fire and ice

Frankenstein- Mary Shelley

Throughout Frankenstein, there’s a constant battle between fire and ice, both in the environment around the characters and within the characters themselves.

Frankenstein’s creature first encounters fire in the woods during his confusion following Frankenstein’s escape and abandonment. In that moment, he not only receives the warmth of the fire, but he also symbolically receives knowledge. In a similar way, the creature itself is fire, created by a spark of life initiated by, once again, knowledge, this time the forbidden knowledge discovered by Victor Frankenstein. This fire is constantly at odds with the ice in the story. As the creature ventures into the world for the first time, he travels through devilishly cold terrain, defenseless against the climate. As he recounts to Frankenstein, “Before I had quitted your apartment, on a sensation of cold, I had covered myself with some clothes; but these were insufficient […] feeling pain invade me on all sides, I sat down and wept”. The creature also has to deal with the icy coldness of the human society he encounters. Their hearts refuse to melt at the warmth of the creature’s efforts to help them and instead seek to extinguish his life by attacking him violently and driving him away from human society. Frankenstein, the creator himself, is also included in the ice of the story, as he abandoned the creature he created and later attempted to end him. As the story comes to a close, we once again see fire and ice seeking to destroy. The creature decides to take his own life, stating that he will burn himself. The fire, the last remnants of the life given to him by Frankenstein, is swallowed up by the ice of the Arctic, leaving only the cold.

This begs the question: Was the fire the evil plaguing the earth, or was it the ice? When spark of life created by forbidden knowledge was vanquished, was the ice a savior, or was it simply a murderer? Perhaps what Mary Shelley wished to say was that it was neither. The fire was not evil, nor was the ice. They were both a confusing mix of both good and bad. The fire was introduced as warmth and saving, a lifeline to the creature that had no other protection from the cod. Yet at the same time, only pages later, it became the cause of destruction, reducing the cottage of the De Laceys to ashes. The creature described the scene saying, “[W]ith a loud scream, I fired the straw, and heath, and bushes, which I had collected. The wind fanned the fire, and the cottage was quickly enveloped in flames, which clung to it, and licked it with their forked and destroying tongues”. The force was capable of salvation and destruction. Ice was no different. Throughout the story, icy climates eat at the well being of the characters. The creature realized this from the moment he was “born.” Yet at the same time, it was ice that saved Watson. Although his ship was originally trapped by ice, not only did he and his crew survive, but it was because of the danger encountered that Watson realized and was able to avoid even greater dangers had the voyage been continued.

Similarly, the creature and the human society he hates so completely cannot be easily categorized into good or evil, but are composed of a mix of both. The creature at first refrains from injuring anyone, even saving a girl from death at the hands of a river, but once he’s experienced the rejection of human society so many times, he turns to the murder of innocent people (William, Clerval, Elizabeth) as a way of seeking revenge against his creator and human society in general. Human society, on the other hand, was good in its determination to catch the murder, yet even before the murders, it subjected the creature to complete rejection due to fear. Both sides were at times on the side of justice and at times the one causing harm, though for their own reasons. Just like fire and ice, Shelley shows us that nothing is definite when it comes to human nature.