Frankenstein

Mary Shelly's book, Frankenstein, is about and contains a lot of different motifs and different themes. The one theme that really drives the book forward is the basic need for human acceptance and relationships. This is the one thing that really makes the monster seem human and forces us to pity it. Like any person, the monster needed to be accepted and loved. Victor Frankenstein could have avoided all the misery and death if he just acted like a true parental figure from the very beginning.

In a sense Victor Frankenstein was a parent of a child. Maybe not in a conventional way, but he created life. Victor was the father of the monster, and if he would have accepted his responsibilities for the child he brought into the world, death and destruction could have been avoided. The monster was a child in a true way, when he was brought into the world everything was new to him. He needed a guiding force, a parental figure to educate him about culture, customs, and just how to act in his new environment.

When Victor first creates the monster, he is a child in his mindset. When he awoke he smiled, happy to be in his father's presence.

I beheld the wretch---the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaw opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped and rushed downstairs (Shelley, p. 43).

Like any newborn, the monster became attached to the first things or people it saw. He didn't want to detain Victor, he wanted to touch him and hold him. If Victor acted like he should have acted and helped the monster adjust to the world, things might have been okay. The monster didn't know how to talk, he didn't know how to act, and he didn't know what to do or how to form relationships with other people.

Victor should have known how to act and how to treat his creation just because of how his parents treated him. Victor had a wonderful childhood filled with his parents care. He flourished because of his relationship with them.

Much as they were attached to each other, they seemed to draw inexhaustible stores of affection from a very mine of love to bestow them upon me. My mother's tender caresses and my father's smile of benevolent pleasure while regarding me are my first recollections.