Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Repentance and stubbornness

A hero is someone who remains seen in literature as a person with great courage and strength, yet though not always the case. The hero usually takes risk for the greater good. The Romantic hero becomes a type of literary idol with different morals. They are passionate about what they love, becoming obsessed with their newfound passion and become determined to perfect at what they do. They eventually become tragically doomed through creating their own individual moral codes by struggling with their internal battles within their minds. Mary Shelley presents us the first persona of a romantic hero through Victor Frankenstein in her book Frankenstein. Shelley fabricates Victor as the main narrator throughout the book, along with Captain Walton and the creature, which Victor creates. Another hero during the Romantic era is the Ancient Mariner, given to us by Samuel Coleridge in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Both Shelley and Coleridge write in the same era of Romanticism and they present the idea of a Romantic hero but both in different spectrums. As Shelley talks about the more traditional yet new idea of a Romantic hero with all the aspects, Coleridge illustrates the Ancient Mariner as a Romantic hero that gains his Romantic qualities from experience unlike Victor who developed his qualities from an interest and passion through their knowledge, which they gained from painful experiences.

As Victor grew up he never gained knowledge from experience like the Ancient, Victory had learned for his own personal gain. It becomes evident that they both had expanded knowledge such as Victor’s knowledge of the sciences and the Mariner’s knowledge of life on a deeper level. Yet Victor had “an eager desire to ...

... middle of paper ...

...of how they saw life, which is simplistic yet amazing. The Romantic hero became the complete opposite of a modern fairy tale hero. Although very ingenious he had his fatal flaws, which the Romantics would always try to justify in the end. Frankenstein and the Ancient Mariner both different and alike in qualities of the Romantic Hero such as sinfulness and their moral codes, but the Ancient Mariner became the hero more looked up to because of how he resolved his burden in the end instead of trying to justify his actions like Frankenstein tried to until his death.

Works Cited

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M. H. Abrams. 7th ed. Vol. 2. New York: Norton, 2000. 439-41. Print.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1831. Ed. Candace Ward. New York: Dover Publications,

1994. Print.