Special Topics in English: Frankenstein

• Module 3A
• Read the third volume of the novel, p. 161-221.
• Volume 3
• Read excerpts from Milton's Paradise Lost p. 251 & 264-8.
• Lecture
• "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay To mould be man? Did I solicit thee From darkness to promote me?" Paradise Lost
• Creation, knowledge, exile, and the problem of "monster"
• Milton: The Fall of humanity as an epic story of creation, freedom, knowledge, and exile.
• Shelley: A modern creator and creation replay the drama in a Gothic, scientific world.
• Central question: What happens when a creator makes a being who can ask why it was created?
• Conversation, not an allegory
1. Creation: God creates Adam; Victor creates the Creature. The analogy immediately raises questions about responsibility, power, and dependence.
2. The Fall: Milton asks how creatures fall from an original condition; Shelley asks how a created being can be pushed into "falling."
3. Exile: Adam and Eve leave Eden. Satan is exiled from Heaven. The Creature experiences exclusion without ever having enjoyed a true Eden.
4. Knowledge: Milton links knowledge with temptation and choice; Shelley links the desire for knowledge to scientific ambition and self-knowledge.
5. Sympathy: The same events can look different depending on who tells the story--and whose suffering we are asked to recognize.
• "I have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature, while I have not scrupled to innovate upon their combinations. The Ilian, the tragic poetry of Greece,--Shakespear, in the Tempest, and Midsummer Night's Dream,--and most especially Milton, in Paradise Lost, conform to this rule" - 1818 Preface
• "Paradise Lost excited different and far deeper emotions." - Vol II, Chapter 7: he reads the poem as a true history and compares its situation to his own
• God -> Adam: Creation gives Adam, life, form, a place in the world, access to knowledge, and a relationship with his Creator.
• Victor -> Creature: Creation gives the Creature life, but Victor withholds care, companionship, instruction, and acceptance.
• Difference: Milton's God remains present to his creation; Victor abandons his. That difference changes the ethical meaning of "creation."
• "I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed." - Vol II, Chapter 2
• Adam: Created without prior experience; longs for fellowship; asks what kind of being his is and where he belongs.
• Satan: Excluded from happiness; responds to others' bliss with envyl transforms exclusion into rebellion.
• Creature: Begins with benevolence, expreiences rejection, then chooses revenge while still demanding recognition of his suffering.
• Interpretive Payoff: The Creature's problem is not simply "evil." Shelley makes us ask how innocence, suffering, exclusion, and choice interact.
• Paradise Lost, Book 8: Adam wants to understand creation and the world beyond his immediate experience. Raphael's lesson places limits around human curiosity: knowledge is valuable, but reatures must recognize that they are creatures.
• Frankenstion Vol I-II: Victor pursues the secret of life. The Creature pursues language, history, religion, and philosophy. Knowledge gives both characters power--but also produces painful self-consciousness.
• The connection: Milton frames knowledge within a theological order; Shelley relocates the problem into a scientific and social world. In both, knowledge changes how a being understand itself.
• "Learn from me... how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge" Victor's warning to Walton, Vol I, Chapter 4
• Books 4 and 9:
• "So farewell hope, and with hope farewll fear, / Farewell remorse, all good to me is lost; / Evil, be thou my good" - Paradise Lost, Book 4, 108-110
• "I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous." Volume II, Chapter 2
• Temptation: Milton makes temptation an encounter with desire, rhetoric, and choice.
• Choice: Both works resist a simple formula: suffering influences action, but characters still make choices.
• After the Fall: The most important question may become: what does a changed being do next?
• Think of the Creature not simply as "Satan," but as a character who repeatedly moves between Adam-like longing and Satan-like rebellion.
• Milton: Adam and Eve are expelled from an actual garden. THeir loss is real because they have known belonging, intimacy, and divine care.
• Shelley: Isolation from the start. The creature is "wretched, helpless, and alone" almost from the moment he becomes conscious. His imagined Eden exists mainly in other people's lives.
• "the world was all before me, whither should I bend my steps?" - Creature leaving the cottage Vol II Chapter 7 - an echo from Paradise Lost, Book 7, 646-649
• Eve in Book 4: Eve is presented as Adam's partner but also as distinct in mind and desire. Her perspective matters to the drama of the Fall.
• Eve in Book 9: The Fall emerges through conversation, persuasion, separation, and competing judgments about what what each person can safely do.
• A "female Creature" in Frankenstein: The Creature asks Victor to make a companion. Victor's decision turns companionship into a question of social responsibility, reproduction, and risk.
• Productive Tension: Milton asks what happens when the first couple disobeys; Shelley asks what happens when the first created being asks for a companion and the creator refuses.
• Differences between Milton and Shelley
• Creator. Paradise Lost: God. Frankenstein: Victor - powerful but fallible, frightened, and absent
• Creation. Paradise Lost: Adam is made "perfect" and enters a designed order. Frankenstein: The Creature is made incomplete in a social sense and must educate himself.
• World after exile. Paradise Lost: Providence guides Adam and Eve. Frankenstein: The Creature enters a fragmented human world with no reliable guide.
• Cause of "fall." Paradise Lost: A theological story of free will, temptation, and disobedience. Frankenstein: A social and psychological story of rejection, loneliness, desire, and revenge.
• Form. Paradise Lost: Epic poem with a providential framework. Frankenstein: Gothic novel with layered narrators and competeing claims to truth.
• Questions
1. What does a creator owe a creation? Compare God/Adam and Victor/Creature. Where do care, instruction, companionship, and responsbility enter the relationship?
2. What makes a fall? Compare temptation, choice, suffereing, and revenge. Which characters seem responsible for the condition they create?
3. Who belongs? Think about Eden, exclusion, friendship, family, and the Creature's repeated experience of being outside human community.
4. How does knowledge change a being? Consider Adam, Victor, and Creature. When does knowledge become self-knowledge--and when does it become misery?
5. Why does Shelley give the Creature the book that gives him the language with which to condemn his creator?
• Discussion
• For this discussion, consider the ways Mary Shelley's Frankenstein engages with questions and ideas raised by John Milton's Paradise Lost. As you read the selected excerpts from Milton, pay particular attention to the relationships among creation, knowledge, responsibility, freedom, and isolation. Then consider how those ideas help you understand Victor Frankenstein, the Creature, and their relationship in new ways.
• Develop a 250-400 word post that explores a meaningful connection between Paradise Lost and Frankenstein. Choose one of the following questions as the starting point for your discussion:
• Creator and creation: How does Milton's depiction of the relationship between God and humanity help you think about Victor Frankenstein's relationship with the Creature? What responsibilities seem to accompany the act of creation?
• Knowledge and its consequences: How do Adam and Eve's desire for knowledge and Victor Frankenstein's pursuit of scientific knowledge shape their experiences? What do the two works suggest about the possibilities and dangers of seeking knowledge?
• The experience of being created: How do Milton's Adam and Eve "and especially the Creature in Frankenstein" respond to the fact that their existence depends upon a creator? How does being created shape their understanding of themselves and their place in the world?
• Freedom and responsibility: How do Milton's characters exercise freedom or make choices within the limits imposed upon them? How might this help you think about the Creature's choices, Victor's choices, or the responsibilities of those who possess the power to create?
• Isolation and belonging: How do Adam and Eve's relationship to God and one another compare with the Creature's experience of isolation? What do the two works suggest about the relationship between isolation, belonging, and human behavior?
• Who deserves our sympathy? Milton's Satan, Adam, and Eve are all presented in ways that can invite a reader's sympathy, even as they make consequential choices. How does this compare with the ways Shelley presents Victor and the Creature? How do the two authors complicate the distinction between innocence, guilt, and responsibility?
• As you develop your response, refer to at least one specific passage or moment from Paradise Lost and one specific passage or moment from Frankenstein. Rather than simply identifying a similarity or difference, explain what the connection helps you see about one or both works.
• Discussion Post
• Milton's and Shelley's characters make similar choices at pivotal points in their respective stories, but the immediate cause of each of these decisions are quite different. In Paradise Lost, Book IX, Satan is awed by Eve's sweetness, "her Heav'nly form / Angelic, but more soft, and Feminine, / Her graceful Innocence, her every Air / of gesture or lest action overawed / His malice" (457-461). But Satan is pulled out of this trance by "the hot Hell that alwayes in him burns / ... / Fierce hate he recollects, and his thoughts / Of mischief, gratulating, this excites" (467-472). In this case, it is not some immediate catalyst that provokes Satan.
• In Frankenstein, Volume III, Chapter III, the Creature reacts to Victor's actions. Victor tears up the Creature's companion and curses his "deformity and wickedness" (175). At this moment, the Creature recommits to his revenge, telling Victor, "Your hours will pass in dread and misery, and soon the bolt will fall which must ravish from you your happiness for ever" (176).
• Both Satan and the Creature are seeking revenge, but the Creature is seeking his revenge directly from the person who has caused him harm. Satan's revenge comes from a "pleasure to destroy" (477), as Eve is not the cause of Satan's pain, but will suffer the consequences of Satan's revenge against God. From this comparison, the Creature is the far more sympathetic character.
• To find a better parallel to Satan's actions, I think we should go earlier in this same chapter. We find Victor facing a similar compulsion as Satan. Victor reflects, "Three years before I was engaged in the same manner, and had created a fiend whose unparalleled barbarity had desolated my heart, and filled it with the bitterest remorse" (174). As Victor continues to reflect, he catches sight of the Creature and decides to take away all hope for the Creature's happiness.
• While these scenes show the Creature as the most sympathetic of the three, Victor and Satan are still sympathetic characters. Their actions, while not directly incited by who they seek to destroy, are justified by the characters themselves. Summarizing the novel as a whole, Percy Shelley explains "[t]he interest gradually accumulates and advances towards the conclusion with the accelerated rapidity of a rock rolled down a mountain" (281). This sentiment would also apply to these characters individually, who have gradually been pushed down these paths, and their compulsions would be as hard to stop as a rock tumbling faster and faster down a mountain.
• Edited out
• From this comparison, the Creature is shown to be the most deserving of sympathy. He is reacting in the moment, to pain caused by the person on whom he seeks his revenge. Satan and Victor, on the other hand, are being compelled to their destructive actions because some exterior
• From this comparison, the Creature is shown to be the most deserving of sympathy. Similar to Satan, the Creature's only option remaining is "destroying, other joy / To [him] is lost" (478-479), but unlike both Satan and Victor, the Creature is reacting to the the immediate cause of his pain. Satan and Victor are still deserving of sympathy, but their sympathy is gathered through a more gradual process. For Victor and Satan, the level of sympathy "gradually accumulate and advance towards the conclusion with the accelerated rapidity of a rock rolled down a hill" (Percy Shelley, 281).
• Milton and Shelley give the reader cause to sympathize with each of these characters in these two moments, but it is Victor and Satan who are being compelled by their past trauma, while the Creature is confronted with being cursed and having his companion destroyed directly in the moment.
• Response to Classmate
• Kolt - I like your response here, but let me come to the defense of my client, the Creature. Quoting from the same paragraph that you cite, the Creature continues, "My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor; and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal." While I agree with your conclusion that "he's entirely free and must take responsibility for his actions," I think it is important to understand he is not making this argument in a vacuum. The Creature is not making a plea to some neutral court. The Creature is making his argument to the very person who is responsible for the crimes against him. It was Victor who molded him from clay and then sentenced him to forced solitude.
• Imagine some hypothetical situation. Some single parent raises a child in complete isolation and treats the child abhorrently through their entire childhood, and then suppose the child turns out to be a monster. Then the child makes a plea to their single parent: what did you expect would happen? How did you think I was going to turn out? Is any of this my fault? Am I responsible for any of my actions?