Frankenstein Duty Quotes

Mary Shelley’s famous novel, Frankenstein, has numerous lessons and themes embedded throughout the story. One very present theme in the story was duty. The leading character in the story, Victor, struggled to choose between his parental duty of his creature, and his duty to humankind. Ultimately, he succeeded with neither.
The relationship between the creature and Victor juxtaposed the relationship of God and man. Shelley displayed this where the creature said, “You must create a female for me with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being. This you alone can do, and I demand it of you as a right which you must not refuse to concede” (161). Just like Adam in the bible, the creature experienced loneliness

“I looked towards its completion with a tremulous and eager hope, which I dared not trust myself to question but which was intermixed with obscure forebodings of evil that made my heart sicken in my bosom” (184). The feelings of hope to be rid of the creature were mixed in with fear of what future terrors he created with his hands. These thoughts accompanied Victor while working, so the closer to completion, the more distraught and ill he became. A fear plagued him illustrated through the quote, “A race of devils would be propagated upon the earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror” (185). Victor feared the intentions of the woman, and that she may not want the fate of exile with her partner, but might want to reproduce and create a race of demons to destroy humankind. With this thought in mind, Victor became so close to completing the woman when he saw out his window the creature and what appeared to be a malicious grin. Fearing what he had done, Victor did not hesitate to fully destroy his work on the woman creature before it became too

“I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price, perhaps, of the existence of the whole human race” (186). Victor sacrificed the peace he wanted for himself and accepted the lifelong torment of the creature, a consequence of his broken promise. Victor did this for the greater good of humanity, recognizing the power of his choice to create or not to create, as well as the power of the creature. Victor had to discover the hard way, how powerful the creature became when reading letters like this one from his father, “About five in the morning, I discovered my lovely boy, whom the night before I had seen blooming and in active health, stretched on the grass livid and motionless; the print of the murder’s finger was on his neck” (72). What Victor thought he was doing to save his family and friends, ended up being the thing that killed them. This is when the monster set out in vengeance to make Victor as alone as he was by targeting Victor’s loved ones. By seeing the creature as a monster, it became