Frankenstein, also known as The Modern Prometheus, written by Mary Shelley, is a Gothic novel narrating the story of scientist Victor Frankenstein creating a destructive monster. The novel starts with four letters written by a sea captain named Robert Walton to his sister. Trapped in the North pole, Walton encounters a wretched man named Victor Frankenstein, traveling on a sledge. After carrying Victor aboard Walton’s ship and relieving his wounded body, Victor expounds his tale of his failing creation of a monster. Victor was born in a wealthy Genevan family, with educated parents as well as brotherly siblings. Gradually, Victor develops his fervent passion of understanding the inner spirits of natural philosophy. At the age of 17, he boarded the university of Ingolstadt, where he met two perspicacious professors, teaching him natural science. Inside his laboratory, he starts creating his own mysterious monster. The monster appeared to be both ugly and revengeful of his master’s abandonment. The monster learns human languages, lifestyles, and actions, but also performs numerous murder of innocent cottagers. The monster then escapes to the North Pole, with Victor chasing him, ending up slipping on ice.
All living organisms undergo a series of nurture, where they are nourished and brought up by their own guardians. Nurture is definitely one of the keys towards success; whenever human beings are educated by their parents well enough, they achieve in terms of all aspects: career, status, and self-worth. This success is therefore relied upon the creator’s responsibility. Responsibility is difficult to maintain and easy to neglect because of simple laziness, loathing, or abandonment. In the novel Frankenstein, Victor’s neglected responsibility toward the monster results in everyone, including himself, to suffer severe consequences. From the beginning, Victor puts forth a neglecting attitude of disgust toward his own creation: an ugly, disgusting, and terrifying gigantic monster. How is it possible to possess the responsibility of nurturing the monster when he detests it himself? As expected, he totally abandons the monster, without giving him any reason, and leaves the monster destroying the innocent human civilization. Lacking responsibility shows the deficiency of love, therefore causing the monster devoid of personal feelings of love or understanding. In reality, some parents act like Victor because they think their children have no potential in achieving their wills to them. They lose patience with their children easily without paying extra effort to care and educate them properly. Parents should always be aware to never abandon their own children by being a “gone parent”, despite their lack of talent, inner potential, or appearance. Abandonment never really relieves, instead it creates further, more serious problems.
The theme of human nature has been widely discussed in numerous novels. It’s inevitable to not acquire sinfulness because everyone acts evil toward each other in some ways. As in Frankenstein, humans have been portrayed as widely ambitious, cruel beings. Shelley depicted Victor as a neglectful creator toward his monster through his disgusting evil descriptions of the monster’s ugly appearance. This shows human’s tendency toward the delicacies of manufacturing and hatred toward deformity. As mentioned, Victor lacked responsibility by abandoning the monster. Abandonment is another common human inclination because it reveals that dissatisfying feeling of not reaching their own idealized result. Specifically in the book, through the monster’s own narrative, not only Victor, but every human, displayed an apparent sense of hatred toward the monster. It’s morality who first abandoned him because they think him as scary and imperfect, then the monster starts murdering them. In the end, Victor determines to capture and kill the monster he created himself, which reveals deep hatred and the evilness of human nature that lies within everyone.
Science should be served for all human beings in the society, not only for personal or minority benefits. The original intention of studying science is to determine the workings of nature, observe the physical world, and to understand the world through research and experimentation. On the contrary, hubristic manipulation of the spiritual nature to serve man’s private ends is considered bad science. Victor used his knowledge of natural science during his scientific apprenticeship to create a monster, aiming to push the boundaries of life and death. However, his primary goal was only for personal glory, which means he only wants to create something that would worship himself and his intellect, instead of using science to help the world. In the process of creating the monster, Victor already breaks the natural law of natural cultivation, therefore leading to the monster being a gigantic, useless infant who is seemingly unhealthy. In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley explains the consequence of unrestrained science, where mankind possesses too much information and scientific obsession, therefore gaining too much power that may induce negative consequences. Investigating the field of physics and science with self-control is different from manipulating science for personal advantages.
The Gothic novel of Frankenstein talks about the story of a wildly ambitious scientist Victor Frankenstein, creating his own ugly disgusting monster giant that later brings desperate destruction toward mankind. From the beginning till the end, Victor lacked any empathy and responsibility to the monster by abandoning him and depicting his own creature nastily, as if he’s a wasteful trash. Later on, consequences of murder of the monster bothers him, and till the end, he’s forced to murder the monster himself, but fails, almost losing his own life. Mary Shelley introduces the prominent themes of the importance of responsibility, human nature, and manipulated science in Frankenstein. Through her novel, she suggests that humans tend to neglect things that are imperfect or not reaching their own expectations. But in reality, the situation is inevitable. Especially nowadays, parents should never abandon their children just because of their lacking innate abilities or appearances. People should focus on the entire future prospect, rather on something already permanent. Same thing applies in the fields of science; performing experiments for personal gain can cause many horrifying, uncertain effects, so we should always be aware of what we create and be responsible for the upcoming consequences of our creation.
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