Frankenstein should not create a second creature because of the original creation’s inadequacies, and the inability to predict the reaction of the second creature to being birthed.
How can a creature that has only been treated with hate and fear truly share love with another? Perhaps the creature may even fly into a rage and abuse its new partner for not fulfilling the ideal of love and companionship it observed in the house of De Lacey where the creature states that “nothing could exceed the love and respect which the younger cottagers exhibited [there]” (Shelley 109). The creature has never experienced an actual relationship with another being and has no idea if the com…
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… to warrant action from Frankenstein. Instead, he must focus on his duty towards mankind to stop any further destruction caused by the hands of his creations. This can only be done in part by not creating a second monster for the world to deal with.
I think that the creation certainly deserves some sort of love and companion, especially some acknowledgement from his creator, other than Frankenstein running in fear. However, I do not believe that making him a “creature of the opposite sex, that is hideous as [the creature’s self]” will solve his inferiority complex and feelings of abandonment from his creator and mankind (145). Maybe Frankenstein needs to work on his own personal relationship with his creation before that possibility is lost forever.
Works Cited
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Johanna M. Smith. 2nd Ed. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s. 2000. Print.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – Narratives of Seduction
Frankenstein: Narratives of Seduction
The following essay is concerned with the frame structure in Mary Shelley`s Frankenstein and its’ functions as it is suggested by Beth Newman`s “Narratives of seduction and the seduction of narratives”. To start with, the novel Frankenstein is a symmetrically built frame narrative with a story at its center. This is not always the case with frame structured novels, as there are examples without a proper center (e.g. Heart of Darkness). The elaborate system of frames indicates that this center reveals some kind of a mystery. However, it would be wrong to asume that the center alone contains the meaning of the novel. On the contrary, the meaning of the novel is brought about by the relation between the different stories at the center and the frames around it.
One of the main suggestions of the article is the functioning of the inner oral narratives as forms of seduction, to be more specific, seductions into a promise. In other words, they try to persuade their listener to promise the satisfaction of a desire that could not be satisfied directly. The two main examples for this are the Monster’s as well as Frankenstein’s story, but the themes of seductive narration and promises can be found also elsewhere in the novel. The Monster’s desire is to be loved by someone. When he realises that not only the DeLaceys but every human being will reject him because of his uglyness, he tells Frankenstein his story in order to persuade him to create a female being of his kind for his companion. At the end of Chapter 8 of Volume II (page 97 of our edition) the monster s…
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…econd reason for the lack of stylistic means to convey the narrators persuasiveness is probably more important and has to do with the frame structure of the novel. Frankenstein offers a reversal of an older novel structure, in which a written document is at the center of a novel surrounded by an oral narrative. In Frankenstein the Monster’s and Frankenstein’s originally oral reports are not only framed by Captain Walton’s written story, but also transformed into written language. This technique is used to exclude Captain Waltons’s sister and the reader from the horror of the narratives, building a barrier to the seductive power of the spoken narratives that does not work any more in the medium of written language. Thus the domestic tranquility of Walton’s sister and her family is saved and not destroyed like the one of Frankenstein’s family in the center of the novel.