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