Frankestien

Frankenstein is also cast as a Promethean figure, striving against human limitations to bring light and benefit to mankind. While he advises Walton to "Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition," he nevertheless invites his listeners to share in the grandeur of his dreams, to glory in his ability to create a sublime facsimile of the human self. Frankenstein's fall, after all, results not from his creative enterprise, but from his failure and inability to give love to his creature. Indeed, another central concern of the novel is the conflict of individual desire against that of familial and social responsibility. George Levine writes: "Frankenstein spells out both the horror of going ahead and the emptiness of return. In particular, it spells out the price of heroism." Unlike her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, and unlike the Romantic poets generally, Shelley advocates self-denial and social harmony over self-assertion, confrontation, and the individualistic, imaginative act. In her novel she shows that Frankenstein's quest is an act of selfish obsession, one that destroys his domestic relationships. He is contrasted with the mariner Robert Walton, whose concern for others ultimately wins over his ambition to reach the "region of beauty and light." Finally, the use of the nightmarish murders, the demonlike monster, the terror of the unknown, and the destruction of the idyllic life in nature by a dark, ambiguous force places Frankenstein in the tradition of the Gothic novel. Like other Gothic authors, Shelley situates good and evil as a psychological battle within human nature. Both Frankenstein and the creature initially have "benevolent" feelings and intentions, but eventually both become obsessed with ideas of destruction and revenge. Shelley's novel successfully manipulates the conventions of the genre, replacing the stock Gothic villain with morally ambiguous characters who reflect the depth and complexities of the human psyche.