Mirrors and Monsters: Character and Responsibility in Frankenstein

Introduction

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published by Mary Shelley in 1818, is a Gothic novel structured around a nested series of narrators whose competing accounts raise persistent questions about who bears moral responsibility for the destruction that unfolds. The novel's central argument, developed through Victor Frankenstein, the Creature, Elizabeth Lavenza, and Robert Walton, is not simply that science is dangerous or that ambition corrupts — it is that the refusal to accept the consequences of one's own creative acts produces a cascade of suffering that no single character fully escapes. This essay argues that Shelley constructs her principal characters as moral mirrors for one another: each reflects back, in distorted form, the failures of the others, so that the novel's tragedy emerges not from any single villain but from a systemic collapse of care and acknowledgment.

Victor Frankenstein and the Abdication of Responsibility

Victor Frankenstein is the novel's most carefully constructed study in self-deception. From the opening pages of his narration, he positions himself as a tragic hero undone by fate, yet Shelley's structural choices persistently undercut this self-image. As a student at the University of Ingolstadt, Victor pursues the secret of life with obsessive energy, but the moment his creation opens its eyes, he flees in revulsion. His abandonment of the Creature is not a momentary failure of nerve — it is the originating moral catastrophe of the novel, the one act from which every subsequent death flows. Shelley signals this through her narrative architecture: the monster's crimes against William, Justine, Clerval, and Elizabeth are all legible as displaced consequences of Victor's original desertion.

What makes Victor genuinely complex rather than simply culpable is his capacity for self-awareness without self-correction. He acknowledges, at various points, that the Creature's wretchedness is his doing, yet this acknowledgment never translates into action. When Justine is executed for William's murder, Victor possesses knowledge that would save her but remains silent, protecting his own reputation and his claim to rational sanity. Viewed through the lens of Frye's archetypal criticism, Victor occupies the position of the pharmakos — the sacrificial figure who embodies the community's sin — but Shelley complicates this archetype by making Victor simultaneously the priest who performs the sacrifice and the scapegoat who claims innocence. He is the creator who plays God and then insists that God has abandoned him, a reversal that the novel's subtitle, "The Modern Prometheus," explicitly frames as a classical act of overreach.

Shelley's choice to embed Victor's narrative within Walton's letters amplifies this critique. Victor's story reaches us already filtered through his own self-justifying rhetoric, and Walton — himself an ambitious explorer risking his crew's lives for personal glory — proves an unreliable witness because he is too disposed to admire what he hears. The frame structure thus turns the act of reading into an exercise in critical skepticism: the reader must resist the seductive power of Victor's eloquence in exactly the way Victor himself failed to resist the seductive power of forbidden knowledge.