Frankenstein and Vegetarianism

            Throughout Shelley’s prose, there is a common, reoccurring theme that underscores a general account through the monster’s perspective. As noted throughout the text, the Creature maintains a vegetarian diet that Shelley meticulously articulates—“The vegetables in the gardens, the milk and cheese that I saw placed at the windows of some of the cottages, allured my appetite (Shelley 73).”  Yet there are also several other characters who also resort to vegetarianism including the De Lacey family which Shelley also fastidiously details—“…and he showed her a large loath and a piece of cheese, [Agatha] seemed pleased, and went into the garden for some roots and plants (Shelley 76).” As noticed by now, the omission and lack of reference towards meat is evident in both the monster’s and the De Lacey’s description as the fiend’s narration of the De Lacey family goes to specify even further that none of the members of the De Lacey family hunt for food. However, many would challenge that vegetarianism was a last resort, since the fiend had not learned how to use fire prior to his discoveries of berries and roots, while the De Lacey family had penurious economic conditions, but what changes the entire validity of such a theory is that for the majority course of time, the Shelley family also abided by a strict, vegetarian diet. Moreover, Victor and his family were not in the same financial circumstances, and therefore, shows that vegetarianism wasn’t resorted to out of necessity, but out of self-obligation. Such a quality makes Frankenstein unique as well as notable because it is one of the few selected, renowned English novels that emphasizes with such tremendous detail the nourishment and intake each of its major characters in the novel consumes.   However, the principal reason that Shelley references vegetarianism is largely because of her husband Percy who practiced abstinence from meat consumption. Likewise, following a few years after Frankenstein was written and in development stage, Percy published his own reinterpretations of the Prometheus myth, suggesting that the significance of the titan’s carrying fire to earth was as a means of introducing flesh-eating to humanity and thus, from that point forward the pristine human civilization was ravaged by disease that was contracted from ingesting meat products due to the ability of fire to roast animals and creatures for satisfaction of appetite as it is written in context--"If the use of animal food be, in consequence, subversive to the peace of human society, how unwarrantable is the injustice and the barbarity which is exercised toward these miserable victims. They are called into existence by human artifice that they may drag out a short and miserable existence of slavery and disease, that their bodies may be mutilated, their social feelings outraged. It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery"; "Never again may blood of bird or beast/ Stain with its venomous stream a human feast,/ To the pure skies in accusation steaming"; and "It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion, and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust." Likewise, he also alludes to this topic in his extended endnotes credited in his philosophical poem Queen Mab that was later reintroduced as a pamphlet called A Vindication of Natural Diet.