Frankenstein :: essays papers

FrankensteinA Freudian InterpretationIn Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, the main character, Victor, has a short, exactly grand ideate right after he brings his creature to life. I hasten chosen to interpret this dream for several reasons. Firstly, there is no need to motion that Victors retelling of the dream is anything but the truth. Also, there would be no reason for Victor to be compensating for lapses in the dream by creating falsities. In society for the novel to work, these assumptions must be made. Also with Victors dream, there is no need to try to extract his past from the dream because in the quartette chapters before the dream we get that information. Victors retelling of his dream is this I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the fist kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death her features appeared to change and I thought that I held the shortly corpse of my dead mother in my arms a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the graveworms crawling in the folds of the flannel. The first thing I identified in the dream was the symbolism. In his works on dreams, Freud often stresses the existence of sexual motivation in dreams. He identifies many symbols of genitals and sexual intercourse. One of the symbols for the phallis is a snake. I extended that symbol to include the graveworms that are mentioned in Victors dream. The existence of this symbol led me to examine the possibility that sexual feelings may go through caused this dream. The two characters that are mentioned in the dream are Elizabeth, his intended wife, and Caroline, who is his now deceased mother. The presence of Victors love object and his mother realise the existence of sexual feelings in the dream. The way in which Victor describes embracing and kissing Elizabeth implies that he has sexual desire for her. He may also have a genuine sense of lov e for her, but this aspect is not as clear. Victors feelings for Elizabeth could be expected by examining his childhood.As he was growing up, Victor was quite sheltered. His only contact with women being his mother and Elizabeth. When Elizabeth was brought into Victors house his mother presented her as .