Assess the Character of Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus

📚 Assess the Character of Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus

🎯 Victor Frankenstein happens to be the centre figure in Mary Shelley’s tour de force, that is, Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus and serves as a mouthpiece of the author throughout novel. Like the mythical Prometheus, Dr Frankenstein takes the plunge in the sea of knowledge to bring

out the crux of life. Whereas mythical Prometheus made up a human figure and animated it with

life thereby drawing wrath for the God, Victor, too, delves deeper into the bio-engineering

process of making a monster to question the superiority and singularity of God’s power. Being

triggered by his passion for knowledge, Victor Frankenstein reads books and spends time in

laboratories to give life to his bio-engineering thoughts. Victor’s engagements with the process

of monster-making and subsequently his attempts to revenge the monster for killing all his near

and dear family members are multidimensional and worth critical scrutiny.

🎯 Dr Frankenstein is marked by an intense passion for the unknown, a leaning for scientific

knowledge, and an insatiable quest for exploring the recent developments in the field of

contemporary science to pursue the crux of life. The story of Frankenstein draws one’s attention

because it relates how Frankenstein gradually incurs the wrath the his own creation, that is, the

monster by not providing him a female companion. Creation of a monster gives him delight, for

it enables him to dislodge the authority of the God. His experimentation with science leads him

to end up with the creation of a monster. It reflects the ambitious and daring attitude in Victor

who becomes overwhelmed by the scientific advances so much so that he audaciously goes to

break free of the law of Nature. When Frankenstein refuses to give a female companion to the

monster, the latter gets exasperated and avows to assault his creator. But, since he cannot

disregard his creator, he ingeniously kills close relatives of his creator thereby making him feel

the agony and pain of being singular in the human world. What is important here to note is that

whereas the monster admits his wrong doings and wishes to die in the end of the novel, Dr

Frankenstein denies any allegation against him and attempts to rationalize his revenge against

him. The irony is that unlike the monster, Victor shows his obduracy in accepting the

preponderance of the God over humanity.

🎯 Victor’s character is modeled in such a way that the author can posit his actions to

critique contemporary patriarchal politics. Victor’s unyielding attitude to the God suggests that anybody who disparages God is bound to face the consequences that Victor experiences. Victor’s

position as a protagonist of the novel is interesting in that he creates his own antagonist by

yielding to the quest for knowledge. Sometimes, he is held as the tragic hero of the novel, for he

finally succumbs to death which he wanted to escape. Inclusion of Victor in the novel is done to

lampoon common people’s growing inclination to science revoking their faith in the God. The

miserable downfall of Victor, a modern representation of Satanic Fall, works as a potential

reminder to those who want to breach the laws of Nature approved by the God. In a way, the

character exemplifies the sharp and imminent tension between religion and science, which used

to plague common readers.

🎯 Frankenstein’s attitude to female gender is quite ambiguous. One the one hand, he denies

the production of a female monster and on the other hand, he marries Elizabeth to lead his

married life. Dominance of Victor over other female characters leads readers to question the

actions by Victor from feminist ideological positions. Whereas Victor began with the dignity of a

human, he ends up becoming a dehumanized person in his pursuit of revenge against the monster. This turn of Victor’s character shows that he fails to respect the worth of humanness and thus

gets driven by animosity.

🎯 On the final analysis of Victor’s character, one may argue that Victor Frankenstein does

not only run the risk of manufacturing a monster out of deceased human bodies, he ends up being

a patient of paranoia. The failure of Victor symbolically gives hint at the limitations of scientific

research which cannot help one lay bare the “secrets of heaven and earth”. Apart from it, Victor

is an example of a round character and the development of whom is fashioned by the horrible

activities of the monster.