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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes. Read more: What Is a Motif in Literature?
Subjugation of Women
There is a striking lack of strong women characters in Frankenstein, which is puzzling given that it was written by the daughter of a pioneering feminist. An exception is Victor’s mother Caroline, who does show strength and determination (ironically including deciding that Elizabeth will marry Victor), but like most of the other woman characters in the novel, she is fated to suffer calmy and then die (when, as a self-sacrificing mother, she expires tending to her adopted daughter). The same pattern fits most of the other woman characters in the novel: Justine who is executed for murder despite her innocence; the female companion for the monster who is aborted by Victor because he fears being unable to control her actions once she is animated; and Elizabeth who spends most of the novel helplessly waiting for Victor to sort out whatever is keeping him preoccupied and return to her, and is eventually murdered by the monster.
Why women are generally so weak in the novel is not certain, but it can argued that Shelley renders her woman characters so passive and subjects them to such ill treatment to call attention to the obsessive and destructive behavior that Victor and the monster (and men more generally) exhibit and how women typically lack the agency to change this.
Read an in-depth character analysis of Elizabeth Lavenza.
Abortion
The motif of abortion recurs as both Victor and the monster express their sense of the monster’s hideousness. About first seeing his creation in Chapter 9, Victor says: “When I thought of him, I gnashed my teeth, my eyes became inflamed, and I ardently wished to extinguish that life which I had so thoughtlessly made.” In the “Watlton, in Continuation” chapter, he monster feels a similar disgust for himself: “I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.” Both lament the monster’s existence and wish that Victor had never engaged in his act of creation. The motif appears also in regard to Victor’s other pursuits. When Victor destroys his work on a female monster in Chapte 20, he literally aborts his act of creation, preventing the female monster from coming alive. Figurative abortion materializes in Victor’s description of natural philosophy in Chapter 6: “I at once gave up my former occupations; set down natural history and all its progeny as a deformed and abortive creation; and entertained the greatest disdain for a would-be science, which could never even step within the threshold of real knowledge.” As with the monster, Victor becomes dissatisfied with natural philosophy and shuns it not only as unhelpful but also as intellectually grotesque.
The Story of Adam and Eve’s Creation
The story of God’s creation of Adam and Eve—as described in the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible as well as the version depicted in John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost—weaves through Frankenstein, underscoring many of the major themes of the novel. When Victor first plans to create the monster, he imagines a new race of beings that worship him, placing himself in the role of God in the biblical story of Adam and Eve’s creation. Victor gets his wish perhaps too literally, as the monster becomes fixated on the dynamic between God, Adam, and Satan as Milton portrays it in Paradise Lost. The monster also asks Victor to make him a companion based on the model of Adam and Eve. By reading Victor and monster against the story of Adam and Eve, we see how short Victor falls from his goal of playing God because of the way he refuses responsibility for his creation. Because of Victor’s negligence and his un-godlike inability to sustain the life he made, the monster ironically begins to parallel Satan when he declares rebellion against his creator.
Read more about Shelley’s references to Milton’s Paradise Lost in Frankenstein.
Letters
Because the narrative of Frankenstein is told through Walton’s private letters to his sister, we are in effect reading his personal correspondence as we read the novel. In the letters, Walton reveals his deepest hopes and ambitions to his sister (and us) while conveying the story of his expedition. But Walton’s letters (extended into the main body of the novel) also give us Victor’s story verbatim as Victor told it to Walton. Going one level deeper, within Victor’s telling of his story we also get the monster’s word-for-word account of his own story as he told it to Victor. The fact that these main characters reveal their stories directly to other characters is an important aspect of the novel’s narrative since their tales reliably reveal their deepest attitudes and emotions. There are other characters that we also learn about directly and reliably in this way since Victor includes verbatim letters written to him by his father and by Elizabeth while telling his story.
Take the Themes, Motifs, & Symbols Quiz Quiz
18 of the Most Brilliant Lines of Foreshadowing in Literature
