Blog Post 4

by ederken

Figuring out how and why things function in a certain way has always been a human drive.  One of the more recent developments, psychology, has led scholars and researchers to provide reasons as to why humans behave in certain ways and attempt to generalize the behavior of humans.  In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the minds of the characters exhibit traits that correlate to Freud’s antithetical system; however, Freud was born almost a century after Shelley published her novel.  This correlation shows that similar features of the human have always existed in humanity, it just took many years for someone to name them.

 

For example, Shelley portrays the monster as a pseudo Oedipus figure.  He wanted a mate, who he could not have because Victor was withholding her from the monster by not creating a mate for him.  To retaliate, the monster kills the people to whom Victor is closest with the hope that he will be able to be with a mate.  Although Freud coined the term, Shelley had experienced a similar situation.  Additionally, Victor had a close relationship with his mother; after her death, his love was displaced onto his cousin Elizabeth.  With the void in his life that his mother’s death created, he was constantly ignoring his father and looking for ways to spite him.