much they all truly love and respect each other, and he comes to strongly desire a relationship like this as well. De Lacey happens to be blind, and so the creature decides to enter the cabin while everyone else is out so that he won’t immediately be forced out based on his repulsive looks. When he eventually gets around to doing this, at first things go well. The creature is able to hold a steady conversation with the old man. Things take a turn for the worse when the rest of the group gets back from the walk they were on though: “At that instant the cottage door was opened, and Felix, Safie, and Agatha entered. Who can describe their horror and consternation on beholding me? Agatha fainted, and Safie, unable to attend to her friend, rushed out of the cottage. Felix darted forward, and with supernatural force tore me from his father, to whose knees I clung, in a transport of fury, he dashed me to the ground and struck me violently with a stick. I could have torn him limb from limb, as the lion rends the antelope. But my heart sank within me as with bitter sickness, and I refrained. I saw him on the point of repeating his blow, when, overcome by pain and anguish, I quitted the cottage, and in the general tumult escaped unperceived to my hovel.” (123-124). This was the creature’s last attempt to find a place in the society of man, and this marks the point when it all hits him, just how cruel and judgemental the world is, and how he has now been discouraged from even trying to find a place for himself given the horrendous failures that his previous attempts were. This also marks the point when the creature truly experiences the desire for revenge, a desire that would later consume him and dictate his every action. He says it himself: “my feelings were those of rage and revenge. I could with pleasure have destroyed the cottage and its inhabitants and have glutted myself with their shrieks and misery.” (125). It cannot be emphasized how important this moment is, as it marks the point when the creature realizes what appears to be his destiny, to be hated by all.
After that fun little experience, the creature was left with no reason to stay, and so he decided to go to the homeland of his creator, which he knew the name of only because he had found some papers in a jacket of Victor’s that he had took way back when he had just been created.

Although the creature thought that Victor was his last hope of achieving any sort of relationship with another creature, he had grown to hate his creator. The entirety of the creature’s story up until this point and a bit beyond this point has come from the creature telling his story to Victor in a meeting they would have, which is why this quote sounds directed at someone: “towards you I felt no sentiment but that of hatred. Unfeeling, heartless creator! You had endowed me with perceptions and passions and then cast me abroad an object for the scorn and horror of mankind.” (128). This appears to be collateral damage of sorts from the creature’s earlier rejection at the cottage, as he has now opened his heart to hatred and revenge. Once the creature reaches Geneva, Victor’s homeland, he goes to a hiding place in the fields to rest, when he sees a child. The creature has a very strange idea, that since this child is still rather young, he will be able to disconnect from his parents rather easliy, and so the creature could then take him along as a little friend of his. When the creature seizes the child, it doesn’t go well, as one could imagine. The child, who’s name is William, says a whole host of

nasty things to the creature. The last thing he says, however, is the important thing: That he is the son of Frankenstein, making him Victor’s little brother. Upon hearing this, the creature snaps the boy’s neck, and afterwards he goes “I gazed on my victim, and my heart swelled with exultation and hellish triumph; clapping my hands, I exclaimed, 'I too can create desolation; my enemy is not invulnerable; this death will carry despair to him, and a thousand other miseries shall torment and destroy him.' (131-132). It is this moment that really justified the creature’s lust for revenge, as it fills him with a sense of joy to have caused Victor misery. The creature goes on to kill several other friends and family of Victor, and then torture him by leading him through some of the most inhospitable environments on the planet, and all because it gave him some sort of high to cause misery in Victor when he killed his little brother. This sounds incredibly messed up, and it is, but the creature has no real other way of feeling any sort of happiness due to society turning him away, leaving him with no connections or relationships through which he can gain any sort of joy.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein displays how vengeance develops in the creature as he ages, and how being rejected by society at such an early point had such a huge impact on the creature’s mental state. It seems as though the development of this theme is more relevant today than it was back when this book was published, as it details how rejection by society at an early age can have a severe impact on the mental development of someone, and while few experience the extreme degree of rejection that the creature went through, rejection to some degree almost seems to be a part of life for many. The effects of this, while again are rarely to the extreme that the creature displayed, can easily be seen in the mannerisms of many people, and sometimes do lead to extreme actions. Mass shooters aren’t necessarily born mass shooters, just as the creature wasn’t born a monster, but rather society turned him into one. That’s not to say that this wasn’t relevant when Frankenstein was published. Rejection by society has always been and likely always be part of human society.