Victor Frankenstein's Illness as Escape Mechanism - Essay Example

Victor Frankensteins Illness as Escape Mechanism “I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health.” Frankenstein, chapter 5. In Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus (1818), her eponymous character spends almost the entire novel in a state of poor health. The framing device of Waltons letters mean that when the story is told, Victor Frankenstein is “a man on the brink of destruction” (Letter 4); the only image of Victor as healthy is during his idyllic childhood, detailed in the first three chapters. A dream in which his lover turns into his dead mother foreshadows that “health becomes disease and death” (Allen, 53). These perpetual mental and physical illnesses enhance the bleak and sickly atmosphere of the book: so bleak that one reader was inspired to study contemporary accounts of death (Richardson). This essay will look at the worst cases of Victors physical distress, and their mental foundation, to show that Victor is the true “monster” (Smith, p. 191) and that illness cannot absolve responsibility. Shelley strongly links mental and physical distress in Frankenstein, suggesting that Victors intense bouts of illness are brought on by his guilt. This idea of mental torture causing physical pain echo throughout descriptions of Victor in chapter four: the dark images evoke clearly a wasted body. Although Victor is “engaged heart and soul” in his scientific work, it seems that this unhealthy obsession with creating life affects his body more than his mind. Victor is, prophetically, “animated by an almost supernatural enthusiasm” on his topic, and becomes “dizzy” when he discovers the secret of life. His work consists of “days and nights of incredible labor and fatigue,” leaving his “cheek … pale with study, and [his] person … emaciated with confinement” (chapter 4). Victor bears more resemblance to the bodies he “researches in charnel houses” (Richardson, xiii) than a living human. This all foreshadows the “unearthly ugliness” (chapter 10) of Victors creation, and generates the nervous disease which afflicts the scientist at the end of chapter five. This “nervous fever which confined [Victor] for several months” is a reaction to the physical exhaustion of the previous two years, as well as to Victors great guilt at unleashing such “horror and misfortune” upon the world. During the illness Victor “raved incessantly concerning [the monster on which he had bestowed existence.” Granting that he was unaware of this at the time, there is an indication that this physical malady was brought on by a subconscious entirely aware of the horror performed. While unconscious of the outside world, Victor could not escape the monster; conversely, during the time the creature itself did escape, and was hence able to (presumably) cause the deaths of two members of Victors family in chapters seven and eight. Victors attempted escape from reality through illness, and therefore his failure to confine the creature, was directly responsible for the continuation of the plot. Clervals death in chapter 21 affects Victor in almost exactly the same way: “The human frame could no longer support the agonies that I endured, and I was carried out of the room in strong convulsions.” For a further two months the scientist is “on the point of death.” As before, the story moves on while Victor is insensible: he awakens to find himself in prison for Clervals murder. It could be argued that this affliction protected Victor from his trial, which no doubt would have upset him further – it may have been better for the characters state of mind to be sentenced in absentia. That, though, precludes Victors innocence, and the fact that he is only as responsible for Clervals death as any parent is for an offsprings murderous tendencies. Mentally, Victors creation engenders in him immense upset. When he is not reacting to the monster with another prolonged period of severe illness, his mindset remains lifeless and desolate. Even “the sight of a chemical instrument,” months after his first bout of nervous disease, “would renew all the agony of [his] nervous symptoms” (chapter 6). His father refers to a “gloom which appears to have taken so strong a hold of [Victors] mind” (chapter 18), and Victor often refers to himself as suffering from “bitter sickness” (chapter 15), overcome with “grief and fear” (chapter 7), “oppressed” by his guilt (chapter 23). These repeated images of the protagonist contribute to the books dark and hopeless atmosphere. His mental illness is less an escape from his horrific reality, than a constant and intense reminder of it. The guilt that Victor feels is something from which he can never escape. Mary Shelley was born to a famous feminist author who died within two weeks of her daughters birth; shortly before conceiving of the idea for Frankenstein, Shelley herself had to undergo the death of her newborn child. Sickness and death is a key motif in Frankenstein, a vehicle used to move the plot onward in several places. Victor is portrayed as a sickly man to highlight his wrongdoing; in the 1831 Preface, Shelley describes the original idea which spawned the novel: “I saw – with shut eyes, but acute mental vision – I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.” Words like pale and unhallowed enhance the sense of innate immorality – sickly takes on the meaning of bilious rather than the more neutral unwell. The protagonist Victor is susceptible to illness as a method of escapism. It is beyond doubt that his ailments succeed in withdrawing him from a reality which he can no longer face, but the escape is ineffective as Victors bouts of infirmity allows the action to progress, unimpeded, towards his own doom. Victors susceptibility to sickness reflects the readers desire to escape from Shelleys nightmarish and all-too-recognizable horror of a person in a position of authority losing their humanity. Works Cited Allen, Graham. Shelleys Frankenstein. London: Continuum International, 2008. Richardson, Ruth. Death, Dissection and the Destitute. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus. Project Gutenberg. Accessed 15 February 2011. Smith, Johanna M. Frankenstein. Boston: Bedford/St Martins, 2000. Read More