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Both Mary Shelley and Gris Grimly suggest that the need for purpose drives all humans, though it does not necessarily drive them to the same ends. Rather, the search for purpose can be both creative and destructive, inspiring the emotions that bring people closer to one another but also contributing to obsession and self-absorption that can drive them apart.
The frame story’s narrative of Arctic exploration immediately establishes this theme. Walton writes, “Nothing contributes so much to tranquillize the mind as a steady purpose—a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye” (3); he and his crew are preparing to take a ship to the North Pole to discover what they may there, and Walton is willing to risk his own life and theirs for the pursuit of science. He hopes to be the first to explore a new land and is energized by the thought of it being so dangerous. At the same time, he longs for human connection, lamenting his isolation in his letters to his sister. His story thus introduces the twin forms that the desire to lead a meaningful life can take: the search for connection versus the search for individual achievement.
Frankenstein’s need for purpose predominately assumes the latter form. He wants to discover and to be remembered: “Wealth was an inferior object; but what glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!” (22). In making his monster, Frankenstein does not consider his responsibility for his creation, nor how his absence might affect his loved ones; instead, his whole being is devoted to this single task. Ironically, Frankenstein immediately rejects the results of his creation and spends the rest of his life either trying to outrun it or to destroy it. While this clearly demonstrates the negative consequences of Frankenstein’s single-minded pursuit of his goals, Frankenstein nevertheless tries to encourage Walton and his crew to fulfill their mission when he first meets them. It is only in his final moments that Frankenstein warns Walton against pursuing discovery for its own sake, inspiring Walton to turn his ship back toward the south.
By contrast, the monster’s driving need, at least initially, comes from a desire to be loved and accepted. He desperately wants to be useful to humans and to befriend them, going out of his way to help a family by gathering wood and food for them. Upon doing so, however, the monster is rejected, and his purpose remains unfulfilled. With no sense of why his creator made him to guide him, the monster ultimately creates a purpose for himself out of Frankenstein’s rejection, turning to revenge and violence. Like Frankenstein, the monster adopts a narrow view and a single goal, wanting only to hurt the person who brought him into existence: “I have devoted my creator to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin” (192). In the end, however, the monster’s revenge proves hollow and unsatisfying, underscoring that true purpose lies in the human connection that he craved but never received.
Shelley’s Frankenstein is often read as a parable concerning the dangers of hubris, and Grimly’s adaptation follows in this tradition. Like Shelley’s protagonist, Grimly’s Frankenstein loses everything as a result of his scientific ambitions, but Grimly also uses the visual medium of the graphic novel to hint at the broader dangers of Frankenstein’s quest.
Frankenstein’s ambition leads him to neglect and nearly forget the outside world from a young age; it creates an obsession with discovery for its own sake and a desire to accomplish something great. Frankenstein notes, “[T]he world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover” (19). Frankenstein begins by reading about alchemy and other types of natural philosophy and soon becomes convinced that “ordinary” science is dull and unambitious. He wants to make a discovery that will change the entire course of history, and he sets his sights on conquering death itself—a figurative challenge to the fundamental principles of nature and thus a sign of excessive pride and self-confidence.
The costs of this pursuit are evident even before Frankenstein succeeds in animating the monster. Frankenstein himself enters a kind of living death, reflecting, “I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit” (37). He neglects his family and friends, rarely writes to them or visits home, and stops eating and sleeping. When he finally achieves his goal, his response is not joy or even relief but “breathless horror and disgust” (42); in a sign of the misguidedness of his ambition, he cannot bear the result of his own pursuit. Ultimately, the monster kills everyone he cares about, sending Frankenstein into a state of misery, grief, and guilt. Frankenstein starts to think of himself as “the true murderer” (70), knowing that it is ultimately his fault that his family was killed. On his death bed, Frankenstein warns Walton, “Seek happiness in tranquility, and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries” (188). He knows now that the desire for glory and achievement can cost a person everything.
Beyond this personal toll, Gris Grimly’s Frankenstein suggests that ambition, even for something as seemingly beneficial as scientific advancement, can have catastrophic consequences for society at large. Though the characters’ clothing suggests a 19th-century setting, other details of Grimly’s illustrations are much more modern, from the electric chair used to execute Justine to the handgun Frankenstein carries as he scours the house on his wedding night. Besides giving the work a vaguely steampunk air, these anachronisms show the potentially deadly applications of scientific knowledge and the dangers of the desire for “progress” at any cost.
Two monsters exist in the story of Frankenstein: the literal monster that Frankenstein creates and the monster that develops within Frankenstein himself. Neither character is “born” evil, however. Rather, both Shelley and Grimly show that their most horrific actions result from trauma and tragedy.
Despite his frightening appearance, Frankenstein’s monster begins life as an innocent and curious creature who does not harm or hate anyone. He spends the first weeks of his life learning about the world. He is not instantly able to talk or even understand the information his own senses provide; all of this knowledge comes with observation and experience, just as it would for a child. Even having been abandoned by his creator, the monster initially wants nothing more than companionship; he finds a small family living a secluded life and spends days watching them to figure out why humans do what they do, hoping he might one day share in their happiness. However, the monster ultimately cannot overcome the prejudice of humans, as they judge him before he even speaks or acts. In telling his story to Frankenstein, the monster cites the family’s rejection as a turning point in his moral arc, asking, “Shall I respect man when he contemns me?” (115): He reached out with love and kindness and was met with violence, so he deals violence in return. The monster again underscores the connection between his isolation and persecution and his “monstrosity” when he demands a companion from Frankenstein, stating, “The love of another will destroy the cause of my crimes” (117). If he was loved by at least one person, the monster suggests, he would not feel so hateful toward those who reject him.
Frankenstein does not experience the same ostracization the monster does, but misery follows him everywhere he goes even before he creates the monster; an early and formative experience is the loss of his mother. His misery only intensifies as a result of his creation, and he eventually becomes a monster as he succumbs to grief, revenge, and hatred. The change is clear by the time Frankenstein is accused of Henry’s murder; as the locals observe of him, “It is the custom of the Irish to hate villains” (147). By this time, Frankenstein is haggard in appearance and looks nearly dead. He is not the spry and curious person he once was and in fact increasingly resembles the monster himself as he bares his teeth in a skeletal face. The process only accelerates after losing the rest of his loved ones: He becomes “possessed by a maddening rage” and puts all of his effort into finding and killing the monster (168). Because Frankenstein is consumed by a “deep and eternal grief” (170), his body slowly starts to die, once again underscoring his connection to his creation. He no longer recognizes himself, nor does he gain any joy from the world around him. In the end, Frankenstein becomes the very thing he hated and tried to destroy.
The theme of responsibility complements the themes of purpose and ambition: If Frankenstein’s first error is creating the monster, his second is failing to consider what he might owe to the being he created. This has tragic consequences, which both Shelley and Grimly use to illustrate the importance of owning one’s actions.
Frankenstein’s rejection of responsibility is immediate upon creating the monster. He does not see the horror of what he made until it is too late, but this belated recognition does not inspire any sort of reckoning, much less any attempt to empathize with the monster, which he refers to as “the demoniacal corpse to which [he] had so miserably given life” (45). Instead, he flees, attempting to escape what he did rather than confronting it; Grimly’s illustrations of the moment depict Frankenstein glancing surreptitiously backward, as though he knows what he’s doing is wrong. From this point on, Frankenstein lives in fear of the monster he created, despising it and considering it to be a blight upon humanity.
Two years pass and Frankenstein is met by his monster, unable to escape him forever. It is only upon hearing the monster’s story of rejection that Frankenstein reflects upon his actions and their larger consequences: “I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind, and endowed with the will and power to effect purposes of horror, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me” (60). As loved ones around him fall victim to the monster’s vengeful wrath, Frankenstein starts to feel like “the true murderer” for creating something he failed to take responsibility for (70): “For the first time I felt what the duties of a creator towards his creature were” (85). It is these new feelings of guilt and responsibility that lead Frankenstein to agree to create a second monster for the first, but when he breaks his promise and the monster retaliates, this new wisdom gives way to anger and vengeance. When Frankenstein nears death, hindsight finally catches up with him, and all he can do is warn Walton not to take the same path as he did.
Similarly, the monster does not take responsibility for his own acts until Frankenstein is dead: “It is true that I am a wretch; I have murdered the lovely and the helpless” (192). By then, his guilt and regret are meaningless, as he has already killed many people and inadvertently led Frankenstein to his death as well.
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By Mary Shelley