Chapters 10-12

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

Chapters nine through twelve begin the second phase of the frame story. This time, Victor's creation is given the change to tell his story. He explains his life after the creation and loss of his creator. In his lonliness and confusion, he runs away and hides in the woods, later coming upon a house where he observes a family and learns how to imitate their gestures. As noted previously in the novel, the creature, though full size, acts like a baby in his acumulation of knowledge and learning how to function. He describes traveling through each stage of early development as children do. At one point, he finds himself invincible telling Victor, "I now found that I could wander on at liberty, with no obstacles which I could not either surmount or avoid," (Shelley, 71). Much later, with the discovery of the family, he learns how to understand emotion and reciprocates acts of kindness. I think that Shelley's point in allowing the creation to feel emotion and making him capable of good and evil is what makes this a horror novel. The creature is not the cut-and-dry stereotypical monster that is only made for evil and is mostly one-dimensional; Frankenstein's creation qualifies as horror in our minds because it questions where emotion and compassion come from. If this monster is capable of compassion, then where does it originate?