The Act of Prometheus Recommitted

Meddling in the affairs of gods will cause doom to whoever does so, but having another soul also share the retribution brought upon the divine intruder for his meddling is an even worse crime. Victor Frankenstein’s creation, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, was the truly innocent victim of Victor’s god-like affairs with science. Victor never thinks about what could happen if he brings a human body to life (he never even starts with a small, simple creature –he is only concerned with producing life (Bloom) and making a species that would treat him as king). When life is brought into the human body, Victor is terrified of his creation’s horrifying frame. Victor, being so caught up in work, never did attempt to create a pleasant-looking human. Being terrified of his own creation, Victor does what only the worst of “parents” would do – he runs away from it, forcing the creature (as a “new born”) to find its way and survive in the icy and snowy winter in a lone attempt (Fredricks). The fact that the Creature is hideous makes all the humans it encounters to become scared, tense, and defensive as they would try and shoo the creature out of their villages.

Victor Frankenstein is a man who does not think before he does something, the type of man that will cause demise to himself and those he has an influence upon. Once Victor begins preparing his experiment for bringing motion to the motionless, he starts his impersonation of Prometheus (who stole the sacred element of fire from Mount Olympus and gave it to the nearby village), as he takes the sacred element of life into a dead body. He wrongly goes to a graveyard and cuts and collects different body parts in order to create his “new species” which he hopes will one day treat him as a king – simply one of his selfish deeds. Frankenstein displays himself as the antithetical half of a human being, which he forcibly places into the Monster.

Victor, after robbing endless graves and spending many hours of research and preparation, finally manages to complete his experiment of giving life to the dead. He irresponsibly makes a very large body instead of starting small in his ambition to create life. Not only that, but he does a very lousy job of designing the Monster. “With yellow skin, lustrous black and flowing hair, watery eyes, dun white sockets, and straight black lips” (Bugg) the poor wretched beast is not a present sight. Victor, after providing the spark of life to his creation, abandons the Monster, leaving it to find its way in the world.” He displays paternal negligence and a lack of responsible creativity” (Hustis). At the time, there was ice and cold all over Switzerland, and the poor Creature would have died had he not been built with his superhuman capabilities which reflect upon Victor’s creative power. The Creature is not wanted by any of the villages he encounters, and ends up being chased out with stones being thrown at him. All of this is the reflection of Victor that the Monster is forced to carry, a reflection of Victor’s disability to help himself or others around him. “Frankenstein naps on a Golden Bed, Or will you quickly distribute fire?”(Duhamel). Living on roots and the like from the ground in the cold, harsh wilderness, the Creature never will enjoy anything other than his brief meeting with De Lacey, a blind, old man whom the Monster asked for hospitality. The man seemed to enjoy his presence, proving that the Creature’s bad points are only in his looks. After his plan to live with De Lacey falls to crumbs, the Creature begins to feel very lonely and executes rage towards his creator, Victor Frankenstein. “The Creature is brought into a hostile world, and he himself looked frightening and was abandoned at creation, alone with no human to help him” (Crouch). The only thing he could try to do to fix his life is to find his master, hoping that he may live a better life. He comes close to his goal when he meets Victor’s brother William, who refers to the Creature as an Ogre, a Monster, and an ugly Wretch (Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus), the second sign that the Frankensteins disapprove of the Creature. Eventually, the Monster meets his horrid creator, and he requests of a mate for himself, someone that may accompany him and comfort him in this misery-filled world. A mate is all that the Monster needs to just live a happy life, but Victor at first disagrees because of the deaths the Creature has already caused and his criminal ways which he adopted from anger and revenge. To this, the Monster argues, and says, “Am I to be though the only criminal, when all of humankind sinned against me?” (Shelley 210). However, Victor does agree at a second thought, that though he would have to make another horrid creation, the two wretches would leave Europe and the human civilization for good. Victor surprisingly does honor his promise, but before he jolts the spark of life into the Creature’s mate is where Victor shows another bad trait about him – the disability to keep promises. Minutes before completion, Victor destroys his second creation, utterly causing the Creature to go insane. All he had been thinking about was the completion of his mate and the happiness that would forever fill him. The monster waits many weeks for what will be a false promise in eagerness, but also with patience, believing that he will be happy. This is something that at this point into the novel that will not happen because Victor is a horrid human who cannot help anybody – those whom he owes a favor and even those who are in desperate need.

Just as Prometheus was sincerely punished by Zeus for giving the sacred fire to the humans, Frankenstein is to be severely punished by his creation for giving the sacred element of life to the dead. Slowly, every single person that Victor loved and had affection for, had died (save for his one last brother). The tiresome forests, dangerous mountains, and frozen seas that Frankenstein endured in his mission to kill his creation were all inevitable emblems for him, as these were all places the Creature had to actually live in on a daily basis. Lacking the superhuman capabilities, Victor dies aboard a ship in the Antarctic North, ending his Creature’s rage towards Victor’s treachery. The Monster’s tragedy, which ultimately led to Frankenstein’s tragedy, was all due a moral error; the lack of love. The Monster has one cruel, harsh mission to complete after this: burn himself to rid the world of his horrible flesh (and what is left of Victor in him) – a very painful, cruel death (Harold). The lesson of never controlling Mother Nature’s ways is passed onto Walton to prevent more tragedy in meddling with scientific affairs and trying to match the power of a god.

Victor Frankenstein exhibits his irresponsibility by giving life to the dead, reenacting the act of Prometheus. No one on Earth is meant to have the power of a god as it would only end up destroying, as shown with Frankenstein’s death in the end of the novel. Victor exhibits rage, vengeance, and depression which he passes on to his Monster, and these feelings are expressed directly back to Victor. Of course, the cause of the rage and vengeance was because of Victor’s poor parenting skills. This is first shown when he abandons the Monster at creation, causing him to endure depression, harsh weather, horrid living conditions, starvation, fatigue, loneliness, and more – all on a daily basis. Not only that, but the Monster was deprived of his mate in his view; utterly crushing the happy future the Monster anticipated would happen. Victor was the cause of depression for himself and the Monster. He deserves to be punished, but the Monster does not deserve the same fate as he would have been an innocent being had it not been for Victor’s influence. The Monster is, without a doubt, is the true victim of Victor’s irresponsible meddling in science. Victor himself deserved punishment, but not his poor Creation as well.