The significance of desolate landscapes

Shelley's use of barren landscapes such as the Swiss mountains, the Orkney Isles, the open sea and the icy desert of the North Pole could represent nature's rejection of Frankenstein for cruelly violating the miracle of creation.

Early in the novel, Frankenstein often appreciates the beauty of nature, as according to Walton 'no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature'(p.30), implying that taking this beauty from him was a punishment. Shelley's preoccupation with wastelands pre-empts the imagery used in the Modernist movement to symbolise man's destruction of nature by writers such as TS Eliot and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Linking to Flodge's blog, Frankenstein is rejected by the 'feminine' mother nature and refuses to create a female companion for the monster in fear that they would reproduce a race that hated him. His lack of typically female characteristics such as care, empathy and foresight prevent him from nurturing a happy being and therefore cause the destruction of his monster, his family and ultimately himself. Through this, Shelley questions the idealism of men's supposedly 'divine' creative powers such as the ideals of the Romantic movement to 'reform the world'(introduction xxiv).

At the beginning of his life, the monster finds himself in an Eden-like garden. However, he is then banished for entering the De Lacey household which is referred to as a 'Pandaemonium'(p.108) with connotations of Pandora's box and the forbidden apple. Like Frankenstein, the monster's obsession with the family became unhealthy and resulted in a murder. To end another person's life prematurely is meddling with mortality in a way as corrupt as Frankenstein's will to unaturally create life. In consequence the monster is banished from the lush, fertile forest to the bare mountains to live a harsh and isolated existence in a place void of life.