Sympathy in Mary Shelleys Frankenstein Essay -- Mary Shelley Frankens

Sympathy in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein In her novel, 'Frankenstein', Mary Shelley employs many innovative literary techniques to invoke feelings of sympathy for the monster. Sympathy is created by the author both by making the readers pity the monster’s loathsome existence and by leading them to understand his violent and cruel actions. We pity the creature because of the way he is treated by mankind and we can identify with his feelings and reactions and understand why he behaves as he does. Shelley uses different narrators throughout the novel and the reader sympathises with the views of these people to differing degrees. The language used when describing the physical appearance of the monster and his feelings is very strong and evocative. The settings and motifs with which the monster is associated are very dramatic and add to our sympathy for his lonely existence. The monster’s use of rhetoric is effective and his speech is eloquent, this is a strong technique by which the reader is drawn in. Commentators have often compared the monster to Adam, or to a newborn baby, this challenges the reader’s view of him. Another technique employed by the author is to lead the reader to draw parallels between the characters of Victor Frankenstein and his creation. The novel is told from the viewpoint of various narrators, a technique explored by Emily Brontà « in Wuthering Heights, which was popular with writers in the nineteenth century. In Frankenstein, like in Wuthering Heights, the first narrator is an outsider - Robert Walton - but as the novel progresses the narrative moves in closer - to Victor, then to the monster. Each narrator contributes their own feelings and descriptions of both Victor and the mo... ...r the period that Mary Shelley was writing in – challenging the social conventions of the time. Parallels are drawn between the anguish of the monster and the grief felt by Victor Frankenstein. These strong emotions are portrayed against some of the harshest, most desolate scenery in the world. The contrast between these settings and the warm and pleasant scenes when Victor is with his friends and family only serve to emphasise the monster’s loneliness and isolation. Images of light and dark, heaven and hell, warmth and cold, fire and ice, high and low, joy and despair can be traced throughout the novel. All of these bring to mind Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’. The novel shows evidence of Mary Shelley’s interest in scientific ideas of the time, a time when the conversation of intelligent, well-educated people often turned to recent scientific developments.