Personality
As depicted by Shelley, the monster is a sensitive, emotional creature whose only aim is to share his life with another sentient being like himself. The novel portrays him as intelligent and literate, having read Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives, and The Sorrows of Young Werther. He is driven by despair and loneliness to acts of cruelty and murder.
From the beginning the monster is rejected by everyone he meets. He realizes from the moment of his "birth" that even his own creator cannot stand be around him; this is obvious when Frankenstein says "…one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped…" Upon seeing his own reflection, he realizes that he too cannot stand to see himself.
Frankenstein's creature is left to find his way in the world alone from the moment he wakes up. He must learn to walk, gather food, and survive by himself. His first encounter with people he is mistreated and scorned. The creature does not know how to talk or how things work in the world. He is stumbling through the world without any help. Living in the forest and traveling by night in order to avoid people. He finally finds a safe place to hide where he was able to observe a kind family. The cottagers were kind to each other and worked together. This is the first time the creature has seen kindness in people and been able to observe how people interact with one another. He stayed in this hiding place watching the people who lived in the cottage during the day. At night he would do things around the cottage he had learned by watching them such as chopping fire wood. He stayed for many months and was able to learn to speak, write, and read by observing them and finding books. The more he learned the more his desire to be accepted increased. For months he tried to find a way to introduce himself to the family in hopes of being accepted by them. All he wanted was to be accepted and loved like he had observed from the cottagers and stories he read.
Unlike Hollywood depictions of Frankenstein’s monster, Mary Shelley's creature has more humanity. The creature in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is striving to find his place in the world. His desire to be accepted and loved is no different than any other person. While the creature is telling Frankenstein about his life since he was created the reader can empathize with the creature and his desire to be accepted. Then slowly Mary Shelley begins to reveal how the creature becomes the monster his exterior shows. After the creature is denied love and acceptance by the cottagers and everyone he runs into on his voyage to find his creator it pushes him farther and farther down the dark path to destruction. When the creature is denied the love and acceptance he desires he sets out to destroy everything that is important to his creator. The creature becomes the monster
In the 1931 film adaptation, the creature is depicted as mute and bestial, unlike Shelly's original character. In the subsequent sequel, Bride of Frankenstein, the creature learns to speak and discover his feelings, although his intelligence and capacity of speech remains limited. In the second sequel, Son of Frankenstein, the creature is again rendered inarticulate. Following a brain transplant in the third sequel, The Ghost of Frankenstein, the Monster speaks with the voice and personality of the brain donor. This was continued after a fashion in the scripting for the fourth sequel, Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, but the dialogue was excised before release. The monster was effectively mute in later sequels, though he is heard to refer to Count Dracula as his 'Master' in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
The creature is often seen to be pyrophobic (afraid of fire).
Read more about this topic: Frankenstein's Monster
Famous quotes containing the word personality:
“Western man represents himself, on the political or psychological stage, in a spectacular world-theater. Our personality is innately cinematic, light-charged projections flickering on the screen of Western consciousness.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“The great pines stand at a considerable distance from each other. Each tree grows alone, murmurs alone, thinks alone. They do not intrude upon each other. The Navajos are not much in the habit of giving or of asking help. Their language is not a communicative one, and they never attempt an interchange of personality in speech. Over their forests there is the same inexorable reserve. Each tree has its exalted power to bear.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“We have no higher life that is really apart from other people. It is by imagining them that our personality is built up; to be without the power of imagining them is to be a low-grade idiot.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)