Major Themes in Frankenstein

[This list has been composed with the idea of assisting readers to trace major themes as they unfold through the intricate texture of the novel. Of course, the critical commentary touches upon these themes as well, but, since each voice is individual and the essays trace their own intricate paths, no attempt has been made to cross-index the commentary thematically. Ed.]

• Adversarial Relations: involving motifs of antagonism, hatred, revenge; the definition of one's self by one's opposite.
• Alienation: a sense of not belonging, either to a community or to one's own sense of self.
• The Beautiful: as an Enlightenment category of aesthetics, invoked in conjunction with or opposition to the sublime.
• Benevolence: among the highest of Enlightenment virtues, the active expression of love and sympathy for one's fellow beings.
• Candor: a social mode highly esteemed by a writer like Jane Austen, an openness expressing a lack of dissimulation and a sense of common bonds with one's fellows.
• Social Class: linked to political power, access to education and justice throughout the novel.
• Creation: involving both creativity, procreation, and the right and/or ability to create.
• Death: the frequency of death, and the place of the dead, are both involved in this theme.
• Delusion: the opposite of candor and truth, dissimulation involving others or oneself.
• Depravity: a word subsuming both a sense of sin and original sin.
• Destiny: or fate, or necessity; both as it may be self-energized or seen as an external force in control of the self.
• Doubling: involving acting in the manner of another, art copying life, similarities of action between two figures, or the eerie sense of there being a second self, a Doppelgänger.
• Duty: both one's sense of obligation to one's fellow beings and one's sense of responsibility for oneself.
• Education: how as well as what one learns.
• Family: the value of the domestic circle is a central issue of this novel.
• Family -- Domestic Affections: the value of shared and loving intimacy to be discerned, and experienced, in family life.
• Family -- Mother: the role and the relationships established by the maternal figure.
• Family -- Orphan: this surprisingly common condition in the novel suggests an obverse condition to that of the enclosing domestic affections..
• Family -- Patriarch: the role and relationships established by, or expected of, fathers in the novel.
• Family -- Son: the role and responsibilities of male children in the novel.
• Female Friendship: the value of bonding among women.
• Gender Roles: how one fulfills or departs from stereotyped expectations of the male or female.
• Guilt: Not just the sense of remorse, but how it is generated, and its value or dangers.
• Health: both its abstract meaning as a sign of well-being, and the specific ways in which an individual's health becomes affected by mental and physical conditions.
• Imagination: a Romantic icon, highly problematized in the course of the novel.
• Justice: how it functions; who is in control of it; who suffers or is privileged by it.
• Knowledge: its uses and abuses.
• Language: both how it is acquired and functions and how it affects communicaiton among human beings.
• Madness: the novel implicitly questions what is to be construed as sane behavior, particularly in the character of Victor Frankenstein.
• Male Friendship: male bonding among the principal human characters is unusually pronounced, as is the fact of the Creature's isolation from it.
• Naming: the Creature in this edition is identified as "the Creature" because that is what he calls himself and he is given no other name; but he is constantly defined, especially by Victor, by other names.
• Narrative: both the self-consciousness with which characters in the novel attend to their narratives, and the larger question of how its events are controlled through their telling.
• Nature: the meaning and function of "nature" in the novel.
• Nurturing: involving its constituent elements and the value accorded its operations; also, by contrast, what happens when these are not present.
• Passion: as opposed to the "domestic affections," the values comprised by it, the implicit dangers within it to the self and others.
• Perspective: involving the ways in which viewpoint can shift meaning throughout the novel.
• Politics: suggestive of various ways in which contemporary political and social issues emerge within the novel.
• Purpose of Life: involving the many different, sometimes conflicting, senses of ultimate purpose driving or surrounding the novel's characters.
• Religion: its individual and social functions.
• Self-Analysis: involving the importance, or dangers, of holding a mirror up to the self.
• Sensibility: essentially, the emotional life, but, in a broader sense, involving elements of gender, psychological balance, social acceptance.
• Sexuality: the role, also the displacement, of physical desire.
• Slavery: involving both the sense of one's control by an external power and its social significance.
• Solitude: involving its effects on various characters in the novel
• Sublime: a crucial term in Enlightenment aesthetics, in contrast to the beautiful; frequently invoked throughout the novel.
• Sympathy: the cardinal human virtue of the Enlightenment, the basis of all fellow feeling.
• Truth: involving not just candor but the problematics of fiction.
• Utility: concerning the contribution, or lack thereof, of individuals to a common weal.
• Vegetarianism: what meaning we may attach to the fact that there is only one vegetarian in the novel, and he is isolated from everyone else.
• Writing/Communication: involving why one writes, how one writes, to whom one writes -- or speaks.