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Role Of Family In Frankenstein

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As seen in Frankenstein, family plays a key element in the development of each character. Victor Frankenstein was nourished by his family from crib to grave and they served as a support system for him. In contrast, The Creature was abandoned from the day he was created. It was the lack of family that drove the creature to seek revenge on his creator, Victor Frankenstein. The two passages above, one from Frankenstein, and one from The Creature, highlight their perspectives on life having either been supported by a family or growing up with no parental guidance. This shows a parallel relationship between the two passages. Ultimately they both end up left in solitary, only having each other. In The Creature’s passage, he talks about his desire for a family. It is now evident he comprehends the meaning of family and the role a father …show more content…

Perhaps, if a human such as Frankenstein had accepted the creature, onlookers would have had an easier time welcoming someone with his appearance into their presence. Society’s false perception of what makes someone “normal” is what altered their first impression of The Creature. People had a hard time distinguishing the difference between mind and body, which resulted in The Creature’s undesired abandonment and a gut filled with hatred towards his creator. In contrast, Victor Frankenstein refers to his family in a positive way several times throughout the novel. From his earliest memories, Frankenstein recalls his family being there for him. He describes his parents by saying “My parents were possessed by the very spirit of kindness and indulgence”(Shelly __) Kindness and indulgence are two specific traits that one should inhabit when taking care of others. Another strong relationship in Frankenstein’s life is with his “sister” Elizabeth. As he was expected to marry her, he confided in her and grew up as one of her best

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The creature is a compassionate being. We see that when he sees the family suffering. By using this point of view we also can relate to him. Us, humans, are compassionate, we can sympathize with those in pain and joyce. Frankenstein learns the importance of family by observing the family of cottagers.

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After successfully creating the monster, Frankenstein is perplexed by what he has created. Due to the monster’s annoyance with Frankenstein, he acts back against Frankenstein mostly due to his lack of parenting and responsibility. Shelley’s novel strongly connects with the act of parenting. It is clear that Victor Frankenstein did not complete his role as a parent. Due to this, it further led the monster to misbehave and feel as if he does not have a purpose in life.

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After telling Victor the story of his short, miserable life, the creature’s longing to be a part of a family continues as he begs Victor to give him a female creature, similar to himself, that he can run away and avoid humanity with forever. The creature explains to Victor “You must create a female for me with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being” (Shelley 156). The absence of family throughout Frankenstein causes psychological as well as physical illness in several characters.

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In the novel Frankenstein, the parent conflict that I mostly seen throughout is between Victor Frankenstein and his creation, whom is the monster. The conflict that Victor create is the abandonment on the monster after he realizes what he has created. Victor leaves for the mountains and the monster stays behind in Geneva feeling lonely, as the society hates him. The relationship between Victor and his monster is replayed by Alphonse Frankenstein, an abandoning father, and Victor.

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In the story Frankenstein by Mary B. Shelley, the creation’s most significant realization thus far in the story is that he is alone and abandoned because of his looks which causes him to feel the emotion of hatred and causes him to do irrational things. The main character, Victor Frankenstein, is a scientist who reanimated the dead. Immediately after seeing his creations horrible countenance, the scientist runs away in fear and the creature grabbed Victor’s clothes and made his way out. With no knowledge of the outside world he seeked refuge from those who attacked him because of his appearance and spied on some cottagers. He soon becomes familiar with the local language and after a few months he learns to read and write.

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„I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me; whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend” (Shelley 163-164). This is the wish of the scientist Robert Walton whose letters start Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. Unlike the first thoughts coming to mind when hearing the title, friendship is one of the main topics in the story and the wish Walton expresses in the beginning stands for the desires of all the main characters. Not only Walton feels to be in need of companionship, the central character Victor Frankenstein does so too and even the Creature he brings into being expresses its strong wish to belong to someone.

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Once noted, the parallels between Frankenstein’s fears and desires and the reality the monster experiences are many. Now that Victor is in university, he no longer has family and friends to fall back upon in the unknown territory of his university. Frankenstein voices is that “[he] believed [himself] totally unfitted for the company of strangers,” irrational as it may be, and believes himself solely dependent on his family and childhood friend for companionship. Without the love guaranteed to him by his family, Victor believes he is unfit to make companions by himself and destined to a life of loneliness. He places much importance on the fact that his father and Elizabeth love him and are concerned with his well-being.

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By denying both main characters the sensation of domestic affection, or any other kind of social belonging, Mary Shelley highlights the importance thereof. The resulting isolation became the driving force behind both Frankenstein and his creation’s abominable actions which, in turn, shows that trying to avoid isolation and seeking the feeling of social belonging is the primary message of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and of

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Interestingly enough, the novel resembles Shelley’s own life and can be interpreted as a reflection of her perception of families. Shelley shares many of the same characteristics with most of her characters. As the main character in the novel, Frankenstein’s creature is depicted as “a motherless orphan” who had an “unnatural birth” (Griffith). This correlates with Shelley’s own childhood as she was raised without a mother and her birth was in some ways “unnatural” as mothers are not naturally made to die during childbirth.

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Mary Shelley uses her novel Frankenstein to analyze the idea of parenting. She compares the two main character's, Victor Frankenstein and his creature, social, mental, and emotional development throughout their childhood.   Victor Frankenstein was raised in what he described as

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After all of their experiences that they had through their lives they each dragged each other down to the same levels and each became the bare minimum of human. After the creation of the monster Frankenstein's life became a rollercoaster and a twisted downward spiral. With the actions of the creature Frankenstein lost his brother, his brother's wife, and his soon to be wife Elizabeth. All these actions were part of the consequence that he received from meddling in the unknown and playing God. He became so consumed with revenge on his creation that he gave up on his life and every chance of happiness to achieve this goal of destruction.

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Frankenstein and his monster begin with opposite lives: Frankenstein has everything and the monster has nothing. However, in creating the monster, Frankenstein’s life and feelings begin to parallel that of the monster’s life. Frankenstein is incredibly intelligent with a fascination for science, but ultimately his thirst for knowledge leads to his undoing. Similarly the monster is determined to understand the society around him. But once he does, he understands that he will never be able to find companionship, which leads him to pain and anger.

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In 1818 Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, a novel that follows Victor Frankenstein, an ambitious man on his journey to defy the natural sciences. In Volume I of the novel, Victor discusses his childhood, mentioning how wonderful and amazing it was because of how his family sheltered him from the bad in the world. “The innocent and helpless creature bestowed on them by heaven, whom to bring up to good, and whose future lot it was in their hands to direct to happiness or misery, according as they fulfilled their duties towards me” (35). When Victor brings up his childhood, he suggests that parents play a strong in how their kids turn out, either "to happiness or misery" (35). In particular the main character was sheltered as a child to achieve this “happiness” leading to Victor never developing a coping mechanism to the evil in the world.

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938 Words | 4 Pages

Parents are everyone 's first role models. Regardless of biological relation, those who raise us have a profound influence on the way we perceive and interpret life. Parents lay the foundation of our first sense of morality and empathy, and usher us to the path of our development of social skills. No matter how consciously one may attempt to have no resemblance to their parents, it is an inevitability of life that we will harness aspects of their influence and carry them through our lifetime. In Mary Shelley’s, “Frankenstein”, the influence of parental figures is displayed by the morals and values instilled in the monster.

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Once the creature begins to go out on his own and learn about life and society, during his first interaction with other people he learns that he will be immediately judged based on how he looks. To start, when Frankenstein first sees the creature, he quickly runs away without any interaction and exclaims “no mortal could support the horror of that countenance” (Shelley 36). This interaction made the monster realize that even his creator could not avoid the habits of the society he lived in, and immediately ran away from him in fear because he didn’t believe he was attractive. Then after that, the creature still has enough hope to go into a village and meet other people, but he is immediately met with children that “shrieked” and one woman who “fainted” just at the sight of him (Shelley 74). In every situation where the creature attempts to interact with others, he is shunned immediately, before even being able to say a word.

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