In Frankenstein, Shelley highlights the characters’ physicality in order to create tension around typical conceptions of life and human-ness. Underscoring the monster’s emotional and intellectual advancements, Shelley also focuses on his physical state in portraying his superhuman vitality – she writes that the monster “leaped from his station, and, running with the swiftness of lightning, plunged into the lake.”(155) On the other hand, Frankenstein the man deteriorates physically and mentally until he is pushed to death. In discussing his mental deterioration, Shelley portrays him as mad and likens him to the dead: “My ravings, as I afterwards heard, were frightful”(140) “I was a shattered wreck–the shadow of a human being. My strength was gone. I was a mere skeleton”(153). This contrasts sharply with the superhuman vitality and health that the monster has.
Shelley also focuses on the monster’s physicality during the emergence of his human-like senses in the beginning of the narrative. “A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt, at the same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses”(80) At first he describes how, “Darkness then came over me, and troubled me”(80). (This is later paralleled against the man’s loss of eyesight: “As the images that floated before me become more distinct, I grew feverish; a darkness pressed around me”(141).
Shelley emphasizes both the monster’s and the man’s physicality in order to exaggerate their respective gain and loss of human-ness; ultimately, this troubles our conception of manhood and humanity.
-Diana Zhu