monicavillalbarojo - Tumblr blog

[monicavillalbarojo]

I just discovered your blog because someone I follow reblogged one of your posts. Very touching to see such thoughtful takes and character analysis. Frankenstein has been my favorite novel since high school and this blog reawakened my love. Time for a re-read. ❤️

it means a lot to evoque that kind of feelings in someone and recieve a complement on your thoughts.

Have fun reading, or be miserable, whatever works best for you.

[monicavillalbarojo]

Reflective essay

Writing this blog nor reading Frankenstein was what I was expecting; this experience has been an enriching and invigorating task, a journey that has teached me a lot about the writing process and the criticism of a character in a literary work.

Victor Frankenstein is a rich character with many sides to explore. He is neither the kind of protagonist you are cheering for nor someone you wish decay upon; all of his misfortunes are the consequence of his own actions. We are able to see how Victor’s personality is somehow twisted even during his childhood. In the first half of the book, the relationships with his family and friends seem somewhat superficial, or at least distant, with the exception of Elizabeth, with whom, more than in love, he seemed to be obsessed with. From the beginning Victor was more interested in the secrets of the world than the people around him; it isn’t but after the birth of the creature that Frankenstein realizes how much he loves and treasures his family and only friend.

Different from the general believe, Frankenstein is not a horror story. It is a story about loneliness and desolation, but more importantly, it is a story about humanity. Frankenstein tells us about the virtuous and fatal flaws of humankind, how Victor’s desires turned against him because of his own mistakes. The idea of being the God of a new species too dizzying to meditate about the aftermath for the creation and himself. The pain he inflicts on the creature its enraging to the reader; he makes excuse after excuse to avoid taking responsibility of his actions; the problem is not him committing sacrilege, the problem is him not fulfilling his duty as a creator. In the novel the creature draws a parallelism between himself and Adam, emphasizing how God didn’t abandoned his creation after bestowing him with life “He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his Creator; he was allowed to converse with and acquire knowledge from beings of a superior nature, but I was wretched, helpless, and alone “Being horrid to the eyes of human beings would not have been so dreadful if at least he counted with Victor’s acceptance. Showing care for his creation could have changed everything in the course of both their lives.

 Writing this blog has been a pleasant and meaningful experience in my development as a writer. Expressing my perspective on a specific character was something new that I would like to repeat in the future, and Victor Frankenstein was an interesting and complex character to analyze. This was a task that I enjoyed deeply; I will miss it.

[monicavillalbarojo]

I'm just like you, you are just like me

Frankenstein is a story about humanity; both the sensibility of the monster and Victor’s rejection towards his creation are very human traits, as it is the desire of revenge. They both have hurt each other in unimaginable ways, following each other’s tail in a never-ending competition of who makes the other more miserable.

Different moments in the novel show us how alike the creature and Victor are. When the creation narrates his first experience of the world, he describes is with such amusement and marvel that resembles early chapters when the doctor talks about his childhood, how everything was beautiful and incredible to his eyes. Most importantly, the creature mirrors how utterly alone Victor felt during his time in college. He was separated from his family almost immediately after his mother died, sent of to an unknown place where he knew not one soul, and he couldn’t properly grief. Victor was always interested in alchemy and necromancy, but having to deal with the lost of his mother in such isolation pulled all the triggers for him. He commits sacrilege thinking of beauty, the beauty of his mother, but unconsciously he creates a being of his own nature and then condemned him to the loneliness he himself was a victim of.  

Victor is not an innocent character nor the victim of the story, yet again, this is not a horror story where there is one spooky monster tormenting an innocent soul. Frankenstein is about humankind, and the imperfection of human nature; Victor Frankenstein faced the consequences of his action, it is not my intention to excuse him, but, just like with the creature, it is impossible not to understand him.

[monicavillalbarojo]

empty guilt

Although he knows that the death of William was caused by his own invention, which makes him indirectly his brother’s murder, he does not intend to do something when Justine, someone he says to love as well, is blamed for the assassination. Even when the possibility of the people in town thinking him crazy exists, he could still try to reveal the truth; it is mentioned earlier in the book that he had other creations before the creature; he hates his sacrilege, but if committing it just one more time could save the name and life of someone he cares for, one will say it is something worth doing. He doesn’t. One excuse to hide under was all he needed to accept Justine’s sacrifice for his actions.

 He spends the following chapters wallowing in how miserable he is and how guilty he feels, but not doing anything to solve the problem he created. Victor weeps and cries about how sorry he is in his internal monologues. He is mourning his brother and his friend, but knowing he could do something to stop the creature from taking more lives, he never even tries. Not once does he go out looking for him to try to reason or, in its defect, kill him; he doesn’t even know if the creature is capable of reasoning because he abandoned him as soon as he was born. Victor only cares about himself; his internal thoughts are about how bad he feels for wronging his family and loved ones, but his actions are always in favor of his own goals. He feels guilty, but would never admit his mistakes to his family, because he lacks accountability.

Being in his childhood house play a part into him not owning his mistakes; seeing all the familiar rooms of his infancy and being around the people that were part of his dearest memories made, in his mind, impossible to speak the truth about the reason that kept him away from his family for so many years, and to admit that the consequences of his sickly obsession reached his family in the most terrible way.

No matter how incredibly guilty Frankenstein feels, I find it impossible to pity him when the reason he gave to reject the creature was that he was ugly. He left an unknown form of life loose in the wild, not worrying about what he could do or what could happen to him one single day, until the consequences were already knocking his door. He didn’t even stay to witness what the creature was capable of; he didn’t adjust to one of Frankenstein standards and was already discarded by him, left alone with no explanations in an unknown world.

[monicavillalbarojo]

Victor's love

After not accomplishing his goal, Victor finds himself not only disappointed, but terrified of his creation; spending the night awake with fear of the sight of, what he considers, a horrid creature.

It is not but after the morning that he finds consolation in his dear friend Henry; with his arrival Victor is able to remember the so longed memories of childhood and how was his life before he has completely possessed by his studies. Due to his lack of care with himself, Victor falls very ill; this gives him time to think about what he has done and feel remorse. Unable to speak with anybody else a word about his creation, Frankenstein forces himself to torment in silence.

Natural philosophy, the science that once delighted him, he finds now atrocious; the mere sight of his former tools makes him uneasy. Such is his discomfort that he cannot stand to talk with his teachers and peers, even when they talk only wonders and compliments for him, the shadow of sacrilege stands constantly by his side.

Henry reminds him of his family in Geneva, how love feels, and what was about life that made him passionate in the first place. Exchanging letters with his family, the book gives us a different side of him that we are yet to see. When even in his childhood Victor was of a twisted nature, now, after committing all of his unhallow acts, he is able to see beyond his  ambition; he sees his family, how they love him and how he loves them, he sees the world and finally there is not only a frenetic impulse to know all of its secrets, but an appreciation of what is in front of him.

If only this appreciation had come sooner; now the creature has suspiciously disappeared of Victor’s apartment leaving no trace and he is hit with the news of his youngest brother, William, death; starting a whole new series of fallings and loses for Victor.

[monicavillalbarojo]

Beauty

Apathetic for the recent lost of his mother, Victor starts his studies of science. He is disappointed with the major, for the secrets of nature that he wishes to discover are far more complicated than the ones the professors there can teach him.

 Frankenstein is obsessed with the origin of life, how when a living thing dies the body starts to decompose. After several years studying natural philosophy and physiology, acquiring the principles of life and the knowledge of death, he became capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.

After the incredible accomplishment, Victor could not help himself from doing it again and again. The preparation of a recipient of life, however, was still a difficult task; veins, nerves, muscles, skin, and all the necessary elements for a being to possess life he needed to collect. All of these made him hesitate before considering making a being like himself but, still drunk in excitement of his first success, he decided to do so.

Frankenstein does not go into detail of how life is created; he expresses this accomplishment as his biggest regret, but he mentions the torture of living animals as part of the process. Having this information, we cannot exclude the possibility of Victor Frankenstein torturing a living human being in order to animate the creature.

Victor is frenetic with his project so much that it overshadows all his needs and responsibilities; he has not written nor visited his family in all the years he spends in university. Seasons pass and the simple wonders of nature that once where astonishing to him now would not even make him blink. His obsessive personality turns self-destructive even though he tries to deny it, using science as an excuse when all he cares about is his own ego. The idea of a whole species that owes it’s existence to him drives him mad. The urge to play God is far bigger than any feeling of guilt he could conceive in his body.

He finally finishes; he is finally able to witness the results of his laborious work for which he has sacrificed his morals, his physical and psychological integrity, his personal life, everything that meant something for him he sacrificed, and what is more, he succeeds. But this is not enough for him; he created life out of lifeless parts of corpses, he could have made a being as complex as himself, but this is not enough for him. Because, when he was selecting the parts for the creature, he wanted him to be beautiful. In the middle of the nights when he was digging and desecrating corpses, Victor was thinking of beauty.

The creature was not even properly awake before he was discarded by Frankenstein; he did not have the chance to do anything before being already a disappointment to his creator because he did not adjust to the ideal Victor had fixed on him before being born.

[monicavillalbarojo]

Victor Frankenstein

After who knows how much time of being alone, Frankenstein finds in Captain Walton an equal in mind, a confidant for his misfortunes; or perhaps he believes that, after Walton expressed he’s yearning for knowledge, he might not judge him too harshly, he might even sympathize with him.

Victor had a happy childhood, full of people who loved him and whom he loved. Even if he only managed to make one friend outside of his family, this relationship with Henry Clerval is precious and meaningful to him. Among his   loved ones, the relationship that has more impact on him is the one he shares with Elizabeth. Everything she does is, to his eyes, selfless and almost divine.

During their early years she became for him more than his sister, in his own words “the beautiful and adored companion of all my occupations and pleasures”. They were raised asfamily; she was like another child for his parents. As they grew older together, Victor’s affection towards Elizabeth evolved from fraternal feelings and to some kind of love/obsession sentiment. He makes special emphasis on her beauty; always describing her features and the way she moves, her kindness and good temper; from his perspective she always seems like some kind of fairy.

The relationships with the rest of his family, although loving, always appeared distant, superficial, overshadowed by Victor’s eager for knowledge, the hunger for learning the secrets of heaven and earth, the secrets of the world.

Frankenstein untroubled youth got interrupted by a thunderbolt with the death of his mother. The sorrow is overwhelming; this is the first time he experiences lost, but he is not able to properly grieve; Victor is sent to university short after the terrible event, with all the feelings stuck in his chest.