Main Points on Criticism: The Lady and the Monster

•    Many people believe a man wrote it, defying the textbook Proper Lady, but by following her mother’s advice she focuses on Promethean and calls into question the egotism that Mary Shelley associates with the artist’s monstrous self-assertion. A Critic says “it inculcates no lesson of conduct, manners, or morality; it cannot mend, and will not even amuse its readers, unless their taste have been deplorably vitiated—it fatigues the feelings without interesting the understanding; it gratuitously harasses the heart, and only adds to the store, already too great, or painful sensations.”
•    Mary Shelley focuses on individual maturation in Frankenstein which can be seen through Victor as he goes through a loving, protecting, compassionate childhood to an accidental find of Cornelius Agrippa’s occult speculations which lead him with a raving for knowledge but has no reliable guide to direct him.
•    Shelley also explores the idea of degeneration of incipient curiosity into full-fledged egotism. In Frankenstein, Victor is consumed by his ambition to conquer death through science, which is fundamentally selfish. He wants to “ultimately defy morality to [find] a new species that would bless him as creator and source.” It is understandable that given Victor’s egotism of his driving ambition, it comes to no surprise that Frankenstein’s love for his family is his first victim.
•    Mary Shelley divides the novel into a series of first person narratives instead of employing a single perspective, whether it is first person or omniscient, has the effect of qualifying her judgment of egotism. This allows the readers to participate in Frankenstein’s desire for innate and natural benevolence but also in the agonizing repercussions of this misplaced optimism. The critic states that Shelley “both recapitulates Frankenstein’s story and, ingenuously, completes it.”
•    Lastly, Shelley mentions that denying ones true origins is the monstrous singularity of egotism. When the creature tried to recreate himself by talking to the old blind father, DeLacy’s children only recognized its ineffaceable monstrosity for what it was and had a violent reaction. The monsters attempts to deny its nature are as futile as they are desperate.