Draft of Essay #3

Victoria Adams

Cline

ENG 102

12 October 2011

Sinful Creation

            Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, was a very intriguing book that caused my eyes not to stop it’s back and forth motion. The book from the beginning to end draws you into the story, as if you are living it. This book in its entirety plays on the reader’s emotions. In the beginning of the story, it draws you in with its interesting, innocent character and background. Without thinking, the story almost immediately takes a turn into a story of dreadfulness that never seems to end and it keeps the reader on the edge of mind due to the horrific pictures it displays. Mary Shelley’s purpose for writing this novel was to reveal the wicked results of sin. The novel is connected to the Genesis of the Bible, with Adam, Eve and the ever sinful Devil. The daemon in the novel represents sin itself, with a sense that Victor Frankenstein is the daemon or sin. The birth of sin, the realization of it, the running from it and trying to fight it is all part of the basis of this novel. Sin has consequences as seen in the story, that Victor Frankenstein had consequences of his sin, the creation of the daemon. Mary Shelley does an exquisite job at proving her point of the miseries of sin.

The story of this novel really starts when Victor Frankenstein begins to tell of his life history. There is nothing more delightful then to hear of his younger years as he explains, “No youth could have passed more happily than mine” (Shelly 20). Victor had obvious love for his youthful past. As he tells of his stories he states, “I feel pleasure in dwelling on the recollections of childhood, before misfortune had tainted my mind, and changed its bright visions of extensive usefulness into gloomy and narrow reflections upon self” (Shelley 21). This directly ties in with the beginning of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve would say their beginnings were better to dwell on then those after their promiscuous fall. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve give this insight where Mary Shelly identifies herself with Victor, Adam and Eve. They say, “…like Shelley herself, appear to be trying to understand their presence in a fallen world, and trying at the same time to define the nature of the lost paradise that must have existed before the fall” (Shelley 229).

Like a piece of chocolate, sin has an attractive appeal to the eyes and mind of the human body. Victor’s sin attraction began when he stated, “Natural philosophy is the genius that has regulated my fate” (Shelley 21). What he meant by this was that the study of nature or science had become the spirit or demon that helped him to where he ended up. This excitement for the science became his sinful downfall. At this point he was very much like Eve, when she seen the forbidden fruit and it caught her eye until she could partake of it. After the attraction and pull to this science, Victor became fanatical about the sin that he would soon partake of.

Sin had overwhelmed Victor and as he told of his story he stated, “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow” (Shelley 31). As the deceptive snake convinced Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Victor ate of the fruit. He became aware of the power sin has before it takes a person down. He began to dabble with the sin and became like the Devil. He said, “It was with these feelings that I began the creation of a human being” (Shelley 31).

In Frankenstein and Radical Science, Marilyn Butler stated, “…don’t usurp God’s prerogative in the Creation-game, or don’t get too clever with technology” (Shelley 302). With resemblance of the Devil, Victor thought he had the power to create a human. The Devil thought he was equal to and higher than God and Victor clearly felt a superior power within himself after sin had completely engulfed his mind. Victor stated, “I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet” (Shelley 34). He felt he had the power of life in his own hands. Marilyn Butler, in Frankenstein and Radical Science, states that the novel, “in a new Preface, interpreted-as the story of a ‘human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world” and further that, “Frankenstein, expresses religious remorse for making a creature” (Shelley 303).

“I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been” (Shelley 17). “If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind” (Shelley 33). “Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil” (Shelley 32).

The Genesis of the Bible and sin’s birth is seen evident throughout Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The novel reveals the effects of sin like that of the birth of sin in the Garden of Eden. Vincent Frankenstein’s life at youth is the Eden.  Further we find that sin quickly enters the untainted mind of Vincent through natural science and philosophy studies. Sin finally overtakes Vincent when he creates the daemon, of whose life he felt was in his own hands.  He becomes like the Devil thinking he is greater than God by creating his own human being. His sin quickly overcomes him and haunts him the rest of his life. This sin factor is clearly seen as the center theme of this novel.