A Note on Figurative Language In Frankenstein
Most people think figurative language in Frankenstein is just about gothic atmosphere. It's not. It's structural. The imagery carries the actual argument Shelley is making about creation, responsibility, and what happens when knowledge outpaces empathy. If you treat it as decorative, you'll miss the whole mechanism. I taught this novel for about a decade, and I keep running into the same problem: students will catalog every simile and metaphor they can find, then sit there with a long list and no idea what it means. I had one student once who wrote a ten-page paper listing "darkness," "light," and "storm" imagery without ever connecting them to the novel's philosophical framework. I spent twenty minutes asking her questions and eventually she realized she'd been reading it like a nature documentary instead of a book about the ethics of making something that can suffer.
Figurative Language In Frankenstein and How to Actually Use It
Here's how I approach it now. Start with the narrative structure. The novel is nested—Walton writing to his sister, then Victor, then the Creature, then Victor again. The figurative language shifts depending on who is speaking. That shift matters. The Creature's vocabulary evolves. Early on his sentences are halting and fragmented, but by the time he's narrating his own story, the figurative devices he uses become more elaborate, more controlled. It's not accidental. Shelley is tracking consciousness developing in real time. The most important cluster of imagery is light and dark, and everyone knows that already. The thing nobody seems to remember is that Shelley consistently associates light with dangerous knowledge and darkness with the absence of moral clarity. When Victor describes his elixir of life as a "bright ray" that he's grasping, he's not celebrating discovery. He's describing the moment something becomes blinding. The light imagery almost always precedes catastrophe in this book. I ran into a specific issue with one class where students kept misreading the sublime imagery—the vast mountains, the stormy seas, the glacial landscapes—as pure Romantic escapism. They saw it as Shelley's way of showing nature's beauty as a refuge from human evil. The fix was having them track what actually happens in those spaces. Victor goes to the mountains seeking peace and instead encounters the Creature. The sublime doesn't comfort anyone here. It exposes them. Nature in Frankenstein is indifferent, not nurturing. That distinction changes everything about how you read the figurative language attached to these scenes.
Key Figurative Devices and What They're Actually Doing
Metaphor dominates the early sections. Victor constantly frames his scientific pursuit in terms that borrow from religion and creation—words like "elixir," "pioneer," and references to Prometheus appear organically rather than as decoration. Shelley is building an extended metaphor that equates scientific ambition with hubris without ever stating it outright. This is where the novel earns its reputation as a warning about overreaching knowledge. Personification shows up most notably in the Creature himself. He is described in human terms throughout, while the humans around him frequently slip into animalistic comparisons. William is called a "fair angel," but the wolves that kill him are treated with tenderness. Meanwhile the so-called monster speaks about love, loneliness, and injustice with precision. The personification works against surface readings of who deserves sympathy. Symbol operates at the level of entire objects rather than individual lines. The torch that connects Victor to the Creature, the frozen lake where they confront each other, the lightning that gives Victor the spark of discovery—these aren't random set pieces. They recur across the narrative with enough weight to function as symbols. The lightning specifically bridges two worlds: natural force and human knowledge, destruction and creation simultaneously. It's the single most concentrated image in the novel.
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Irony saturates the text. Victor spends the entire novel trying to escape responsibility for what he's made, while the Creature spends equal energy demanding accountability from a creator who refuses to show up. The dramatic irony is thickest in the letters from Walton's sister, who remains completely unaware of what's happening on the ship with her brother. The reader watches a chain of cause and effect while the characters operate under different assumptions.
Common Pitfalls and What to Watch For
The biggest mistake I see is treating figurative language as isolated from theme. Students will identify a metaphor, name it correctly, and move on as if that's the whole assignment. Naming the device isn't analysis. Analysis requires connecting the device to what the text is doing philosophically or emotionally. A metaphor about darkness in Chapter 4 isn't just atmospheric—it reflects Victor's growing moral blindness as he isolates himself from family and friends to pursue his experiment. Another issue is assuming the Creature is purely a symbol of the "other." Yes, he functions that way in certain readings, but Shelley gives him interiority that a flat symbol wouldn't have. His figurative language evolves. If you're writing about symbolism, account for his development. The text rewards careful attention to how his voice changes between his early encounters with De Lacey and his final confrontation with Victor. One workaround I found effective is having students map figurative language by speaker rather than by device type. You end up seeing patterns you'd miss otherwise. The Creature uses more organic imagery—plants, animals, weather. Victor leans toward mechanical and religious metaphor. Walton uses nautical imagery. These choices aren't arbitrary. They reflect each character's relationship to the world and their place in the hierarchy of consciousness Shelley is building.
What This Approach Can't Do
It won't help if you're writing a paper that demands a single authoritative reading. Frankenstein supports genuinely conflicting interpretations, and figurative language analysis alone won't resolve the tension between them. You still need a thesis that makes a claim, not just a collection of observations about imagery. A well-written analysis with strong figurative evidence but no central argument reads like a annotated bibliography with opinions. It also doesn't account for the cultural context of Shelley's time. The novel drew from specific scientific debates about galvanism and the possibility of reviving the dead. Without at least a surface-level grasp of what those conversations looked like in 1818, some of the figurative language loses its sharpness. Victor's metaphors about "infusing a portion of life into lifeless matter" carry weight that contemporary readers would have caught immediately but modern readers might skim over. There's no quick fix for that gap. Reading about early nineteenth-century science takes time. But you don't need a full dissertation. A few pages on Galvani, Volta, and the specific terminology of "animal electricity" will make the figurative language land differently.
