Frankenstein

Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a profound meditation on the power of language, the nature of identity, and the consequences of human ambition, employing a complex narrative structure and layered semantics to explore themes of creation, alienation, and the limits of knowledge. Framed as a series of embedded narratives, the novel’s shifting perspectives—from Walton’s epistolary framing to Victor Frankenstein’s fevered confession to the Creature’s poignant monologue—highlight the instability of truth and the subjectivity of experience, demonstrating how language both constructs and distorts reality. The Creature’s struggle for linguistic mastery is central to his existential anguish, as his acquisition of speech and self-awareness intensifies his isolation rather than granting him agency, reinforcing the novel’s interrogation of the Enlightenment ideal that knowledge leads to empowerment. The novel’s semantic field is deeply rooted in Romantic and Gothic traditions, contrasting the sublime, awe-inspiring landscapes that reflect inner turmoil with the cold, scientific rhetoric of Frankenstein’s ambition, underscoring the thematic divide between emotion and reason. Frankenstein’s scientific discourse, infused with alchemical and Promethean allusions, carries connotations of hubristic overreach, positioning him as both creator and destroyer in an unsettling inversion of the divine act of creation. Meanwhile, the Creature’s narrative, rich with biblical, Miltonic, and Rousseauian echoes, recasts him as both Adam and Satan, victim and villain, demonstrating the fluidity of moral categorization and the novel’s resistance to fixed meanings. Shelley’s language plays with duality and contradiction, as words that denote life—birth, animation, creation—are inextricably linked with imagery of decay, monstrosity, and ruin, illustrating the ethical ambiguity at the heart of Frankenstein’s scientific transgression. Ultimately, Frankenstein is a novel about the perilous relationship between language and identity, demonstrating how words have the power to shape self-perception, construct reality, and, in the hands of both creator and creature, determine the boundaries between acceptance and exile, civilization and monstrosity, life and death.