Abandoning Satan Essay, Research Paper

Abandoning Satan

In Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, the author employ’s several different themes to suggest a tone of tragedy. Those include abandonment, tragic flaw, and the punishment exceeds the crime. The two main characters, Victor Frankenstein and his monster, are deemed as tragic heroes in Shelly’s novel. Webster defines a hero as “a person noted for feats of courage or nobility of purpose, especially one who has risked or sacrificed his or her life.” Frankenstein and his monster each have their own levels of tragedy. Shelly also supplies each character with flaws and imperfections. The punishments for creating the monster are greatly harsher than the crime of creating it.

Abandonment is the first main theme in the novel. Abandonment is defined as “to give up completely and to desert”(Webster 1). Both Frankenstein and his creation go through several different episodes of abandonment. Frankenstein abandons his family, his creation, and his homeland. The monster abandons his non-evil state of mind, and then society. Young Victor abandons his monster because of its wretchedness. What began as a man ends up a mockery, and a “hideous being of gigantic structure”(Tropp 62). Victor barely even thinks twice about leaving his creation. The shear ugliness of it took over all thought of whether it could be good or evil or if it needed anything. The monster had “no father [to watch his] infant days” and, “no mother to bless [him] with smiles”(87). The monster was a “poor, helpless, miserable wretch,” with no one to turn to (72). When the creation woke up Victor instantly left the building. The creator never saw his creation after that until he was detained by it. The creation was left to “struggle with a child’s blindness, added to a student’s thirst for knowledge” (23).

Frankenstein’s next episode of abandonment tears him away from his family. Victor leaves home to go study at college. In the mean time his family and his beloved Elizabeth got left out of his priorities. He wished to exert “his own selfhood” over others (Walling 45). Frankenstein, “so deeply engraved in [his] occupation,” never ceased to think about his family. He thought only of himself and how to command the powers of life as he worked so diligently on his creation and studies. He misses seven years of his family’s life in consequence to his actions. During this time many thing happen at home that will lead up to the death of several family members and his own fate with the monster. He is unable to explain what he means by his self reproaches because, “of course, the very existence of the monster is a secret” which he cannot share (Small 173).

Victor’s last offence of abandonment is abandoning his homeland. He abandons his homeland in search for power which man cannot possess. He desires to “raise himself to eminence” to make him feel unique (Walling 36). Frankenstein abandons his country again to chase the monster in revenge of the death of his family member and to make sure that he does not continue his killing spree. He “burned with rage” to pursue the “murderer of [his] peace (124).

The monster is not free from this offence. It completes two episodes of abandonment. It abandons its good nature, then society as a whole. The monster was not born evil. The monster “being capable of good,” is made clear by its own story (Intro 2). The monster, spurned by everyone, changes his thought. After trying to fit in as a human being and becoming a “master of their language”(80), he left his “feelings of affection, and they were requited by destation and scorn” (124). After it learns to read and deciphers the notes left by Frankenstein in the garments the monster took, the monster figures out what he really is an realizes that he will never be part of society. He then wants revenge on Frankenstein. He abandons his self-taught morals of good and turns evil. He begins to slowly make his creator suffer as he did by killing some of his family members. The monster tells Victor, “If I have no affections, hatred and vice must be my portion” (108). This means that he will no longer care and chooses to use evil revenge to replace what should have been.

The monster also chooses to abandon society. The monster soon learns of his place in the world and that he will never be accepted. He then chooses to remain absent from the society of man. The monster is “miserable from the inclemency of the season, and still more from the barbarity of man (75). After scaring many people and being chased out of a village, the monster take refuge in a small hut and remains their in a “state of utter and stupid despair” to stay away from the humans (100). He comes out only at night to quench his thirst and equate his hunger. The creation will try one more time at being human but will fail miserably. He then abandons society for good, and stops trying to learn or be like any human. He then decides he needs a mate so that they can leave and never be seen by society.

In the novel both characters have tragic flaws that make them susceptible to each other, themselves, and society. Frankenstein has two major flaws. He cares only for his work and wishes to become godlike because of it. The monster also has two major flaws. He is Satan-like and is ugly and wretched beyond belief. Tragic flaws keep characters from getting what they desire which does not allow them to live the perfect life in which they wish to live.

Victor’s caring only for his work causes most of the problems in this tragedy. While creating his monster, “Frankenstein forgets his family and friends and ignores the natural world,” rendering him no love (Tropp 63). All he has is his work. He is willing to devote his entire life, “his ostensible goal,” to the creation of his monster (Walling 35). Frankenstein looked forward to the completion of his creation with “tremulous and eager hope” (121). He is selfish in his ways because of his abandonment of all he knows. According to Tropp, “All of things man makes are to some extent copies of himself” (Tropp 65). He “deliberately and selfishly chose to make [him] an imperfect image of himself” (Walling 46). The motive for Frankenstein’s creation is his “desire to bring forth a new species” (Walling 45). This makes Victor selfish because he does not stop to think what havoc the new species could cause or the horror that it might cause him and others later. Also during his studies he loses himself in his work. It was as if “[he] had been animated by an almost unnatural enthusiasm” (33). His true failure, though, “stems from the poverty of his imagination and from the inadequacy of his love.

Frankenstein’s other tragic flaw comes from trying to be a god or godlike. He wished to learn the “secrets of heaven” (Walling 37). Frankenstein soon grasped and solved “great cosmic” riddles (Tropp 63). He therefore looses all touch with reality. Too late, Frankenstein realizes “that this detachment from human feeling has been the cause of much of the worlds misery (Tropp 65). Victor is the “picture” of a “finite god at war with, and eventually overcome by his creation” (Oates 250). He “momentarily commands divine power” only to be destroyed by it (Tropp 56). Frankenstein shows to depart from “ his dream of becoming godlike in direct proportion to his failure to love” his family and his work (Walling 45).

The monster has flaws man cannot have or posses. The monster is demonic and Satan-like. He is the “monstrous double of Lucifer” (Tropp 68). The monster turned from archangel to arch destroyer.

“In Paradise lost, after the meeting a Pandemonium, Satan decides to fly to earth and inspect gods latest creation. Taking the form of a cormorant, he perches on a tree in Eden and secretly observes Adam and Eve in the garden. After the monster has left the shepherd’s hut, traveled to a village, and been driven out in a hail of stones, it hides in a hovel where it can secretly observe the lines of a noble family reduced to poverty” (Tropp 72-73).

This passage tells how the life of Satan and the monster are parallel. When the monster “reflected that they had spurned and deserted me anger returned” (101). Satan feels the same type of torment as he spies on Adam and Eve. The interplay of Frankenstein/Monster is somewhat like the relationship between Lucifer/Satan.