Mary Shelley’s Criticism of Anthropomorphic Compassion in Frankenstein

Abstract

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has produced numerous criticisms and adaptations, which proves its enduring power, just as the undead Creature in the novel has fascinated generations of readers. Yet, while critical attention is often given to the two main characters, Victor Frankenstein and his deformed “son,” the Creature, readers tend to be oblivious to the significance of the novel’s framing narrative and its narrator, Robert Walton. This essay examines Walton as the moral center of the novel, in comparison with Frankenstein. Though less heroic than Frankenstein and less eloquent than the Creature, Walton, as a stand-in for the reader, demonstrates the power of compassion, the important virtue championed in modern European society. His non-anthropomorphic compassion mediated by language can be juxtaposed with Frankenstein’s immediate affection originating from his self-projection. While Frankenstein’s visually-oriented, kinship-based identification is often restricted to his family, Walton’s compassion towards both his fellow humans and the nonhuman Creature transcends the affective boundaries of the familiar and the foreign. Walton’s sympathy illustrates Shelley’s appropriation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idea of the pity generated between speaker and listener in the process of storytelling. Following Rousseau, Shelley contests the definitions of sympathy provided by eighteenth-century British materialist philosophers as well as the Enlightenment idea of human perfectibility.