Frankenstein Themes

‘ Theme ’ is a central idea present in a literary piece. It serves as an essential ingredient that makes a story appealing and persuasive. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley has various themes woven together to complete a narrative which teaches value, warns of possible consequences of abusing science or intelligence, highlights a futuristic outlook. Some of the overarching themes of the novel are given below.

Themes in Frankenstein

The theme of creation is at the center of the novel, Frankenstein. The story shows how Victor creates a monster and instills life in it after gaining scientific knowledge of life at Ingolstadt. Victor plays God or pretends to become one to create life. His ambition of creating life and emulating his own creation fails. The creature, he has created, forces him to create a companion. When Victor denies he turns into a real monster. In other words, Victor’s secret toil, as Mary Shelley had stated, was an unnatural and irreligious act which costs him dearly. The theme also signifies that interrupting natural order may cost lives and sanity and it is important to stay within boundaries.

Although depicted at the secondary level, the novel also explores the theme of alienation. It might be possible that Victor creates the monster to end his isolation. However, in the process of doing an unnatural thing, he creates a creature, who is also his enemy. The creature, who is innocent feels alienated. Hence, he asks for a companion. When humans hate him for the way he looks, he begins to kill to persuade his creator, Victor Frankenstein. Another alienation is of Robert Walton who seeks his sister’s love and writes her letters. Victor, too, seeks Elizabeth’s and his family members’ love as he alienates from them and immerses in the world of science.

Although several characters are trying to align themselves with one another. For instance, Robert Walton with his sister through letters and Victor Frankenstein with his family, they feel quite isolated from the world. Victor is engaged in his experiments, and Robert Walton goes on expeditions, where he meets Victor. In the same way, the creature, Frankenstein’s Monster tries to seek the companionship of the poor family to end its isolation.

Crossing Boundaries

Mary Shelley has very beautifully woven the idea of the crossing limits in this novel. Through Victor Frankenstein, she explains that humans have certain limits despite grand ambitions. When these limits are crossed, the natural order is destroyed. This interruption rebounds when the limits are crossed. Victor’s attention to Waldman’s lectures and his obsession with the idea of creating a new life is equated to the crossing of boundaries set by nature. Victor eventually pays the price as he loses his family members and friends until he dies while chasing the Creature.

Under the overarching theme of creation, the theme of ambition also runs parallel in the novel. Although since the ancient period, ambition is associated with negative passion, here Victor’s ambition leads him to create a human deemed as a monster physically. It proves that ambition is not good when it comes to unnatural directions. The creation of a new life defying the natural order of life and death is clearly an incorrect ambition. Later, it proves to be fatal when the Creature begins to kill Victor’s closest family and friends.

Another secondary theme in Frankenstein is an injustice. Mary Shelley has demonstrated this theme in two ways. The first is Justine’s trial in the court on the accusations of murdering William. The court awards her death sentence even though Victor has clear hints of the creature having killed William and Justine was framed for the murder. The second example of injustice is when the Creature request for a companion Victor denies. The Creature was helpless and innocent turns into a killer.

Responsibility

The novel, Frankenstein, highlights the theme of individual responsibility as well as social responsibility. Victor’s ambitious project of the creation of a new life reflects the lack of realization of the individual responsibility and the lack of government control. Victor does not show any fear in creating a new life and playing with the laws of nature until it takes the lives of several of his family members. Justine’s death signifies that entire the judicial process lacks responsibility when they punish an innocent. In other words, individuals and society often fail to respond to their duties and responsibilities toward the family and community .

Natural Laws

Although this is not an explicit theme, the theme of natural laws is implicitly put into the mouth of characters and the narrator in Frankenstein. Natural laws keep the balance of life on this earth. ‘Life and death’ cycle is a natural law. However, when Victor Frankenstein uses science to create life using dead human organs and chemicals, he violates the natural law of life and death. The result is the birth of innocent yet monstrous creature who turns violent when his needs aren’t met.

Parental Responsibility

The parental responsibility is another theme apparent in the upbringing of Victor Frankenstein. His father, Alphonse Frankenstein, has done his best to educate him in the top university Ingolstadt to study science. Victor whole-heartedly completes his education which shows his good upbringing. However, when Victor creates the Creature, he forgets to give this monster the moral and social education about how to live and behave in a society. In other words, he forgets his parental responsibility towards his creation.

One of the secondary themes that stay in the background is the theme of revenge. Victor Frankenstein creates the monster but stops short of creating its companion which leads the Creature to take revenge on him. The Creature kills his family members to make him realize the pain of loneliness. In the same way, Victor runs after the monster to exact revenge of his family members but dies during the chase.

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Frankenstein

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frankenstein theme thesis

Frankenstein

Mary shelley, everything you need for every book you read..

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Frankenstein explores one of mankind's most persistent and destructive flaws: prejudice. Nearly every human character in the novel assumes that the monster must be dangerous based on its outward appearance, when in truth the monster is (originally) warm and open-hearted. Again and again the monster finds himself assaulted and rejected by entire villages and families despite his attempts to convey his benevolent intentions. The violence and prejudice he encounters convinces him of the "barbarity of man." That the only character who accepts the monster is a blind man, De Lacy , suggests that the monster is right: mankind is barbaric, and blinded by its own prejudice.

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Frankenstein Themes, Symbols, and Literary Devices

Pursuit of knowledge, importance of family, nature and the sublime, symbolism of light, symbolism of texts, the epistolary form.

  • B.A., English Literature, Cornell University

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a 19th-century epistolary novel associated with both the Romantic and the Gothic genres. The novel, which follows a scientist named Frankenstein and the horrifying creature he creates, explores the pursuit of knowledge and its consequences, as well as the human desire for connection and community. Shelley depicts these themes against the backdrop of a sublime natural world and reinforces them using symbolism.

Shelley wrote Frankenstein in the midst of the Industrial Revolution , when major breakthroughs in technology were transforming society. One of the central themes in the novel—man’s pursuit of knowledge and scientific discovery—explores the subsequent anxieties of this period. Frankenstein is obsessed with uncovering the secrets of life and death with ruthless ambition; he disregards his family and ignores all affection as he pursues his studies. His academic trajectory in the novel seems to mirror mankind’s scientific history, as Frankenstein begins with the medieval philosophies of alchemy, then moves on to the modern practices of chemistry and mathematics at university.

Frankenstein's efforts lead him to discover of the cause of life, but the fruit of his pursuit is not positive. Rather, his creation only brings sadness, misfortune, and death. The creature Frankenstein produces is an embodiment of man’s scientific enlightenment : not beautiful, as Frankenstein thought he would be, but vulgar and horrifying. Frankenstein is filled with disgust at his creation and falls sick for months as a result. Catastrophe surrounds the creature, who directly kills Frankenstein’s brother William, his wife Elizabeth, and his friend Clerval, and indirectly ends the life of Justine.

In his search for the root of human life, Frankenstein created a deformed simulacrum of man, privy to all the usual human degradations. With the disastrous consequences of Frankenstein’s achievement, Shelley seems to raise the question: does merciless pursuit of knowledge ultimately cause more harm than good to humankind?

Frankenstein presents his story to Captain Walton as a warning for others who wish, like he did, to be greater than nature intended. His story illustrates the downfall caused by human hubris. At the end of the novel, Captain Walton appears to heed to the lesson in Frankenstein’s story, as he calls off his dangerous exploration to the North Pole. He turns away from the possible glory of scientific discovery in order to save his own life, as well as the lives of his crewmen.

In opposition to the pursuit of knowledge is the pursuit of love, community, and family. This theme is most clearly expressed through the creature, whose singular motivation is to seek human compassion and companionship.

Frankenstein isolates himself, puts aside his family, and ultimately loses those dearest to him, all for his scientific ambition. The creature, on the other hand, wants precisely what Frankenstein has turned away. He especially wishes to be embraced by the De Lacey family, but his monstrous physique bars him from acceptance. He confronts Frankenstein to ask for a female companion, but is betrayed and cast away. It is this isolation that drives the creature to seek revenge and kill. Without Frankenstein, his proxy for a “father,” the creature is essentially alone in the world, an experience that ultimately turns him into the monster he appears to be.

There are multiple orphans in the novel. Both the Frankenstein family and the De Lacey family take in outsiders (Elizabeth and Safie respectively) to love as their own. But these characters are markedly dissimilar to the creature, as they are both nurturing, matriarchal figures to fill in for the absence of mothers. Family may be the primary source for love, and a powerful source for purpose in life at odds with the ambition for scientific knowledge, but it is nevertheless presented as a dynamic in conflict. Throughout the novel, family is an entity fraught with the potential for loss, suffering, and hostility. The Frankenstein family is torn apart by revenge and ambition, and even the idyllic De Lacey family is marked by poverty, the absence of a mother, and a lack of compassion as they turn the creature away. Shelley presents family as an important means for love and purpose, but she also depicts the familial bond as complicated and perhaps impossible to achieve.

The tension between the pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of belonging play out against the background of sublime nature. The sublime is an aesthetic, literary and philosophical concept of the Romantic period that encapsulates the experience of awe in the face of the natural world’s extreme beauty and greatness. The novel opens with Walton’s expedition to the North Pole, then moves through the mountains of Europe with the narratives of Frankenstein and the creature.

These desolate landscapes mirror the problems of human life. Frankenstein climbs Montanvert as a way to clear his mind and minimize his human sorrows. The monster runs to the mountains and glaciers as refuge from civilization and all its human fallibilities, which cannot accept him for his façade.

Nature is also presented as the ultimate wielder of life and death, greater even than Frankenstein and his discoveries. Nature is what ultimately kills both Frankenstein and his creature as they chase after one another further into the icy wilderness. The sublime uninhabited terrains, of equal beauty and terror, frame the novel’s confrontations with humanity so that they underline the vastness of the human soul.

One of the most important symbols in the novel is light. Light is tied to the theme of knowledge as enlightenment, as both Captain Walton and Frankenstein search for illumination in their scientific pursuits. The creature, by contrast, is doomed to spend much of his life in darkness, able to walk around only at night so that he may hide from humans. The idea of light as a symbol for knowledge also refers back to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave , in which darkness symbolizes ignorance and the sun symbolizes truth.

The symbolism of light arises when the creature burns himself in the embers of an abandoned campfire. In this instance, fire is both a source of comfort and danger, and it brings the creature closer to the contradictions of civilization. This use of fire links the novel with the myth of Prometheus: Prometheus stole fire from the gods to aid in humankind’s advancement, but was eternally punished by Zeus for his actions. Frankenstein similarly took a kind of ‘fire’ for himself, by harnessing a power not otherwise known to mankind, and is forced to repent for his actions.

Throughout the novel, light refers to knowledge and power and weaves in myths and allegories to make these concepts more complex—calling into question whether enlightenment for humankind is possible to achieve, and whether or not it should even be pursued.

The novel is filled with texts, as sources of communication, truth, and education, and as a testament to human nature. Letters were a ubiquitous source of communication during the 19th century, and in the novel, they are used to express innermost feelings. For example, Elizabeth and Frankenstein confess their love for one another through letters.

Letters are also used as proof, as when the creature copies Safie’s letters explaining her situation, in order to validate his tale to Frankenstein. Books also play an important role in the novel, as the origin of the creature’s understanding of the world. Through reading Paradise Lost , Plutarch’s Lives and the Sorrows of Werter , he learns to understand the De Lacey’s and becomes articulate himself. But these texts also teach him how to sympathize with others, as he realizes his own thoughts and feelings through the characters in the books. Likewise, in Frankenstein , texts are able to portray the more intimate, emotional truths of the characters in ways that other forms of communication and knowledge cannot.

Letters are also important to the novel's structure. Frankenstein is constructed as a nest of stories told in epistolary form. (An epistolary novel is one told through fictional documents, such as letters, diary entries, or newspaper clippings.)

The novel opens with Walton’s letters to his sister and later includes the first-person accounts of Frankenstein and the creature. Because of this format, the reader is privy to the thoughts and emotions of each individual character, and is able to sympathize with each one. That sympathy extends even to the creature, with whom none of the characters within the book sympathize. In this way, Frankenstein as a whole serves to demonstrate the power of narration, because the reader is able to develop sympathy for the monster through his first-person storytelling.

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'Lisa Frankenstein,' Oscar fave 'Poor Things' reclaim Mary Shelley's feminist mythos

frankenstein theme thesis

Another “Frankenstein” film, another chance to come up to the lab and see what’s on the slab. In the horror comedy “ Lisa Frankenstein ,” however, the electrifying reanimation device was almost a 1980s hair crimper.

Played by Kathryn Newton , goth girl Lisa Swallows brings a dead Victorian dude back to life, attaching various found body parts to Cole Sprouse’s accidentally resurrected corpse. But the styling tool wasn’t doing the job for screenwriter Diablo Cody. Then an idea came that was her “Frankenstein lightning strike”: She swapped the crimper for a malfunctioning tanning bed, akin to the ones she saw rich girls had growing up.

“Those have always looked like coffins, like some kind of scientific slab,” Cody says.

“Lisa Frankenstein” (in theaters Friday) is the latest movie with its own take on the now-familiar mythos unleashing an experimental creation, first told in Mary Shelley’s classic 1818 novel “Frankenstein” and popularized a century later by the 1931 Boris Karloff horror movie. There’s a mini-resurgence at play where filmmakers are reinventing this timeless tale with elements of female empowerment and modern fears.

Last year’s “The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster” offered a young genius bringing her brother back from the dead after a gang shooting. “ Poor Things ,” up for 11 Oscars next month, features best actress nominee Emma Stone as a reanimated woman who gets a second chance at a better life. And monster-movie master Guillermo del Toro is about to start production on Netflix’s “Frankenstein,” an adaptation of Shelley’s tale with Oscar Isaac as the egotistical Dr. Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as his creature.

“It's always been about playing God and creating life. I don't think that's lost its allure for anyone over the course of history,” Cody says of the original “Frankenstein.”

“There’s no doubt, even in our secular society today, that the theme of ‘transgression’ beyond the limits of what is deemed acceptable for human knowledge continues to fascinate ‘Frankenstein’ audiences more than 200 years later,” says Peter J. Capuano, associate English professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

'Lisa Frankenstein' review: Goth girl meets cute corpse in Diablo Cody's horror rom-com

‘Lisa Frankenstein,’ 'Poor Things' return 'Frankenstein' to the feminine perspective

Cody points out that most retellings feature a doctor figure who is male, though “Poor Things” and “Lisa Frankenstein” both focus on female narratives, from different viewpoints. In the former, Stone’s “creature” Bella Baxter matures from a child-like state to a free-thinking woman, and in the latter, Lisa is the “creator” who takes in a previously undead, speechless but strangely caring figure (given life via lightning strike) and, through murderous means, completes him.

For “Lisa,” Cody wanted to throw it back to the legend’s origins through Shelley. “What if you flipped the script and it was about a woman creating her ideal partner, which in this case is a genteel undead Victorian man? In Lisa's case, he's just what she needs in her life,” the writer says. “He’s the first person to really listen to her in a long time, and he validates her feelings and he doesn't interrupt – because he can't."

'Poor Things': How sex (and sweets) helped bring Emma Stone's curious character to life

Mary Shelley’s classic novel ties into modern themes (thanks, AI and COVID)

Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and the iconic 1930s movie leaned into the theme of technology run amok. “The fact that we have all this cultural anxiety around AI right now could be an underlying subconscious reason for why everyone is revisiting these ‘Frankenstein’ myths all of a sudden," Cody says. "We are excited about our ability to create this thing, and then we're scared of what the implications could be.”

The 19th-century novel has been interpreted in recent years as “a dire warning about the dangers of scientific hubris” in regard to nanotech, synthetic biology and especially AI, Capuano says. That’s where “we see the convergence of old themes such as Victor Frankenstein’s neglect of his creation – which is what spurs the creature to act monstrously – and new societal fears,” Capuano says. While there have always been fears about unintended consequences with technological creation, “the exponential growth of AI in the past few years has spurred a whole new, more widespread – and perhaps more real – fear of human obsolescence.”

Additionally, the aftermath of pandemic lockdown has spurred "real fears of the social damage that being isolated from other humans can have,” Capuano adds, recalling that in Shelley’s novel, Victor Frankenstein can only create his artificial being when he locks himself away from others.

Frankenstein's movie history: The good, bad and ugly

The new Frankenstein’s Monster takes a turn toward the attractive

In contemporary “Frankenstein” imaginings, the creature has moved far from the Karloff days of a giant figure with a flat-topped noggin and bolts protruding from his neck. In 1975’s “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” the title creation is a musclebound blond adonis and in 1985’s “Weird Science,” a freak electrical accident brings Kelly LeBrock to life. And in "Poor Things," Stone's character is the object of several men's sexual cravings.

“The original ‘Frankenstein’ story was about power and playing God, less so than being about desire. Latter-day retellings of the legend are definitely more about wish fulfillment,” Cody says. With “Weird Science,” the creators are “these two teenage boys so of course they want to create the hottest woman imaginable.”

And in “Lisa Frankenstein,” the Creature is made more attractive through Lisa’s love and care. "He arguably doesn't look great when he first comes out of the ground. So he has a glow-up like Lisa.”

Women’s Rights and Women’s Wrongs: Lisa Frankenstein’s Complex Heroine Is the Real Monster

Diablo cody and zelda williams on making the anti-weird science..

Women’s Rights and Women’s Wrongs: Lisa Frankenstein’s Complex Heroine Is the Real Monster - IGN Image

Warning: We get into major spoilers for Lisa Frankenstein near the end of this story. We’ll warn you again when we get there, so just FYI!

What if I told you teenagers have a lot in common with necromancers? Both are aesthetic trendsetters shrouded in an air of soul-burdening melancholy - and, more importantly, very willing to defy the laws of god and the universe if it gets them what they want. Lisa Frankenstein takes this a step further and asks: OK, but what if a teen girl wanted a boyfriend so bad she raised him from the dead?

Kathryn Newton’s Lisa is lonely. That’s really the crux of the film: watching an outcast struggle to find a place until she decides she’s going to have to find that place somewhere much darker than the conventional society that shuns her. She exemplifies the complex heroine. The crimes she commits for the sake of the Creature (Cole Sprouse) are objectively morally reprehensible but maybe, deep down in the most hurt places of our hearts, entirely understandable.

“Complex is such a nice, charitable way of putting it,” says writer Diablo Cody, who basically set the standard for bloodthirsty teen girls with Jennifer’s Body 15 years ago. “I love Lisa. She's complicated, yes. Problematic perhaps. She’s navigating her own grief with the help of the Creature, who's the literal embodiment of death.”

Director Zelda Williams explains that this aspect of Cody’s script particularly resonated with her. “I'm so drawn to empathetic monsters,” she said. “It's one of the reasons I love Guillermo del Toro so much. He talks about that quite a lot, that a lot of times in his movies the humans are monstrous and the monsters are very human. So to get the opportunity to approach a zombie that's madly in love was a large part of what I was really drawn to right off the bat.”

The Creature may amble around in all his undead-ness, evoking fear via the ghoulish appearance of his rotting flesh, but he’s ultimately not who the townsfolk should be most afraid of. Lisa doesn’t fit in, she doesn’t feel loved, and she embodies one of the scariest things of all: someone who doesn’t have anything left to lose. It’s been said that grief can make us monstrous. When your heart is wrenched open and gapes like an open wound, of course there’s always the possibility of infection. Especially in a society with rigid expectations of what women can or can’t feel, do, and think.

But how do you make a character like Lisa truly empathetic? How do you keep the audience on her side?

“The second that you bring anyone into a universe where there's some fantasy element - in this case, death not being permanent - the stakes are changed,” explains Williams. “It's a lot easier to support someone like Lisa's rights and wrongs in a world where [death] is not the finality of the repercussion that it is for us. She's going into this as someone that I don't think necessarily is murder-hungry.

“I do think she does like a healthy dose of vengeance,” Williams adds. “And I like that in a woman.”

And what about the Frankenstein of it all? Frankenstein’s monster has become a lasting mythology within our cultural ethos, referenced again and again in film,TV, music and more - sometimes parodying the famed moment in 1931’s Frankenstein in which the doctor declares his success by shouting “It’s alive!” An archetypical Frankenstein story begins with close proximity to death - generally the loss of a loved one - that coaxes a character into a sort of mania that drives them to pursue the key to resurrection. Lisa Frankenstein starts here, informing the audience early on of the gruesome death of Lisa’s mother.

Lisa Frankenstein Gallery

frankenstein theme thesis

However, the film takes the additional step of dissecting Pygmalion-esque stories within pop culture. Rather than a man in pursuit of creating the “perfect woman,” here we have a young girl creating the perfect man.

“The heartthrobs that I see women really holding onto tend to be all about longing,” says Williams. “It's not about six-pack abs, it's not about the fancy car. They love Mr. Darcy - despite the fact he never takes off any clothes - because that man genuinely from afar is just staring at [Elizabeth Bennet] like she's a box of Legos and that's all he wants to do with his day.”

As a staunch Mr. Darcy lover myself, this makes perfect sense. We’ve got a phenomenon of sitcoms wherein the entire premise relies on a very particular dynamic: goofy-guy-nagging-wife (The Simpsons, Everybody Loves Raymond, The King of Queens) an unrelenting representation of relationships where a man’s dismissal of his cranky wife borders on cruelty but is consistently played for laughs. AMC’s “Kevin Can F**k Himself” subverts this very trope, contrasting a multi-camera sitcom format with that of a single-cam drama to follow a wife as she endeavors to murder her incompetent, bumbling husband. What a contrast, then, to have a dashing character like Mr. Darcy whose entire character arc revolves around improving himself for the sake of the woman he loves. Referencing the hand scene alone is enough to send people swooning.

“I felt like growing up I was exposed to stories about creating the perfect woman. That was always a fantasy that was in the zeitgeist,” says Cody. And in many cases, being “the perfect woman” depended entirely on physical appearance. This exact trope has been dubbed Born Sexy Yesterday, which references material in which the allure of a woman hinges on her attractiveness and her wide-eyed, childish naivete. “In the ‘80s we had this movie, Weird Science,” Cody explains. “I remember watching as a little girl, and it's these two nerds sitting at a computer literally designing the perfect woman and playing with the size of her boobs. The seed was planted where I thought, ‘Oh, what about a story where a young woman gets to create a man according to her specifications?’”

What's your favorite Frankenstein or Frankenstein-esque movie?

We’ve seen more and more subversion of Born Sexy Yesterday. Poor Things, for instance, is a recent Frankenstein-esque story that attempts to dissect this very trope by placing agency back into Emma Stone’s resurrected Bella’s hands (though the film is arguably not always successful). Lisa Frankenstein tackles this idea too: placing the power of creation in a woman’s - and very specifically, a teen girl’s - hands.

“It was fun to have [Lisa] literally dig up a boyfriend from another era,” Cody says of the Creature. “He's a Victorian man. He comes from an era of etiquette and manners. There was originally a scene in the screenplay where she realizes that before he breaks into the house to try and claim her, he took his boots off. I'm not necessarily saying we want to regress to Victorian times, but there's something about the men of that era that I just thought, oh, this is going to appeal to the girlies.”

There’s something particular about being the object of adoration that acts as a sort of drug. “Be worse!” a tiny part of the brain screams. “Be worse and see if they’ll support you anyway!” It’s a spiral of sorts for Lisa in which she’s willing to stray further from her own morality for the sake of pleasing the Creature. For our lovestruck zombie, murder doesn’t really mean much. Instead, he sees Lisa’s actions as a kindness to him and therefore devotes his loyalty to her. For misunderstood and rejected Lisa, that’s really all the motivation she needs.

The movie’s final scene is relatively kind to Lisa in a way that’s sort of surprising.

Spoilers ahead for the end of Lisa Frankenstein.

Cole Sprouse as the Creature and Kathryn Newton as Lisa

After Lisa’s own death, the Creature resurrects her himself and the audience watches as he nurses her back to whatever we’d consider the undead equivalent of health. I was endeared by it, but also honestly quite shocked. Stories about enraged women tend to become tragic cautionary tales (think the end of Promising Young Woman) and for a moment that’s what Lisa Frankenstein was shaping up to be.

However, Lisa gets her happy ending. She’s escaped a society that wanted nothing to do with her, she’s gotten her revenge on the people who wronged her, and, somehow, she’s survived it all to get the guy. It felt so rare, so significant, that I had to know if there was ever a version of the ending that saw her punished rather than, ostensibly, rewarded.

“There was never a plan for her to have a comeuppance in terms of being arrested or anything like that,” says Cody, explaining that instead the original ending was less definitive in reuniting Lisa with the Creature.

“It used to be more open-ended,” Williams agrees, “As if we were implying that she would get resurrected similarly to him. In the end, there was just something so lovely about the tactile nature of now she's the monster and he's taking care of her.”

Maybe it’s not the love stories we’ve grown up with, full of dashing princes rescuing their morally spotless damsels. This isn’t Cinderella and her slipper; it’s a young, angry, grieving girl on a rampage alongside her devoted, decomposing suitor.

“It's definitely kind of a twisted fairy tale,” Cody says, “But there's a lot of love in the darkness.”

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Ethics as a Theme in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Essay

Introduction, frankenstein’s story, monster gone mad, moral judgments.

Frankenstein is a classical novel designed by Mary Shelley. It explains the process by which human beings can create monsters. The novel brings to the fore many aspects relating to morality and ethics. In the novel, some names used in reference to the monster include the demon, the ogre, the devil, or the thing. The name Frankenstein owes its origin to the creator of the monster, Victor Frankenstein.

From childhood, Frankenstein has been having an interest in science. Still, he later develops more interest in chemistry and goes ahead to assemble humanoids and creates a living creature, the ogre. The creature goes out of Frankenstein’s control and kills several individuals, including Frankenstein’s younger brother William and Elizabeth. Therefore, this essay argues that the story of Frankenstein is about a monster that goes mad and provides moral judgments concerning the scientist, Frankenstein, and the monster.

Frankenstein is a story about a monster designed by Victor Frankenstein after developing an excessive obsession with the concept of creating a living thing, especially in chemistry. From the novel, it is evident that humans drove the monster into a state of madness when they subjected it to hatred and rejection, and thus the monster’s madness emerged due to the treatment it receives from society.

After its creation, rejection and hatred subjected to the creature made it run out of control, and as a consequence, Frankenstein runs away from his creation. The monster undertakes many horrific activities soon after its creation.

The horrific activities awakened by Frankenstein’s creation scares Frankenstein, and he runs away from the creature. Some of the scary activities that the ogre engages in include murder of people such as Elizabeth and Frankenstein’s younger brother William. When the monster becomes lonely, it beseeches its creator to make a female monster to act as his companion and relieve loneliness. After Frankenstein refuses to create a female companion, the creature avenges by killing Elizabeth.

According to Shelley, the novelist, the creature becomes mad when it realizes that everyone in the society does not appreciate or like its existence. Frankenstein, the monster’s creator, runs away from it, thus commencing a series of rejections subjected to the monster. The monster decides to kill human beings after it fails to receive love, affection, and appreciation from them.

The creature expected to find love and acceptance from society; however, it encounters hatred and rejection. These feelings of hatred and rejection of the society make the monster mad, and it develops a negative attitude towards humankind, which compels it to avenge by killing.

From the novel, the monster is a sensitive, emotional, and intelligent being, as it has learned the basic human duties like dressing, speaking, and reading within 11 months. Therefore, the novel clarifies that the madness of the monster is due to rejection and isolation it experiences. The rejection and isolation of the creature drove it to a state of loneliness and anger towards humanity.

In the novel, the monster appears to be a lonely creature, especially after everyone in the society, including his creator Frankenstein, rejected it. This loneliness is clear when the creature begs Frankenstein to design a female companion of the same kind. In her novel, Shelley depicts that the monster has the sole objective of sharing love, affection, and feelings with another one of its kind.

However, loneliness, hatred, and rejection lead the monster to kill a quest to avenge humanity. Hence, the monster had no intention of killing or engaging in any vice, but since society fails to show love, appreciation, and compassion, it decides to engage in the vice of killing. Hence, it is clear that humans made the monster to become mad. Furthermore, Frankenstein’s refusal to create a female companion maddened the monster.

From the ethical and moral perspective, Frankenstein is determined, goal-oriented, and purpose-driven, which are the qualities of a morally praiseworthy individual. Frankenstein works hard until he succeeds in creating a living thing regardless of objections and discouragements from friends who raised questions about the animal’s existence. Individuals who have moral praiseworthy have traits like determination, goal-oriented, assertiveness, passion, and self-control, Feinstein practiced these traits.

Thus, the novel portrays Frankenstein as a determined young man who is morally praiseworthy. On the other hand, the monster fails to meet the ethical and moral requirements, since it starts to kill humans when it realizes that they do not like its existence. The monster fails to create a positive impression in the minds of individuals but, in turn, embarks on a mission to avenge by killing humans.

Frankenstein is a myth that demonstrates how the monster goes mad due to the treatment he receives from society. Some of the factors that make the creature to become mad include rejection, hatred, lowliness, and isolation from society. Therefore, the monster decides to kill humans since they fail to love and appreciate their existence. As the monster becomes lonely, it beseeches Frankenstein to make a female companion, but when Frankenstein refuses to do so, the monster goes mad and starts killing humans.

From the novel, the ogre fails to meet ethical requirements like assertiveness, love, compassion, and self-control. Frankenstein demonstrates determination and objectivity until he successfully creates the monster despite the discouragements from society. However, the monster fails to adhere to the ethical principles of society, but it decides to avenge by killing humans.

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  • Mary Shelley: Biography
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