Frankenstein: Educating a Culture Essay Example

of dangerous conduct and focuses on the problematic influence of education, both social and literary, as it molds both individuals and classes in society. The text describes again and again the process by which individual characters are formed and, as with the male characters whose stories she will describe in greater detail, Mary Shelley offers one version of female upbringing that broadly examines the impact of environment on character.In the treatment of all major female characters, Caroline Beaufort, Elizabeth, and Justine, Frankenstein reflects cultural anxieties about the influence of lower-class culture on vulnerable groups in society like women. Caroline Beaufort, who "possessed a mind of an uncommon mould" (32) is the model of virtuous femininity rescued from class degradation. Caroline, rescued by bourgeois benevolence, seeks out other girls similarly situated, rescuing them from lower-class influences and educating them in the virtues of feminine domesticity.

Thus she finds Elizabeth, who's seemingly innate, upper-class feminine virtue makes her shine amid a family of "dark-eyed, hardy little vagrants" (34). Justine Moritz is also saved and educated by Victor's mother, whose very "phraseology and manners" (65) she imitates. Since each woman is rescued from the mediocrity and ugliness of an uneducated existence, and thrives under proper middle-class instruction, Shelley is clearly asserting the stabilizing nature of bourgeois education for defenseless groups in society.To further highlight women's vulnerability, Shelley concentrates her female characters' development on how they are affected by society, rather than by any choices they make. It seems ironic that Shelley, who was the daughter of a feminist and a social radical, limits her treatment of women to an exposition of frailty and concentrates her text on the education

of her male characters and its consequences.

The novel's structural unity is supplied by the autobiographical narratives of the parallel figures of Walton, Victor, and the monster, and in particular their educations.It is in these male characters that Shelley explores education as a determinate of behavior and each narrator explains himself in terms of his childhood education, in particular his reading. Walton described how books, the primary tool of his self-education, have shaped him and his choices. He characterizes himself as "passionately fond of reading" (16) but adds that as a boy he was "self-educated: for the first fourteen years of my life I ran wild on a common, and read nothing but our uncle Thomas's book of voyages" (19).He bemoans this neglect: "Now I am twenty-eight, and am in reality more illiterate than many schoolboys of fifteen" (19). His goals, to confer "inestimable benefit.

. . on all mankind to the last generation, by discovering a passage near the pole. . .

or by ascertaining the secret of the magnet" (16) are a direct contradiction to his father's dying wish that "had forbidden my uncle to allow me to embark in a seafaring life" (17). Clearly Walton's personal struggles are a result of unguided childhood reading that has been almost the sole influence over him.By contrast, the world in which Victor grows up seems an educator's paradise, with all the elements necessary to turn happy children into virtuous adults. His parents took very seriously their charge to care for their child, "the innocent and helpless creature bestowed on them by Heaven, whom to bring up to good, and whose future lot it was in

their hands to direct to happiness or misery, according as they fulfilled their duties toward me" (33-34).

The happy family lives in Geneva (the ideal embodiment of middle-class ruling values), a republic composed of virtuous businessmen like Alphonse Frankenstein, with "simpler and happier manners than those which prevail in the great monarchies that surround it" (65). In contrast to Walton, Victor credits his parents with close guidance of his education, but like Walton, it is a book that shapes his future actions-the work of Cornelius Agrippa, the medieval natural philosopher.He calls it, and the other books he is lead to read, "wild fancies" (39); like Walton's sea stories, they are unsanctioned, dangerous explorations of the mysterious. And they have obvious power: although first Alphonse Frankenstein and later M. Krempe dismiss them as worthless, they start Victor down the path that results in his awful creation. Victor's reaction to Agrippa is partly determined by his father's careless dismissal of the book as "sad trash" (39) and Victor imitates that his father has been neglectful of his parental duties when he says:If, instead of this remark, my father had taken the pains to explain to me, that the principles of Agrippa had been entirely exploded, and that a modern system of science introduced.

. . I would certainly have thrown Agrippa aside. . . It is even possible, that the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin.

" (39) As Walton disobeys his father's injunction against seafaring, so Victor disobeys his father's will in pursuing his interest; further, he seems to imply that his father is responsible for that

act, and for its consequences.The novel thus raises the central issue of dangerous conduct and its causes. Who is responsible for the train of events beginning with Agrippa and ending with the annihilation of the entire Frankenstein family? Though Victor describes himself at times in his education "left to struggle with a child's blindness, added to a student's thirst for knowledge" (40), the novel is complicated by making Alphonse scientifically ignorant rather than careless and adding Victor's innate longing to penetrate the secrets of science.In both Walton and Victor, Shelley shows the complex influences of social and literary education in one's development and both are representative of the problematic 're-education' of the ruling class in Shelley's time-no longer traditional nobles, but a new educated middle class. The monster provides Shelley's most obvious exploration of the influence of experience and education in shaping one's values and it additionally is where her Enlightened ideas are most pronounced.

As with Walton and Victor, we see in the story of the monster the complex question of reading, upbringing (or lack thereof), and will. The creature's sensory development, as described from his moment of "birth," echoes Enlightenment ideas of sensory experience as the source of thought and Shelley goes on to describe the various encounters with people and literature that give rise to the monster's evil. Books literally shape his initial conception of reality, giving him the ideological concepts by which to explain the social behavior he witnesses.It is because the world offered in the books so radically differs from his experiences with humanity that the monster "declared everlasting war against the species, and, more than all, against him who had

formed me, and sent me forth to this insupportable misery" (136).

When the monster calls his story an "account of the progress of my intellect" (127), it signifies that his education has been more than a personal struggle complicated by hatred, fear, and neglect. Shelley uses the monster to represent cultural anxieties about the culturally displaced, newly literate, rising working class lacking class traditions to guide or guard them.Clearly Shelley is commenting on the "criminal potential" of the lower classes amid social disorder, but she is rather firm in her depiction of hatred spurning hatred, as the monster only reacts to irresponsible and inadequate education. Though Mary Shelley's rather timid Introduction credits the 'incitement' of Frankenstein to her husband, she is careful to claim its central ideas as hers and hers alone. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a time of tremendous upheaval and revolutionary voices rang out to reshape every aspect of life.Mary Shelley's voice was a fitting, if somewhat surprising one to join them.

Her novel immersed itself in the revolutionary spirit of her times, and is a near perfect example of the application of Enlightenment philosophy to society. Her exploration of societal influences and the importance of education on the individual continue to be issues central to Western culture. The endurance of Frankenstein is a tribute to the social perceptiveness and literary talent of young Mary Shelley, who told a story of not only one man's struggle to reconcile social and literary experiences, but also Europe's struggle to do the same.