Frankenstein

In all honesty, procrastination has found me a little too willing to employ it in the last few weeks. I have now snapped out of that cycle, but only after I realized that I hadn’t the foggiest clue as to what theme I would choose to write about, and my topic proposal was due the next day. I made up my mind on three different themes, and then changed it again before finally coming to a decision to write about the “Nature vs. Nurture” theme. Finding something that I could write about wasn’t the problem. I could talk all day about obsession, guilt, isolation, loneliness etc. The hard part is actually finding sources that I could use to draw information from for these same themes.
I did find a couple of good sources for my selected theme. One that most closely and plainly reflects my views on the subject is an article by Percy Bysshe Shelly titled, “On Frankenstein”. He begins the article inviting the reader to ponder what might have been the thoughts of the author, to produce such a work of peculiar nature. He then goes on to describe what I would call the tempo of the book. “We are led breathless with suspense and sympathy, and the heaping up of incident on incident, and the working of passion out of passion. We cry “hold, hold! Enough!”- but there is yet something to come; and, like the victim whose history it relates we think we can bear no more, and yet more is to be born.”(Shelley)
Percy Shelly explains that the direct moral of the book is “Treat a person ill, and he will become wicked.”(Shelly) I’m tempted to finish this posting with quotes from this section of the article because they so blatantly reiterate the theme of Nature vs. Nurture as it applies to the Monster. He wasn’t a wicked creature from the day of his creation, but he did not experience a single interaction with a human that didn’t have a negative result.