The Fallen Angel: A Question of Identity
The creature’s narrative is a confusing and difficult one to process, for it offers readers a question which cannot easily be answered: what is identity? Are we creatures of some inborn nature or are we man made, products of our environment? Frankenstein’s monster, abandoned as an infant, is forced to develop his own ethical bearings from the moral boundaries of literature, a resource which he unwittingly discovers.
It is through this literature, particularly Paradise Lost, that the creature simultaneously finds and loses faith in Providence, which leads him to find and lose his own identity. Milton’s Paradise Lost never offers a clear-cut sense of good and evil, yet the creature mistakenly attempts to label himself in this manner. The creature’s true error does not lie in his rebellion against Dr. Frankenstein, who is an absent father and an irresponsible creator, but in the belief that he is able to choose his own nature.
Since the creature was denied the comfort of a father’s guidance from birth, the discovery of Milton’s Paradise Lost is a life-altering event. In the creation of Adam he finds both solace and despair: “Like Adam, I was created apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect” (Shelley 105). It is also from Paradise Lost that the creature learns of Providence, which D.S. Neff describes as our ability to “live in the assurance that God is present and active in our lives.” Through Providence the creature identifies with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise as they must “make ‘their solitary way’ into the post-lapsarian world, with ‘Providence their guide’” (Neff). These separate identities offer the creature conflicting interpretations of how to accept the fact that he is so desperately removed from his own creator, unlike Adam. It is no surprise that the creature begins to identify with the isolation of Satan: “Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition; for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me” (105).
The inevitable destruction of the creature’s innocence comes not only from patriarchal detachment, but also from his mistaken commiseration with Satan’s rebellion and subsequent fall from grace. As John B. Lamb explains: “The monster’s error has not been in his rebellion against the father but in his mistaken assumption that his ‘nature’ was a thing that he could ‘willingly’ choose.”
Within the creature we see an inability to recognize the fallacy of adhering to the fixed moral values of good versus evil, and the conflict of assuming that a creature’s nature is something that he or she may choose. From Chris Baldick’s book In Frankenstein’s Shadow: “When Victor and his monster refer to themselves back to Paradise Lost--a guiding text with apparently fixed moral roles--they can no longer be sure whether they correspond to Adam, to God, or to Satan, or to some or all of these figures” (44). As we learn from the creature’s experience with the De Lacy family, he does not seem to be an inherently vicious being, but rather a creature, like any other, struggling to survive.
The creature extends his hand to the De Lacy’s in their time of need despite his own misery: “... as often as it was necessary, I cleared their path from the snow, and performed those offices that I had seen done by Felix. I afterwards found that these labours, performed by an invisible hand, greatly astonished them” (Shelley 91). Because the creature has no father figure, no moral compass other than the one born within him, his willingness to assist the De Lacy’s is a genuine act of kindness.
This seems to imply that we are beings designed by a certain predestined nature; if this is the case, however, what can we make of the creature’s “fall from grace?” Regarding the De Lacy’s rejection of the creature, D.S. Neff claims: “That a dramatic undermining of the Creature’s faith in Providence could have constituted a fulcrum in the major plot shift in the Creature’s narrative, and, by extension, the novel as a whole, is substantiated by an examination of the overall plot structure of ... Frankenstein.” This shift in the creature’s narrative is a demise influenced by events completely outside of his control, leaving him no choice but to commit the evils necessary to survive. It seems that the creature was destined from birth, because of hideous features and the absence of a loving father, to a life of terrible pain and suffering.
When the creature explains “evil thenceforth become my good” to Frankenstein, he is unjustly accepting responsibility for the evils that his impetuous creator inflicted upon him (Shelley 188). The creature’s fate is not one achieved by a self-governing decision to become the monster of Dr. Frankenstein’s nightmares, but it is instead an unfortunate consequence of his fight or flight attempt at survival. The rejection of the De Lacys, a rejection of the creature’s faith in the power of Providence, is also the destruction of the creature's fragile identity. It is this confusion of self that forces the creature to adhere to the unfortunate role of a monster, a destiny that seems to have been cast for him from birth.
Works Cited
Baldick, Chris. In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987. Print.
D.S., Neff. ""Invisible Hands:" Patlock, Milton, and the Critique of Providence in Frankenstein."
ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 25.2 (2012): 103-08.
OmniFile Full Text Mega (H.W. Wilson). Web. Sept.-Oct. 2012.
Lamb, John B. "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Milton's Monstrous Myth." Nineteenth-Century
Literature 47.3 (1992): 303-19. JSTOR. Web. 15 Oct. 2012.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Marilyn Butler. Frankensteins: The 1818 Text. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2008. Print.
