Obsession In Frankenstein Quotes

I don't understand this obsession with happiness," she said. "Happiness is like the Hollywood sign. It's big, it's unattainable, and even if you do make it up there, what's there to do but come back down?

I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit.

death is never allowed to touch you

I wished, as it were, to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of affection until the great object, which swallowed up every habit of my nature, should be completed.

Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind, when it has once seized on it, like a lichen on the rock. I wished sometimes to shake off all thought and feeling; but I learned that there was but one means to overcome the sensation of pain, and that was death -- a state which I feared yet did not understand.

Winter, spring, and summer, passed away during my labours; but I did not watch the blossoms or the expanding leaves — sights which before always yielded me supreme delight, so deeply was I engrossed in my occupation.

I knew well therefore what would be my father’s feelings, but I could not tear my thoughts from my employment, loathsome in itself, but which had taken an irresistible hold of my imagination. I wished, as it were, to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of affection until the great object, which swallowed up every habit of my nature, should be completed.

Victor Frankenstein has become the prototype for pretty much all subsequent depictions of mad or evil scientists. Many people have their impressions of Victor formed from film or theatre adaptations of Mary’s novel, or the interpretations of the Frankenstein scientist type that followed from them. However, the idea you may have in your head of an hysterical, obsessive scientist with evil ambitions is very different from the character Mary Shelley created in 1816. The figure she depicted was certainly focused, perhaps even obsessive, about his scientific endeavours, but she did not portray Victor Frankenstein as mad. Victor’s work may have been misguided, and lacking foresight, but Mary never showed his intentions to be evil. Nor is Frankenstein a very good example of science gone wrong. Victor’s experiment in bringing life to an inanimate corpse was a complete success. It was his inability to foresee the potential consequences of his actions that brought about his downfall.

Better isn't always a feeling.

The Gothic repeatedly stages moments of transgression because it is obsessed with establishing and policing borders, delineating strict categories of being. The enduring icons of the Gothic are entities that breach the absolute distinctions between life and death (ghosts, vampires, mummies, zombies, Frankenstein's creature) or between human and beast (werewolves and other animalistic regressions, the creatures spliced together by Dr. Moreau) or which threaten the integrity of the individual ego and the exercise of will by merging with another (Jeckyll and Hyde, the persecuting double, the Mesmerist who holds victims in his or her power). Ostensibly, conclusions reinstate fixed borders, re-secure autonomy, and destroy any intolerable occupants of these twilight zones.

And then there was Frankenstein. While in London, Melville had acquired from Bentley a copy of Mary Shelley’s novel about an errant genius who hunts down the quasi-human monster he has created after it has turned against him and murdered the woman he loves. Having tracked the creature to the icy North, Frankenstein commandeers a scientific expeditionary ship headed to the Arctic and turns it into an instrument of his private vengeance. This story of obsession and revenge so captured Melville’s imagination that when he read in Lamb’s Final Memorials about William Godwin’s (Mary Shelley’s father) gift for creating characters “marvellously endowed with galvanic life,” he wrote in the margin: “Frankenstein.