Loneliness And Social Isolation In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

According to Brigham Young University researchers, “loneliness increases risk of death by 26% and social isolation… by 29% and 32%.” These damaging and life-threatening conditions negatively impact the lives of numerous humans every day, frequently due to the harsh judgement of appearance by civilization in the world. Society has predisposed that humankind must judge people’s outer beauty and torment if they are different, condemning them to the path of loneliness and the higher risk of death. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the monster suffers from social alienation and solitude through verbal bullying in a cruel, corrupt world, which mirrors the isolation experienced by children who are bullied on their appearance in the real world, specifically …show more content…
His creator, Victor, said that “breathless horror and disgust filled [his] heart” when he first caught sight of his creation (Shelley I, v, 58). Victor didn’t want anything to do with the monster due to his unsightly innate factors and thus he abandoned him, even though the monster had no power over what he were born to look like. Therefore, the monster came to realize on his own what a wretched outcast he was through his discovery of how society judges based on appearance. The sense of being an outsider due to the grating judgement of appearance was also experienced by a thirteen year-old girl named Morgan Musson. Her mother, Debra Savage, explained that she “was called names and threatened with violence because of her size” (Daily Mail). She couldn’t help that she stood at six feet tall, towering over many of her classmates. Her physical appearance was not accepted by those around her, so she became an outcast like the monster in Frankenstein. Both Frankenstein and people in real life are excluded from society based on