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Personal Responsibility In Mary Shelley's Paradise Lost

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Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein opens with an epigraph taken from Paradise Lost: Did I request thee, Maker, from my day To mould me man? Did I solicit thee From darkness to promote me?— (Paradise Lost, X. 743–5) This profound statement raises the important question of personal responsibility for both the creator and the created. Victor Frankenstein, the ambitious protagonist of the gothic novel, is ardent with revealing the deepest, darkest mysteries of existence, and is lead by modern science and the occult to discover the methods to create life. By this dramatic discovery, Frankenstein is able to create an engineered man, a proclaimed monstrosity, whose miserable destiny perpetually connects with his creator’s. The novel chillingly dramatizes the dangerous potential of life begotten, and subsequently rejected upon a laboratory table, and shows …show more content…

From the very beginning of Frankenstein's creature’s existence, the creature expresses a resolute plea for Victor, his “father”, his “creator”, to accept parental responsibility for him. He questions his creator, “To whom could I apply with more fitness than to him who had given me life?” (Shelley ) The creature’s appeal is the most natural of appeals- for a father to accept his obligation to provide and care for his child. In doing so, the creature offers a paradigm of humanity, indicating each person’s innate set of duties and responsibilities present in their very being. However, Victor neglects the inherent duties as creator once he brings the creature to life. He spurns his creation out of instinctive repulsion, fleeing from the very being he gave life to. Frankenstein's flaw is not only that he recklessly plays with the sacredness of the life, a dominion belonging only to God, but that he fails to take responsibility for the consequences his own actions. He is blind to his error and

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