Frankenstein/Exam essay outline/Essay

Abandonment

- when Elizabeth's family abandoned her by giving her to victor family. His mom said I got you a gift- this caused him to be possessive

- when victors mother died(Caroline),(abandoning him) this caused him to be vengeful land angry towards god.

- when victor abandons the creature because if it's appearance

Obsession

- when victor is creating the creature, he is so obsessed that he will do anything to succeed, like dig people's graves and memorials. 

In this time period, religion is important and victor is so obsessed he doesn't care that he is defeating death/becoming god. 

- his obsession causes him to pull away room his family.

Selfishness

- victor wants to keep his project a secret so he lies and deceives his family and friends

-victor leaves the creature because he doesn't want anyone to know he created him, this caused the creature to be mad and kill William. If victor didn't keep Frankenstein a secret, Will probably would have never been killed or could at let be warned to watch out.

- victor want this creature to be kept a secret so bad that he lets an innocent person, Justine, take the blame for Will's death even though he knows it was his creation. 

Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.(Shelley, p. 38). Victor, in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, is a man who is more of what he thought he created, than a man at all. Victor is more of a monster than the monster he created. To begin with, he isolates himself from society essentially abandoning his own life. He then becomes obsessed with making himself God, even to the point of disrespecting burial grounds. He is selfish, he deceives society and doesn't take the blame for something he created. Victor is causing the problems in this novel, not the monster he created.

Victor's constant abandonment is his monstrous way of thinking that if he's away from society, that he can be resistant to the feeling of loss. Because he had loss in his life (is mother dying when he was young), he is caught up with the thoughts of abandonment. He doesn't want to get too involved with anyone so he doesn't have to go through the stage of heartache and loss if they die in his lifetime. He turns his grief into anger with God for making death something humans have to go through. He enables himself to believe that he can bring dead spirits back to life. He wants to do this because he wants his mother back. He creates a human out of other human body parts, thinking the creation will be an amazing accomplishment and will be a beautiful and amazing creature. What happens instead is that the creation he made he believes to be a monster because of it's hideous appearance. In reality, it just has baby thoughts and emotions, it doesn't know how to behave or what is going on. Instead of nurturing the newly formed human, Victor rejects him in utter repulse. He recreates the abandonment that his mother had put him through, but in a different way, Victor had the choice to reject his creation. Leaving the monster alone and scared in a strange world, like leaving a baby out in the streets alone, this is a horrible thing for Victor to do. To create a life and then leave him to fend for himself. Everything he does is in a very inhumane way.

When creating the monster, he becomes obsessed with it. He redraws from society to create this life and only goes out to dig body parts from graveyards. He studies the course of human's decay so he can accurately build his (thought to be) monster, "Now I was lead to examine the cause and progress of this decay and forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses.”(Shelley p.36). This is not a normal thing to do, religion was thought of highly in this time, and to dig up graves is a monstrous thing to do. He is disrespecting the burial service held for the person, and he is disrespecting God and his act to end the person's life. Victor is so obsessed with creating the monster, he goes against the thought that there is and can only be one God. He wants to become God in his obsession. This is not normal for a man like Victor to want to do. Many people would love to have those to passed away, still alive, but Victor goes to the extreme and it is not something people would want to perfect. He has a deranged obsession that causes him to act in a way that normal men would not.

This leads him to become selfish in the sense that he is risking others lives instead of his own. The monster was his plan and accomplishment and he won't take the blame for it even though it causes Justine's death. Realistically, Victor killed his own brother by not warning the country about his creation that had escaped. If he had told someone of the monster, they could have went though precautions to protect themselves. Victor also caused the death of Justine, he got a second chance (maybe from God) to tell everyone about the monster he created but he didn't tell and Justine was accused of murder. He kills his best friend Henry by continuing to let the monster be unknown by humanity. Victor then causes the death of his cousin and wife on their wedding day. If he hadn't been so selfish and told people about his creation, he wouldn't have had to relive all of the grief, heartache, and loss that comes along with the death of someone close. He's selfish by thinking of his own feelings, thinking that if he told someone of what he had done they wouldn't believe him, or they would reject him as well for making something so horrifying. Although what they think of horrifying isn't his personality, they would label him as that because of how he appears. They believe that if you look ugly, that you are a bad person, that you could never need love or feel love or be a successful member in society. Victor fears this for his own gain, in doing so, he hurts himself and ultimately kills himself for resisting to share his mistake with his friends, family, and country.

Victor is the actual monster he had thought he created. He abandons his life to become God-like person to try to make his mother live again. He actually becomes obsessed with this creation and goes to extreme unnecessary measures to create him. Because of his selfishness, he causes the death of four innocent people not including himself. Victor goes to through all of this to defeat death, and then life (of his creation) and it ultimately does more harm than it does good. Now you're left to think, what makes a monster? How they appear to society, or how they appear to themselves?