Frankenstein 979reSponSIbILIty in Frankenstein
Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein explores
what it means to be responsible for the acts, the
welfare, the very lives and deaths of others—to be
bound to others by sympathy, familial obligation,
or civic or natural law, such that the effects one’s
relations produce in the world might be regarded as
truly one’s own.
The earliest, most persistent, and most emphatic
appeal voiced by Victor Frankenstein’s creature is
that his “father” and “god,” “lord and king,” “creator,”
“origin and author,” assume proper responsibility
for him. The creature’s sense of his contract with
his maker is highly articulated. “To whom could I
apply with more fitness than to him who had given
me life?” he asks, invoking a natural order in which
fathers are obligated to care for their offspring, gods
bound to provide for their creations, kings expected
to protect their people, and authors required to
answer for their works. “Thou art bound [to me]
by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of
us,” the creature reminds Victor, offering a model of
humanity defined by the set of duties and responsi-
bilities that lie at the core of a person’s being.
While Victor initially appears to appreciate “the
duties of a creator towards his creature,” he neglects
these duties once his artificial man is animated,
fleeing him in horror. Following his maker’s rejec-
tion, the creature spends his early life seeking a
surrogate family, a set of relations who will take him
in, sympathize with him, and voluntarily bind their
lives up with his. Imaginatively adopting a family
of cottagers whose domestic harmony he observes
from afar, the creature comes to think of the De
Lacys as his own. Though the creature remains
“unseen and unknown” to them, he indulges in an
increasingly elaborate fantasy of membership in the
family, referring to them as “my beloved cottagers,”
“my friends,” and “my protectors.” When they, too,
flee from him, the De Lacys “break the only link
that [holds him] to the world.” It is only once he
finds himself congenitally “unsympathized with,”
“spurned and deserted”—indeed, incapable of elicit-
ing the sympathetic response by which he perceives
men and women to be naturally connected—that
the creature becomes recognizable to the reader as
a monster. In this moment, the creature recalls, “I
declared everlasting war against the species, and,
more than all, against him who had formed me, and
sent me forth to this insupportable misery.” His vow
to exact hateful revenge is, of course, only reinforced
when Victor refuses the creature’s request for a mate
who will reattach him “to the chain of existence and
events, from which [he is] now excluded.”
Recognizing that the human condition is defined
by interconnectedness, mutual dependence, and
responsibility, the creature vows to sever his enemy’s
emotional and social ties by murdering all “whose
existence[s] [are] bound up with” his. His objective
is not merely to exact revenge or torment his tor-
menter, but to force Victor to take responsibility for
the consequences of his actions and to acknowledge
the inextricable tie that binds him to his creature.
By creating circumstances for Victor that mirror his
own, the creature seeks to expose that bond.
The creature’s reign of terror begins with the
accidental murder of Victor’s little brother, the
young, innocent, beloved William. Nearly every
character in the novel is implicated in this act of
violence, the first in a chain of events seemingly
designed to expose the limits of free will and indi-
vidual responsibility. While it is the creature’s hands
that strangle the boy, Justine, Elizabeth, and Victor
all hold themselves responsible for William’s death.
“I have murdered my darling,” exclaims Elizabeth,
who assumes that the murderer has been motivated
by greed. Justine, too, confesses to the crime after
a coercive interrogation; she is tried, found guilty,
and hanged. Even Victor’s mother is posthumously
implicated in the deaths of Will and Justine in that
her image and memory lie at the heart of both their
deaths.
It is Victor’s repeated confessions that he is Wil-
liam’s “true murderer . . . not in deed, but in effect,”
however, that rings most true for the reader. Victor
is responsible, not only because, as he admits, he has
paradoxically “endowed [the creature] with the will”
but because he has refused to own and guide him. As
the victims accumulate—first William; then Justine;
and finally Clerval, Victor’s closest friend, and Eliz-
abeth, his bride—Victor has no choice but to assume
responsibility for the creature who has enslaved him.
Unable to control, avert, or counteract the effects of
his own will, albeit effects produced at one remove,