Frankenstein Blog 4

                Because Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is essentially told from the point of view of Victor Frankenstein himself, the reader is swayed to believe up to this point in the story that Victor’s creation is a loathsome monster with nothing but cruel and selfish motives. However, I believe Shelley may actually be utilizing this limited point of view to mislead the reader; while I am actually unfamiliar with the story of Frankenstein and cannot remember exactly how it ends, I have a strong feeling the story will ultimately portray Victor’s creation as a decent being and humankind as the savage entity. Although Frankenstein has portrayed his creation as vicious and vile thus far, little evidence has actually been proven to substantiate this claim up until this point. After creating such an ugly being and fearing it, Frankenstein himself was the one who rejected and fled his creation. While he awoke from slumber to find his creation at his bedside reaching out “seeming to detain me” (Shelley, 35), he has no proof that the creature was in fact attempting to capture him. Furthermore, while Victor assumes that his creation was the one who murdered William merely because he found Frankenstein at the site of the murder, no substantial evidence exists which proves this theory. As far as the reader knows, Victor’s creation may simply have been looming at the site of the murder because he believed he might find Victor there and was hoping to speak to him.

                On the other hand, while no evidence yet exists which proves the cruel nature of Victor’s creation, the creature’s story in explanation of the first two years of his life actually do provide evidence to prove that he is inherently a good and decent being. While living in the hovel of a destitute family, the creature came to observe the family very carefully and expressed a desire to make himself known to them and share in their companionship. Upon discovering their poverty, he desired to help them from no longer eating their food and anonymously performing small acts of kindness for them, such as gathering wood and clearing snowy paths for them. Furthermore, he shared that he felt sadness and pain with the family did yet sympathized with their joy. On the other hand, humans have been shown to exhibit nothing but hostility towards the creature as a direct result of their fear. After all, Victor’s fear of his creation was the main motivation behind his flight from the creature. Moreover, when the creature naively stumbled into a small village looking for food, “the whole village was roused; some fled, some attacked me, until, grievously bruised by stones and many other kinds of missile weapons, I escaped to the open country…” (Shelley, 74). Considering all of these facts, I am led to believe that Shelley is cleverly manipulating point of view in order to misguide the reader in believing that Frankenstein’s creature is a detestable and inherently evil being when, in reality, humanity is in fact the savage and uncivilized entity.