Victor's Metamorphosis In Frankenstein

In the context of her childhood, the monster’s metamorphosis represents the alienation and subsequent disillusionment suffered by Shelley as both a woman and a daughter. Using her own emotions and experiences, Shelley likens the monster to a child; in doing so, she reveals many of her own fears and insecurities while also creating a visceral, tragic, and terrifying experience for the reader.

The vivid, dark imagery of the monster’s creation is used to emphasize Victor’s emotional and intellectual motherhood. This false maternity sets the stage for the future personification of the monster as a child. For instance, while Victor creates his creature, he is utterly consumed. "The summer months passed while I was thus engaged, heart and soul,

in one pursuit.” In this way, the creation is like a pregnancy. It takes up a good portion of his physical and emotional strength. Furthermore, the climax of the monster’s creation is described much like one might describe childbirth. The tone is dark and dreary, as “with an anxiety that almost amounted to agony,” he gives life to the monster. In his essay, Waxman describes this strange experience of maternity:

"Shelley helps readers to understand motherhood in its often tragic context as -- although she would hardly use these terms -- a pair of dialectical relationships or binary oppositions which, in Robert Scholes's words, "organize the flow of value and power" in motherhood; she suggests through Victor's experiences that most mothers alternately experience both poles of the two oppositional relationships, almost as a process of reversals. The first opposition is creative energy, or life, versus destructive energy, or death; the second is love versus hatred. Victor's experiencing of these two binary oppositions allows him to understand the profundity and tragic potential of maternity.” (Waxman, 1987)

In addition, this tragic depiction of birth was a reflection of Shelley’s own fears. "For if Mary Shelley was always afraid that birth was the prelude to an inscription in stone,” Hogle writes, "then she confronted the same terrors in the act of writing. Indeed in the 1831 preface, the essay that calls her fictional "progeny" something “hideous," she reflects in revealing ways on how fabrication is like reproduction.” This analogy not only brings light to Shelley’s own fears about childbirth, it also sets the stage for a much broader analogy which likens the creature’s experiences and feelings to those of an abandoned child.

After his birth, the monster is jarred by abandonment.

However, he still behaves like a child; unmarred and relatively pure, he is eager to explore his new world and seek the companionship of others. When the creature recounts his story, he has difficulty remembering the early days of his life, much like an adult has trouble recalling the distant memories of their childhood. "It is with considerable difficulty that [he remembers] the original era of [his] being; all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct… [He] saw, felt, heard, and smelt at the same time…” Still, he remembers feeling cold, frightened, and desolate after his abandonment. He was a “poor, helpless, miserable wretch; [he] knew, and could distinguish, nothing; but feeling pain invade [him] on all sides, [he] sat down and wept.” It is likely that Shelley poured her own emotions into this vivid scene of loneliness and disdain; her mother died after Shelley was born. "If a child may see a parent's death as a deliberate desertion, then she had been abandoned by her mother at birth just as the monster was abandoned by Frankenstein: thus, Shelley had Frankenstein do to the monster what she, on some unconscious level, may have felt Mary Wollstonecraft had done to her.” Furthermore, her father had estranged her recently at the time of her writing the novel. The fact that the monster’s experience parallels Shelley’s own childhood is evidence that the monster was meant to be personified in this way; as a

child, lonely and without guidance.

Due to his abandonment and the fact that he received no affection or interaction whatsoever, the creature craves companionship and love; however, he quickly realizes that in this world, he is unique and alone.

He finds pleasure in watching the Delaney’s interact with each other; he "longed to join [them], but dared not.” He also finds great joy in helping the family, at first. For instance, he cuts wood for them so that they don’t have to. "I observed, with pleasure, that he did not go to the forest that day, but spent it in repairing the cottage and cultivating the garden.” However, he is aware of his appearance; he knows that he is hideous, and he began to understand that he was alone. He observed and saw that nobody else was like him. He was a monstrosity and an abomination in this society. Despite this, he had hope. He "imagined that they would be disgusted, until, by [his] gentle demeanour and conciliating words, [he] should first win their favour and afterwards their love.” He is able to get the attention of the blind family member temporarily, but his optimism is crushed when the rest of the family shuns him. This rejection, combined with the abandonment the creature suffered earlier in the story, truly breaks the creature’s

heart.

The monster is not innately cruel or malicious; but society expects him to be. Due do his childlike understanding of the world, he molds himself according to those expectations and truly becomes a monster. His isolation caused him to suffer. A similar isolation was suffered by Shelley during her life time; not because she was a monster, but because she was a woman. "Although she was by no means ugly, her problem, like the monster's, was her appearance: her strong mind was housed in a woman's body. With interests and aspirations resembling those of the men with whom she associated, she was isolated from them by her sex.” Shelley often felt isolated from Byron and Percy Shelley because of her sex. This feeling combined with the feeling of abandonment she suffered from due to her lack of parental love are personified in the monster. The monster rebels as a result of his tribulations. "Once brought to life, Frankenstein's nameless creature responds to its maker as a child to its father… eventually rebelling in anger and vengeance when Frankenstein first rejects him and then refuses to complete work on a monstrous companion.” He yearns for a partner to ease his loneliness, trying and failing to get Victor to fulfill his wish. In the end, he is nothing but a murderer, and he knows that he is irredeemable. Tormented and alone, he resigns himself to death in the arctic. This resignation parallels Shelley’s ow resignation to the reality of her womanhood.

Shelley uses birth-symbolism, fear inducing imagery, and her own painful experiences to create the monster as a child transformed by society.