Psychological Analysis of “Frankenstein”

                 

                                      In Mary Shelly's ‘Frankenstein’, the two main characters are Victor Frankenstein and his creation. Victor is driven to create this being by his desire for glory which he believes when he unlocks the secrets of life and creation. Victor's creature is a patchwork of human pieces that have been woven together from the deceased to form a superhuman.

                                        One of the most conspicuous features of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel ‘Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus‘ is a strikingly accurate portrait of a pathological narcissist as expressed by the novel’s protagonist, the science student Victor Frankenstein. Victor Frankenstein only one other character appears as fully developed: An unnamed creature, born out of Victor Frankenstein’s grandiose fantasies, scientific skills and pursuit of divine power. All other characters appear as mere scenery on a stage where dichotomies of human nature contrast each other, and where the underlying question of whether or not the two main characters are shadow images of each other is ever present. By focusing on Victor Frankenstein and the creature, Mary Shelley succeeded in creating a novel that mirrors a personal story as well as many of the intellectual and aesthetic themes of the romantic era.

                                             It is obvious that Victor Frankenstein suffers from a mental disorder in the shape of pathological narcissism. Therefore, focusing on the disorder might be a useful prism for the understanding of the novel and its subsequent influence on popular culture. In this articled will find examples in the novel where Victor Frankenstein shows clear signs of having a mental disorder according to Millon and DSM-IV, discuss to what degree Victor Frankenstein perceives the creature as an echo of himself, which not only reflects his mental disorder, but also a fear of the unnatural, discuss the likelihood that Mary Shelley had a personal experience with a narcissist, and thus had a more profound knowledge of narcissism than what she could have derived from the literature, and suggest that Mary Shelley has contributed greatly to the myth of the ‘Mad Scientist’, and to the myth that anthropoeia will never succeed when its maker has a weak and corrupt character such as a vain desire to create a grandiose double of himself.

                           Despite the notion of Mary Shelley being inspired by a romantic archetype of the Shadow or the Prometheus, Mary painted an astonishingly accurate picture of a pathological narcissist in Victor Frankenstein. Surprisingly few literary critics have pointed out this pervasive personality trait in the novel’s protagonist, which might, at least in part, be due to the fact that narcissism and its corresponding pathological description was developed some hundred years later by Sigmund Freud.

In the light of modern psychiatry‘Frankenstein’ is a sad tragedy portraying a narcissist at full blast, a total disaster destroying his own being and the people around him in an obsessive and delirious pursuit of divine power. Indeed, ‘Frankenstein’ is richly furnished with descriptions of incidents that expose Victor Frankenstein’s mental condition.

                        Things could have been different, though. Like all true romantic novels, an innocent and unspoiled being is not cruel in its natural state. As the creature starts to tell its own story about how it learns the ways of life the reader realizes that it is like a ‘noble savage’; innocent, good and free from the corrupting influence of civilization, having no other desires than to love and be loved. Only when faced with its fate the creature turns vindictive and wicked. As Percy Shelley notes in his introduction to Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’; “the destructive consequences of withheld love can only be revenge and wickedness.”

                         At work is a dyadic transfer: Victor Frankenstein calls the inanimate body “beautiful” up until the point where it opens its eyes and looks “wicked”. But the creature is beautiful on the inside, only carrying a bit of bad craftsmanship on the outer shell. Frankenstein’s inability to comprehend this suggests that the creature might be more human than its creator. In fact, all that was admirable and noble in Frankenstein can be seen as transferred to the creature. Of course the creature is misunderstood by the outside world.

                           The centuries old fear about the treacherous, Faustian nature of anthropoeia – of the creation of artificial people – is the true cause of the unraveling tragedy, and not the creature as such. Among scholars this is called a naturalistic fallacy; an erroneous belief in the equivalence of the unnatural and evil, the artificial and imperfect, the ugly and wicked. Only through the reflecting lens of education and civil norms the creature eventually learns to see itself the same way as others do: “Increase of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was. I cherished hope, it is true, but it vanished when I beheld my person reflected in water or my shadow in the moonshine, even as that frail image and that inconstant shade.” Now the creature only dares to look at itself in the moonshine at night, ashamed of being unnatural and ugly. It has annexed the prevailing beauty ideal by hating its ugliness. It has become naturalized to the fear of the unnatural.

                     It has repeatedly been observed that the literary value of Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ mainly relies on a fortunate convergence of romantic and pre-romantic archetypes creating a powerful mythology of the self. Claiming to be a tale about the modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley successfully blends Greek mythology as inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses (especially, it seems, book three on Narcissus and Echo) with other works such as Milton’s Paradise Lost, Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Goethe’s Werther and Byron’s Manfred. But the truly innovative aspect in Mary Shelley’s novel might lie somewhere else. Her description of Victor Frankenstein’s mental world and behaviour match the definition of a pathological narcissist to such a degree that it makes it quite improbable for her to have based the novel solely on well-developed religious and literary tropes. In other words, Shelley must have had real life experience with narcissism which she subsequently used as template for Victor Frankenstein.

                                        The monster and Victor have many experiences which result in their loss of innocence and almost all of them are linked. Victor, with his view point of a creator, is vastly different from the monsters. The most important experiences that Victor has are the creation of the monster, the death of his brother, the execution of his maid, and the murders of his best friend and wife. These are compared to those of the monster, his creation, the abandonment by his creator, the negative experiences with people (especially the De Laheys), seeing his potential mates body destroyed by Frankenstein after they had agreed upon a deal (that Victor would make the monster a mate, so that he would not be alone, and in return the monster would stop his plans for vengeance) and his merciless murders warp his mind and cause him to allow retaliation to rule his actions until it is too late.

                                              The experiences of Victor, besides that of bringing the monster to life, deal directly with death. He feels, that each one is, although committed by the monster, is because of him, because he created the monster. Therefore these experiences, especially the death of his wife, cause him such pain and suffering that he can no longer deal think in a rational manner.

                                The loss of innocence that, not only will people suffer from human advancement and technology, but that even institutions which he puts his faith into fail. This failure of the institutions is best illustrated when the Geneva court convicts Justine Moritz, the family maid, on circumstantial evidence (of murdering Victor's brother, William), against the family's (Victor's) testimony that Justine would never commit such a crime. When Victor finds out that Justine confesses after her conviction by the court, he learns that she only confessed so that she would not be excommunicated. This failure of the judicial practice to find someone innocent, and then to execute the innocent person, is one more negative occurrence that hastens Victor's experience.

                                  The monster's continuous contact with humans and its negative consequences has left him little choice to sympathies with his creator. In fact, he blames this unhappiness on his creator saying,

"God in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours...Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage, but I am solitary and abhorred. "

                            Since his creator did not create him in a way that would allow him to assimilate into society, and because he is alone, the monster becomes bitter and resentful

Conclusion

                       When Victor creates the monster, he regrets his decision to create life the moment he fulfils it. It seems very shallow of Victor, because he rejects his monster on appearance alone, and does not try in any way to fulfil his responsibilities (as either a God or father). This does not lend the reader to sympathize with Victor's predicament for two reasons; one because he allowed his ambition and desires to overrule reason and second, that he failed to take responsibility for actions.

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