The Importance Of Isolation In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Emotional and physical isolation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein are the most pertinent and prevailing themes throughout the novel. These themes are so important because everything the monster, Victor, and Robert Walton do or feel directly relates to their poignant seclusion. The effects of this terrible burden have progressively damaging results upon the three.
The first glimpse of isolation we see comes from Robert Walton. The Arctic seafarer whose letters open and close Frankenstein. Walton picks the bedraggled Victor Frankenstein up off the ice, helps nurse him back to health, and hears Victor’s story. Within his second letter to his sister he confides to her “But I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy, and the absence …show more content…
Victor brings the isolation he experiences upon himself. Victor has two of the most loving and caring parents. Because of the loving and care he received from his parents, Alphonse Frankenstein and Caroline Beaufort, Victor found himself unable to function around a new group of people. "I, who had ever been surrounded by amiable companions, continually engaged in endeavoring to bestow mutual pleasure. I was now alone. In the university whither I was going I must form my own friends and be my own protector." (26). The isolated Victor is different in many ways including his manner, and the way he goes about his education, now much more focused and almost obsessive. He has no one to comfort him and this leads to the madness of creating the monster. Victor has had supportive people around him since birth; however now that he is at the university he has nobody to help keep him level headed. "Every night I was oppressed by a slow fever, and I became nervous to a most painful degree; the fall of a leaf startled me, and I shunned my fellow creatures as if I had been guilty of a crime" (35). The isolation being portrayed by Victor is now moving from not only psychological but physical as well. Countless hours that Victor has spent creating this monster has caused him to become ill, malnourished, and deprived of sleep. Obsessiveness has driven Victor into this state of mind which then pulls him
The first glimpse of isolation we see comes from Robert Walton. The Arctic seafarer whose letters open and close Frankenstein. Walton picks the bedraggled Victor Frankenstein up off the ice, helps nurse him back to health, and hears Victor’s story. Within his second letter to his sister he confides to her “But I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy, and the absence …show more content…
Victor brings the isolation he experiences upon himself. Victor has two of the most loving and caring parents. Because of the loving and care he received from his parents, Alphonse Frankenstein and Caroline Beaufort, Victor found himself unable to function around a new group of people. "I, who had ever been surrounded by amiable companions, continually engaged in endeavoring to bestow mutual pleasure. I was now alone. In the university whither I was going I must form my own friends and be my own protector." (26). The isolated Victor is different in many ways including his manner, and the way he goes about his education, now much more focused and almost obsessive. He has no one to comfort him and this leads to the madness of creating the monster. Victor has had supportive people around him since birth; however now that he is at the university he has nobody to help keep him level headed. "Every night I was oppressed by a slow fever, and I became nervous to a most painful degree; the fall of a leaf startled me, and I shunned my fellow creatures as if I had been guilty of a crime" (35). The isolation being portrayed by Victor is now moving from not only psychological but physical as well. Countless hours that Victor has spent creating this monster has caused him to become ill, malnourished, and deprived of sleep. Obsessiveness has driven Victor into this state of mind which then pulls him