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The Byronic Hero In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

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The monster that Victor Frankenstein created was a Byronic hero. A Byronic Hero is a charismatic, broken, dark individual often in exile with a troubled past. The hero has flaws that make him more human like and attainable to the audience. He is a vulnerable and imperfect being and in these traits we find Victor Frankenstein’s monster. Lord Byron penned the first Byronic hero in 1812 and when Mary Shelly wrote, “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus,”(1823) she was arguably influenced from his epic poem, “Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.” (1812-1818) Additionally, Shelly was greatly influenced by John Milton’s, “Paradise Lost,” (1667) as evidenced by the correlations between Satan and Frankenstein’s monster. Both characters exhibit traits of having an alluring and attractive nature while simultaneously being frightening and a danger to society. Victor Frankenstein longed to reanimate a living being and in his efforts to do so, he created a monster that will prove Doctor Frankenstein is just as monstrous. In the corpse turned monster, we find the Byronic hero.
The monster has an unavoidable fate. That is, he is going to die by either his hand or the hand of his creator. The monster comes to understand he is an experiment that Victor detests and after Victor refuses to make …show more content…

He does, however, show remorse for his actions when he is telling his story to Frankenstein at the top of the mountain by his fire. He explains how he is haunted by his sins and the lives he has taken as evidenced by the quote, “It is true that I am a wretch. I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing.”[Frankenstein 319] Many times throughout the monster’s story and on the ship with Captain Walton, he is brought to tears over when remembering his

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