Frankenstein

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein follows a man, Victor, who creates a creature, out of many scavenged human parts, but becomes overwhelmed in the reality of what the creature actually becomes. The being that Victor brings alive is a brutal, murderous, secretly sadistic monster that terrorizes the town and makes Victor take a step back and question what he has done. Frankenstein is significant in that it is the first book of its genre of romantic ideals. For this reason, Shelley’s use of light is representative of Victor’s development of character throughout Frankenstein.

Victor, having all of the careless, bad qualities with the relationship shared with the creature, seems to have a positive side to it as well. Victor describes the light eloquently. When describing the light in shining on the lake, in the initial sequences, he says it is “the most beautiful figures” (62). This perception is seemingly accurate until his ignorance is broken. Before Victor created the creature, he only viewed Earth as a way to go through with his study of knowledge. He liked the natural world and science. He spent all of his time in scientifically discovering the means to produce life. Victor initially claims “What could not be expected in a world full of light” (1). Victor’s ambition to create life culminated in his realization that acquiring the understanding to perform anything is not necessarily beneficial. The monster‘s existence allows Victor to understand the drawbacks of knowledge. Just as the fire shatters Victor’s perfect image of nature, his grotesque creation shatters his flawless image of science. Victor begins to see that there are two sides to light; it can illuminate or it can burn. Science can help the pursuit of knowledge or it can create unwanted, dangerous creatures. Both the monster and Victor notice the dual possibilities of light. Victor describes the light as wondrous and brilliant, but instantly after his first breakthrough realizes that the monster was not so great, as he had initially deeply believed. Victor “Closed not his eyes” (29), as he was scared after creating the monster and in constant fear that something would happen. This didn’t stop Victor from pursuing what he loved, but it was not the same now that he had created this rouge experiment. Victor explains that he was going to a country of eternal light, where the “sun is forever visible (12)”, but soon, things all go wrong with the unexpected turn of his creature. This land of eternal light was described this way because Victor thought

that making the monster would make him happier, when it instead just brought rage and harm. The bursts of light that the creature was experiencing was so “brilliant and wondrous (54)”. This means that the murders he would commit were frequent and he would continue to do them because of the illicit pleasure they brought him, one of the worse qualities in the relationship between the creature and Victor