Frankenstein: Motifs

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Subjugation of Women

For a novel written by the daughter of an important feminist, Frankenstein is strikingly devoid of strong female characters. The novel is littered with women who suffer calmly and then expire: Caroline Beaufort is a self-sacrificing mother who dies taking care of her adopted daughter; Justine is executed for murder, despite her innocence; the creation of the female monster is aborted by Victor because he fears being unable to control her actions once she is animated; Elizabeth waits, impatient but helpless, for Victor to return to her, and she is eventually murdered by the monster. One can argue that Shelley renders her female characters so passive and subjects them to such ill treatment in order to call attention to the obsessive and destructive behavior that Victor and the monster exhibit.

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, 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.” The 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, he literally aborts his act of creation, preventing the female monster from coming alive. Figurative abortion materializes in Victor’s description of natural philosophy: “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

The story of Adam and Eve—both the version from the Bible and John Milton’s 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 for 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.