"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.
"I often referred the several situations, as their similarity struck me, to my own. Like Adam,
"I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence;
"but his state was far different from mine in every other respect.
"He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous,
"guarded by the especial care of his Creator;
"he was allowed to converse with, and acquire knowledge from, beings of a superior nature:
"but I was wretched, helpless, and alone. 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."
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To fully understand what Shelley is trying to tell us about the monster in Frankenstein by
associating him with Satan and Paradise Lost, there's something you have to know about Milton's great work.
You see, many have argued that Satan is actually the protagonist in Paradise Lost, even though Milton would not explicitly come out and say it.
One of the great espouses of this theory was proto-romantic
William Blake and this idea was all the rage amongst the romantics.
Shelley would have almost certainly thought of the character of Satan in these terms. You see, in Paradise Lost
it's easy to see Satan's character as the great advocate of freedom, the rebellious symbol of liberty.
It's from him that we get that immortal line, "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."
I mean, swap in some different proper nouns, that line could come from any number of hero characters resisting oppression.
Because to him, being free of all yokes is worth any price. In the book, Satan is zealous,
courageous, bold, loyal to those who have been loyal to him. But most of all, no matter what the cost,
he is single mindedly opposed to surrendering to the will of Heaven: to unquestioningly obeying orders given to him.
By associating the monster with Satan, what Shelley is hinting to her reader is that much like the devil in Paradise Lost, the
protagonist in her book may not be who you expect. It may not be the human fashioned and divine image
but rather the creature whose physical form we are told is a mockery of such.
And it's from Milton's portrayal of Satan that I believe Shelley drew the inspiration for some of the monster's most notable features.
Principally among them his power of speech.
Like Satan, the monster in Frankenstein is more articulate and more eloquent than any other character in the story. For both characters,
their outer appearance belies their inner thoughtfulness and their ability to express grand ideas.
Frankenstein's monster is a grotesque creature
cobbled together from the corpses of the dead, and Satan was made hideous by being cast into
Hell before Paradise Lost even begins. And yet in each case, the wars they fight are
already lost. In each case,
they are fighting a war that they have no chance to overcome.
One of them fights God, the other one fights human nature.
And yet as you read, these characters managed to convince you that there might yet be hope for their cause-- that there might be
some way yet unseen to find success even though by the very nature of the works
they exist in, we know these characters have lost long before their battles even begin. And through those lost causes and their eloquence,
both characters seduce the reader into overlooking the evil in their nature, for they do both share that same
consuming flaw-- the desire for vengeance.
When Satan realizes that he's lost his war with Heaven, he says,
"What though the field be lost? All is not lost; the unconquerable Will, And the study of revenge,
"immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield: And what is else not to be overcome?"
And Shelley plays with the monsters' knowledge of Paradise Lost,
making the monster see just how similar he is to Milton's Satan, having the monster describe his own killing frenzy by saying,
"Evil thenceforth became my good", nearly a direct quote of Satan's words,
"All Good to me is lost. Evil be thou my good". In that moment, Shelley is trying to make us realize that these are not heroes to emulate but rather
heroes to pity. Her book is not an adventure or even a horror story;
it's a tragedy, a tragedy of human weakness,
of lofty moral hopes dashed upon petty and sordid ground. And just like the
juxtapositions in Plutarch, the parallel between Satan and the monster forces us to consider another juxtaposition, for if the monster
so clearly mirrors Milton's Satan,
then is Victor Frankenstein supposed to mirror Milton's God?
Because uh, he doesn't. And that comparison serves to make us realise just how weak and unfit a creator
Frankenstein is.
He is not omnipotent. In fact, a mere fright leaves him laid up in bed for months, and whenever his emotions overwhelm him,
he's consumed by delirium and fever.
He doesn't even comprehend the responsibilities of fatherhood or creation. He abandons the life
he brought into being the instant he sees how ugly it is. And in that too,
we see how unlike Milton's God Victor is. For Milton's God creates creatures in his own image,
whereas Frankenstein, in his haste to see his hopes fulfilled, creates a creature that is a mockery of his image.
But these characters are similar in one way.
Neither Milton's God nor Shelley's Victor Frankenstein are self-critical enough to see that they are hurting the very
beings who they're supposed to be responsible for.
Both of these books are infused with the same sense that these creators could have easily averted this tragedy that
unfolds had their characters been just slightly different. And in both of these works, the created
perpetuate that tragedy. This is what makes the tragedy of Frankenstein's so effective. From the outside as readers, as
observers, we can see how easily these tragedies might have been avoided and yet we can also see how completely impossible
avoiding them actually is. The book asks us to look at our own lives
through this lens. Where have we let our natures lead us to tragedies that might have easily been avoided?
That we could have prevented if we were aware and willing enough to take a step back and for just a moment act
beyond our nature? Lastly though,
there is one more tragedy
embedded in the monsters association with Satan, and that is that he himself knows which character
he's like. He knows who he is, but he wants to be more.
It's clear that he wants to be Adam, with a loving creator who builds for him a paradise and helps guide him through life, and
we're forced to think, at least in part, that it's out of this yearning, this desire to be Adam, that the monster
emulates Adam and demands a mate, the action that
ultimately brings everybody to ruin because the monster is not Adam and Victor isn't God. And so all of this knowledge,
everything the monster learns about humanity as an outsider peering in, leads him to say one telling line.
He says, "Increase in knowledge only discovered to me more clearly
"what a wretched outcast I was."
That is the true tragedy of Frankenstein. The monster has all of the building blocks of a great individual,
and yet he is very literally built in such a way that the world won't let him be.
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