Frankenstein: Romanticism, Religion, and Science in Shelley's Novel

Introduction: Beyond the Surface Moral

On the surface, the moral of Frankenstein seems clear. A man attempts to take on the godlike role of the creator and defy the laws of life and death. He dies as a result of his hubris and faith in science rather than in the Bible. This reading is underlined by the fact that Mary Shelley's novel is subtitled "The Modern Prometheus." Prometheus sought to bring fire to humanity and to uplift human lives through technology, and was punished by the gods for his defiance. But it is just as easy to read the novel as anti-theological and potentially heretical to accepted religious norms of original sin and the inherently fallen nature of humankind. From the point of view of much of Mary Shelley's early nineteenth-century audience, Frankenstein also functions as an allegory of the cruelty of God in relation to His desperate human creation.

In the novel, viewed from a Romantic vantage point, science becomes a parallel with the religious creation of Adam in the Garden of Eden. Frankenstein's creature is given innate intelligence as a result of his origins in humankind and his creator's design. Yet the creature is cast adrift, alone and alienated, in a world not of his own making — one that is cruel and hostile to his individuality. Not because of disobedience, but because of the world's callousness and the creator's lack of interest in his creation, the created being turns cruel. The creature's sin of killing Victor's fiancée comes not out of temptation or innate badness, but out of his innate goodness and desire for emotional connection with others — a drive strikingly lacking in his creator.

The Creature as Romantic Hero

The alignment of Romanticism with the creature's emotional orientation can best be seen in his observations of the gentle, loving people of the cottages he watches from a distance. Unlike his creator, the monster has no fascination with science and no cool ambition to overcome the limits of the human species, as Victor does. The monster is touched by the pastoral landscape and can emotionally understand, as a human being with a poetic soul, the way these people relate to one another — even before he understands their language:

"I soon perceived that, although the stranger uttered articulate sounds, and appeared to have a language of her own, she was neither understood by, nor herself understood, the cottagers. They made many signs which I did not comprehend; but I saw that her presence diffused gladness through the cottage, dispelling their sorrow as the sun dissipates the morning mists" (Chapter 13).

The monster perceives that family and human connection are what heal pain. This stands in stark contrast to Victor, who shies away from family and friends to engage in the process of rational scientific creation and discovery — defying the laws not only of God, but, more damningly to the Romantics, the laws of the natural world, such as death itself.

Literary Taste and the Romantic Spirit

To a nineteenth-century audience, the literature the creature reads would clearly mark him as a Romantic and poetic spirit. When the creature finds the books that provide him with his first intellectual views of the world, he responds with characteristic eagerness:

"I eagerly seized the prize, and returned with it to my hovel. Fortunately the books were written in the language the elements of which I had acquired at the cottage; they consisted of Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch's Lives, and the Sorrows of Werther. The possession of these treasures gave me extreme delight; I now continually studied and exercised my mind upon these histories, whilst my friends were employed in their ordinary occupations" (Chapter 14).

Paradise Lost is, of course, a religious document about the morally bankrupt Satan, who tries to rule the heavens but ends up in hell — an obvious parallel of ambition with Victor Frankenstein. Adam, meanwhile, seems to mirror the creature, who is eventually corrupted by the world because of his creator's failure to provide moral nurturance, despite the creature's desperate longing for connection and guidance. Many Romantic authors, like Byron, identified with Milton's Satan, and the creature's interest in Milton marks him as more sensitive and more morally aware than Victor, who shows little interest in literature or in understanding the world through religion until he is consumed by fear after his creature escapes beyond his immediate control.

Perhaps Shelley's implication is not that the monster is Satan, but that Victor would recognize his own Miltonic parallels had he been as interested in literature as in science. The monster's identification with the suicidal Werther — a Romantic hero who takes his own life because of unrequited love — further demonstrates that emotional rather than scientific understanding drives the creature's innate inclinations and exposes the limits of Victor's worldview.

Conclusion: Shelley's Ambiguous Third Way

In Shelley's work, both scientific rationalism and traditional theology are problematic. Scientific rationalism does not take into consideration the emotional needs of the human species. Religion does not acknowledge the complexities of morality, and offers a false and dogmatic solution to the problems of the world — that human beings are fallen and that punishments are just. Religion makes the seeking of knowledge evil, but the world is so fallen that even innocents like the monster become corrupt. While Victor's "eye for an eye" punishment may seem fitting, the monster's sentence to live alone, and the deaths of Victor's loved ones, are not.

Thus Shelley's novel provides a third solution of sorts: an acknowledgement of the imperfect and estranged nature of humanity that is not comforting, but seems more realistic. To modern readers the monster reads as a recognizable anti-hero — a figure who resonates even from a twenty-first-century point of view.

Even to nineteenth-century readers, Shelley's ambiguous views of science and religion were likely to resonate. The analogies of creator and created are deliberately ambiguous in their parallels with Romantic literature. Frankenstein is tempted by science to transgress moral boundaries, yet he also tempts the creature to sin by casting him adrift in the world. The creature has never done anything wrong, but because of the fallen nature of his creator, becomes fallen and estranged himself. Yet the creature possesses a Romantic soul and an understanding of the real purpose of human existence — that to be fully human requires connection with others as well as the transcendence of human limitations. Most blasphemously of all, this is an idea that fundamentally eludes his creator.

Works Cited

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Literature.org: The Online Literature Library. Last Updated May 2005. 19 Mar 2007. http://www.literature.org/authors/shelley-mary/frankenstein/