Frankenstein: How A Satire on Chivalry Hides So Well From A Narcissistic.

The creature was determined to see Victor suffer on his wedding night after it saw him tore to pieces what could have been its only hope for solace until the end of time. Victor, convinced that he was in the right for refusing to grant the creature its wish, was ever more adamant against a misery he brought on himself. Completely absorbed in his own interpretations of events, Victor was unaware that it would be Elizabeth, not him, who would “die and at once satisfy and extinguish [the creature’s] malice” (147). It is undeniable that, in a sense, hubris had the best of Frankenstein, as the pride in his own “righteousness” led him to believe that the evil’s retaliations would be directly upon him, not Elizabeth, and that he shall be remembered as a great guardian whose passing would sorely be missed:

“The prospect did not move me to fear; yet when I thought of my beloved Elizabeth, of her tears… when she should finer her lover so barbarously snatched from her, … I resolved not to fall before my enemy without a bitter struggle.” (147)

                Time and time again, we would see Victor expressing the inner turmoil equal in magnitude with that of a martyr. He feared his death would leave Elizabeth devastated, as noted earlier. He contemplated and weighed the horror that would fall upon his reunion with Elizabeth against her joy of seeing him.  And he wondered if he should be present to bring her joy only to rob it away from her in a length of a breath. Cumulatively, the times Frankenstein lost in these undeniably chivalrous thoughts stand in sharp contrast with the effort he took describing his very reunion with Elizabeth itself. The wedding ceremony lasted a paragraph (170); their honey moon spent on the sea lasted a few pages (172-73); and Elizabeth’s death less than a page (173).

Clearly, Mary Shelly has cleverly voiced her opinion against frivolous chivalry mindset that pre-occupies the sub-consciousness of not just Frankenstein, but – in the social context of her own time – also of men who think of their women as something merely “so worthy” of their love (173). Would this include Shelley’s own husband? It must be noted that it is Percy who wrote the Preface of this novel. Surely he must have gone over the final chapters thoroughly and realized this subtle satirical message of his wife. But, if we were to take into consideration the fact that Percy is a narcissistic – a point of discussion in class last week, it is possible that Percy himself has also let hubris get the best of him, and that this novel is perhaps the finest satire on chivalry ever made it out alive to the fine print.