It will always be there as a pleasure and a burden. Society puts labels on everything as good or bad, rich or poor, normal or aberrant. Although some of these stamps are accurate, most of them are misconceptions. Shelley simply makes this known to the reader, so that they can see the error of their ways. Society is also very ignorant, as can be seen later on in the book, when they kill Justine because she is the only person that could have possibly have done such an evil act. They again wrongly label Justine as the killer.
They do not look into the facts but instead find a quick and easy answer to the problem. This again shows the ignorance of society in this novel. The faults with Mary Shelley’s society are again shown up by the one person who is not repulsed by the vile appearance of the monster – a blind man. If society is so ignorant that not even a single person could look at the monster without taking violent action or running away in fright, Shelley is surely trying to tell us something – that society is ignorant and there is nothing that can be done about it.
The old man is in the house the monster tries to find shelter in, and when at last he thinks he has found it, he has barely had time to make a conversation with the man before his children enter the cottage and start driving the monster away with a stick. The daughter is scared and flees the cottage, and it is the son who attacks the monster. At this point in the book, the monster has done nothing to deserve the title “monster”, yet he was given no name for him to be called otherwise. This is very inhumane, as people resorted to simply calling the monster, “it.
” There is another form of nature, though, which also plays a large part in this novel, and that is the power of the natural world. Nature is presented as possessing an immense curative power; the beauty of the natural world heals Victor when he is too miserable to find solace anywhere else. Nature is very significant in this book, as large parts of it are devoted to describing the surrounding scenery and natural events, even when they are not beautiful – “the thunder burst at once with frightful loudness from various quarters of the heavens. ”
Frankenstein takes pleasure in being close to nature, as you can see from the quote, as he finds even the most destructive of nature’s powers amazing, and thinks they are from “heaven”. The whole book obviously revolves around the monster, and he himself is a product of nature. Not only is any living thing automatically part of nature (and it is true to say that Frankenstein’s monster has been given a life), but also if it weren’t for nature he would never have been created in the first place.
It is things like these which make us realise that even without mentioning nature, it still plays an essential part in the book. The flash of lightning from Victor’s childhood sparked off an immense compulsion to explore nature and science. From that point in his life he had a great yearning for knowledge and started reading books such as Paradise Lost, as well as books about the works of great scientists like Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus. “Here were men who had penetrated deeper and knew more. I took their word for all that they averred, and I became their disciple. “
