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Priscila Bordon

Dr. David A. Roberts

HC 101: Essential Academic Writing

12 November 2015

Understanding the role of sympathy in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Sympathy towards characters in a novel has been discussed by scholars for

many years, and "literary discussions of sympathy have tended to focus on two

literary kinds - drama and the novel"(Lobis, 4). Frankestein is a novel in which we

find ourselves compelled to sympathize with a cause or a person. The cause is the

innocent attempt of giving something of value to the human race, that is science, and

the person is what is created from this attempt. Is the creature a person or just the

result of something that was meant to help mankind and did not work out?

In this essay I present arguments to support that sympathy is what makes

Mary Shelley's novel contraversial, since readers are led to believe they have to

choose who to be sorry for. The different points of viwe inside the novel makes it

hard to choose a side. Who should the reader be sympathetic with; Victor

Frankenstein or his creation? Or neither of them?

In my rhetorical analysis, The monster in Frankenstein and Sympathy: An

analysis of David Marshall’s article “The surprising effects of sympathy: Marivaux,

Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley", David Marshall presents arguments to

explain he failure of sympathy in Frankenstein; how society failed at sympathizing

with a creature different from themselves in his form. I state that many of David

Marshall's opinions about the role of sympathy in Frankenstein are close to my own

interpretation of the novel, mainly because of the great influence Jacques Rosseau's

works had in Frankenstein. Jacque Rousseau believed in the concept of natural man
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which inspired Mary Shelley to portray the monster as a noble savage (Marshall, 4).

However, more than a novel based on sympathy, Mary Shelley wrote a piece on the

failure of sympathy towards Victor's "child", abandoned after his creator and realized

how hideous it was. From a noble savage that longed for sympathy and

understanding, a creature planned with excitment by his creator became a monster

capable of killing Victor's loved ones.

At the moment of abandoning his creation, Victor was afraid of what he

created. He did not know what to do at that moment when he did create life from

parts of the dead. He abandoned the creature by running away from it. He acted like

a human, who feared the unknown and in a attempt to protect himself. On the other

hand, the creature, not knowing what feelings like fear and anguish mean, felt

abandoned by his "father"or even mother, according to Mellor in her essay “Making a

"monster": an introduction to Frankenstein”. Sometime after his abandonment the

creature looked for his creator in order to ask him if he deserved sympathy. Foucault

states in his work, Order of Things, the role of sympathy in society:

Sympathy plays through the depths of the universe in a free state. It can

traverse the vastest spaces in an instant: it falls like a thunderbolt from the

distant planet upon the man ruled by that planet; on the other hand, it can be

brought into being by a simple contact – as with those ‘mourning roses that

have been used at obsequies’ which, simply from their former adjacency with

death, will render all persons who smell them ‘sad and moribund. (26)

Victor wanted to infuse “a spark of being into the lifeless thing” (Shelley, 35),

although he did create life, the “spark” was supposed to be sympathy as well which

is not earned when the creature deserves it. Sympathy comes when it is not

expected . It is a sign of compassion towards anything or anyone. Victor was incable

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of sympathy towards his creature, he gave the spark of life to his creature, the

thunderbolt described by Foucault never fell from Victor to the creature. Although

sympathy from Victor to this creature never happened throughout the novel, we, as

readers, are led to feel compassion toward the creature, mainly in the first chapters

of the second volume of the novel, when we learn how the creature discovered the

instruments that lead to our emotions, such as music and literature. At this moment

the reader is compelled to believe that this creature had a soul, he is human

because he can feel what humans feel.

But Paradise Lost excited different and far deeper emotions. I read it, as I had

read the other volumes which had fallen into my hands, as a true history. It

moved every feeling of wonder and awe, that the picture of an omnipotent

God warring with his creatures was capable of exciting.(Shelly, 90)

The audience of the novel, while reading about the creature’s attempts at

receiving compassion, and his failure, tend to sympathize with the creature, since in

the novel itself the creature cannot find what he looks for. The generation of

sympathy depends on the audience reading and listening to what the monster has to

say about his life experiences, more than the visual effect he causes when he is

seen by society in the novel (Britton, 3). Sympathy expected by the creature comes

from the reader rather than from the characters in the novel. The creature receives

from Victor and the DeLaceys something other than sympathy, what Foucault called

the other twin of sympathy, antipathy; “Antipathy maintains the isolation of things and

prevents their assimilation; it encloses every species within its impenetrable

difference and its propensity to continue being what it is” (27). Victor and the

DeLaceys could not understand this living creature which was not created in

conventional ways, how something so hideous, in their view, could have been
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created by God, or do something good. Although Victor created this creature, he

could not relate to it because of its ugliness. In many different passages of the novel,

Victor points out how hideous and grotesque the creature is in the eyes of society;

Oh! no mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again

endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch. I had gazed on

him while unfinished; he was ugly then; but when those muscles and joints

were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could

not have conceived.(Shelley,36)

Ugliness is the reason why Victor and others cannot relate and sympathize

with the monster. Gigante exposes in her text “Facing the Ugly: The Case of

Frankenstein” the relations of the ugly to evil and beauty to good in the case of

Frankenstein and his creature; “He not only fails to please, he emphatically

displeases. And in his relation to the subject, Victor Frankenstein, he manifests

precisely the opposite of lack: excess. (Gigante, 505). It is a commom belief in

literature that ugly represents what is worse in humanity. That it shows on the

outside what is inside; ugly symbolizes evil. It becomes difficult to see such a

hideous creature and relate or sympathize with him. This difficulty may be the

reason why the reader is compelled to sympathize with the creature, since the

reader has only the monster’s narrative and is not there to see such an ugly figure.

The reader can relate to his story and his suffering on a different way than Victor,

who saw the image of a monster from the first look of the monster’s awakening,

allowing the reader to blame Victor for his action which transformed the monster to

what he was at the end of the novel, a killer.

The narratives in Frankenstein notably shift from many different narrators,

and cause the reader to view the same story through different perspectives. For
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example. when Frankenstein was telling his story to Walton, he immediately felt

compassion for Victor. When the creature told his story to his creator, it was the only

time Victor, reluctantly, felt sympathy for the monster, because he was listening to

the creature’s story and felt engaged to his narrative, the figure of the creature is not

important at this point, he is the reader who is reading the creature’s story, that is

the time when Victor is engaged to the narrative and even promised him a

companion; Jeanne Britton in her book “Novelistic Sympathy in Mary Shelley’s

Frankenstein” defends the ideia that sympathy is related to the narratives of both

Victor and the creature, sympathy is not possible, but they can feel engaged to each

other’s stories; “When experiences of sympathy prove to be impossible, the

transcribed narrative suggests that textual production approximates, preserves, and

replaces the visual and auditory engagement that sympathy would otherwise allow”

(Britton 6). Sympathy, resemblance and engagement are only possible in

Frankenstein whenever a story is told by one of the characters to another character.

This insight can explain how the reader is the one expected to feel sympathetic to

the creature. The power of Frankenstein is in the amazing story of how an ugly

abandoned monster could become human, and we only learn his story by his

narrative, as well as Victor.

In conclusion, Frankenstein is a novel that can take us to many different

directions of understanding concerning the role of sympathy inside the story.

Although sympathy does not occur among the characters, neither to Victor towards

Walton, nor to Victor towards his creature, the reader is the one with the power in

his/her hands to decide who deserves sympathy. The human who created a killer,

the human who ran away from his creation because he was afraid of it or the

creature who suffered with his “father’s” abandonment? Mary Shelley did not want us
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to come up with an answer to who deserves sympathy, she wanted to make us

reflect on the consequences of the lack of sympathy towards the ones who are

despised by society, the outcasts who were born from sin and who, therefore are

sins themselves.