Key Themes in Frankenstein: Ambition, Obsession and Responsibility

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Frankenstein Themes

Mary Shelley’s *Frankenstein*, subtitled *The Modern Prometheus*, remains a cornerstone of English literature since its publication in 1818. Frequently featured on A-level and GCSE syllabi, the novel captivates British readers not merely with its Gothic elements but also through its profound meditation on themes that transcend its era. Shelley’s narrative ingeniously intertwines tales of ambition, knowledge, prejudice, justice, revenge, and obsession, casting a searching light on the dangers and responsibilities of human endeavour. This essay examines these central themes—exploring how Shelley crafts her message through the lens of character psychology, narrative structure, and contemporary context. In so doing, it seeks to illuminate the rich ethical and philosophical questions at the heart of *Frankenstein*, making the novel as relevant now as it was in Shelley’s early 19th-century Britain.

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Obsession: The Dual-Edged Sword of Fixation

Victor Frankenstein, the eponymous scientist, is Shelley’s most striking portrait of obsession’s peril. His relentless pursuit to uncover “the secrets of heaven and earth” is so intense that it leaves him physically ruined: “my cheek had grown pale with study, and my person had become emaciated with confinement.” Victor’s singular goal—to animate lifeless matter—drives him to neglect his health, shun his family, and forsake any semblance of emotional balance. Upon achieving his aim, his obsession does not abate but shifts, transforming into a haunted need to eradicate his creation. This prolonged vengefulness sustains, rather than heals, his suffering, encapsulating the futility of an unquelled fixity of purpose.

Obsession, however, is not Victor’s alone. The Creature himself, at first gentle and yearning for acceptance, becomes consumed by a desperate hunger for revenge in the face of universal rejection. “I will glut the maw of death,” he vows, his hope for kindness replaced by relentless anger. Shelley grants the Creature a tragic complexity, depicting how obsession can arise from pain and injustice, evolving into a destructive force when compassion is denied.

A subtler figure, Captain Walton, mirrors Victor in his thirst for discovery. Eager to “tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man,” Walton’s letters to his sister indicate a similar tendency towards fixation. Yet Shelley affords Walton the wisdom Victor lacks; faced with the likelihood of disaster, he heeds the pleas of his crew and turns back. This decision underscores Shelley’s nuanced message: obsession, if left unchecked, promises misery; but reflection and self-restraint can break its spell.

The sum effect, then, is a powerful caution. Obsession’s seductive grip shuts out reason and empathy—the very qualities that might redeem those who suffer under its weight. Shelley’s insight into this psychological trap remains acutely relevant, resonating in contemporary discussions around workaholism and the perils of single-minded ambition.

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Knowledge and Its Ambivalence: Curiosity versus Destruction

Both Victor and Walton are animated by a hunger for knowledge—Walton to reach the North Pole, Victor to unearth “the elixir of life.” Their quests, though ostensibly benign, reveal the slippery slope from healthy inquiry to dangerous hubris. Victor’s “mad enthusiasm” drives him into forbidden territory, giving rise to catastrophic consequences: the deaths of William, Justine, Henry Clerval, and Elizabeth.

Knowledge is equally double-edged for the Creature. Unlike Victor, he is not born but self-fashioned through reading and mimicry, learning to “discover himself unknown,” echoing the figure of Rousseau’s natural man. However, knowledge brings not comfort but pain—the realisation of his grotesque alienation and the world’s prejudice. In learning language and history, the Creature only grows more aware of his exclusion and the seeming impossibility of belonging.

Shelley’s critique extends to the prevailing Enlightenment belief that knowledge guarantees progress. Her deconstruction of scientific optimism aligns with Wordsworth’s lament in *The Prelude* at “man’s meddling intellect” disrupting the harmony of nature. Shelley’s answer is clear: knowledge pursued without foresight, humility, or moral consideration paves the way to ruin. Whether in the hands of Victor, Walton, or the Creature, newfound understanding becomes a burden—a means not to liberation but despair.

Victor’s refusal to recognise his responsibility towards the being he creates stands as a succinct condemnation of the reckless pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Shelley’s heroine, Elizabeth, serves as an implicit contrast, representing qualities of empathy and emotional wisdom undervalued in the masculine scientific world of the novel.

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Justice and Injustice: Failures of System and Self

Perhaps the most scathing critique involves the wrongful execution of Justine Moritz, illustrated as "a wretched mockery of justice." Justine’s vulnerability, as an orphan and domestic servant, makes her especially susceptible to judicial error; her confession is wrung from her through fear and pressure, not evidence. The very institutions designed to deliver justice instead perpetuate suffering, a point echoed in the fate of Safie’s Turkish father, imprisoned not for his actions but his heritage.

Yet justice in *Frankenstein* flows beyond formal tribunals. The story is propelled by cycles of personal retribution: the Creature avenging his abandonment, Victor consumed by guilt, and the fates of families destroyed as indirect consequence. This pattern of poetic or cosmic justice suggests that no crime—whether an act of creation or neglect—goes unanswered. Still, Shelley makes it clear that this is justice tinged with cruelty; the innocent suffer alongside, and sometimes more than, the guilty.

The psychological torment Victor endures underscores the disconnect between external "legal" justice and inner, moral reckoning. Unlike Walton—who reprieves himself and his men—Victor cannot escape the consequences of his deeds. Shelley thus asserts the necessity of individual conscience, indirectly critiquing the inadequacies and biases of both legal and societal authority in her own society.

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Ambition: Human Aspiration and Hubris

Victor’s ambition blinds him to consequences. He behaves, as Clerval observes, with "child's blindness," never considering what might follow animation of the dead. It is this blinkered pursuit that causes Victor’s tragic unravelling and the suffering of those he loves. Walton, as noted, is offered a chance at redemption which he accepts, marking a rare moment in the novel where caution tempers aspiration.

Shelley, writing at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, appears suspicious of such unchecked ambition. The figure of Prometheus, invoked in the subtitle, alludes to the ancient Greek warning about hubris: those who overstep natural bounds will suffer. The positive aspects of ambition—curiosity, striving, hope—are acknowledged, but Shelley’s ultimate message is that pursuit divorced from ethics courts disaster.

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Prejudice: The Cruelty of Surface Judgement

Justine’s misfortune at being a servant in a rigidly hierarchical system, the Turkish merchant unjustly persecuted because of his ethnicity, and even Victor’s own status as a foreigner in Ireland—each exposes how appearance, class, and national identity shape access to justice and compassion.

The Creature’s experience is most harrowing in its demonstration of prejudice’s potential cruelty. Universally scorned for his monstrous visage, the Creature suffers only one moment of pure kindness—extended by old, blind De Lacey, whose incapacity to judge by sight allows genuine sympathy. This episode exposes the superficiality of societal judgement: only blindness, literal or metaphoric, can pierce prejudice’s veil.

Victor’s horror and immediate rejection of his own creation signal a further, more intimate failure: the inability to see beyond appearance. Shelley seems to ask her readers—both in Regency England and now—what monsters are created by a society that equates surface with soul? The resulting loneliness and rage prompt tragedy, suggesting the immense cost of exclusion and othering.

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Revenge: Cycles of Violence and Despair

Victor, in parallel, is drawn into a vendetta of his own, vowing to “pursue the daemon… until he or I shall perish in mortal conflict.” The pursuit, symbolically and literally, crosses the icy wastes of the Arctic—a landscape reflecting the emotional desolation wrought by sustained hatred.

Notably, Shelley seems sceptical that revenge provides closure or balance. Both Victor and the Creature are left ruined, isolated, and tormented. The absence of forgiveness, whether from others or oneself, guarantees the perpetuation of suffering, not its alleviation. By choosing both men’s decline rather than redemption, Shelley prompts her audience to question the value—indeed, the sanity—of cyclical retribution.

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Conclusion