Frankenstein Mary Shelley
Cramped Labs and Infinite Ice: The Architecture of Isolation in Mary Shelley's Landscapes
The Book in 3 Volumes
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley, published in 1818 by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones
The Plot
Driven by a dangerous obsession to defeat death, a brilliant young scientist named Victor Frankenstein pieces together and brings to life a colossal, grotesque Monster from scavenged human remains. Mortified by the atrocious reality of his accomplishment, Victor instantly abandons his Creation and casts it out into a hostile world that violently rejects its existence. As the lonely Monster switches from an innocent outsider to a resentful predator, he launches a premeditated, damaging crusade against his Creator’s family to demand a female companion of his own. When Victor refuses his request the Monster goes on a globe-spanning chase across the frozen Arctic Circle, destroying any sense of humanity.
Mapping the Geography of Loneliness
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a story which is deeply engrossed with the physical restrictions of human experience, through contrasting spaces. From the dark, hidden attics of European universities to the endless whiteness of the North Pole. The story reveals the psychological deterioration of the characters of the plot onto the landscapes they live in. From the small claustrophobic interior rooms to the vast landscapes, Mary Shelley builds an architecture of isolation based around the environment.
The Micro-Architecture of Obsession: The Stifling Laboratory
The fall into isolation begins in the narrow, domestic prisons of Victor Frankenstein’s scientific interests. His workshop in Ingolstadt is described as a solitary cell, a hidden attic room severed from the natural rhythm of the changing seasons and the warmth of his family. This tightly cramped laboratory represents the intellectual ego turning completely inwards. It’s a secret space to work in which he chooses where he can ignore any moral code. Victor stores body parts inside these claustrophobic walls. He works under the flicker of candlelight and chooses to ignore any ethical consequences of his working. He later works on a second Monster, a female, as a companion for his first one, whilst he is on the very remote Orkney Islands. One may say these small cluttered spaces were the breeding-ground for his These small, cluttered, and hidden spaces are breeding grounds for his self-absorbed obsession which enabled him to block out empathy and understanding whilst focusing on his ambitions.
The Macro-Landscape of the Sublime: Inescapable Polar Ice
The Monster wakes in the tiny dark room and moves about in the other tiny rooms which feel even smaller due to his giant size. Both Monster and Creator are living in a prison-like space. They are also prisoners of the outdoor environment as the vast, endless, frozen Alpine glaciers are treacherous making it a lonely space to live in. From the tiny rooms to boundless distances marks a shift from private secrecy to a grand, inescapable punishment. In this frozen wild, human architecture fails, and the illusion of human control is swallowed up by unsympathetic nature. The flat fields of white polar ice become a permanent prison for both Frankenstein and his Monster. Victor is stripped of his high status and social rules disappear he becomes equal to the Monster. The unlimited fields of ice mirrors their emotional starvation, physically representing a cold life entirely devoid of human love.
The Broken Middle Ground: The Collapse of Domestic Spaces
Shelley highlights the tragic depth of her characters’ remoteness by showing that these middle spaces are barred from entry. The Monster spends his happiest months living in a low, frozen hovel attached to the De Lacey cottage, he is physically separated from human warmth by a wooden wall. He is treated like an outsider looking out the window at a life he never be a part of. Victor transforms his domestic spaces into crime scenes with the murders of William, Justine and Elizabeth violating his family properties.
The Permanent Wilderness of the Self
The story of Frankenstein tells us of the ruin of the human soul when it is intentionally cut off from human compassion. Victor flees his cramped room only to find himself hemmed in by the vast mountains of the Arctic ice proving that a change in the size of a space offers no escape from moral consequences. The journey from the micro-isolation of the workshop to the macro-isolation of the ends of the earth reveals a profound psychological truth in that the most terrifying architecture in the story is not made of brick or ice, but is built from the cold, rigid choices of the characters themselves. Whether locked inside a hidden attic or stranded on a boundless filed of ice, Victor and his Monster remain hopelessly trapped within the freezing, internal wilderness of their own making.
Between the cramped laboratory and the infinite ice lie the domestic architectures of the novel, the warm, structured spaces designed for family, community, and civilisation. Shelley highlights the tragic depth of her characters’ isolation by showing that these middle spaces are systematically broken down or barred from entry. The Monster spends his happiest months living in a low, frozen hovel attached to the De Lacey cottage, physically separated from human warmth by a single, impenetrable wooden wall; he is an eternal outsider looking through a window at a life he can never join. Meanwhile, Victor’s ambition brings a destructive rot that violates his own family properties, transforming safe domestic sanctuaries into crime scenes with the murders of William, Justine, and Elizabeth. By showing that the traditional home cannot withstand the fallout of Victor’s secrets, Shelley warns that isolation is a contagious force that actively dismantles the very foundational structures of civilised society.
Chained to the Desk vs. Caged in the Attic: Navigating the Domestic Trap
There is a stark divide between Victor Frankenstein and his Monster in how they handle being inside four walls. For Victor, indoor spaces are an extension of his own mind, places where he can hide away, obsess over his achievements, and escape the real world. His laboratories and bedrooms are areas of intense, self-inflicted focus where he willingly locks out nature and family to mix with filth. Yet, the moment his work is finished, these rooms instantly flip into terrifying cages. The four walls of his apartment or his family estate do not offer any safety as they trap him with his guilt, turning every shadow in the corner or knock at the door into a pending threat. Indoors, Victor is like a restless, anxious prisoner of his own secrets where he walks around like he is in a cage which he built for himself.
The indoor spaces represent a forbidden world of warmth and family to the Monster that he is cruelly blocked from ever entering. His shelter in a low, cramped hovel attached to the De Lacey cottage, is used to learn about the outside world whilst he sees Victor’s family integrate with one another. He is watching and learning and yearning to be part of it unlike Victor who uses the spaces to distance himself from the outside world. To the Monster, the indoors is a beautiful place where there is warmth and humanity but moment he tries to step foot inside the cottage, he is beaten and forced out.
Shelley shows us the stark contrast in how the Creator and the Monster interact with the natural world as the latter has an innate biological mastery over the elements, whereas Victor remains delicate and fails to adapt to it without the protective shield of civilisation.
She also revealed that the Monster effortlessly displays physical superiority. His massive frame and his resilience to the hostile temperatures mean he can jump across frozen crevices maintaining his super human strength. Frankenstein when talking of his capacity to thrive in environments that threaten humans says “I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”
The Monster’s profound lack of fear is not an act of courage; it is the chilling consequence of having been stripped of everything that makes life worth living, leaving him with absolutely nothing left to lose. Fear is naturally a protective mechanism designed to guard our relationships, our social standing, and our future. By violently denying him a place in the human family, society inadvertently breaks this evolutionary chain. Having already survived the absolute peak of emotional abandonment and physical violence, the Monster arrives at a state of total desolation where he can no longer be threatened, coerced, or controlled.
Soon enough his desire for love changes to one of a burning obsession for revenge and self-preservation goes out the window. He fears death no more as his life is already a living hell. His only intention is to ensure that his Creator suffers just as much as he had suffered. Victor thought that the Monster would be weakened by the elements after abandoning it, instead it grew stronger and turned into a force of nature.
It is Victor who turns weaker as he undergoes a complete physical and psychological breakdown whenever he steps outside the structured comfort of his home or laboratory. He does not adapt to his environments; instead, the environments slowly chip away at his life as every emotional trauma leaves him bedridden, feverish, and entirely broken by the elements. This leads him to famously describe himself as a static, ruined object, a tree blasted by lightning. When he pursues his Monster into the freezing north, his human limitations are viciously exposed. He becomes utterly dependent on heavy furs, artificial tools, and imported rations just to keep his heart beating against the wind unlike the Monster who survived off berries and his strength. When packs of the polar ice start cracking beneath his feet, his body completely gives out, leaving him to freeze and die aboard Captain Walton’s ship. Ultimately, Victor’s attempt to conquer nature through cold, clinical science leaves him entirely helpless against it, while his abandoned creation inherits the wild corners of the earth.
Reactions to the Domestic World
The reactions of Victor and his Monster differed in certain rooms. In the Ingolstadt attic room Victor’s saw this room as a self-imposed “solitary cell” where he used to hide away from society and obsess over forbidden science. It acted as a cocoon for his ego until the creation wakes, instantly transforming the room into a site of “breathless horror and disgust.” His Monster saw it as a birthplace of confusion and immediate abandonment. The moment he opens his eyes within these narrow walls, his Creator flees, forcing him to navigate a strange, cold interior before being cast out into the wilderness.
In the de Lacey Cottage/Hovel to Victor this was an unvisited, foreign space representing the idealised domestic simplicity he willingly abandoned in his pursuit of fame. The Monster’s experience of this was a rented sanctuary used as an observational classroom. He squeezes his massive frame into the low, attached hovel to learn language and love through a crack in the wall, only to be brutally beaten when he tries to cross the threshold.
The Orkney Islands hut for Victor was perceived as a dark, squalid “retreat” picked specifically for its remote isolation so he can stitch together a second Monster in total secrecy, which he ultimately destroys within the room out of sheer panic. Whereas for the Monster it was a site of profound betrayal. He tracks Victor to this tiny, two-room shack and peers through the window, forced to watch his future companion torn apart right before his eyes.
The Geneva family estate for Victor A house of mourning where his secrets actively invite tragedy inside. The safe, familiar walls of his childhood offer zero protection, trapping his family like sitting ducks for the Monster’s vengeance. For his creation it was a hunting ground where he shatters the illusion of domestic security. He effortlessly breaches the family boundaries, culminating in the murder of Elizabeth in her bridal chamber to ensure Victor is left completely homeless.
How Mary Shelley’s Life Shaped The Text
To understand how Mary Shelley’s life shaped the geography of Frankenstein we can analyse the text through the foundational lens of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Looking at the novel through Freud’s landmark psychoanalytic concepts of mourning and melancholia, the settings emerge as direct, externalised projections of unresolved grief, maternal trauma, and a deeply fractured psyche.
Writing the novel as an eighteen-year-old, Mary was trapped in a gruelling cycle of consecutive pregnancies, social exile, and profound loss. Haunted by the infant death of her first daughter in 1815, she suffered from obsessive nightmares about warming her dead child by the fireside until it revived. When she began her novel, her mental state was still locked in a state of pathological mourning, a condition Freud famously defined as an inability to let go of a lost object, causing the mind to create alternative realities or shadows to cope with the void. On 19 March 1815, seventeen-year-old Mary wrote down the harrowing psychological blueprint for her future novel.
Many literary historians view this profound grief on her desire to reverse death, and the spark of her reanimating lifeless matter as a major personal seed for her 1818 gothic novel.
The landscapes in Frankenstein acts as the physical architecture for this psychoanalytic struggle, she was projecting her internal trauma, her loneliness and her sorrow by using the Arctic landscape. By choosing to elope with the married Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, the eighteen-year-old Mary was completely cast out by polite British society. Her father, the political philosopher William Godwin, strongly disapproved of their relationship and alienated her completely. She was off from her family home, her inheritance and her social circles, Mary felt the same sense of abandonment that the Monster’s had when it was rejected by his Creator.
Even within her immediate circle at Lake Geneva, which included Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Dr John Polidori, Mary was faced with exclusion. a massive volcanic eruption that blotted out the global sun, the weather kept the group trapped indoors for days on end amidst violent electrical storms and relentless rain. While the men engaged in sweeping philosophical debates and embarked on daily sailing excursions, Mary was frequently sidelined as a passive observer during the “Year Without a Summer”. This was due to a massive volcanic eruption that blotted out the sun, the gloomy weather forced the group to be trapped indoors for days on end amidst violent electrical storms and relentless rain. Mary often felt sidelined while the men engaged in philosophical debates and embarked on daily sailing excursions.
Mary’s isolation was deeply attached to biological and psychological trauma. She was haunted by her mother’s legacy, the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died of childbed fever just days after Mary was born. Shelley may have felt the guilt that her mother died because of her. Mary gave birth to a girl which was premature in 1815 and the baby died just a few days later, triggering agonising, obsessive journal entries where she wrote about dreaming that her baby was cold, and that rubbing it by the fire would bring it back to life. She would have been traumatised by several consecutive high-risk pregnancies wondering if these babies would also die. There were also many family tragedies, including the suicides of her half-sister Fanny Imlay and Percy’s pregnant first wife, Harriet, Mary was enduring the lonely, silent trauma of postpartum depression and maternal grief and this was left to manifest.
The Suffocating Indoors: The Claustrophobic Ego
The claustrophobic rooms of Victor’s “cramped labs” represents what Freud would classify as the defensive isolation of the Ego. Confined indoors at Lake Geneva during the “Year Without a Summer” Mary projected her literal physical entrapment in her writings. Victor’s hidden attic cell operates as a site of mental incubation where the outside world is deliberately shut out. In psychoanalytic terms, this micro-architecture is a space of unhealthy avoidance coping, where traumatic obsessions are left to fester away from the light of human society.
The Alpine Glaciers: The Retributive Superego
When Victor flees his creation and ascends to the Chamonix valley, he encounters the crushing majesty of Mont Blanc and the Mer de Glace. In Romantic philosophy, nature was celebrated as a maternal force, but under a Freudian analysis, these frozen peaks function as a rigid, punishing Superego. Because Victor perverted the laws of birth and reproduction, abandoning his child much like Mary felt abandoned after her own mother’s death, nature turns fiercely retributive. The grinding, slow-moving glaciers represent a cold, unyielding moral reality that refuses to soothe his guilt. The landscape hardens into a psychological trap, reminding Victor of his failed paternal duties and his fractured relationship with his own biological duties.
The Polar Void Inescapable Melancholia and the Death Drive
The ultimate destination of the novel, the boundless, flat white of the Arctic ice is the ultimate spatial manifestation of Freud’s concept of melancholia and the Thanatos (the death drive). For Mary Shelley, who felt fundamentally cast out by her father and polite society, this frozen boundary was the crucial canvas of utter emotional starvation. The endless sheets of ice represent an environment completely stripped of human warmth, society, and family. By sending the Creator and his Monster into this sub-zero void, she overstates the psychological collapse where all social structures dissolve. The endless ice is not just a setting; it is a flat, unyielding prison of the mind where Victor and his shadow-self are locked in a fatal chase, which mirrors the cold, frozen remoteness of a psyche consumed by unhealed grief.