Frankenstein Vs Pygmalion

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he novel Frankenstein and the play Pygmalion both tell stories of a person that is socially undesirable in one way or another who tries to become happy with the assistance of someone else. In different ways, the two stories look at similar ideas of personal transformations that a person may go through and the search for love and happiness in a person’s life. Even though the genres, main characters, and overall themes may seem very different at first glance, both stories examine the relationships between a creator and its creation and the responsibilities that the creator has to its creation in addition to looking at themes of social conditioning versus agency, or, in other words, nature versus nurture and whether or not the ways that people…show more content…
In both tales, the creators are forever tied to their creations because they made them who they are. Dr. Frankenstein gave the creature life and Higgins took Eliza completely away from her old life and out of the streets and made her look and behave like a lady. The nature of these two bonds is very different though. While Frankenstein resents his bond with the creature and wishes it did not exist, Higgins, in a way, treasures his bond with Eliza and doesn’t want her to leave him to begin her own life with Tommy. In addition to this bond, the stories also teach that a creator has a great responsibility to provide for his creation. Both the creature and Eliza both want more from their creators because they believe that those things are what will make them happy. Eliza wants to be treated like the lady that she has been taught to behave like and the creature wants to be treated like a human being who has the capability to have companions. Their creators are the only ones who can provide those things in the way that is needed to make Eliza and the creature happy in the way that they want to…show more content…
During the time that they were written, that was the prevailing theory and it is represented well in these two works of literature. The characters of the creature and Eliza are completely changed by their environments in the form of their cultures, their surroundings, and their respective creators instead of just being born with a certain disposition. In Frankenstein, the creature was literally a corpse before Dr. Frankenstein reanimated him. From the second he came back to life his personality was formed by how people treated him. The first thing that the creature experienced was Dr. Frankenstein being horrified by his creation and what he had done. “but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room and continued a long time traversing my bed-chamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep.” (Shelley,

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