“The catastrophe of the tragic hero thus becomes the catastrophe of the fifth-century man; all his furious energy and intellectual daring drive him on to this terrible discovery of his fundamental ignorance - he is not the measure of all things but the thing measured and found wanting.” -Robert Fagles. A tragic hero is one who dares to complete the entirety of their aspirations, resulting in an exponential downfall and early demise--failing to recognize their flaws and only pines after what ‘could’ have been. In the book Frankenstein, the author Mary Shelley expands on the theme of the tragic hero through the main character Victor Frankenstein. Initially, Victor has a fairly comfortable life. He has loving family and friends which he has strong …show more content…
Once life is created, Victor is disgusted by the fact that the creature has actual eyes, and an actual soul. His whole of beliefs and purpose of life are shaken, and he flees the life he has conjured. His wellness is then damaged, and a shadow of isolation and inhumanity constantly tears him to extreme conflict. When Clerval visits, there are distinct distances between the two men and their conduct. After the deaths of Justine, William, and Clerval, Victor rationalizes that he is the murderer and falls into a frenzy of illness. By the end of the book, we see a broken man that acknowledges his pain and suffering, but is no longer guilty, and accepts his death with a ‘smile.’ Victor’s digression through the book due to error of judgement, psychological damage, physical damage, and fall from humanity illustrates the wholeness of what a tragic hero …show more content…
Victor cannot acknowledge the real facts of his situations due to his tendency to suppress emotions that lead to dangerous secrecy and a failure to recognize his flaws. One of these flaws is the process of guilt. This is first seen after the trial and death of Justine when he says, “during the whole of this wretched mockery of justice I suffered living torture” (67). However, as he is sick on the ship of Walton he says he no longer feels guilty, and welcomes a peaceful death. Another error in judgement is his blindness in understanding of humanity. In the beginning he does not acknowledge the effects the creature will have on the human race, too consumed in his personal pursuit for knowledge. Then, the opposite extreme occurs when he destroys the plans for another creature. He justifies his actions by saying, “Had I the right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations?” (156). Victor then considers the effects of the creature after seeing the destruction the first can cause. This exemplifies the fact that Victor tends to be blinded due to his own anticipation and excitement. A failure to process his responsibilities and guilt exemplify a solid base of tragic
At first, Victor believes himself superior to nature, and he builds a creature to prove his dominance. After gathering the information and materials needed to create life, Victor begins to fantasize about what he is about to do. He sees “life and death [as] ideal bounds, which [he] should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into [their] dark world. A new species would bless [him] as its creator and source, many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to [him]” (Shelley 55). Life and death are natural things, but Victor thinks that he can “break through” them and create life. He alone would be the person to “pour a torrent of light into their dark world,” as if he was God, ruling over all of the world. This shows Victor’s lack of respect towards life and how he intends to overcome the boundaries set by nature. Unlike the Romantic who revered and honored nature, Victor wants to use it for his own gain. He expects “happy” and “excellent natures” to obey him, and he doesn’t dwell upon the consequences of his actions. His outlook changes after the Creature comes to life. As Victor stares into the watery, lifeless eyes of his creature, he finally realizes his mistake in trying to disrupt the natural order of the world. Scared by the outcome of his actions, Victor attempts to run away and find comfort in nature. He travels to the Arve Ravine, where “the
Victor Frankenstein may be the leading character in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but a hero he is not. He is self-centered and loveless, and there is nothing heroic about him. There is a scene in Chapter twenty-four where Captain Walton is confronted by his crew to turn southwards and return home should the ice break apart and allow them the way. Frankenstein rouses himself and finds the strength to argue to the Captain that they should continue northwards, or suffer returning home "with the stigma of disgrace marked on your brows." He quite obviously has alterior motives and if he were not the eloquent, manipulative creature he so egotistically accuses his creature of being, he might not have moved the Captain and the men so much that they are blind to the true source of his passion. Unfortunately for Frankenstein, the crew, (however "moved") stand firm in their position. Yet the things he says in his motivational speech are prime examples of the extent to which Frankenstein is blind to his own faults and yet will jump at the chance to harangue others. He is so self-centered that his lack of interaction and love for others after his experiment has been completed, would barely qualify him as a person, if the difference between being human and being a person lies in the ability to have relationships with others.
In the novel Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, the main theme revolves around the internal and external consequences of being isolated from others. Being isolated from the world could result in a character losing his/her mental state and eventually causing harm to themselves or others. Because both Victor Frankenstein and the creature are isolated from family and society, they experienced depression, prejudice, and revenge.
Furthermore, after his creation breathes its first breath, Victor already despises it, which leads to his health’s deterioration and hatred of his previous love. His love quickly changes to despise when he says, “I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (53). His statement shows how his heart does a complete 1800 and stops loving the monster the moment it lives. When Victor’s “…heart palpitated in the sickness of fear…” (54), it proves how his monster tormented his creator without having to be near him. Which also leads to the teaching of the lesson “think before you act”.
...he window and see his own creation killing his wife. As a result of all the deaths in Victor’s family, his father kills himself because he cannot stand all the grief that he has been struck with. His death is a result of the hideous monster that his own flesh and blood created, but he will never know that because Victor will not tell anyone.
Victor’s lack of compassion and sympathy towards the monster causes him to become angry instead of guilty. His cruelness to his creation made the monster kill and hurt the people he did but “when [he] reflected on [the monster’s] crimes and malice, [Victor’s] hatred and revenge burst all bounds of moderation,”(Shelley 325). Without compassion Victor thinks that the only way to stop the monster is to get revenge on him, instead of just giving him the empathy and kindness that monster craved. Victor realizes that "if he were vanquished, [he] should be a free man...balanced by those horrors of remorse and guilt which would pursue [him] until death. ”(Shelley 731).
Victor Frankenstein is forced by society to live a life of suffering. From an early age, Frankenstein grew up in one of the most distinguished families in the republic, meaning he had to partake in society and suffer from it’s influences unwillingly. He describes his father as being an honorable, and respectable syndic, which set high standards for Frankenstein. At university, Frankenstein is ridiculed for his belief in the alchemists, furthering Frankenstein’s ambition to prove the professors wrong. The actual “fate” Frankenstein describes is the influence of society which is constantly influencing him, whether it be through his professors or his parents, to be as ambitious as he is. The only way to have stopped
Many people know that Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, was part of a family of famed Romantic era writers. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was one of the first leaders of the feminist movement, her father, William Godwin, was a famous social philosopher, and her husband, Percy Shelley, was one of the leading Romantic poets of the time ("Frankenstein: Mary Shelley Biography."). What most people do not know, however, is that Mary Shelley dealt with issues of abandonment her whole life and fear of giving birth (Duncan, Greg. "Frankenstein: The Historical Context."). When she wrote Frankenstein, she revealed her hidden fears and desires through the story of Victor Frankenstein’s creation, putting him symbolically in her place (Murfin, Ross. "Psychoanalytic Criticism and Frankenstein.”). Her purpose, though possibly unconsciously, in writing the novel was to resolve both her feelings of abandonment by her parents, and fears of her own childbirth.
Victor’s cruel and hostile actions toward his creature demonstrate his monstrous characteristics. One example of Victor’s inhumane cruelty is when he decides to abandon his creature. When Victor realizes what he has created, he is appalled, and abandons his creature because he is “unable to endure the aspect of the being [he] had created” (42). This wretched action would be similar to a mother abandoning her own child. Victor’s ambition for renown only fuels his depravity; he brings new life into the world, only to abandon it. This act of abandonment accurately depicts Victor’s cruelty because it shows his disgust toward his own creation, as well as his lack of respect for life. An example of a hostile action is when Victor destroys the creature’s
Everything starts to change once Victors ambitions become his life. He leaves to study at Ingolstadt, where his destiny begins to unfold. This is when Victor’s isolation begins. The search for the secrets of life consumes him for many years until he thinks he has found it. For months, he assembles what he needs for his creation to come alive.
Throughout the journey, Victor mourns for his deceased loved ones, but consistently blames the Creation as the murderer. He uses the blame as an escape and justification to end the creature. While he repents building the creature, Victor does not accept that his ambition led to the loss of his family and friends. As soon as Victor encounters the Creation, he chastises him of the “victims whom [the Creation has] so diabolically murdered!” (102). Victor presumes the Creation is the murderer without evidence, thus imposing the complete fault on him. Victor admits to being the creator, driven by compulsive passion, and regrets it. However, he refuses to consider how his desire to create and role as the creator led to the deaths. Victor uses self-deception to avoid the reality of his assistance in victims’ deaths. Marking the Creation as the sole murderer, Victor uses the belief as a basis for desiring revenge against the Creation. Victor defends his reasoning, “he destroyed my friends… he ought to die” (220). Similarly, Victor places the blame on the Creation, but uses it as a subterfuge. Victor’s previous fixation on bringing life to a corpse replicates itself, but in the form of revenge. He self-deceptively sees it as a logical reason and derives his enslaving obsession from it. Subsequently, Victor surrenders the rest of his life to pursuing the Creation, failing to distinguish reality from his flawed perception, even until his last breath. His self-deception of the Creation as the murderer begins as an excuse, but transforms into a reason to defeat
In the novel, Victor is an introverted scientist who achieves the unachievable; Victor creates a monster out of various dead body parts. Both Victor and the monster soon realize the monster’s appearance is undesirable, and Victor refuses to create a mate for him. The monster then seeks revenge on Victor by killing Victor’s friends and family. Victor spends the rest of his life trying to stop the Monster from hurting more innocent victims, but his efforts fall short when he passes away before seeing the Monster die. Frankenstein’s Victor Frankenstein is a tragic hero because he represents all five of the actions that Aristotle calls for in his definition of a tragic hero through his actions, choices, and
When Victor arrives in Geneva and hears the results from the jury regarding the monster’s murder of William, Victor feels absolute guilt. Victor states “ words cannot convey the heart sickening, despair I then endured”(Shelley 72). Victor's guilt eats away at him for being responsible for the murders of William and Justine. Victor is responsible for the murders because he is responsible for the malign nature of his Creation and its’ actions.This shows that Nature is capable of using its omnipotent sway to alter the mental state of man. When Victor's Father visits him while sick after the recent death of Clerval, Victor's best friend Victor proves himself to be delirious. After an outburst Victor’s “ speech convinced my father that my ideas were deranged”(Shelley 176). Natures punishment of mental decay has caused even Victor’s family to believe he is deranged. Victor is suffering because when a person possesses guilt from a tragedy, the guilt manifests into reality and plagues the guilty. Nature uses its power to manifest toxic emotions into reality to affect current state as punishment. Also The monster demands Victor create a companion for him. While Victor is reluctant to begin construction because he fears “vengeance of a disappointed monster”(Shelley 139). Victor is plagued again because he allows his mind to be polluted with thoughts of defying nature. Nature applies mental deterioration as a punishment as a response to
After Justine is executed due to being wrongly accused of killing William, and Victor being at fault for unleashing the monster that had done the heinous crime, he cannot help but feel great remorse and anguish for the fact that Justine was killed for a crime she did not commit and he instead was free to live. He uses imagery when describing the blood flowing through his veins, and it is symbolic of the life that is actively present in his body. By bringing this up, Victor intends to question the integrity of his life because he feels that he should not be the one living, and bears tremendous guilt for aquiring life when Justine can not due to the cause of his own actions. Victor further emphasizes his anguish when he describes all of the emotions playing with his inner self; using a simile to compare himself to a wandering evil spirit.
Mary Shelley in her book Frankenstein addresses numerous themes relevant to the current trends in society during that period. However, the novel has received criticism from numerous authors. This paper discusses Walter Scott’s critical analysis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in his Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine Review of Frankenstein (1818).