Tragedy and Death in Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN

           Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein presents the circumstance in which death is an ultimate catharsis to a faulted creation. It revisits the idea that death, in its peaceful and silent method, is entirely promoted by the natural world and that death is not necessarily a relief from life, but rather a final sacrifice that one with life owes to its creator in returning to the endless naught. It is the cyclical conventionality of nature to present life with death; however, Victor Frankenstein has indulged in the hubris of assuming the position of an imperfect God, and while robbed of true deistic power, he chooses still to promote life which inevitably will end, and has ended, with this life, his creation, ironically choosing death. There is a literary paradox formed in the manner in which humans commemorate or emphasize death and the subtle and repressed nature with which death consumes the monster. There is an incredibly passive yet relieving value to the death of Frankenstein’s monster; it alludes to the birth of Biblical Adam in Paradise lost, from clay to ashes, as if in life the magnitude of death is entirely reduced. This contradicts with Romantic values, the recognition of life as nature’s gift and presents the idea that, in science’s attempts to reinvent human life, there is a consequence of absence, of some missing visceral quality which awards meaning to life. This is literally represented when considering the deaths that Victor has inadvertently created as opposed to the singular and solitary life he has so proudly crafted.

            There is almost a bitter irony in the death of the monster, there is no satisfaction felt by the reader but rather a lasting and surprising empathy; it is a diatribe on the wavering frailty of human emotions. Though the monster has murdered it is through sympathy and understanding of the human condition which begs love and friendship that it is recognized that Victor is the unlikely antagonist. This fickle quality of human allegiance is an active reason why humans, when plagued with hubris, make faulted Gods.