Frankenstein (idea)

Impassable Ice and Broken Boundaries: The Setting as a Moral Meaning in Shelley’s Frankenstein

“...it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight” (1).

This line embodies the potential of knowledge as an essential driving force. To some, knowledge and the pursuit thereof is a powerful aphrodisiac. In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley captures this sentiment and explores the moral consequences of such an obsession through the parallel aspirations of driven arctic adventurer Robert Walton and sometimes deranged scientist Victor Frankenstein. Moreover, she uses the sprawling “icy climes” of the polar regions, bathed in the “perpetual splendor” of eternal sunshine as a metaphor for the inherent duality of knowledge, as both a light for humanity stumbling in the dark and a fire to burn away that thin veneer of civility supposedly inherent in our being (1).

Both Walton and Frankenstein possess an overwhelming desire to conquer that vast desert of knowledge and push back the boundaries that none have previously. For Walton, this means to color in the Arctic Regions on the global map. Frankenstein, on the other hand, wants to unlock the most profound secrets of life. But this parallelism in motivation, regardless of action, is wherein the moral implications of such a blind ethic are revealed and tied to the setting. There exists a direct correlation between Walton’s expedition into the Arctic, and Frankenstein’s unnatural goal of reanimating dead flesh. To achieve his dream, Walton must fight biting winds and impassable ice, he must fight nature itself. Likewise, Frankenstein’s grotesque vision appears to him as a holy grail to be sought after, and in his pursuit of it, Shelley exposes the sobering reality that to satisfy this aspect of human nature, one must battle Nature itself. Without a question, she is positing a morality of science, that there is a necessary limit not on what humankind can know, but on what humankind should know.

There is at once a sense of “wondrous power” and a remittance of “torturing flames” at work in Frankenstein (1,198). Shelley’s novel elicits this feeling in the reader by exploring the deeper facets of a world that could create a monster, through the Creature’s own eyes. This creates a dilemma. Though his outward appearance suggests “unhallowed wretchedness,” the Creature was born with “sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and majesty of goodness” (196). That the base of society could transform such desires for “happiness and affection” into the malcontent of a “malignant devil” spurned and spit on by humanity, creates a crisis of unspeakable misery within the Creature’s psyche (196). Those in crisis instinctively turn their eyes towards their origins and look for a sign. The Creature looks towards Frankenstein, but is let down, left destitute and alone. And it is in Frankenstein’s death, that the Creature returns to his metaphorical origins, that he shall “seek the most northern extremity of the globe” and “ascend [his] funeral pile triumphantly” (197,198).

In nature, life begets life; in the case of the Creature, he is life created from a contrivance of dead body parts. Death is inherently cold, and it is in his bitter arctic homecoming that the Creature answers Shelley’s question of the moral limits of science. There are places that science should not tread, the metaphorical northern utopia, that pinnacle of sacred knowledge, where the consequences of violating Nature may be disastrous and profane. The Creature extinguishes for the world “the light of that conflagration,” brought on by Frankenstein’s sickly romantic dream–he brings about an end to the sub-divine suffering of such irresponsible origins.