God vs Man: Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus”

The traditional reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is that of the Icarus legend: fly too high and too close to the sun, you will lose your wings and plunge to your death. Victor Frankenstein’s attempt to play God gives birth to a “monster” that will stop at nothing to destroy his loved ones. Its hideousness is an affront to civilised society and to godliness. Shelley’s novel does indeed lend itself fully to this reading, but a contemporary reading, one that bears in mind Man’s alienation in modern times, can reveal a new element or two.

Doctor Frankenstein is referred to as “the Creator” on numerous occasions. His intellectual pursuit is entirely of a divine nature, as is evidenced in the following passage:

It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things, or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my enquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world. (39)

Driven by the desire to learn all about the nature of earthly life, he devises a plan that will allow him to create life. This extreme ambition has its roots in Frankenstein’s paternal instincts. He longs to create a being that will look to him with admiration and gratitude: "A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs" (55).

A parallel observation could be drawn between Frankenstein as a creator and Man’s perception of God as the Creator. Both have created with the intention to be praised and held in high regard. Both are proud, paternal figures. If this observation holds water, we shall inevitably arrive at the disturbing interpretation of the “monster” as Man. In Volume 2, Chapter 2, when Frankenstein encounters the “daemon” for the first time and spurns him, the “daemon” has the following to say: “Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend” (103). The creature’s word choice is interesting in that it contains several well-known biblical allusions. He says he “ought to be thy Adam,” but is now the “fallen angel” (Lucifer?) instead. Ironically, the creature is Adam (Man). He is the fallen Adam, the victim of circumstance. He was once “benevolent and good,” but his fall from grace has turned him into a “fiend.” He entreats Frankenstein to embrace him again, so that he “shall again be virtuous”; but Frankenstein refuses to do so, and the creature is driven to despair and rage, swearing that he “will keep no terms with [his] enemies” (103). In short, his desire to destroy and kill derives from his creator’s unwillingness to accept him.

The creature’s destructive behaviour has already left its grisly mark on Frankenstein’s world. His wretched condition is also the condition of the human race; his anguish is the cause of human suffering. This is particularly emphasised in an earlier conversation between Frankenstein and his cousin Elizabeth, after the execution of Justine Moritz, a girl wrongly accused of a murder committed by none other than the creature, as the reader will learn later:

‘When I reflect, my dear cousin,” said she (Elizabeth), ‘on the miserable death of Justine Moritz, I no longer see the world and its works as they before appeared to me. Before, I looked upon the accounts of vice and injustice, that I read in books and heard from others as tales of ancient days or imaginary evils; at least they were remote and more familiar to reason than to the imagination; but now misery has come home, and men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other’s blood. (95, italics mine)

Elizabeth’s speech reveals the ugliness of not the creature (she has no idea such a thing exists), but of men, as in the human race. The world is a place of suffering and misery because men are not capable of being “benevolent and good.” This is proved to be true as the novel moves forth, and we realise that the creature will stop at nothing to cause Frankenstein (and the world) more misery. The ultimate symbolic act of destruction is of course the murder of Elizabeth – the personification of beauty and purity – on her wedding night. Her death spells the end of innocence, and Frankenstein’s world is plunged into eternal darkness from then on.

However, long before we get to this point of no return, we are given the creature’s perspective on life and the human race. (Chapters 3 to 8 of Volume 2 are all dedicated to the creature’s account of his various experiences after his escape from Frankenstein’s laboratory.) He portrays himself as a tabula rasa that had to learn everything from scratch. He talks of the trait of kindness and how he “discovered the names that were given to some of the most familiar objects of discourse” (115). He even taught himself to apply the basic words he had learnt; in time, he could even read Milton’s Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, and Göethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. As his language skills developed, the way a human child’s would, he began to comprehend abstract notions such as “the division of property,” “immense wealth,” “rank,” “descent,” and “noble blood” (122). But the more knowledgeable he became, the more his feelings of exclusion deepened. Understanding the human language meant that he could now grasp the hopeless condition, both physically and metaphysically, he was in. He regretted the knowledge he had acquired:

“Of what strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind, when it has once seized on it, like a lichen on the rock. I wished sometimes to shake off all thought and feeling; but I learned that there was but one means to overcome the sensation of pain, and that was death…” (123).

What the creature expresses here is remarkably similar to the sentiments of the anguished modern man who has divorced himself from his Creator. Like the creature, the modern man cannot understand why he has been created and simply “abandoned” to fight for his own survival in a hostile environment. The modern man, too, feels lonely, excluded, and misunderstood. The knowledge he has acquired (the legacy of Eve) has served him to a certain extent, but it has failed to answer the most fundamental of questions: Why are we here? Why are we alone? Why do we bear the mark of Cain? Does our Creator abhor and despise us? These are the very same questions that plague Frankenstein’s creature: “My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them” (131).

The creature and the human race will never solve these age-old questions. The reason for this is, if we are to follow Victor Frankenstein’s reasoning, the creation of either is entirely fortuitous, and the creator, mortified by the repulsiveness of his creation, has long fled the scene of the crime, leaving not a single answer behind.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. London: Penguin Books, 2003.