Responsibility In Frankenstein

What would you do if you were God? In Mary Shelley’s gothic novel, Frankenstein, Shelley adopts a disapproving tone towards Victor. Victor believes he is God and makes his own creation, showing what his true passions are. Once created, he not only despises his creation based off of its looks, but neglects it, revealing a conflict between one's passion and one’s responsibility.

Victor’s desire for knowledge and bigger things in the world set the stage for his downward spiral into arrogance. From a young age, Victor had an eagerness for things that no one else had. He compares himself to Elizabeth, stating, “Elizabeth was of a calmer and more concentrated disposition; but, with all my ardour, I was capable of a more intense application and

was more deeply smitten with the thirst for knowledge,” (Shelley 22). He claims that Elizabeth is more calm and his passions are more driven and focused than hers. In the very beginning of this novel, Victor clearly states what his dreams are and how he plans to pursue those dreams. He sets his aspirations high and later on, the audience can see he does not achieve his goals and is disappointed with his final result. He believes he can create something so amazing, declaring, “Wealth was an inferior object; but what glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!” (Shelley 26). He is saying that wealth was never a problem for him and he does not value it as much as he values glory. Victor wants to attain fame and be noticed more than anything in the world which gets in the way of his responsibility which is his creation. He cannot grasp the idea of what comes with this power he so desires, but only thinks of how it will benefit him, showing his selfish behavior. Victor’s knowledge also surpasses his classmates, making them dislike him. He describes, “My ardour was indeed the astonishment of the students, and my proficiency that of the masters,” (Shelley 36). Victor is a very smart student, but also flaunts his wisdom. He puts himself above others, causing his arrogance to get in the way. It is one thing to have knowledge and use it for good, and another to advertise it for the sole purpose of oneself. Victor is an example of this. He considers that what he is working on will help the human race to flourish but the only person it will help is himself, if that. Author Keyishian states, “Horney (1950) clearly describes what occurs when an individual seeks to gain a sense of integration and identity through self-idealization. "In the process," she writes, "he endows himself with unlimited powers and with exalted faculties; he becomes a hero, a genius, a supreme lover, a saint, a god" (p. 22). He also, of course, turns away from true sources of growth within {203} himself, striving through imagination to fulfill his search for glory,” (Keyishian 11). He uses evidence from Karen Horney where she provides insight on the behavior of an individual who pursues power while being self absorbed. She states that the individual possesses skills which lead them to believe they are god-like and then in turn disregards everything else in order to obtain the fame the individual dreams of. Victor’s conceited character wishes for a higher power that he is not yet prepared for and overlooks his responsibilities.
Victor thinks of himself as God when building his creation, revealing his egotistical character. In his studies, he now has an understanding of life and death and wishes to pursue it in his creation. He has this idea of being able to create something from nothing, stating, “I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter,” (Shelley 38). This idea that Victor discovers corresponds with God and his creation of man. Comparing God and Victor, God raising his son from the dead, and Victor giving life to something that was once dead, goes hand in hand. He equalizes himself with God which is considered very immoral. Comparing man’s power with the power of God can be damning to a person’s soul. Expressing his vainness, he writes, “What had been the study and desires of the wisest men since the creation of the world was now within my grasp,” (Shelley 38). It truly shows how inflated Victor's ego is that he is capable of measuring his greatness to that of a higher being or some of the wisest people since the beginning of time. He is so obsessed with this idea of fame and glory from the world that he ultimately loses touch with reality and isolates himself in order to achieve his goal. As Keyishian puts it, “To complete his work, and to attain the God-like status he desires, he isolates himself from his friends and family and from the healing influences of nature,” (Keyishian 11). As he works on his creation, he removes himself from society to focus all his attention on this project and refuses to stop until it is finished. He is extremely determined in his project which can be a good characteristic but being overly eager can be unhealthy. Victor assumes that when his creation is made, it will worship him and be grateful for creating it. He absentmindedly says, “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs,” (Shelley 40). Victor has high expectations for the creature to treat him as his master and show respect to him. He claims he deserves this child that he is creating but later will not even look at it out of disgust. It foreshadows how he will not take care of it the way a father or creator should take care of his child. Victor expects so much from the creature when he does nothing to take care of it.
Once Victor’s creation is born, he does not take responsibility for it and neglects it, showing his selfish nature.

As soon as he sees his creation, he finds it repulsive and refuses to have anything to do with it. He condemns it saying, “I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart,” (Shelley 43). Victor had high hopes of what he was building and perceived it to be beautiful and perfect but is let down. He was so caught up in his work and this idea of how fascinating it would turn out, blinding him to what he was building and how ugly it was. Now that his project is done, he is disgusted and hates what he has made. The saying, “don’t judge a book by it’s cover,” applies in Victor’s situation. Although the creature is not attractive, Victor does not try to get to know it’s personality, only looking at the outward appearance. The creature, is like a baby, innocent and wanting love. The way Mellor describes it, “But rather than clasping his newborn child to his breast in a nurturing maternal gesture, he rushes out of the room, repulsed by the abnormality of his creation. And when his child follows him to his bedroom, uttering inarticulate sounds of desire and affection, smiling at him, reaching out {42} to embrace him, Victor Frankenstein again flees in horror, abandoning his child completely,” (Mellor 3). Right from the start, Victor rejects his creation because of the way he looks. The only thing the creature wants is a figure in his life to love him and take care of him but Victor thinks he is trying to hurt him. Author Naomi Hetherington defends the creature, “The being possesses no independent standard by which to judge himself, and is therefore self-alienated. He is forced to accept the opinion of the only humans that he has ever known -- that he is hideously ugly and so inferior it is impossible to associate with him,” (Hetherington

28). Every human interaction he has encountered, he has either been rejected or ran away from. This leads him to believe that he is ugly and so he hates himself just as much as everyone else around him does, leaving him alone. Whenever something bad happens to Victor, he becomes ill, ultimately using it as an excuse. Victor states, “Ever since the fatal night, the end of my labours, and the beginning of my misfortunes, I had conceived a violent antipathy even to the name of natural philosophy. When I was otherwise quite restored to health, the sight of a chemical instrument would renew all the agony of my nervous symptoms,” (Shelley 53). Victor believes that the creature makes him ill but also uses his illness to avoid the creature right after he created it. Victor is mentally-unstable when it comes to anything related to science because it reminds him of the creature. He becomes sick just being near a medical instrument or talking to his old professors. Anything that even refers to the creature also makes him sick, revealing his insanity. Hetherington reports on his sickness saying, “He recalls that the moment the creature came to life 'the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart' (39). Utterly repulsed and exhausted, he is sent into a nervous fever for several months. After the deaths of his brother William and the servant-girl Justine, he begins to exhibit symptoms of severe depression -- intense loneliness, guilt and dejection and violent mood swings as well as hallucinations that the being is at his throat. Other characters within the novel start to perceive him as approaching the threshold of insanity,” (Hetherington 20-21). This illness Victor appears to be having, is his way of getting through tough times in his life. He uses it to avoid things just like he avoided the creature throughout the novel. When he does get sick, he becomes extremely unhealthy and isolates himself, causing his loneliness to sink in. When the creature confronts Victor, he tells him how lonely he is and how he has neglected him, along with society. The creature tells Victor, “'Hateful day when I received life!' I exclaimed in agony. '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. Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage him, but I am solitary and abhorred,'” (Shelley 118). The creature is angry with Victor, asking him why he bestowed life upon him and making him so hideous that all of mankind seems to hate him. Everybody around him finds him disgusting or scary and he is tired of being rejected all the time. The creature knows how much Victor hates him and he doesn’t understand why other than the fact that he is repulsive to look at. Victor hates him because the creature caused the deaths of all the people he loved but it is ironic because he created this creature so he has a right to be angry but not at the same time. He tells Victor how God made man in his own image so Victor made him in his image, but a worse type of him. He goes on to say that even Satan had companions that surrounded him but he has no one in his life and is hated instead for no reason. Mellor writes, “Deprived of all human companionship, the creature can never recover from the disease of self-consciousness; for him, no escape, save death, is possible,” (Mellor 9). The creature is not accepted by anyone and hates himself so much for the way his creator made him that he results to suicide in the end.
The thirst for a knowledge of something higher than one can imagine is a big responsibility to begin with. On top of that, the creation of something can also be a responsibility and being able to tend and care for it. Victor Frankenstein believes he can achieve this goal in order to earn fame and recognition. He gets so caught up with this god-like power and himself that he neglects his creation. Acquiring knowledge to this degree can be wonderful and dangerous, but a person must always remember to focus on their responsibilities and not themselves.