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Comparing The Creature And Safie In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

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Mary Shelley lived during 1813, a time filled with many societal problems, including familial abandonment, violence, the French Revolution, and incredible gender discrepancies. Consequently, her first novel, Frankenstein, was rife with these issues, as Shelley took a stand for what she believed in. The novel predominantly focuses on women’s subordination and how unjust society as a whole was to the female gender. This injustice is most notably represented in the comparison of Safie and the Creature, for even though Safie is present in just three chapters of the novel, her impact is immense. This parallel between characters can be clearly seen as both Safie and the Creature share their “other” backgrounds, their motivations, and their learning …show more content…

This quest for love is the ultimate endgame and the two characters will stop at nothing to achieve this all-consuming acceptance. Safie recognizes love’s importance when she sees Felix, and this is further driven home by her mother. Her mother imparts on her the knowledge that by marrying a Christian man Safie will be able to “take rank in society,” a thought that was “enchanting to her” for Safie values acceptance, and love is her way to gain this (86). This quest for love brings her to Felix and the De Lacey residence. Similarly, the Creature decides that he wants a companion for life, someone that he can share himself with, and someone who will accept and love him. For by him being seen as frightful “from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned,” he realized how unfair it was that he did not have someone to love (83). He declares that he currently has “no link to any other being in existence” leading him to sorrow and pain and consequently violence (90). Love however, could breach that pain and bring about peace and happiness, as love has the ability to break through loneliness and misery and replace those harsh emotions with joy. Coincidentally, the characters’ quests for love bring them together to the De Lacey household, where they both attempt assimilation and

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Mary Shelley includes the story of Safie in the novel to represent the creature's hope of being accepted into society. Throughout the chapter, Shelley communicates the many parallels between Safie and the creature. For example, both characters have neglectful fathers. The creatures observe Safie's father as "the cause of [the DeLacey family's] ruin,"(Shelley 3), similar to how Victor is the root behind his creature's suffering. Both characters experience alienation while integrating into new societies: Safie, an outcast for being a Christian Turkish Arab, learns to assimilate into the DeLacey family, and the creature, whom society rejects because of his monstrous appearance despite his kind soul, desires too to be accepted.

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becomes totally unlike her female compatriots and as totally unfitted to "harem" life and its "puerile amusements." (Lew 281). the arrival of the exotic Safie changes the physical and emotional milieu of the cottage as her presence inspires happiness and her wealth provides material comfort". The novel seems to suggest that this relationship between the European Man and the Oriental Woman can be stable, happy, and Fruitful. Yet one wonders about easily Felix accepts a parasitic relationship, living off Safie´s stolen wealth (Lew 279) Safie does not visit the De Lacey family empty handed "taking with her some jewels that belonged to her, and a small sum of money, she quitted Italy “

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One character, Justine, is very passive and used as a device to make Victor feel guilty for creating The Creature; as her major contribution to the plot was The Creature framing her for her brothers death and shortly after, being sentenced to death. Another female character, Safie, is used to teach The Creature how to speak: “My days were spent in close attention…and I may boast that I improved more rapidly than the Arabian…I could imitate almost every word that was spoken… I also learned the science of letters” (Shelley 106). Even the most prominent female character in the book, Frankenstein's lover and wife, Elizabeth, is killed by The Creature on their wedding night, in order to again make Victor regret creating The Creature, and eventually die of his unhappiness. Mary Shelley's depiction of women might be her indicating the roles of women at the time as inferior, a similar thesis brought about by Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication on the Rights of Women.

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Another characteristic that they share in common is that both Shelley and the creature were neglected by their fathers at some point in their lives. For the creature it was early on in his life while for Shelley it came after she eloped at the age of 18 and her father “all but disowned her” (Aldiss). As it has been observed by others before “Frankenstein is peculiarly a book of male parents” (Phy). Consequently, Frankenstein’s mother dies early on in the story, the DeLacey family is absent of a mother figure, and Safie is raised by her father as her mother also passed

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