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dantecouldnothaveconceived-blog · 8 years ago

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The Fear of Inferiority

Throughout Frankenstein, a perpetual war for superiority rages on between the Creature and the creator. By nature of creation, Victor begins in a position of superiority over his monstrosity in the same way that a matriarch controls her spawn. Though the Creature is created in Victor Frankenstein’s image, he is created as a “filthy type of yours [Victor’s], more horrid even from the very resemblance,” (Shelley 131). Victor created the Creature in such a way that it would never find social or intellectual superiority over him; he abandoned its egregious form from the moment of its birth, effectively destroying any chance of its development as an equal and stopping any chance of Victor losing superiority (or so he thinks). “These (and other) short histories... in the novel not only define the creature's difference from others as the lack of such a history but indicate the philosophical implications of this fundamental element of narrative. ‘The circumstances of his marriage illustrate his character,’ says Frankenstein of his father. It is an observation that this novel, and indeed many novels, turns into a general rule: character is composed from the circumstances of relationship and engagement with others. The philosophical mind, by contrast, is generally composed by abstraction from such circumstances,” (Yousef). Shelley chooses to develop the negative features of the Creature by taking advantage of society’s tendency to judge others in various ways. We as a society tend to develop prejudice towards individuals based on those that surround them. In the case of the Creature, however, there is no one around him: no father, no friends, no society. According to Nancy Yousef’s philosophy regarding character composition, the Creature is nothing.

Shelley continues to describe the Creature’s psychological development as a means of setting the stage for the conflict between creator and creation. Through the Creature’s narrative, Shelley illustrates the development of his fear of inferiority and drive for subverting Victor’s rule. Throughout the novel, “power… is envisioned as the power to wound,” (Sherwin 886). In his attempt to gain power, the Creature wounds Victor’s status by making himself an equal in a way Victor never thought possible: intellectually. As the acquisition of power is the means of gaining superiority, the Creature damages the emotions of his creator both by challenging his intellect and killing his brother. The Creature is born with no animosity and no entity to teach him to possess animosity, so his heinous actions are rooted in no feeling other than fear.

The potency of fear is further illustrated throughout the life of Victor Frankenstein. From his perfect childhood, Victor is destined for success in whatever he chooses to pursue. He chooses natural sciences, and in his studies, he finds himself to be a gifted learner, and he knows it. He becomes quite arrogant because of intellectual superiority, and his newfound narcissism subconsciously develops a superiority complex to the world around him; he knows that he’s destined for greatness, and achieving anything short of that leaves him inferior to another. His simultaneous fear of inferiority and supposed claim to superiority causes him to ignore his warning that he so strongly gives Walton when he tells him to “preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity,” (Shelley 41). In order to prevent what he fears most, he develops an infatuation with his chemistry and philosophy, his passions, to the point of obsession in an attempt to transcend the barriers of life and death, “ideal bounds, which I [Victor] should first break through, pour a torrent of light into our dark world’ (Shelley 53). Shelley chooses to include such an impossible feat to illustrate the incredible lengths to which humans will go to combat their fears. Victor’s efforts also stretch beyond what is accepted in the realm of science as he “studies in physics and chemistry, which are always on the verge of becoming metaphysics and alchemy,” (Brooks 599). His downright disregard towards the beliefs of others illustrates his narcissistic personality, a psychological effect of his fear-based insecurities that we will delve into later.

However, Shelley’s battle with social norms endures beyond the book; her incorporation of Victor’s discoveries and ideas beyond what was accepted in society parallels her own crusade against the status quo of her day. As an English citizen in the early 1800s, Shelley was perpetually exposed to the dominating force of the patriarchal society. To express her disgust for the patriarchy, Shelley chooses to create the monster in such a way that it “constitutes a criticism of [male] appropriation,” (Yousef). Her criticisms that she presents through parallels between the characters in Frankenstein and men are “‘written in her [Shelley’s] own blood, carved in the very body of her own victimization,’ because ‘she is powerless to stop her own appropriation and can only demonstrate the pain that appropriation causes.’” “Whether or not Frankenstein evinces Shelley's ‘pain,’ it certainly demonstrates her strength and depth as a reader and thinker working both in and against a philosophical tradition into which she was born,” (Yousef). Shelley’s reflection of her own struggles in life in Frankenstein further illustrates how even she is driven by a fear of inferiority; exhausted by the unwavering control of the patriarchy, she openly criticizes the standard form of society with hopes of gaining some sort of moral or intellectual superiority over her masculine opposition. She diverts from the typical conduct of women in society to protest innate female inferiority, a social idea that brings emotional terror to the hearts of women worldwide.

Mary Shelley’s many parallels illustrate how ubiquitous the presence of fear is, especially with inferiority. Although it can often be seen in literature and media, it has a very potent effect throughout society in the world today. Shelley’s subtle depictions of this effect reflect the power of fear in the minds of man by detailing the extreme lengths to which man will go to overcome it.

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dantecouldnothaveconceived-blog · 8 years ago

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Fear of Failure

Much of Frankenstein revolves around one word, one concept, one part of life: failure. Although a failure is an incredible common occurrence, especially in the realm of science, its effect on mankind varies greatly; some accept it and use it to allow them to succeed in the future; some feel emotionally distraught and as though there is no escape from it; others, however, fear its effects so such a high degree that they simply pretend like it isn’t there. One lad who has developed such a potent fear of failure that he does literally everything he can do to prevent it is our apparent protagonist but true antagonist, Victor Frankenstein.

From a young age, Victor was destined for success; he was intelligent, happy, had a loving family, etc. As he discusses his childhood with Robert Walton, he brags about how “no human being could have passed a happier childhood than myself. My parents were possessed by the very spirit of kindness and indulgence. We felt that they were not the tyrants to rule our lot according to their caprice, but the agents and creators of all the many delights which we enjoyed. When I mingled with other families I distinctly discerned how peculiarly fortunate my lot was, and gratitude assisted the development of filial love,” (Shelley 23). While this is certainly a lovely way to be raised, a way free from adversity, it leaves Victor free of any method of dealing with any kind of challenge or failure. He, in a way, develops a form of affluenza wherein he is incapable of properly dealing with a lack of success. Victor’s psychological problems can first be seen as his mother dies after helping Elizabeth recover from an illness. Unlike the rest of his family, Victor hardly grieves over this loss; instead, he is more focused on his failure to save his loved one. This was the first instance of Victor experiencing loss, and he has no clue how to deal with it. Instead of mourning the loss of a loved one, Victor places the burden of failure on himself and makes it his job to prevent such an emotionally damaging event from happening again. As this was Victor’s first true failure, the death of his mother is what he comes to associate it with; not a minor event that he can easily overcome but a tragedy. He comes to fear the very nature of failure as it carries horrible connotations in his mind.

In the same way that humans try to counter their fear of inferiority, Victor does everything he can throughout his life to combat his fear of failure. He “absents himself from our world of ordinary awareness and relatedness, which recedes from him in much the manner that a dream fades at the instant of awakening. Severing all contact with his family, other being, and familiar nature, he is intent on hollowing out a zone in reality where he can be utterly alone,” (Sherwin 892). Victor abandons the blessed life he has been given to prevent any further failures through death. To conquer death, he attempts to play god and create life. “Victor's decision to create new life also seems related to his efforts to master fears of death. Is it merely accidental that his philosophical interest in regeneration immediately follows his mother's death? Despite his acceptance of maternal loss and rejection of the mourning process, Victor attempts to reverse the forces of time by resurrecting the dead. He thus enacts a rescue fantasy, not unlike the service Robert Walton performs for him,” (Berman 60-61). To conquer death, he breathes live into an inanimate combination of the finest deceased body parts a lunatic could ask for. Upon finishing his creation, he realizes that what he saw as a perfect means of success is truly another failure. Instead of taking responsibility and handling the monstrosity conceived with his own hands, Victor simply abandons him. He pretends as though it never happened because he is too concerned that others would view him as a failed scientist. His fear of being seen as a failure causes him to unleash a superhuman recluse upon the world and leave it to suffer and snowball into a murderous behemoth. He abandons what is essentially his child because he is too worried about others discovering his failed experiment, an action that illustrates the part of his character that causes him to only truly care about himself: his narcissism.

Victor’s life becomes little more than a battle with his community, his family, and, most importantly, himself as he tries to preserve the lives of those he loves while continuing to seem successful. This conflict becomes most apparent when Victor’s motive for breaking his covenant with the Creature is revealed. Atop the alps, when Victor encounters his creation and is convinced to create a female being of the same stature, he finally shows decides to take an ounce of responsibility for the hell that he has let reign upon his progeny. This covenant would put an end to the deaths of his loved ones and free himself from the metaphorical prison that he has become trapped in. When it comes time to finish the creation of a second being and complete his promise, Victor obliterates the corpse and dooms those he loves to a world of suffering. “Frankenstein’s decision to break his covenant with the Monster explicitly concerns the ‘chain of existence and events.’ It occurs to Frankenstein that the inevitable result of ‘those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted’ will be a race of monstrous progeny which may wreak havoc on mankind (p. 166). Precisely because the special creation demanded by the Monster has as its purpose the inception of an effective chain outside humanity- a new family, a new society- it raises the frightening possibility of a new and uncontrollable signifying chain, one with unknown rules and grammar,” (Brooks 598). His motive was not to protect those he loved; it wasn’t to bring happiness to the Creature; it was to protect his name. He doomed his family and the Creature to lives of eternal misery because he feared the possibility that “future ages might curse me [Victor] as their pest,” (Shelley 156). What else could drive a man to abandon those who have given him the world on a silver platter for nothing in return than the overwhelming power of fear. Victor’s narcissistic tendencies cause him to care more about not being seen as a failure than the lives of those he, supposedly, loves more dearly than anything in the world. As these narcissistic tendencies are manifested in his fear of being seen as a failure, his actions illustrate how incredibly controlling fear can be.

Victor’s concealment of his failures has a much larger effect on the novella as a whole, however. The story is formatted in such a way that everything that we, the readers, perceive has been altered by Victor’s narrative bias. For such a simple reason as how he is the one telling the story, Victor has the power to omit or contort any details that he so pleases. Although there is no concrete evidence that he does so, his personality that we discover to be narcissistic and his fear of being seen as a failure reveal that it is unlikely that he did not alter some details to deceive Walton. As he tells his tale, Victor “precedes his narration by admonishing Robert Walton to ‘deduce an apt moral from my tale’ (Shelley 30). Victor frequently interrupts his narration, however, to prevent Walton from deducing anything other than a prescribed meaning. ‘Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow’ (Shelley 53). The phrasing of the sentence is revealing. Even as Victor attempts to repudiate his ambitions, he idealizes those who, like himself, aspire to become greater than their nature will allow, and devalues those who narrow-mindedly believe their native town to be the world. When he does acknowledge guilt, he refuses to locate the true meaning of his crime. Thus, Victor sees himself as a failed Promethean rather than as a pathological narcissist. By interpreting his defeat in terms of the acquisition of forbidden knowledge, instead of empathic failure, Victor heroicizes his story. His last words to Walton indicate the belief that his ambition has been noble and blameless,” (Berman 72-73). In addition to altering the details of the story, Victor interjects his ideas and defines his motives in certain ways to prevent Walton from seeing him in any way apart from the protagonist, the victim, the scientist whose “mild” failure was no fault of his own but instead of external factors. Even on his deathbed, Victor refuses to accept or blatantly reveal that he has not been successful. His fear of failure is so deeply rooted that he feels forced to not only deceive his friends that he grows up with, his family that he loved so, and his companion who is the captain of an atlantic crabbing vessel; he also feels forced to deceive himself.

The juxtaposition between the happy Victor in his days of youth and the narcissistic Victor who indirectly kills everyone that he loves illustrates the wholly negative effect of terror. Though Victor has free will as a member of mankind, he forces his own hand to do whatever would most fully combat the failures that coat every aspect of his life. Shelley’s depiction of Victor’s descent into madness vividly illustrates how much power fear holds over the lives of mankind.

#failure #ap lit #analysis #project due in 40 mins

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