Overview Writing about motif is key to understanding the author's theme. Given that a motif is a repeated idea, a theme is often the author's perspective ABOUT that repeated idea. These motif questions are typically open-ended and serve as questions for debate in class or for followup in writing assignments.
What does the fact that Victor makes the monster eight feet tall because working with larger parts is easier to do suggest about Victor's attitude to the creature?
Why does Victor reject the creature he has labored so long to create?
Does Victor see himself as a father-figure or a mother-figure? In what way are those two parental roles different, and how would they affect or change Victor's relationship to the monster?
Consider also Victor's relationship with his own parents. Is that relationship echoed or paralleled in Victor's creation of his monster?
Compare these two scenes: Victor's dream of kissing Elizabeth after the monster is created and Victor's wedding night. In both, we see a recurrent pattern in which desire is conflated with death -- one concern quickly shifts into the other concern. What does this desire/death overlap tell us about Victor's own psychology or his relationship to women?
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Bride of Frankenstein: Victor's Second Creation
When the monster begs Victor to create a female counterpart, Victor initially agrees, but then second-guesses himself and fears he is making a terrible mistake. What is it that he fears about the possibility of a female monster?
Followup to #1: What do Victor's fears suggest about his attitude toward women?
Examine the language Victor uses to describe his destruction of the female monster. What do these words suggest or evoke?
In her chapter "Usurping the Female," from Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters, author Anna Mellor argues, "By stealing the female's control over reproduction, Frankenstein has eliminated the female's primary biological function and source of cultural power. Indeed, for the simple purpose of human survival, Frankenstein has eliminated the necessity to have females at all. One of the deepest horrors of this novel is Frankenstein's implicit goal of creating a society for men only: his creature is male; he refuses to create a female; there is no reason that the race of immortal beings he hoped to propagate should not be exclusively male." Do you agree with Mellor's basic assertion that Victor is trying to create a world in which women are fundamentally irrelevant?
_____________________________________________________ Class and Wealth Issues
During his time with the De Lacey family, the monster reads about social inequality, saying, "I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty; ... I learned that the possessions most esteemed...were high and unsullied descent united with riches." The monster is disbelieving and dismayed that this inequity is the case. How is her novel a commentary on this political injustice?