Frankenstein Cultural Analysis

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Writers often highlight the values of a culture or society by using a character who is alienated from that culture or society because of their gender, race, class, or creed. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a scientist, Victor Frankenstein, manages to find the secret to life and bring an 8 foot tall hideous monster to life which is socially an outcast, despite its efforts to “fit in” and prove to people it does contain humanity. The novel begins with the sailor, Robert Walton, looking for a new passage from Russia to the Pacific Ocean through the Arctic Ocean. A couple weeks later, Waltons ship is stuck in a nearly impassable ice field far from land and is also surrounded by a field of mist. The next morning, to Robert's surprise, he comes …show more content…
From the very start of his life he is abandoned by his creator, left alone and confused. Victor describes it as having “yellow skin scarcely covering muscles and arteries beneath...flowing lustrous black hair...teeth of a pearly whiteness...with watery eyes...shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.” It repeatedly tries to integrate itself into society, only to be feared and outcased each time. Even the sweet and gentle family in the forest that it had been watching is taken aback when they see the monster; Agatha faints, Safie runs away, and Felix beats the monster with a stick. The monster even uses "extreme labour" to rescue a young girl from drowning. Even Walton, who was told of the hideousness beforehand, can't look at it. "Never did I behold a vision so horrible as his face, of such loathsome, yet appalling hideousness. I shut my eyes, involuntarily” says Walton. No matter what it does, its actions are always misinterpreted. Felix and Agatha think it's come to attack their father; people think it's trying to murder the girl instead of saving her from drowning; William Frankenstein assumes that it's came to kill him. Although he does not retaliate on the people who ostracize it, or humans in general for his misfortune, he does take revenge on his Victor by hurting his family to make him make him pay for bringing it into a world of pain and misery where acceptance isn't even a remote possibility for it. The monster, obviously tired of being lonesome and an outcast, asks Victor to "make me a mate of my own" so that at least it could have someone it could to confide in, someone that wouldn't look at him like the monster it is, someone that it could be happy
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