Frankenstein:The Creature as a Foil to Frankenstein
...on of sorts. And he does this by reacting to his basic needs for shelter, food, warmth and company. In her book, Mary Shelly: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters, Anne Mellor argues that the creature is Mary Shelly’s allusion to Rousseau’s “noble savage” who is “a creature no different from the animals, responding unconsciously to the needs of his flesh and the changing conditions of his environment.”(47) In the debate on the importance of nature versus nurture, Mellor explains that Frankenstein shows nurture to be crucial because the creature “rapidly discovers the limitations of the state of nature and the positive benefits of a civilization grounded on family life.”(48). This is the informal education that the creature experiences, which in modern society, is termed “socialization” [2] [3]. The De Lacey family is metonymic of the general population or the working egalitarian base of a society. The creature learns about the gentle love and respect that the members of the family show to each other; the division of labor among the able-bodied members that keeps the family alive; in Safire’s story and the De Lacey’s unfortunate past, he learns about the problems that society has its problems such as greed and corruption. Sadly, although he learns about the wonderful aspects of civilized life, the creature also learns of his own status in “the strange system of human society” (96). He has no history because he is ignorant of his creator and creation, he does not possess money, friends or property, and he “was not even of the same nature as man” (96). The creature’s discovery of knowledge led to his own self-knowledge and he finds that all his knowledge has somehow become part of him and his identity: “‘of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind, when it has once seized on it, like a lichen on the rock’” (96) Like a lichen, knowledge also covers the mind and to look outward from the mind into the world is to see it through the color and the thickness of the lichen. The principles that first gripped Frankenstein’s mind are those of prominent alchemists from as early as the thirteenth century. Cornelius Agrippa defended the status of “hidden philosophy” or magic and once set up a laboratory in the hopes of synthesizing gold. Albertus Magnus was a medieval theologian who, while maintaining that human reason could not contradict divine revelation, defended the philosopher’s right to investigate divine mysteries. Paracelsus was a doctor and chemist also concerned himself with alchemical knowledge like Agrippa but also defied the medical tenets of his time, asserting that diseases were caused by agents external to the body and that they could be countered by chemical substances[3][4]. These writers were, as Waldman explained, “men to whose indefatigable zeal modern philosophers were indebted for most of the foundations of their knowledge” (31). However, not all their ideas were considered scientific or even socially acceptable because they contradict strongly held religious beliefs. It is Frankenstein’s father who tells him not to waste his time with these writers because “a modern system of science had been introduced, which possessed much greater powers than the ancient, because the powers of the latter were chimerical, while those of the former were real and practical”(23). Instead, he is extorted to take up the study of natural philosophy, the eighteenth century equivalent of the sciences like physics and chemistry. Although his first attempts at attending lectures were interrupted and not at all fruitful, he enjoys reading the works of Pliny the Elder and Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de, both of whom wrote extensive encyclopedic books on natural history[4][5]. Frankenstein begins to build on his scientific knowledge and when he goes to Ingolstadt and finds a mentor in Waldman, he also starts to take his study of chemistry seriously. There, he becomes part of the new science [5] [6] that penetrates “into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding places” (30). The sexual imagery of such as invasion of the female privacy cannot escape detection of course, but furthermore, throughout his education, he seems to have only male teachers. As he clearly states, “My father directs our studies, and my mother partook of our enjoyments.”(25). Frankenstein grows up in an environment where the intellectual side of things is controlled by men and women are delegated to be in charge of games or of nursing the younger members of the family. Furthermore, not only do the women, like Elizabeth, prefer poetry to science, their emotions overrule their reason, such as when Frankenstein’s mother insisted on seeing Elizabeth when the girl was ill with scarlet fever and contracted the deadly disease as a result. The author seems to show an overwhelming male presence in the Frankenstein household as the males are able to become surrogate parents easily, such as when Frankenstein becomes the instructor of his brothers. He also looks upon Elizabeth as a creature more fragile and unthinking in her carefree life than he is, and sees her an “a favorite animal” (21). Katherine Hill-Miller in her book, “My Hideous Progeny”: Mary-Shelly, William Godwin and the Father-Daughter Relationship, explains that even in his role as an overreaching scientist, Frankenstein can also be read as a father figure because “Part of his motivation in fashioning his creature, after all, is his desire to receive homage and the thanks of beings dependent on him for their generation.”(60). However, ideas are simply not enough to cause a young and intelligent man like Frankenstein to try to take on the role of the ultimate Creator and bring life to a corpse. Shelly shows us that the external or the society at large will always intermingle with the internal or the emotional and psychological makeup of the person. It is Frankenstein’s own “chimerical” makeup- a confidence in the male scientific ability, a belief in the male prerogative to control nature by the accumulation of knowledge, the absence of a tempering maternal influence and his own hubris, that leads him to “circumvent the natural channels of procreation”[6][7]. His knowledge of the world is ironically one that is created in piecemeal; hence the creature can be seen as a physical representation of the terrible patching up of mismatched parts to make a whole. In trying to be more than he is, that is, a human being, Frankenstein finds himself wedged in between nature and God, becoming estranged from his immediate society as he becomes burdened with the tragedies broug...