The Effect of Caroline Frankenstein Many people have a close connection with their family. A parent, sibling, or grandparent could be crucial to one's life. Whether helping them through hard times or teaching them life lessons, that person is needed in everyone's life. Although, sadly, some lose their person too soon. When one experiences a loss to someone close to them, it can be mentally, physically, and emotionally taxing. The effects of losing someone are seen in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, through the main character, Victor Frankenstein, and how he reacts to the loss of his mother, Caroline Frankenstein. The novel follows the young bright boy, Victor Frankenstein, who is intelligent and is known for his love for knowledge. So when …show more content…
This feeling of disconnection could be attached to Caroline's wishes for him to marry within the family, not forcing him to reach into the real world to search for connections. Although Victor feels as if his family members were his only friends, he soon begins to disconnect from them, focusing solely on his studies, “Two years passed in which I paid no visit to Geneva, but was engaged, heart and soul, in the pursuit of some discoveries which I hoped to make” (36-37). With Victor having no connections to anyone whatsoever, he was forced to live in solitude, making him less and less social as his college years continued. Due to Victor’s mother’s death, and her wish for him to marry, he was never fully able to connect with people in the outside world, or even his own family. Victor did not only isolate himself from society after his mother's death, he also became obsessed with the idea of life, death, and how to recreate human life. Once finishing his studies at the University of Ingolstadt, Victor decided to focus on pursuing his interests of recreating life. Victor became so infatuated with these ideas that he dove into scientific …show more content…
It also gives the reader an example of how far Victor would go within his experiments, and how unaffected he seemed to be by them. He began to use animal, human, and mechanical parts to place together and produce scientific experiments, playing the role of god (37). Once Frankenstein was able to understand and discover the true advantage he had with his knowledge, he completely submerged himself into his discoveries. Victor states, “On the very brink of certainty I failed yet still I clung to the hope which the next day or the next hour might realize; one secret which I alone possessed was the hope to which I had dedicated myself” (40). This conveys to the reader that Victor was so obsessed with the idea of life that he would not stop, after failing over and over again. This obsession most likely came from the untimely death of his mother, and Victor’s overall reaction to death. With the threat of both Elizabeth and his mother’s lives on the line at the same time, Victor learned to fear the death of the people closest to him (29). So how would he be able to fix this issue other than to create a way to stop life from ending itself, or at least be able to create a