Isolation and Alienation in Frankenstein and The Metamorphosis - Essay Example

23 April Isolation and Alienation in Frankenstein and The Metamorphosis In 1816, a young woman wrote one of the most well-known stories of the modern era. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) has spawned a genre of scientific horror which even now “registers profound cultural anxiety about the medical and scientific professions” (Newitz, 54). An equally disturbing text is Kafka's 1915 novella The Metamorphosis, written almost exactly a century after Shelley's groundbreaking work, with similar motifs of rebirth and creation. However, although both of these texts rely on very physical images to make their point – Shelley speaks of Doctor Frankenstein's creation as a “demoniacal corpse” (Shelley, Ch. 5) and Kafka's protagonist is transformed into a “horrible vermin” (Kafka, Ch. I) – their horror lies in the intangible. Both creatures suffer mentally due to their alienation from society and isolation from loved ones. This essay will compare the themes of alienation and isolation in both Frankenstein and The Metamorphosis to show how Shelley and Kafka were portraying the terrors of loneliness rather than the terrors of modern technologies. One of the major differences between Gregor Samsa and Frankenstein's monster is their attitude towards their loneliness. Both are, admittedly, desperately unhappy: the creature calls himself a “poor, helpless, miserable wretch” (Shelley, Ch. 11), and Gregor is described as “sad and tired to death” (Kafka, Ch. III). However, the creature actively attempts to find a way to alleviate his loneliness, by learning language to be able to communicate with people (Shelley, Ch. 13), reading fiction (Ch. 15), and eventually by persuading Frankenstein to create a companion for him. His powers of rhetoric fail to work on the doctor, who remains horrified by his work; this spurs the creature on to gain human interaction through malice, such as the declaration he makes to the doctor: “I shall be with you on your wedding night” (Ch. 20). Unable to form meaningful relationships, the monster resorts to making threats. He is dramatically aware of his loneliness and determined to remedy it. Gregor, on the other hand, is characterized by listlessness. Neither he nor the author express any surprise at his transformation, and the first few pages of the book record Gregor being “unable to decide to get out of bed” (Kafka, Ch. I) even though he is late for work – to which he still plans to go. The dreary tone of the storytelling contributes to this apathy. Even when events overwhelm Gregor, as his mother and sister clear the furniture out of his room to allow him to crawl over the walls and ceiling more easily, his instinctive reaction is to lie still “with his head and legs pulled in against him and his body pressed to the floor” (Ch. II). A drone-like creature of work in his human life, this lack of imagination translates across to his life as a bug, hemming him into his new and repulsive body in a way which a more imaginative and fulfilled person may not have been. His work had previously isolated him from human interaction; it now isolates him from human imagination. The different attitudes portrayed by Shelley and Kafka could be because of the different ways in which Gregor and the creature are rejected. In The Metamorphosis, the primary cause of pain to Gregor is not just the fact that his parents and sister are revolted by his new form, and treat him with “hostility” (Ch. I) and disgust, but also that their rejection of him is slow and gradual. Well into the third and final section of the novella, his sister provides him with food, leaves his bedroom door open so that he can observe family life, and decide against moving to a smaller apartment because of concerns about relocating him. However, upon discovering Gregor's corpse, his father exclaims “let's give thanks to God for that!” (Ch. III). Despite the “emotion and love” (Ch. III) for his family which Gregor felt in his dying moments, the objects of his love do not reciprocate. It is clear that their care of him is merely perfunctory, underlined by a vacancy rather than familiar sentiment. Even though Gregor has dedicated years of his life to a job he hates in order to “pay off [his] parents' debt to [the boss]” (Ch. I), while his family lives so idly that his father “would stretch [breakfast] out for several hours as he sat reading a number of different newspapers” (Ch. I), they cannot overcome their innate “repugnance” (Ch. III) at Gregor's new body. He is slowly rejected by the people who should love him most. The creature, on the other hand, is rejected completely and immediately. There is no agonizingly gradual separation from humanity; the creature is instead born into a world which swiftly and unequivocally regards him as “monstrous” (Shelley, Ch. 21). The cottagers, under whose unknowing tutelage the creature flourishes, react to his reveal “in a transport of fury” (Ch. 15) and even move house after seeing him; when attempting to save the life of a drowning child, her father “aimed a gun, which he carried, at [his] body, and fired” (Ch. 16). There is no reprieve for the soul which resides in a patched-together gallimaufry of human and animal corpses from the “dissecting room and the slaughter-house” (Ch. 4). The monster's “anger” (Ch. 16) at the world is a dramatic response to a dramatic event, unlike Gregor's apathy, born of slow change. Another contributing factor to the creature's and Gregor's differing attitudes to solitude is the manner of their creation. Although neither are curious about how they came to exist, Shelley has her creation find out. The creature stumbles across some of Doctor Frankenstein's old documents detailing “every step [he] took in the progress of [his] work” (Ch. 15), and thus discover the method of his creation. The minute detail of Frankenstein's revulsion pains the creature, and leads him to consider himself “a blot upon the earth” (Ch. 13). One can only imagine the “agony” (Ch.13) that it would cause to learn that one's very existence was deeply regretted by life's creator. Interestingly, at this point in the tale, roles are reversed: the monster knows the precise process of his creation, which Frankenstein earlier admits that “this discovery [of how to create life] was so great and overwhelming that all the steps by which I had been progressively led to it were obliterated” (Ch. 4). The parent-child, or god-subject, relationship between Frankenstein and the creature is an unbelievably complex one, but at the simplest level it seems obvious that to be rejected by one's own creator is the deepest form of alienation imaginable. This emotion is only intensified by the monster's understanding of Frankenstein's scientific processes: that the doctor worked so hard to create life, only to be horrified by the result, must rankle with the creature even more than it would otherwise. Kafka, conversely, writes so that Gregor never even considers the reason for his transformation. Although he is saddened by the effect it has had on his family, he never laments the change; in the text, he never expresses a wish to return to his previous life – in fact, his only wish is “to see his mother” (Kafka, Ch. II). Gregor's mother, on the other side of this close relationship broken by physicality, does predict that her son “will come back” (Ch. II) but this hope fails to actualize. The protagonist's utter lack of curiosity plays into other themes Kafka was highlighting, such as escapism, guilt, and the inability to create one's own self-identity. As mentioned above, it reflects Gregor's disinclination to reconnect with the hostile world around him. After a few half-hearted attempts to communicate with his family, Gregor accepts his little bubble of loneliness, and as such can be held partially responsible – though not at fault – for his own solitude. Finally, the writing style of each book also contributes to a sense of otherness, of separation from human society. Frankenstein is a story of multiple layers – in chapter thirteen, which deals with Safie's return to Felix, the cottagers transmit the story to the creature, who tells it to Frankenstein, who tells it to Walton, who writes to his sister. Only then does the reader receive the tale. The multiple filters through which the story is written creates an unbridgeable gap between what is told and what actually occurred – we must penetrate through the biases and characteristics of many storytellers in order to understand what is happening. The reader is thus alienated from the content of the story, intensifying the loneliness felt by both the monster and the doctor. The pain experienced by both characters in being set apart from the rest of humanity by Frankenstein's experiment is echoed in the storytelling and reverberates in the reader. The baldly factual tone of The Metamorphosis works in a similar way. It is widely accepted that what should be the climax of a story – the protagonist's transformation – is subverted in Kafka's novella. The very first sentence of the text plainly states what has happened, without explanation or reason, and Kafka never returns to this event to give an account of why it happened. Within the context of the story, the reader is forced to accept this absurd transformation as given. As much as we would like an explanation, Gregor does not demand one, and so we are as isolated as he is from the underlying cause of the story. To be completely ignorant of a situation is to be distanced from it, and as such the reader is both drawn into Gregor's life and pushed away – in the exact same way that he is unaware of the whys of his own existence. The creature is alienated from his creator; Gregor's alienation, from himself, is even worse. One could go even further and say that isolation, in different forms, caused both books. Internally, Doctor Frankenstein's years of lonely work, during which he “shunned [his] fellow creature” (Ch. 4) and without a friend to bring him back to reality, resulted in his much-regretted creation. It is a testament to friendship that without such relationships in his life, the doctor animated horrendous life. Externally, however, both Shelley and Kafka were recognized as lonely people, who sought happiness in their writings. Like the creature, Shelley grew up without a mother, as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley had died in childbirth – to a young child, this could feel like an ultimate rejection, rather than a simple medical mistake. Similarly, it has been conjectured that The Metamorphosis is an allegory of Kafka's own relationship with his poisonous father. For both the creature and Gregor – Shelley and Kafka – isolation from one's own family, perpetuated by the very people who should love you the most, was an effective topic for a memorable horror story. Works Cited Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. Trans. David Wyllie. Project Gutenberg. Accessed 23 April 2011. Newitz, A. 2006. Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture. California: Duke University Press. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus. Project Gutenberg. Accessed 23 April 2011. Read More