Nearing the end of Chapter 4, Shelly illustrates the scene where Victor Frankenstein builds his creation. Although I was tempted to write about the famed scene of the monster’s emergence, I think this passage, on page 54-55, is extremely powerful and sets the tone for the rest of the novel. In the first few chapters, Victor paints a very picturesque portrait of his essentially perfect childhood. He discusses his family, Elizabeth, his friend Henry, where he grew up, his love for knowledge of science, math and philosophy. He proceeds to attend school and becomes passionate about natural philosophy.

In chapter 4, his passion turns into an unhealthy obsession, which leads him to isolate from his friends, family and society around him. He soon discovers the “secret to creating life” and decides to build his very own creature.

Just by skimming down the page, we see him speaking of himself in a very pretentions and arrogant way as he narrates this story. “ I found so an astonishing power in my hand” (53). The specific passage that intrigued me is when he is in the midst of creating his work. The way Victor describes himself is frightening. He explains the “horrors of [my] secret toils” by depicting how he became sick and emaciated due to his loneliness and how he visits the graveyards to collect body parts and tortures living animals until they become like clay. These horrifying images makes me wonder if Victor is in fact as monstrous as the beast he is about to conceive. I also wonder how his love for knowledge, understanding human anatomy and life turned into something evil.

Another question I posed was, for what reasons does Victor feel the need to build his creation?

As aforementioned, the scene I picked gave me the impression that Victor was turning into this monster! It puzzled me how he went from having this perfect life to becoming the way he did. He had a very stable family with his parents and Elizabeth. So, what made him leave all that behind to go build his creature? One could assume that he was using his knowledge and understanding of life for good purpose. Perhaps Victor performed this project to better mankind, or to find a way to create a “new human”.

Yet, he says, “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.” (54) This sentence exemplifies his ulterior motive to become a G-dlike figure to this new breed of human. I believe that Victor Frankenstein used his knowledge for very selfish and egotistical purposes.

In the Torah, (the Jewish Bible) knowledge is compared to fire. Like anything, fire can be used for positive and can also be extremely detrimental. You can use fire as a source of light and warmth, but at the same time if used improperly, it can cause severe damage. So too, in Frankenstein’s case, his brilliance and knowledge of chemistry and philosophy could have been used in positive ways, but ended up having a devastating result.

I believe that another reason Frankenstein decides to build this creature was to have a sense of control over the ideas of life and death. His mother’s death evidently took a toll on his attitude towards life and he though that if he had the proper solution, he could fix this notion of fate.