Conformity In Frankenstein Essay

A creature—possessing the consciousness and speech of man, but wavering between deformity and conformity to manhood—trudges through the unforgiving Arctic sublime. He’s unperturbed by the battering wind, the bite of ice beneath the calluses of his hands, the snow gathering in the thicket of his clothes. The reason for his creation now lays dead in the belly of an English ship, and he remains: purposeless, abhorred, alone. At his creation he was as pure as a newborn, longing for affection and love, but driven toward his deathbed he walks with blood upon his hands. The creature personifies Mary Shelley’s pivotal role of moral ambiguity in her novel Frankenstein, as the creature validates the powerfully subjective topic of whether good

The most powerful image of this gap between beauty and its responding love and ugliness and its responding hate is the minutes after his creation, when his creator Victor Frankenstein falls asleep from stress in his bedroom and the creature awakens him. The creature notably reaches out for Frankenstein’s sleeping form, who awakens and flees from fear at the ugliness he encounters at the foot of his bed. “I beheld the wretch… one hand was stretched out…but I escaped…” (Shelley, 56). In that small moment, nearly blind and deaf, the creature has no motive to harm Frankenstein. He’s vulnerable and helpless. He merely feels the warmth of another being, one who he knows created him, and he yearns to derive companionship and affection from it. However, despite the rejection the creature faces from Frankenstein, he continues to stumble through his first few weeks of life seeking out love in a form of man. He attempts to find this love in a village that torments him with stones for his deformity, and later a family living secluded in a small cottage. This family, the De Laceys, teaches the creature of love and kindness from his hidden hovel. Their songs captivate him, their language instills curiosity in him, and their generosity to the needy causes pride to bloom in his heart. He witnesses their misery and their

He’s an apotheosis of strife, misery, and misplaced hatred. He condemns before guilt and morality can superimpose themselves into his better conscience, he mulls over his figurative wounds until they fester, and he derives pleasure from it all. During the course of his life, he nurtures a detestation he gained from mankind’s repugnance of his appearance and it becomes the driving force behind his purpose of life. His first months were rooted in hopes of companionship and love, but his development spurs more complex feelings resulting from rejection and torment. In a momentous decision, the creature declares “everlasting war against the species (man), and, more than all, against him who had formed me…” (Shelley, 135). This decision, which can be noted was made during an exponential path of mankind’s abuse of the creature, causes the deaths of William, Elizabeth, and Henry Clerval. Had revenge been spared from the creature’s conscience, or had the De Lacey’s expressed mild acceptance of him during the most pivotal point of his life, his decision may have been delayed or depressed altogether. This warpath of revenge doesn’t label the creature as inherently evil; he had to learn and experience hatred before he could convey it himself. The most apparent instance of the creature’s internal justification of this is Justine’s condemnation. He stumbles upon her in the shelter of a barn during a storm, in which he approaches