Frankenstein, How The Reader Is Encouaged To Make Moral Judgements Essay

This essay will be considering the statement ‘The novel guides readers to make moral judgements about characters while allowing sympathetic involvement in their experiences’, and will discuss this further in relation to the novel Frankenstein written by Mary Shelley.   It will focus on the moral dimensions, how the reader is encouraged to make moral judgements and how Shelley presents the characters in order to gain reader sympathy.                 Shelley uses an unusual combination of styles: realism disrupted by a gothic element, the different locations visited throughout the novel give the reader a sense of realism as they are well described and accurate ‘From Derby, still journeying northward, we passed two months in Cumberland and Westmorland’ (Frankenstein p.161) whilst the wild scenery support the gothic genre ‘we saw many ruined castles standing on the edges of precipes, surrounded by black woods’ (p.155).     Frankenstein begins with a chain of letters from Robert Walton to his sister Margret.   Walton is the primary narrator, the whole novel is related by him and this use of the telling technique envelopes Victor and his creation which follows the gothic convention of a story within a story.   From chapter one the narrator changes to Victor Frankenstein, his focalisation tells the reader that he was born into an attentive family ‘they seemed to draw inexhaustible stores of affection from a very mine of love to bestow them upon me’ (p.33), Shelley uses this early on in the novel to draw the readers attention to how the nurture of a loving parent(s) is very important in the moral development of a child ‘their child, the innocent and helpless creature bestowed on them by heaven, whom to bring up to good, and whose future lot it was in their hands’ (p.33).   Victors mother dies and it is here that the reader is first encouraged to feel sympathy for him, when he gives an emotional description of what it feels like to lose the person you hold dearest to your...