Loneliness In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

IB HL Essay

Cayni Mohamed

Everyone has experienced loneliness in their life. That loneliness could come from many different causes, but the result is the same. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, we see Victor Frankenstein and his creature compared in numerous ways, and they’re opposites of each other. Shelley depicts many different types of loneliness depicted through different characters, specifically Victor Frankenstein and his creature. This raises the line of inquiry of how Mary Shelley depicts different types of loneliness using Victor Frankenstein and the creature as foils of each other. Shelley uses the creature to represent involuntary loneliness by being ostracized while Victor represents voluntary solitude through self-isolation.

He is outcasted by everyone he meets in the story, including people he admires and even the man who created him. As the story continues, we see how The Creature becomes more aware of how people are repulsed by him, and how no human will ever want to associate with him. This realization combined with the loneliness he feels makes him miserable, which leads to his conversation with Victor when he requests Victor to make another creature for him. He says “I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species with the same defects.” (Shelley, 103-104) After the horrific encounters that the creature experienced with humans, he started to believe that no human could ever accept him. He learned how to speak the same languages that humans did, and he learned how humans act, but no one would interact with him enough to see beyond his appearance. The only way he could see himself having company is if another creature who looked like him and was just as lonely and outcast existed. While both Victor and The Creature are lonely, The Creature has been shunned by society so severely that there’s no way for him to cure his loneliness unless there’s someone else who has no choice but to interact with him. No matter how hard he tries to imitate humans or change himself, he will always be outcasted by

Rather than finding joy in the fact that the creation he made had taken life, he was horrified. It seems like he never truly thought through the moral and ethical implications of creating life, and only realized that he didn’t want this when it was too late. He then begins to isolate himself intentionally out of self-hatred, which he explains when he says “I abhorred the face of man…I was attracted to even the most repulsive among them…I felt I had no right to share their intercourse. I had unchained an enemy among them.” (Shelley, 136) Victor views human interaction as a good thing. He’s expressed that he enjoys it when he spends time with Clerval, but he believes he isn’t worthy of it. He believes that he deserves loneliness, and the guilt of The Creature’s actions eats at him. While he accidentally isolated himself before with his work, he’s aware of what he’s doing and chooses to isolate himself as a form of punishment for creating The