In class we discussed how one of Mrs. Clinch's least favorite men of literature was Dimmesdale of The Scarlet Letter. I can see how Dimmesdale would not be held favorable in the eyes of many due to his weakness, cowardice, and overall pathetic-ness, but I cannot get over Victor Frankenstein.
Victor Frankenstein is my least favorite person in all of literature. I simply despise him.
He's my least favorite so far, anyway. Which made it hard to read and discuss with others without ranting incessantly about how bad of a guy he is. (I'm not even sure if succeeded in doing that.)
I read Shelley's Frankenstein previously in 8th grade, and I remember disliking Victor then as well. Before I read it again this year, I credited my dislike for Victor to middle school ignorance and a general misunderstanding of the text, and vowed to read the book again with an open mind.
I got to about the second chapter when it all started to come back to me. If anything, my hate (what a strong word) for Victor intensified after reading the story a second time.
In my opinion, Victor is simply repulsive. He is the monster that the others should have been throwing rocks at. Sure, when compared to Dimmesdale, Victor can be called the braver of the two, but at what cost?
Victor started out his quest thinking he would be able to do better than God or Nature and create life with his own hands....which is forgivable. I mean, we all get a little self-absorbed and haughty sometimes. But Victor took it to another level. With his narrations of his desire to "penetrate the secrets of nature" and "unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation", the reader could clearly see that this guy truly believed that he could surpass the divine. He killed me with his final declaration of his supposed success before the Creation came to life: "A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs." I'm sorry, Victor? "Bless" you? "Owe" you? "Deserve"?
If conceptual conception between man and woman under God is classified as "natural" birth, then Victor is a rapist. He claimed to "pursue nature to her hiding-places" to "penetrate her secrets", for Pete's sake.
Even if we ignore all those evocative statements and only read that he wanted to reanimate the dead, his behavior when his creation finally comes to life is still contemptible. Victor is actually surprised how appalling his creature appears when it takes its first movements, even when he knew it was going to be ugly before he finished creating it. He abandons this creature without teaching it any morals or values at all, but gets upset and vows revenge at it when it does him wrong in return. Seriously, Victor?
And even after all of that, Victor refuses to take any responsibility for his actions. He instead decides to blame Fate, Destiny, and others for the way his life turned out. He reanimated the dead with his own hands, chose to abandon it, rejected taking responsibility for the Creature's actions before all of his friends and family were dead, and he still narrates to Walton about how "Destiny was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter and terrible destruction". Victor only starts to see what he himself might have done wrong in the tenth chapter, when he sees the Creature again and thinks "For the first time, also, I felt what the duties of a creator towards his creature were, and that I ought to render him happy before I complained of his wickedness."
Perhaps Victor Frankenstein is the biggest of all Shelley's warnings in her book about the responsibility of the Creator towards his creation. And I would say she made her warning very clear.
P.S.--This post was harder to write than I originally thought it would be. I reeeaaally do not like that guy. I had to take breaks when reading the book for the second time because I was too agitated with Victor to continue.
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