Victor Frankenstein's Connections With Nature

Reagan Evers

Ms. Roberts & Mrs. Moore

ENG 11: World Literature

15 March 2023

Nature and Science Are Intertwined Nature is a way to for some to escape. Lightning and electricity bridges nature and science together by the studies Victor Frankenstein conducted. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Victor escapes to nature any time there is adversity. While Victor’s loved ones appreciate art and humanities, Victor turns to science for understanding about how the world works. Victor loves science, but when science fails him, he turns to nature for peace. Throughout Victor’s connections with nature, Shelley implies that nature provides a sense of nostalgia and escape for one who is in stress or grief.

Nature inspires a sense of nostalgia and peace for

Similarly, as memories are a way to escape grief, stress, or anxiety, in the novel, Victor cries out, “My country, my beloved country! Who but a native can tell the delight I look in again behold thy streams, thy mountains, and, more than all, thy lovely lake!” (Shelley 61). Victor is walking home from college after his brother William’s murder. When he sees his most beloved country, the most familiar objects to Victor’s eyes, Victor becomes overwhelmed with a great sense of nostalgia: “...I wept like a child. ‘Dear mountains! My own beautiful lake! How do you welcome your wonderer? Your summits are clear; the sky and lake are blue and placid. Is this to prognosticate peace, or to mock at my unhappiness?’” (61). As Victor approaches Geneva, he gets an overwhelming sense of nostalgia and peace as he is pondering the fact he has not been home in six years. Just imagine that, leaving home and not returning for six years! Victor also gives a very visual and detailed scene about thunderstorms and lighting. They are the very reason why Victor became a scientist. His initial inspiration to become a scientist came when “[t]he thunder burst with a terrific crash over my head. . . .

As time goes on, Victor studies his fascination with lightning and thunderstorms, as they inspire his pursuit of electricity and how it can create life. Importantly, a storm in Geneva when he was 15 years old changes his life forever: “A most violent and terrible thunderstorm. It advanced from behind the mountains of Jura, and the thunder burst at once with a frightful loudness from various quarters of the heavens” (32). The lightning is so far away yet so loud. Victor begins to wonder how this is possible. He rightly concludes that lightning is a very powerful element. “An old and beautiful oak which stood about 20 yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the Oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump” ( 32). As Victor observed this, he started to wonder, what else could happen if electricity struck like that. So, using his scientific knowledge, he took electricity to the next level. Galvanism is a form of science that involves electricity to create life. “On this occasion a man of great research in natural philosophy was with us, and, excited by his catastrophe, he entered on the explanation of a theory which he had formed on the subject of electricity and galvanism, which was at once new and astonishing to me” (32) The definition of galvanism in Frankenstein is used to create life through electricity. Galvanism is related to nature because lightning is natural