Comparing Frankenstein’s Creature to Milton’s Satan

 Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein teaches us that the literature and the media that we expose ourselves to ultimately affects our own personal development and eventually forms us into who we are and what we will become. As Victor abandons the creature, he is forced to survive without his creator with an underdeveloped brain. While in isolation, he reads the epic poem Paradise Lost and learns about Satan. Part of the epic takes place in Hell where Satan seeks to gain power and reign over everyone else. He eventually gains that power and when exalted, he takes the throne in Hell. With his power, he decides to use it to destroy the human population on earth because he knows that if he destroys God’s most precious things, his children, he wins and beats God. This is important because it is all very similar to the creature’s own personal story and he relates to it. Most of the creature’s first pieces of knowledge come from the reading of this epic. Satan, being the epic hero and protagonist in Paradise Lost who he sympathizes with, is the one to go through a hero’s journey. The creature relates with Satan on a deep and personal level and a connection is made. Through the epic, the creature shapes his personal identity and it is with that identity, that he makes his decisions. 

The creature’s personal identity is formed in the way that he relates to Satan in Paradise Lost. According to Sigmund Freud, “identification is known to psycho-analysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person” (Freud, 1922). Identifying with someone means that they can recognize feelings that come from experiences because they have had them before. As the creature does this while reading, Satan’s actions become the formula to get him out of feeling alone and angry with Frankenstein. While the creature is in isolation in a hovel, Shelley mentions that Paradise Lost “excited different and far deeper emotions” within the creature (141). These words tell us that the creature really truly identifies with the story because of his emotional tie to it. Later, we find out that it is not just the story he identifies with, but with Adam in that he “was created apparently untied by no link to any other being in existence” (141). This is where the creature can identify with Adam’s isolation because he experienced the same thing when he came into the world. But other than that, he is nothing like Adam, because his “God” was good to Adam and Victor wasn’t good to the Creature. Victor being the creature’s creator, was essentially the “God” over him. The creature felt that Victor had never been good to him. It must have hurt him to know that Adam was “happy and prosperous, guarded by the special care of his Creator” while the creature was alone and hated by those he came in contact with (142). In this way, he felt less of an emotional tie with Adam than he did with Satan. He finds that Satan was a better and “fitter emblem of [his] condition” (142). His deeper emotions and connection to those emotions have him identifying with Satan. There are many reasons why he probably identified better with Satan rather than with Adam. One is that Satan isn’t named in Paradise Lost at first until much later in the epic much like how the creature doesn’t get a name in Frankenstein. “The monster, first an "object," is named as "demon" and then later as “Devil" bringing up the fact that his God didn’t care to name him as God named Adam (Lamb, 1992). With the words “demon” and “devil” regularly being used to call Satan makes this argument even more concrete. Like Satan, he was hungry for vengeance, power and to ultimately destroy his god’s world as he does throughout the story.

As we look at this with a psychoanalytical lens, we can see that Satan and the Creature destroy people and plans in hope to have something gained. For Satan, it is in hope that he will gain some power and something from attempting to get God’s children off track. Then for the creature, he hoped to get Victor’s attention and affection. In the end, he does get Victor’s attention, but not so much his affection and certainly not in the way that he ultimately wanted. The creature hoped to gain a friend or a caretaker as most beings and living creatures long for. In an article that analyzes the basic psychological needs of human beings, it is confirmed that the “desire to interact with others or to be part of a group is based to some extent in the need for relatedness” (Ryan & Deci, 2000). The creature could not relate with the people who ran away from or were scared of him simply because they did not give him a chance. He could relate to Satan and that was simple for him. Not only is it a need to be able to relate with individuals, but it is the “deficit-oriented and derivative means of obtaining comfort, safety, and security” (Greenberg, Solomon, & Pyszczynski, 1997). Without comfort, safety and security, we become psychological monsters. The fact that we have been programmed since the beginning of our lives to be cared for and to be nurtured alludes to the fact that we have a great need for it. The internal functioning in our brains yearns for it because of how we were created. The creature was created in the same way and without those psychological needs tended to, he became a monster.

There is a contrast with Heaven and Hell both in the novel and in Paradise Lost. The creature’s heaven is his depiction of society. He admires it for a while, but then, with the anger that comes from the rejection, he turns completely from it and chooses evil just as Satan does in the epic. The creature, unnamed and alone naturally ventures out to find a sense of family. The creature tries to lead a good life, but each time that he attempts to talk to someone, he is rejected. Finding the DeLacy family, he wants to be a part of what they had as a family, but they soon reject him. Then, as he moves on still trying to find a sense of belonging, he finds William. As the creature goes on in his journey he becomes “more thwarted in his desire for a family when the child refuses to accompany him, his anger claims its first human sacrifice” (Mellor, 1988).  The creature realizes in the beginning and more as he goes on in his life that his ideal happiness to have his own family cannot be obtained. Satan shares a similar experience. He finds that he cannot have all the power for himself and in the end, “destruction through his misery is the only thing he can achieve for himself” (Putnam, 2009). All they want in the end is power and to inflict misery in the lives of the ones their “Gods” love because they are miserable. 

Ultimately, the novel is the story of how Victor battles Satan in his life on earth. With the creature’s learning capacity set in a tunnel vision with only the people around him and his reading of Paradise Lost to draw upon, it was easy for him to become a monster. Some of the creatures most prominent role models were Victor and Satan. With Victor being a mad scientist with unlawful passions and Satan being a miserable demon, there was not a lot of room for the creature to be anything different from them. In a way, the creature is Satan and Victor’s child because of what they taught him to become and that is why the creature is who he is and does what he does.  

The creature’s struggle with his personal identity starts from the beginning when he is completely alone and abandoned. The reaction here was completely understandable, he went to find people to help him feel not so alone which is a normal psychological need that disturbed him. When he attempts that, he is rejected and even more isolated by society. This isolation damages him psychologically and adds to his monstrous behavior. When he finds Paradise Lost, he reads the words “what was I?” And that definitely resonates with him (130). He was wondering that same thing as he looked at his reflection later. As he read this question, it probably seemed like the answer to his most internal questions and emotions. He knew that he was not the only one who wondered about what their true identity was. Just as Satan did in his destruction, the problems in his life felt lessened as he ruined Victor’s life and family, the very things that he could never obtain. A destroyer was who he became in his search for his personal identity. With Satan being the only one he could identify with, he ultimately followed him in his path of life creating the end result. The creature’s mode of getting rid of his internal hurt was destroying what Victor loved most and he did. Satan tried to destroy what God loved most, his children, Adam and Eve. As we each take our own journey’s on the path of life, might we check who our role models are and allow ourselves to think if that is who we ultimately want to become.