Shelley’s Frankenstein

Shelley’s Frankenstein does an excellent job at demonstrating the ideas and accomplishments of the enlightenment period. Shelly expresses these ideas and thoughts through the character of Victor Frankenstein who is an aspiring scientist seeking an intellectual challenge. Victor Frankenstein live s his hometown of Geneva and leaves in quest of a valued education in Ingolstadt. When Victor arrives at college he is lonely and finds himself in a new world in which he lives by himself. He than meets Mr. M. Waldman who is a chemistry professor. We can tell the Frankenstein is a representation of the Enlightenment and scientific period because he just like the earlier theorist Who is a Each character represents an important part of history such as the ideals of the scientific revolution, the embodiment of non- European ideals, and the scientific path that the Europeans would be taking in the future. The creation of Frankenstein itself is a symbolization of the progress of the enlightenment period. During this time the Europeans had just witnessed the scientific revolution where simple devices like the microscope and better telescopes were invented along with the advances of knowledge.

The creature’s embodiment of the non-European, the outcast, the alien and the other stems from the incompleteness of the monster ability to engage in cretin perceptions of the world he was brought in. Unlike the Europeans, the monster was brought to life with no concept of value, or cultural norms. This also included the inability to use his 5 senses, to differentiate the differences of emotions and let along the use of empirical sciences to derive about the truths of the life he was forced to live. He was such and outcast to the people around him because of his appearance, though at first the monster had sincere feelings for others, they began to diminish because of the rejection of people to accept him because he was alien to them. When Frankenstein realizes how hideous a creature he has mad he instantly creates a negative connotation of the monster. We know this because when the creature is brought to life Frankenstein says "For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart (Chapter 5, pg. 42).” Immediately after the event he runs out of the laboratory petrified at what he had done. From the passage quoted above and from his actions in the labatory this further implies that Frankenstein was very unhappy with the result of his invention, resulting in negative actions toward him.

Later in the book we learn to understand that the creature becomes violent. This is resulting from any encounters that the monster has had with people. When he soon learns the rejection of him by people, he becomes violent and sets out to kill Victor his creature. As the monster stumbles upon a