Victor Faces His Creation - Essay Example

 “He saw a wildness in my eyes for which he could not account; and my loud, unrestrained heartless laughter, frightened and astonished him….”Do not ask me,” Cried I, putting my hands before my eyes, for I thought I saw the dreaded spectre glide into the room; “he can tell.- Oh save me! Save me!” I imagined that the monster seized me; I struggled furiously, and fell down in a fit. Poor Clerval! what must have been his feelings? A meeting, which he anticipated with such joy, so strangely turned to bitterness. But I was not the witness of his grief; for I was lifeless, and did not recover my senses for a long, long time. This was the commencement of a nervous fever, which confined me for several months. During all the time Henry was my only nurse. I afterwards learned that, knowing my father’s advanced age, and unfitness for so long a journey, and how wretched my sickness would make Elizabeth, he spared them this grief by concealing the extent of my disorder.” What happens when an arrow is released from the bow, with full force and skill by an archer, and he suddenly realizes that it is traveling at a great speed towards an unintended target and it will cause immense damage? The archer has no other option but to watch the results of his skill, and desperately lament over the outcome. Similar is the position of Victor Frankenstein. He has created a creature, which he should not have created at all and now is aghast at the unpredictable and impending consequences. It is a dreaded situation when the scientist is afraid of his own creation! He sees his creation before him and the responsibility for its horrors lies in his hands. His inner world lay in shambles. Any individual will turn utterly cynical, confronting such grim consequences, having created something destructive and horrific. From the first chapter, Mary Shelley characterized Victor as someone whose attitude towards the pursuit of knowledge is inexorable; he is blinded by his obsession to succeed and his fear of failure to some extent. Moreover, Victor is also driven by his inclination to create life and his desires to exceed the boundaries established by man and, surpass the expectations of his professors and peers. Although, once engaged in his pursuits, Victor was entranced; he had a long ethical hesitation, on how morally correct of him to create his 'greatest work'. The passage above comes from Chapter 5 of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In this chapter, there is a mood of melancholy and fear. Victor’s dream, which was beautiful, has turned dark, like summer gives in to winter. This is a contrast to Chapter 6 – the rebirth of his health and the return of the seasons of life and new hope, in Frankenstein's case. “Desperate hope” because Victor has brought himself into an illusory world full of self denial, and self pity, it seems as though he just expects the monster to never be a part of his life again. The reality of the monster in Chapter 5 horrifies the creator himself, and when he returns to his home to find that it is gone, he seems to carry an attitude of 'out of site out of mind.' The ‘dreaded specter’ in the passage refers to the monster created by Victor. Being aware of the consequences of his actions had a catastrophic effect on Victor. It was so devastating that he fell unconscious or ‘lifeless’ as the passage states. The effects are also reflected by his ‘nervous fever,’ which indicates the outcome of his devastated mind. When the mind is unable to bear the intense load of negative pressures, it passes the burden on the nervous system. The sequences and consequences of the destructive power unleashed by Victor, was too much for him to endure. He collapses; his body turns into a heap of nervous wreck! In a way the story is prophetic and throws light on the prevailing conditions that confront humanity deeply – impact of materialistic civilization, and the industrial and internet revolutions. The combustible younger generation of the day acts first and thinks later. This happened to the scientist Victor. Victor’s inexorable passion to go beyond the limits of science certainly had tremendous consequences. “None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science.” (47) The ‘enticements of science’ is a symbolic expression. It refers to the lure of making scientific discoveries. As Victor excels in his quest, his body begins the process which a dead decaying body goes through. Mary Shelley shocks readers, because of Frankenstein's surprisingly uncontrollable incapability to draw back from his work after several months of intense labor. We can see that as Frankenstein begins to give life to this monster, he himself, begins to decay, bringing the inanimate object to life deteriorates him, nearly bringing him to his death. His lack of self-control comes as another shock, because although his aware of his body becoming emaciated he does not dare cease his work, he seems sanctimonious and prideful of his works, which are signs of the intensity of his obsession. Once on the threshold of glory, the scientist feels that he is up to the final conquest. He has achieved the ultimate! Having reached the summit, he feels great that the whole mountain is under his feet. But when he turns, he sees the approaching avalanche through the mountain range, and now he wishes to run as fast as he can to escape the fury of the Nature! The first flush of enthusiasm and success achieved by the scientist has proved too costly for him with damaging consequences for the humanity. Victor feels elated. He thinks, “No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.” (51) ‘Like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success,’ and ‘a torrent of light into our dark world,’ are symbolic expressions. That was the fond hope of the budding scientist Victor. But soon he visualizes that the creation process is getting out of control. He has become the misguided arrow heading for an unintended target. “How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form?” (55) asks Victor. ‘This catastrophe,’ is a symbolic expression. The scientist Victor puts a question to himself for which he has no answer. He has taken every care as for the external details, the muscles and the skin, but what about his inner world? He had not taken that factor into account at all! Everything was perfect, except the savagely imperfect inner world—and that lapse would cause the irreparable, ultimate damage! He laments, “The different accidents of life are not as changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body… [b]ut now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished….” (56) The technological product that Victor had created was without the human face – by then he had realized. He had already become sick, thinking about the grave consequences. The scientists and the technological leaders need to know when and where to stop. Unless the politicians and the scientists who do research and create great scientific tools, plan in advance the self-balancing, self-cleansing and self-adjusting acts, the results will be like extending the cordial invitation to the doomsday! Chapter 6 is much like the summit of a mountain because once it hits the top, the direction changes drastically as does the direction the story, everything begins to go down hill and things begin to turn for the worst for Victor. It is the moment when the arrow was released from the bow and a series of calamitous incidents are waiting in the wings to befall on Victor. Super-technology and super-inventions are compared to a foreign body. Therefore, one finds numerous rejections and mal-adjustments of such developments. Nature adjusts to the extent possible and finally explodes to reject. The system breaks down. Through the various characters in Frankensein, Mary Shelly has provided the prophetic slides of PowerPoint presentation about the state of affairs in a society impacted by materialistic civilization and chasing scientific inventions, without applying proper thought as for the consequences. ********** References cited Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein. New York: Enriched Classics, 2004. Read More