The story of Victor Frankenstein is one of the most disputable in contemporary literature. Written at the beginning of the ninetieth century, it became a real event of the Victorian era. In her book, The Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley brought up the topic problem of the correlation between creator and creature, ambitiousness and encroachment upon the right to be God.
The destiny of the novel protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, and his creature is just an inevitable result of arguments with nature. Victor was sure that he would manage to create a man, as well as many years ago God did it. Still, he failed to create a beautiful human being and paid for his mistake.
“Shelley’s fictional portrayal of grief in Frankenstein not only prefigures God win’s response to an emotional crisis, but it replicates the sensibility of Reason and emotional restraint. Shelley creates the same terrible struggle for moderation between a learned father who shares Godwin’s “philosophy” of logic and a passionate son struggling for self-control” (Hobbs).
Still, Victor did not realize the main mistake of his experiment. He did not understand that he doomed not only his family to death: the Creature is the main victim of Victor Frankenstein:
“Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance.” (Shelley 113)
Victor did not realize that God created humanity and took care of creature, while Frankenstein sought for the success of scientific experiment: “From the beginning, the creature is unloved: Victor, in his flight and subsequent ignoring of what he has done, seems to treat the creature as a nuisance that if ignored might simply go away, disappear” (Seabury 135).
The monstrous feature of Victor Frankenstein is the inability of compassion and love which is so necessary for a living being to be identified as a human. The only thing he saw was the experiment he did, and created an evil creature: “Frankenstein repeatedly insists that every significant event in his life is a predetermined step towards a terrible deed. External events in his history are shadowed by developments in an intellectual life whose course is directed as if by original sin” (Goodall 19):
Of course, the destiny of the Creature was predetermined by Victor’s mistake. Without any doubt, the situation was absolutely different for it. “Frankenstein likewise belongs to the criminal confession genre because, famously, it provides a space in which the Creature speaks for himself, giving his version of things” (Marshall). The creature was created by the man who was the God for the monster, the only member of the family, its father, but it got nothing but hate and disappointments. The Creature realized that other people had the same attitude as Frankenstein, still, their motives were not clear.
To sum it up, it should be admitted that Victor is guilty of what happened to his family and Creature. Frankenstein’s ambitiousness and indifference towards the Creature made a real monster of it. Both characters hated each other; still, the Creature hated Victor for the fact he abandoned it: “…declared everlasting war against the species, and more all, against him who had formed me and sent forth to this insupportable misery.” (Shelley 113) and Frankenstein detested the Creature because it was his unsuccessful experiment.
Works Cited
Goodall, Jane. “Frankenstein and the Reprobate’s Conscience.” Studies in the Novel 31.1 (1999): 19.
Hobbs, Colleen. “Reading the Symptoms: An Exploration of Repression and Hysteria in Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein.’.” Studies in the Novel 25.2 (1993): 152.
Marshall, Tim. “Not Forgotten: Eliza Fenning, Frankenstein, and Victorian Chivalry.” Critical Survey 13.2 (2001): 98.
Seabury, Marcia Bundy. “The Monsters We Create: Woman on the Edge of Time and Frankenstein.” Critique 42.2 (2001): 131-144.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein Or, the Modern Prometheus. New York: Collier Books, 1961. Print.