Criticism Summary

• Frankenstein is Realist because it is impossible to determine any true good or evil, although evil is extremely present. Victor is a victim of ambition and the monster a victim of society.
• Victor and his monster are “both aspects of the same being.” They both become increasingly dependent on one another, with their roles at the end of the novel even reversed.
• Clerval and Victor are both similar in a way reminiscent of Victor and his monster, both being men of education who reject the world of business for the world of ambition.
• Almost all of the characters in the book form an interconnected family, reflective of Percy Shelley's preoccupation with incest. This connectedness also serves to underscore each death as a “death in the family.”
• Frankenstein is more structured than a normal Realist work, but “the freer the imagination is allowed to roam, the more formally shapely will be the structure of the work.” It is argued that because Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in such an imaginative way that there is a large amount of structure in the novel.