Section 1. Introduction
Are our traits and behaviors shaped more by innate character (nature) or by environments and societies that mold us (nurture)? Locke and Rousseau, among other philosophers, have wrestled with this question for centuries. Even today, the tension between nature vs. nurture shapes everything from parenting to AI design. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein offers one of literature’s most haunting experiments in that debate.
An ambitious scientist, Victor Frankenstein created a nameless Creature but recoils in horror at his own work and abandons it to wander the world unguided. Each encounter shapes his understanding of humanity—first curiosity, then hope, and finally despair. The more he learns, the more complex his knowledge becomes. Language becomes the pivotal turning point, awakening in him a desire to know who he is and to belong to human society. Yet, because of his monstrous appearance, he meets only fear and rejection. The more he is denied humanity, the more he becomes what others see—a fiend. His story, however, is not only one of horror but of philosophy.
Written in 1818 by Mary Shelley—daughter of two philosophers—Frankenstein emerged from the Romantic era as a passionate reaction against the Enlightenment’s cold faith in reason. Mary Shelley created the Creature as a “perfect test case” to challenge the optimistic faith of philosophers like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ultimately arguing that nurture and acceptance are more crucial than pure potential.
Frankenstein is a profound critique of Enlightenment-era optimism—the belief that reason and science alone could perfect humanity—viewed through the intertwined themes of responsibility and nurture. Through Victor and the Creature, Shelley transforms Enlightenment optimism into a moral warning: potential means nothing without nurture, and knowledge without responsibility breeds monsters.
Section 2: The Creature as Locke’s Tabula Rasa and the Promise of Optimism
Through her Gothic fiction, Mary Shelley tests Locke’s hypothesis to its breaking point. She asks what would happen if a ‘black slate’ experienced only cruelty and pain rather than love and guidance.
Defining the Tabula Rasa
John Locke, a central thinker of the British Enlightenment, proposed the theory of tabula rasa—the idea that the mind is a blank slate shaped entirely by experience. Though its roots trace back to Aristotle’s De Anima, Locke refined the idea into a modern epistemology that challenged the notion of innate knowledge championed by Plato, Descartes, and Spinoza.
Shelley applies Locke’s tabula rasa in depicting the Creature’s education. At his creation, the Creature has no name, no memories, and no moral understanding—a pure blank slate of consciousness, just as Locke imagined the newborn mind.
In his earliest moments, the Creature is a newborn mind in an adult body, sensing light, dark, heat, cold, hunger, and pain in almost childlike wonder and confusion. He describes his first sensations with striking simplicity: “A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt, at the same time” (Frankenstein, Vol. II, Ch. III.), a line that perfectly illustrates Locke’s belief that knowledge begins in sensory experience. The Creature starts neither good nor evil but entirely impressionable. The Creature even recalls, “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend,” indicating his initial disposition was kind-hearted.
Morality from Observation: The De Lacey Experiment
In Locke’s framework, education and experience shape virtue; without guidance, reason and morality cannot develop. Victor’s abandonment is therefore not just emotional neglect but a philosophical failure—he denies the very nurture that would allow the Creature to become good.
While hidden near the De Lacey family, the Creature displays remarkable empathy: moved by their music, he stops stealing their food and secretly helps them. This moment is the purest expression of Locke’s optimism—that moral sense can arise purely from observing goodness in others. He learns language, yearns for belonging, and seeks acceptance from the human world, yet every step toward society brings new rejection.
The Creature’s descent into violence is not innate but learned. Shelley thus affirms Locke’s belief that nurture shapes character. The monster becomes monstrous only after enduring a world devoid of compassion. In this way, Frankenstein dramatizes Locke’s optimism and his warning: without moral education or empathy, even the purest mind can be corrupted by experience alone.
Section 3: Language, selfhood, and the Double-Edged Sword of Knowledge
One of the most significant intertextual influences in Frankenstein is John Milton’s Paradise Lost. By invoking Milton’s epic, Shelley reframes the Enlightenment question of creation and responsibility through a moral and theological lens. When Shelley has the Creature read Milton’s Paradise Lost, he begins comparing himself and Victor to the figure within Milton’s epic. At first, he sees himself as Adam—a newly created being entitled to love. Later, rejected by his maker, he identifies with Satan, the castaway filled with envy and rage. Through this allusion, Shelley questions the Enlightenment’s optimism by posing a darker theological challenge. What happens when the creator abandons his responsibility to his creation?
The Creature as Adam: The Hope of a Cherished Creation
After discovering Paradise Lost among the books he found in the wilderness, he initially mistakes the poem for literal history. The creature took the lesson to heart and saw himself as Adam. Shelley wrote, “Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence.” The Creature did feel that he was familiar with Adam.
Like Adam, he believes himself to be the first of his kind, yet he soon realizes his tragic difference: Adam was cherished and protected, while he was abandoned and despised. He recalls, “He [Adam] had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his Creator, … but I was wretched, helpless, and alone.” While Adam was cherished by his creator, the Creature was immediately abandoned and left to misery by Victor. God even created Eve as Adam’s companion, but no such being is made for the Creature.
From Adam to Satan: The Wretchedness of Utter Isolation
Realizing he is denied Adam’s blessing, the creature begins to identify with Satan—envying the happiness of others and resenting his creator. Even Satan, he observes, had companions in his fall, while the Creature suffers a loneliness far deeper—utterly alone in a world that rejects him. Therefore, the Creature was even more alone than Satarn.
In his confrontation with Victor, the creature crystallizes his self-understanding: “Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel whom thou divest from joy for no misery.” His plea reveals the moral center of the novel—not vengeance, but the cry of an abandoned creation demanding justice. He is created and abandoned, left to suffer a loneliness he never chose. It is because Victor’s failure to act as a responsible creator transforms a philosophical experiment into a tragedy. Shelley asks, in effect, what if God had abandoned Adam? In doing so, Shelley exposes the limits of Enlightenment faith in reason and progress when divorced from empathy and moral duty.
Learning language marks the Creature’s second awakening. Through words, he moves beyond mere sensation to self-awareness. Yet this awakening comes with pain: language, his greatest gift, becomes a double-edged sword.
When Victor destroys the female companion, the Creature’s hope collapses into despair. Denied even the possibility of love, he turns his pain into vengeance—but even his violence is purposeful. He makes Victor share the isolation that created him, proving that his actions stem not from evil but from longing.
Shelley thus presents knowledge and language as a double-edged sword: they awaken selfhood even as they expose the unbearable awareness of rejection. In this way, the Creature becomes both the Enlightenment’s triumph and its tragedy.
Section 4: The “What if?” of Ethical Treatment: Society as the Corrupting Force
The Noble Savage: Innate Goodness in the State of Nature
In creating the Creature, Shelley also drew on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy of innate human goodness. Rousseau argued that human beings are born innocent, compassionate, and free. It is the civilization and society that corrupt his innate goodness. Rousseau’s concept of the ‘noble savage’—a human uncorrupted by society’s inequalities and prejudices—finds a clear parallel in Frankenstein.” Shelley situates the Creature in isolation within nature, where he embodies Rousseau’s ideal of the ‘noble savage.’
During the early days, the Creature delights in birdsong, moonlight, and the simple beauties of nature. Then, the Creature recalls, “I was delighted when I first discovered that a pleasant sound… proceeded from the throats of the little winged animals.” His recollection captures a childlike innocence and tranquility—precisely the state Rousseau imagined for humanity in its natural form. Rousseau believed that man remains innocent and benevolent so long as he remains uncorrupted by society.
Rousseau’s Warning: Society as the Corrupting Force
Rousseau warned that a society’s inequality, prejudice, and harsh judgment would inevitably corrupt the natural man. Frankenstein vividly illustrates this principle by detailing how the Creature’s encounters with humans gradually introduced him to cruelty, rejection, and violence. Due to his horrible appearance, his first interaction with villagers was met with horror. Even his attempt to save a drowning girl ends with him getting shot by her terrified father. De Lacey’s children see him as a monster even when he approaches the blind old De Lacey with kindness. These experiences gradually kindle his rage at the injustice of humanity. Eventually, the Creature concludes that human cruelty is deeply rooted—a system that inflicts suffering on the innocent.
The Societal Corruption: When Acceptance is Denied
The monster himself explains this chain by saying, “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.” In other words, it was his exposure to hatred and pain from a corrupted society that bred hatred within him. Rousseau could not ask for a more apt demonstration of his thesis that “everything is good in the hand of Nature; all things degenerate in the hands of man.” The Creature’s degeneration begins directly through human cruelty.
Shelley illustrates this transformation by contrasting the Creature’s gentle behavior while observing the De Lacey family with his later turn to violence after repeated rejection. As Rousseau saw, natural man feels innate compassion. The Creature became a fiend because society treated him as one.
Rousseau also warned that a child abandoned without guidance would grow up “the most disfigured of all”—a prediction that perfectly mirrors the Creature’s transformation into hatred and violence. This is another warning Shelly offers; If a being with the potential for goodness receives only neglect and cruelty, the result is inevitably tragic. The novel essentially confirms Rousseau’s warnings—it is social injustice and isolation that create the monster, not an absence of innate goodness.
Section 5: The Tragedy of Shared Guilt and Failed Responsibility
Through the Creature’s tragic story, Shelley asserts the ethical responsibility of the creator to nurture what they bring into being—and reveals the nightmarish consequences when that duty is abandoned. Philosophically, Frankenstein aligns decisively with the ‘nurture’ side of the nature versus nurture debate. The novel is a cautionary tale that pure potential (nature) means little unless it is supported by love, education, and social inclusion (nurture).
The greatest sin of Victor Frankenstein is not that he created life, but that he failed to care for what he created. Victor’s selfish pursuit of knowledge—and his subsequent cowardice—isolates him as completely as the Creature’s appearance isolates his creation. Shelley does not condemn Victor for creating life, but for abandoning it. In the end, Victor lost everyone he loved.
All of Victor’s tragedies—the murders of William, the deaths of Jastine, Henry Cleval, Elizabeth, and his father—stem from the Creature’s rage at being denied compassion. Victor not only abandoned his creation in the wilderness but also destroyed his chance for companionship. The Creature reminds him, “I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?” His plea reveals not evil, but a desperate wish for the nurture he was denied.
Victor’s decision to flee and later destroy the companion represents the ultimate obliteration of his responsibility—the antithesis of the nurture required to fulfill the Creature’s Lockean potential. In the end, Victor chooses destruction over responsibility—and in doing so, brings destruction upon himself. Shelley’s message is unmistakable: the true monstrosity lies not in creation, but in abandoning what one creates.
Section 6: Conclusion
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can be read as the dark inversion of Rousseau’s educational novel Emile. While Rousseau’s Emile depicts a child guided by a devoted tutor into virtue, Frankenstein presents the opposite: an orphaned being, deprived of guidance, who grows into torment and despair.
Frankenstein is not merely a horror story—it is a tragedy. It tells the sorrowful tale of a nameless Creature, denied even the dignity of an identity. Dehumanized at birth and abandoned to face society’s injustice alone, he endures isolation from the moment of his creation. The true horror of Shelley’s story lies not in the Creature’s form, but in the negligence and rejection he suffers.
Shelley suggests that the potential for human goodness requires cultivation. She does not reject Locke’s or Rousseau’s optimism, but she insists their ideals hold true only when society fulfills its nurturing role. The Creature possessed the capacity for virtue—if only he had received proper guidance. Being born innocent, Shelley reminds us, is not enough.
In his final words to Walton, the Creature does not gloat in victory; he calls himself “a fallen angel” and seeks death, acknowledging the tragedy of what he had become. He was not destined to be a demon; he was made into one. Walton, who bears witness to this tale, learns its final lesson. He turns his ship back from a perilous quest, recognizing that ambition without empathy leads only to ruin—just as it did for Victor. In this way, Shelley closes her novel not with horror, but with moral awakening: the redemption of understanding, even in the face of tragedy.