The Role Of Suspense In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

In Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Victor Frankenstein discovers how to create life. After creating a creature, Victor becomes horrified and abandons the creature; later in the novel, Victor faces the consequences for doing so. Frankenstein is very effective as a gothic novel due to the main character becoming an outcast and the suspense throughout the entire book. Throughout most of the book, Victor is portrayed as a lonely outcast, and his solitude allows Frankenstein to be effective as a gothic novel. After Victor’s closest friends and family die, “a solitary cell had become [his] habituation” for many months (176). Everything that Victor loves is taken from him, and he becomes isolated. He even decides “to quit Geneva forever” as it, “in [his] adversity, became hateful” (179). By the end of the book, Victor loses his loved ones and his home. Also, while creating the creature, Victor separates himself from society and forgets “those friends who were so many miles absent, and whom [he] had not seen for so long a

Victor refuses to create a female monster, and the monster that he created warned him that he would “be with [Victor] on [his] wedding-night” (147). Shelley builds suspense by having the creature threaten to be with Victor on the night of his wedding. The suspense is built up even further when Victor hears “a shrill and dreadful scream” come from the room where Elizabeth was (173). Elizabeth is killed by the monster, and the fight between Victor and the monster reaches its peak. However, even after that scene, the suspense continues to be built when Victor explains that he “dared not die and leave [his] adversary in being” (179). Shelley builds up the suspense until Victor is finally killed at the end. Shelley uses the conflict between Victor and the monster to create suspense throughout the whole book, and that suspense allows Frankenstein to be very effective as a gothic