Complex attitude short essay

Mary Shelley illustrates Victor’s complex attitude towards his work, by first demonstrating that Victor’s motives are misguided. Victor desires to feel powerful, and for this reason he states, “Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through…” (Shelley 32).  The way Victor says this is as if he desires to be some powerful sorcerer. In addition, he wants to have a high status in the world. He states that “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.” (Shelley 32). Thus, Victor, rather than thinking about the good of human kind and what the ability to create life means, solely thinks about the awe of his own work. He does not evaluate the consequences of his actions, since he is so focused on the success of his scientific project.

 Secondly, Shelly demonstrates Victor’s complex attitude through his tense words. Victor’s words are dark and filled with loathing of his deed. For example, he states, “No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane…” (Shelley 32). “Hurricane” implies darkness and destruction; the reader gets a sense that his feelings are destructive. Other descriptions set the scene for a dark setting and deed, with words such as “My cheeks had grown pale,” “The moon gazed on my midnight labours,” “tortured the living animal, “my limbs now tremble,” “filthy creation,” etc. The reader realizes that the scientist Victor is doing is bizarre.

Hence, Shelley portrays Victor’s attitude towards his work through the two paragraphs of the passage on page 32. The first paragraph illustrates Victor’s attitudes towards the motives of his experiment, whereas the second paragraph illustrates Victor’s disgust with the experiment itself.