April Chaplin
Cline
ENG 102
15 October 2011
Human Nature as Horror
According to the preface of the Norton Critical Edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the story of Frankenstein came about almost by accident and was meant to be a scary story. It started out as a contest between several people to produce a story of “sublimity, terror and the unknown” (Hunter, vii). What ultimately came to be the story of Frankenstein is indeed one of terror, but not in the sense of a scary monster story. The true horror of Frankenstein is in the illumination of the very real flaws of human nature and how, left unchecked, these flaws can turn to evil and destroy all that is sacred and worth living for. The three main characters, Walton, Victor Frankenstein and Frankenstein’s monster, are each very real and sympathetic characters that the reader can easily relate to, their flaws are our flaws, and it is because of this that the story is so fightening.
Human beings are, by nature, flawed and imperfect, and Shelley brings to light in her characters, some of the most devastating and destructive flaws of mankind. The natural impulse to rebel against ridicule and that which is forbidden is an impulse that both Walton and Frankenstein are guilty of, it is an impulse that feeds something even scarier, blind and all-consuming ambition. For Frankenstein’s monster, the fatal flaw is vengeance fueled by a heart-wrenching loneliness and rejection that Shelley artfully illustrates in such a way that the reader can’t help but relate to and sympathize with.
Walton’s story is one of a self-educated man fascinated by the sea and exploration. His fascination is fueled by the contents of his uncle’s library of whose “…volumes were [his] study day and night” (Shelley 8). Walton learns of his father’s command that he not be allowed to become the explorer that he so desperately wants to be and subverts the desire to become a poet, but on his failure at this task he goes against his father’s wishes and decides to take up his journey. Walton’s journey is not just a simple exploration, however, it is an expedition driven by the impulse, the ambition and unrelenting need for glory. He writes to his sister of the “inestimable benefit which [he] shall confer on all mankind to the last generation…” (Shelley 8). It is not enough for Walton to live a happy, normal life, he wants to be everything to every man and explorer until the end of time, and he cannot stop or rest until he has sacrificed everything good in his life to achieve greatness. He continues, “…do I not deserve to accomplish some great purpose. My life might have been passed in ease and luxury; but I preferred glory…” (Shelley 9). Not just everyday greatness but a kind of generally unattainable greatness that is nearly the ruin of him and the people around him. We all secretly long for greatness in our lives, but what sets us apart is not allowing our ambition to control and consume us. Mary Poovey, in her essay The Lady and the Monster, describes the way that “…Shelley characterizes innate desire…as quintessentially egotistical” (Poovey 253), how “she sees imagination as an appetite that can and must be regulated-” and how “If it is aroused but is not controlled…, it will project itself into the natural world, becoming voracious in its search for objects to conquer and consume” (Poovey 253). In the context of the novel Walton’s flaw is scary but he redeems himself by relenting on his mission of glory, by learning from one whose sin is greater, Frankenstein.
Victor Frankenstein embodies all that is destructive and frightening in an unrelenting and egotistical existence bent on ambition and glory. He too, like Walton, finds the object of his fascination ridiculed and all but forbade by his father. He describes how his father “looked carelessly at the title-page of my book, and said, ‘Ah! Cornelius Agrippa! My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash” (Shelley 21). It is this resistance that admittedly propels Frankenstein further and deeper into his imagination and ultimate quest for unparalleled greatness. He says that had his father taken a different approach to his disapproval and explained his opinion that, “It is even possible, that the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin” (Shelley 21). This is a circumstance that everyone can relate to, how many times has the disapproval of an authority figure lead us to do and pursue exactly that which we have been warned against.
This rebellion is, both in Walton and Frankenstein, however, not the truly frightening part of their nature, it is merely a foreshadowing of the parts of their character, and ours, that is capable of making one shudder. It is a driving force that pushes them onward into their singular ambition. As with Walton, Frankenstein is propelled by an innate desire to be great. He recounts, almost echoing Walton in his sentiments, “…wealth was an inferior object; but what glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!” (Shelley 22). Again, we see the desire to be everything to all people, to be God-like. His ego and his ambition to be God-like are the most frightening aspect of Frankenstein’s character because they drive him to repeatedly act without regard for consequences. It is in this single-minded drive and disregard for the natural order of the world that evil is born and evil is true horror. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar describe Victor’s transformation and descent into evil,
As his researches into the ‘secrets of nature’ become more feverish, however, and his ambition ‘to explore unknown powers’ grows more intense, Victor begins to metamorphose from Adam to Satan, becoming ‘as Gods’ in his capacity of ‘bestowing animation upon lifeless matter’…(Gilbert and Gubar 231).
His ambition and consequent descent into evil is so horrifying because it illustrates the cost of surrendering to human impulses and ego. George Levine puts it simply, “what Frankenstein’s ambition costs him is the family connection which makes life humanely possible” (Levine 213).
Without family and social connections, life becomes a desolate and agonizingly lonely proposition. When you add the pain of rejection, especially by one’s own parent you get what is perhaps the scariest insight into evil and flawed human nature that Shelley provides in this book, that of Frankenstein’s creation. Shelley imparts to the reader the horror of the monster, not in his external ugliness, “a figure hideously deformed and loathsome” (Shelley 80) and not even in his fiendish and murderous deeds but rather in his character. Shelley creates a being so sympathetic that nearly everyone who reads it can relate. The creature tells his maker, “Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend” (Shelley 66). All he wants in his existence is companionship and happiness, the same things that we all want. It is only when he is denied this opportunity that he descends into a vengeful evil that seeks to destroy and to inflict the same misery he suffers upon the one whom he sees as having inflicted it upon him. Poovey describes the moment of that the monster realizes he will not, by conventional means, get what he wants and surrenders to his inherent monstrousness,
Their violent reaction, which the monster interprets as rejection by its ‘adopted
family,’ at last precipitates the creature’s innate nature; abandoning humanity’s
‘godlike science’…the monster embarks on its systematic destruction of domestic
Harmony. (Poovey 259).
This is a very natural human response and one that is inherently ugly, terrifying and hard to face.
As a gothic novel, Frankenstein’s purpose, and Mary Shelley’s intention, was for it to be the “kind of ghost story that would ‘curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart’(Moers 215). There is no doubt that she succeeded, but she did so less by the telling of a story about a monster than the telling of a story of monstrousness; the innate monstrousness that resides in all humans and when allowed to run rampant, becomes ugly and evil and truly terrifying. George Levine, in his criticism of Frankenstein states that “…as Nelson suggests, reader and writer alike were freed to pursue the possibilities of their own potential evil” (Levine 209). As this quote suggests, it is the very recognition of the qualities that reside in each of us and the freedom that Shelley’s story gives us to explore these qualities, both in the book and in ourselves, that makes it such a scary story.
Works Cited
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan. “Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve.”
Frankenstein, The 1818 Text,Contexts, Nineteenth-century Responses, Modern Criticism. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. W W Norton & Co Inc, 1996. 225-240. Print.
Levine, George. “Frankenstein and the Tradition of Realism.” Frankenstein,The
1818 Text,Contexts, Nineteenth-century Responses, Modern Criticism. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. W W Norton & Co Inc, 1996. 241-251. Print.
Moers, Ellen. “Female Gothic:The Monster’s Mother.” Frankenstein,The 1818 Text,
Contexts, Nineteenth-century Responses, Modern Criticism. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. W W Norton & Co Inc, 1996. 241-251. Print.
Poovey, Mary. “’My Hideous Progeny’: The Lady and the Monster.”
Frankenstein,The 1818 Text,Contexts, Nineteenth-century Responses, Modern Criticism. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. W W Norton & Co Inc, 1996. 251-261. Print.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein, The 1818 Text,
Contexts, Nineteenth-century Responses, Modern Criticism. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. W W Norton & Co Inc, 1996. Print.
