Shelley's Frankenstein The Monster's Meaning

Frankenstein
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was a gothic work of literature written during the height of the Romantic Era—a period in the 19th century when her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friends Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron were writing classic poetry full of passion that spurned the conventional doctrines of the Old World and rejected the over-emphasis on Reason of the Enlightenment. As E. Michael Jones, has noted, however, their orientation was still rooted in a faithless and naturalistic approach to life. They had no interest in the salvation story of the Old World or its religion. Perhaps not coincidentally, they literally left a string of bodies in their wake, as Janet Todd has pointed out: Percy’s first wife drowned herself after he left her to run away with the 17-year-old Mary (daughter of the authoress of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman). Mary’s half-sister killed herself. Two of their children then died at a young age. Mary Shelley was deeply depressed and her husband was essentially a libertine masking his license in Romanticism. From this perspective, Shelley’s gothic horror fiction Frankenstein seems at least somewhat semi-autobiographical. Her husband could be said to be represented by Victor Frankenstein in the novel and the monster could be said to be the personification of all his machinations and the death and misery that his commitment to passion and Romance ultimately brought about.
What is Frankenstein’s monster after all? It is a rejected, mutilated, pieced-together, re-animated corpse of all the fragments of various bodies of the past—with breathed new life in it and with a desire to know his creator. When his creator spurns him and rejects him because he is hideous, the superficiality of the creator is seen: the creator was not creating out of love but rather out of narcissism. When the creature manifested proved to truly be made in the image and likeness of the creator (his spiritual superficiality reflected in the physical deformities of the creature), the creator reacted with personal revulsion: it was like Dorian Gray seeing the portrait of his own soul for the first time. The creature’s heart is wounded and his innocence suffers as he strives to find a being with whom he can come into contact in human sympathy. He reads Milton’s Paradise Lost and feels like Satan who is rejected by God. Just like Milton’s poem was a rebuke against the Puritanical God of the Protestant Reformation—a God Who created willy-nilly to save some and reject others, the monster is a rebuke against Romanticism, which essentially sprang from the same head as the Reformation—just later on down the line. Neither was rooted in the traditional values and norms of the Old World doctrines that had brought stability for centuries during the Middle Ages.
Shelley’s Victor is like her husband Percy, in his push for fame as a poet: “Do I not deserve to accomplish some great purpose? My life might have been passed in ease and luxury; but I preferred glory to every enticement that wealth placed in my path,” says Victor (Shelley 17), echoing surely what must have been her husband’s same sentiment having left all behind to run away with her and his poet friends, only to have his dreams dashed by an early death—just as happens with Victor as the monster of his own creation picks off his loved ones, one by one, ultimately leading him into the oblivion of nothingness where he too succumbs. Shelley undoubtedly sympathized with the monster, as she was able to give it a deep human longing that evoked the longing felt by every living soul yearning to be united to its creator: “I remembered Adam’s supplication to his Creator. But where was mine? He had abandoned me, and in the bitterness of my heart I cursed him,” Shelley wrote, depicting the monster’s internal thoughts (131). Shelley most likely felt the exact same way, at times feeling cast off from her husband and ultimately being left without him as a result of his own early death, as Jones has shown. The monster, however, becomes more enraged the more he thinks about the injustice done to him—reflecting the same thoughts that Milton’s Satan has in his angry outburst towards the Puritan God that created him only to cast him away. Shelley’s monster says, “I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. Even now my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice” (222). The monster here could be representing all the fruits of the Romantic poets’ license—their once passionate joys so vivid in the act of creation now trammeled under foot by the cold realities of the consequences of those actions—death, suicide, despair, isolation. Shelley had the monster end his days in a wilderness of ice for a reason, the body of his creator aflame on a pyre. Shelley knew exactly what was in store for the Romantics and their passion: it would dwindle out and be reduced to flames on a floating sheet of ice in no man’s land. After all, they had rejected all else and had nothing but themselves and their own mortal flesh to sustain them.
In conclusion, Frankentsein’s monster can be seen as a rebuke by Mary Shelley herself towards her husband and his libertine/Romantic lifestyle. Though she ran away with him of her own free will, the shock and drama and tragedy that the two left behind them in their wake undoubtedly impacted her psychology. The monster is a reflection of herself, in a sense—a reflection of the horror underlying their Romantic fantasy and their escapade into the unreality of passion and Romance.


Works Cited
Jones, E. Michael. Libido Dominandi. Sexual Liberation and Political Control. St.
Augustine’s Press, 2000.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. UK: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Todd, Janet. Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle.