Conflict and Creation in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Introduction

Victor and his creature are opposing forces locked in conflict throughout Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. Conflict is the dominant theme of the novel—one that Shelley herself experienced in her own life as the wife of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who struggled with his own Romantic ideals just as Victor Frankenstein struggles with his vain desire to be a Creator. While Victor does become a creator, he accomplishes his task ironically: he is the creator of a monster, and that monster becomes monstrous precisely because of Victor's incapacity to love him. True, the creature comes into life looking hideous—but that is because he had an uncaring creator. The monster is actually thoughtful and desires to love and be loved. He attempts to make friends but finds himself rebuked for his ugliness and driven into isolation. He then burns for revenge against his creator, likening himself to Milton's Satan, whom he encounters through the epic poem Paradise Lost. Thus, the monster and Victor are in conflict with one another—just as Milton's Satan was in conflict with his creator. Yet both characters undergo change: Victor regains his humanity after losing his beloved to the monster, and the monster becomes introspective once more. Their mutual destruction in the icy wilderness reflects their essential sameness and the manner in which their conflict ultimately unites them in a cold, dreary bleakness where warmth, humanity, and love have no place. This paper argues that Victor and his monster conflict with one another even as they are drawn irresistibly together.

Man vs. Man

Victor acts like a brutal human being for much of the novel's first half: he is isolated, indifferent to those around him, uncaring toward the woman who loves him, and wholly focused on his obsession—reanimating a body, that is, creating new life. He wants to be like God; he wants to be a Creator. He is nearly driven mad in this pursuit and behaves more like a monster in his madness than like the rational scientist he professes to be. Shelley foreshadows all of this by framing the novel's action with a quotation from Milton's Paradise Lost—the epic poem that figures prominently in the monster's consciousness. The epigraph reads: "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould Me man? Did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me" (Milton 10.743–5). What is striking about this passage is that these words are not spoken by Satan—with whom the monster identifies, feeling rejected and spurned by God for no good reason—but by Adam, who does not understand why he was created. This is significant because Adam is a man, not a fallen angel. As men, both Victor and the monster can identify with Adam, feeling a conflict within themselves as though turned against their own humanity, which they do not understand. They are men turned against mankind—and that is why both ultimately leave society for the icy wilderness at the novel's conclusion.

Man vs. Society

The theme of man vs. society is explored throughout the novel as well. Victor is a scientist who wants to revolutionize his field. He has absorbed the teachings of the Age of Enlightenment and enshrined Reason and liberalism in his own heart. In doing so, he has lost his humanity and his capacity for social life: he locks himself in his laboratory, consumed by the physics of reanimation. His Enlightenment ideology has dehumanized him—a revelation Shelley passes on to the reader, drawn from her own experience as the wife of a Romantic-Enlightenment poet likewise struggling with revolutionary ideas and obsessions. Victor seeks his own glory in society and writes vainly to Margaret: "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" (Shelley 17). He seeks to stand above others, to be raised on a pedestal above the mere mortals around him. In this manner, Victor is anti-social; his vanity and pride make him so.

The monster, on the other hand, desperately tries to unite himself with society. He befriends the blind old man—who does not judge his appearance because he cannot see—and learns from him. But when the blind man's family arrives, the monster is cast out, just as Satan was expelled from Paradise. The monster reflects on his alienation from society, which he feels is undeserved: "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 131). Having been despised for his ugliness, the monster directs his anger and hatred toward God and toward his own creator, Victor. Thus, while Victor rejects society out of a sense of his own superiority, the monster seeks society but is rejected because of his perceived inferiority.

Conclusion

The theme of conflict in Frankenstein—whether it is man vs. nature, man vs. society, man vs. man, or man vs. God—is evident throughout. Indeed, all these conflicts are variations on the same theme, which is ultimately the conflict of man vs. love. If God is good, then God is love. If God has created all things, then He has also created nature. An individual who is at war with nature is, ultimately, an individual at war with God and thus at war with love. Victor Frankenstein is, from the beginning, such an individual. He cannot accept life on the terms that God has ordained. Life and death are part of a cycle that the pre-Enlightenment world understood in religious—specifically Christian—terms, a context supported by the novel's sustained use of Milton's Paradise Lost. Victor refuses to accept these terms, and the monster refuses to accept his rejection by an unloving world. Thus, both assert themselves and challenge all things. The problem is that neither is God, nor does either demonstrate the capacity to love to the degree that God does—and that is why both spurn all things, leading inevitably to their mutual destruction.

Works Cited

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Oxford University Press, 2008.