For my own part, I must confess that my interest in the book is entirely on the side of the monster. His eloquence and persuasion, of which Frankenstein complains, are so because they are truth. The justice is indisputably on his side, and his sufferings are, to me, touching to the last degree. (199)
Frankenstein is full of terrible murders, and passionately-expressed emotions of enmity and hatred between Frankenstein and his creation. But who is most to blame for the series of murders which continue right to the very end of the novel when Victor dies on Robert Walton’s ship and his creation leaves, vowing to end his own life? This essay will endeavor to discuss this issue and will reach a more nuanced conclusion than many of the critics whose views will be examined.
In one sense, to put it very simply, Frankenstein himself must bear the most blame: he brought the creature into existence and then abandoned him. Without Frankenstein initially bringing the creature into existence, none of the murders in the novel would have occurred. However, there are key mitigating factors. Frankenstein had some good motives for his creation: while engaged in his exhaustive preparations for his attempt to create life, he hopes that in time he may be able to “renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption” (32). However, Shelley presents his reaction to the creature with a sense of such vivid disgust that it is impossible not to sympathize with him: he achieves his aim of making a living being, but “breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (34). The following morning, Frankenstein runs away from his creation. Moers in “Female Gothic: the Monster’s Mother” argues that Frankenstein’s reaction to his new-born ‘son’ is where the novel
is most interesting, most powerful, and most feminine: in the motif of revulsion against new-born life, and the drama of guilt, dread and flight surrounding birth and its consequences. Fear and guilt, depression and anxiety, are commonplace reactions to the birth of a baby. (218)
However, this defence of Frankenstein’s reaction to his creation ignores the trauma of the creature, abandoned by his ‘father’. Owing to Shelley’s narrative structure we do not hear the creature’s voice until later: he tells Frankenstein that after sleeping in a forest near Ingolstadt he wakes and felt “cold also, and half-frightened as it were instinctively, finding myself so desolate. I was a poor, helpless, miserable wretch; I knew, and could distinguish nothing; but, feeling pain invade me on all sides, I sat down and wept” (68). The creature has suffered too, and surely it is not impossible for the sensitive, even-handed reader to feel sympathy and empathy for the sufferings of both Frankenstein and his creation. In any case, the degree of sympathy we feel for either character, at different points and for different reasons, impinges only tangentially on the question of blame for the awful things that take place in the novel. Similarly, to think of Frankenstein or the creature, or both of them, as unreliable narrators seems to miss Shelley’s point: they are wholly reliable narrators, but also wholly self-centered and self-obsessed narrators.
Frankenstein, born into a life of ease and wealth in a family prominent in Swiss civic society, commits some awful acts before he makes the creature. While at university in Ingolstadt, he never once writes to his father or to his fiancée, Elizabeth. We know this, because he tells us that his father and Elizabeth write to him frequently, yet he never replies. Thus, it could be said that Frankenstein has a casual, indifferent attitude to maintaining familial relationships which Shelley establishes before he abandons his creation. His excuse (and Victor Frankenstein is full of excuses) is that he is too busy, too obsessed with the research he undertakes in order to create life. This is surely part of Shelley’s warning about the dangers of the over-reacher, too ambitious to act responsibly to his nearest and dearest. His act of creation is often criticized as an unnatural act, and he is berated by some readers by attempting to ‘play God’ with life. However, there is something even more unnatural going on: Elizabeth is his future wife, yet he does not marry her until very late in the novel, and, if he really wants to create new life, he could marry Elizabeth and use the traditional method. His treatment of Elizabeth throughout the novel is outrageously bad. His abandonment of his creation does lead directly to the murder of Frankenstein’s younger brother, William – but it does not make the murder right or just. Justine is put on trial for William’s murder and is condemned to death, and in his reaction to this Frankenstein displays his solipsistic and reckless lack of care to those close to him. All Frankenstein has to do is stand up in court and tell them that he has made a creature, whom, he thinks at this point in the novel, has murdered William. This action will save Justine’s life. Victor alone has the power to save Justine’s life. He chooses to remain silent. Indeed, from the reader’s point of view, he confirms his cowardly self-centeredness by stating, “The poor victim, who tomorrow was to pass the dreary boundary between life and death, felt not as I did, such deep and bitter agony” (57), thus asserting that his feelings are more anguished than Justine’s, as if his inner torment can act as an excuse for his inaction during the trial.
There is no doubt that because he was abandoned as a ‘baby’, so to speak, or in the first hours of his life, the creature is justified in seeking out his creator and having negative feelings about him. This sense of grievance is compounded because of the way he is treated by ordinary human beings when they see him: villagers throw stones at him and shoot at him because of their fear of his hideous appearance. However, thanks to the creature’s education while in hiding at the De Lacey’s cottage and the books he reads there he knows that in human society murder is considered a terrible deed – and yet he chooses to murder William because he shares a surname with his creator. Like Victor, the creature has an excuse – the passion of the moment and the revenge he seeks on his creator. However, it would have been more logical to question William further in an effort to discover more about Victor’s whereabouts. Shelley chooses to have the creature murder William in an attempt to demonstrate the evil outcomes of the bad parenting of which Frankenstein is guilty. He is also guilty for making his creation so ugly and horrific in appearance that all ordinary human beings are repelled by his appearance.
There are critics who propose that Frankenstein and his creation are, in a sense, doubles, but there is one area of life in which they are completely different. Victor spends most of the novel avoiding Elizabeth and delaying their marriage. Given that they are engaged it is remarkable that Shelley never presents any even minor physical displays of affection between them: Victor hugs Elizabeth twice in the entire novel – once in a dream in which she turns into his mother’s corpse and then, for the second time, when she is dead. By contrast, the creature simply wants a wife – for love and companionship. The creature’s normal feelings endear the reader to him, but his desires lead to more death. Frankenstein agrees to create a female creature for his creation but, as he is in the act of creation and appalled at the possible consequences of his act (a whole race of creatures to populate the earth and overthrow mankind, in Victor’s fevered imagination), he decides not to proceed and hurls the body parts that he has collected to perform the act into the sea. In revenge, the creature murders first Clerval, and then, much later, Elizabeth. Both Frankenstein and the creature are culpable: Frankenstein reneges on his promise and ‘kills’ the creature’s future wife; the creature takes wicked revenge on the two people Frankenstein loves the most. The shock of Elizabeth’s murder on her wedding night causes Frankenstein’s father to die.
Although it is Victor’s crazed ambition, and his reckless and irresponsible abandonment of his creation that sparks off the novel’s chain of murders, in terms of culpability he and his creation are almost equally to blame. Lipking argues that in this matter, and in others
Frankenstein does not admit a resolution. The basic, defining questions it raises in the mind of the reader – is Victor an idealistic hero or a destructive egoist? Is the Creature a natural man or an unnatural monster? What moral are we to draw from this strange story? - receive strong answers that directly contradict each other. (320)
Both men end the novel dying – justly so, given the murder and mayhem for which they have jointly been responsible. Shelley wants us to see the tragic consequences of two wholly opposed and irreconcilable opposites (both men), and what happens to both reckless ambition and single-minded revenge: people die. Even Shelley’s use of the framed narrative encourages the reader to see both Frankenstein and his creation as equal and their stories equally valid.
Lipking, as quoted above asks “What moral are we to draw from this strange story?”. The reason Lipking is puzzled is because he is looking in the wrong place for the moral. If we accept the conventional sense of an ending, then the ending of Frankenstein is one of mutual destruction – the only good thing is that Walton gives up his ridiculous ambition and resolves to return home to where his female relatives are waiting for him. However, if we look at the very center of the novel – as Shelley’s framed narrative encourages us to do, then the moral of the story is clear. The novel is exactly 24 chapters long. At the end of Chapter 12 there is an idyllic description of the earth coming alive in spring – Shelley calls it a “fit habitation for gods” – and at the start of Chapter 13 Safie arrives at the cottage to be reunited with Felix. This is the moral of the novel: it lies at the dead center of the novel - in family life and self-sacrifice, the independence and courage of Safie, and the modest life-style of the De Laceys. The moral does not lie in the equally culpable, self-obsessed lives of Frankenstein and his unnatural son.
Works Cited
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2012.
