Vegetarianism

• Percy Shelley was a committed and vocal vegetarian, and wrote two articles on the subject
• Conservative voices such as some of the literary magazines saw this (along with his atheism and the fact that he didn’t drink alcohol) as a sign of Percy Shelley’s unnatural and uncivilised behaviour
• Vegetarianism, however, rose to prominence during the Romantic period despite these negative voices
• Romantic vegetarians often saw meat eating as a sign of man’s Fallen nature: i.e., they felt that Adam and Eve didn’t eat meat in Eden
• it is an important part of the creature’s identity. While he does seem to eat the remnants of some meat he finds cooked by a fire, he makes it clear that he will not kill animals for food.
• His words suggest that he views vegetarianism as a moral choice, and one that separates him from humanity – a deliberate act of separation
• “My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite.”
• This might be used alongside the point about Victor hiding himself from his father as a way of viewing Victor as a fallen – postlapsarian – figure, and the creature as having possessed the potential to be an example of prelapsarian innocence.