Drama Frankenstein Motif & Symbols by Mary Shelley
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Subjugation of Women
For a novel written by the daughter of an important feminist, Frankenstein is strikingly devoid of strong female characters. The novel is littered with women who suffer calmly and then expire: Caroline Beaufort is a self-sacrificing mother who dies taking care of her adopted daughter; Justine is executed for murder, despite her innocence; the creation of the female monster is aborted by Victor because he fears being unable to control her actions once she is animated; Elizabeth waits, impatient but helpless, for Victor to return to her, and she is eventually murdered by the monster. One can argue that Shelley renders her female characters so passive and subjects them to such ill treatment in order to call attention to the obsessive and destructive behavior that Victor and the monster exhibit.
Abortion
The motif of abortion recurs as both Victor and the monster express their sense of the monster’s hideousness. About first seeing his creation, Victor says: “When I thought of him, I gnashed my teeth, my eyes became inflamed, and I ardently wished to extinguish that life which I had so thoughtlessly made.” The monster feels a similar disgust for himself: “I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.” Both lament the monster’s existence and wish that Victor had never engaged in his act of creation. The motif appears also in regard to Victor’s other pursuits. When Victor destroys his work on a female monster, he literally aborts his act of creation, preventing the female monster from coming alive. Figurative abortion materializes in Victor’s description of natural philosophy: “I at once gave up my former occupations; set down natural history and all its progeny as a deformed and abortive creation; and entertained the greatest disdain for a would-be science, which could never even step within the threshold of real knowledge.” As with the monster, Victor becomes dissatisfied with natural philosophy and shuns it not only as unhelpful but also as intellectually grotesque.
The story of Adam and Eve
The story of Adam and Eve—both the version from the Bible and John Milton’s Paradise Lost—weaves through Frankenstein, underscoring many of the major themes of the novel. When Victor first plans to create the monster, he imagines a new race of beings that worship him, placing himself in the role of God in the biblical story of Adam and Eve’s creation. Victor gets his wish perhaps too literally, as the monster becomes fixated on the dynamic between God, Adam, and Satan as Milton portrays it in Paradise Lost. The monster also asks for Victor to make him a companion based on the model of Adam and Eve. By reading Victor and monster against the story of Adam and Eve, we see how short Victor falls from his goal of playing God because of the way he refuses responsibility for his creation. Because of Victor’s negligence and his un-godlike inability to sustain the life he made, the monster ironically begins to parallel Satan when he declares rebellion against his creator.
Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
Light and Fire
“What could not be expected in the country of eternal light?” asks Walton, displaying a faith in, and optimism about, science. In Frankenstein, light symbolizes knowledge, discovery, and enlightenment. The natural world is a place of dark secrets, hidden passages, and unknown mechanisms; the goal of the scientist is then to reach light. The dangerous and more powerful cousin of light is fire. The monster’s first experience with a still-smoldering flame reveals the dual nature of fire: he discovers excitedly that it creates light in the darkness of the night, but also that it harms him when he touches it. The presence of fire in the text also brings to mind the full title of Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. The Greek god Prometheus gave the knowledge of fire to humanity and was then severely punished for it. Victor, attempting to become a modern Prometheus, is certainly punished, but unlike fire, his “gift” to humanity—knowledge of the secret of life—remains a secret.
Ice
Ice frames Frankenstein, representing isolation and alienation. Ice carries with it connotations of emotional coldness, or lacking the warmth of human companionship. Victor’s fate—to pursue the monster across the frozen north—represents how his dangerous experiments have led to his complete alienation from society. Victor’s pursuit of knowledge has taken him outside the boundaries of the scientific community, cost him his family, and murdered his wife. Notably, the monster states that he cannot feel the effects of the cold and snow because of his nature. According to the monster’s view of himself, an inherent part of his nature is his alienation, the fact that he is the only one of his kind, which is why he feels at home in the land of ice. Victor, however, has lost companionship, and the cold lack of humanity is an excruciating fate. This symbolic dimension of ice adds a chill meaning to Walton’s encounter with Victor. When Victor appears, Walton’s ship is trapped on a sheet of ice, isolated from civilization, as if Victor brings with him a physical manifestation of his fate. When the ice dissipates, Walton decides to listen to his crew and return home, choosing humanity over alienation.
The Monster
Although a character in his own right, the monster also carries symbolic meaning as the consequences of careless science. In the process of creating the monster, Victor thinks little of the social and moral taboos he crosses, such as graverobbing, or of how his devotion to science has caused him to neglect his family. Only when he looks at the monster for the first time does he consider the weight and reality of what he has done. Once beholding the monster, the thought of making another terrifies him because he cannot stop thinking about the ramifications of the monster having a partner. Whereas he gladly sacrifices time with Elizabeth before the monster’s creation in the name of science, after creating the monster the possibility of the monster hurting her terrifies him. The shadow of the monster hangs over Victor’s entire life. Notably, the monster is not inherently violent, but he learns violence because of Victor’s rejection and lack of responsibility. The warning of the monster does not seem to be that science itself has dire consequences, but rather science done without forethought or a sense of responsibility has consequences.
