VictorFrankenstein begins to talk about himself and his attitude toward study and learning in chapter 2. He contrasts himself with Elizabeth, noting that she was interested in poetry and the beautiful landscape that surrounded their home, while he proclaims "the world was to me a secret which I desired to divine."
Dr. Frankenstein puts a finer point on what interests him and what doesn't. He is indifferent about language, government, and politics. He declares himself passionate about the physical and metaphysical "secrets of the world." He explores what he wants to know through reading, first Agrippa, then Paracelsus and Magnus. He becomes an acute observer of nature and becomes fascinated with the power of electricity after witnessing a formidable lightning strike.
At seventeen (in chapter 3 ), it is decided that Frankenstein will leave Geneva and study in Ingolstadt. There, Frankenstein hears a lecture by M. Waldman that inspires...
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him to delve more deeply into chemistry, natural philosophy, and mathematics. Frankenstein recalls that this meeting shaped his destiny.
In chapter 4, Frankenstein recalls that, for the following two years, he studied without a break. It is fair to call his approach obsessive, as it was common for him to work in his laboratory all through the night. Human anatomy becomes a subject he explores with his signature ardor. Ultimately, he discovers "the cause and generation of life" and confesses that he took quite a long time to decide how he would put this knowledge to use.
The creature that Frankenstein reanimates makes its debut in chapter 5. Paradoxically, Frankenstein is overwhelmed, fearful, and regretful at the culmination of his years of study.
It becomes clear from the early chapters of this novel that study and education is to Victor something that he is completely obsessed with, especially any kind of study of literature that discusses his favourite topic, which is Natural Philosophy. Any text that has any bearing on his self-given goal of conquering the power of disease, aging and death from the human frame Victor shows an obsessive fascination for. Consider how the birth of this interest is described to us in Chapter Two after Victor reads his first book about Natural Philosophy:
When I returned home, my first care was to procure the whole works of this author, and afterwards of Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. I read and studied the wild fancies of these writers with delight; they appeared to me treasures known to few beside myself. I have described myself as always having been embued with a fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature.
Victor studies in a way that shows he is dangerously obsessed with the pursuit of hidden knowledge and the penetration of mysteries that are rightfully beyond our capacity to understand. The way in which he is depicted as studying and learning in all of his frantic intensity of course foreshadows the terrible events that occur when he does finally manage to penetrate those secrets and plays god by creating life.