Victor Frankenstein Father

If Victor Frankenstein had such a perfect childhood, why did his life play out the way it did? In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Victor insinuates that growing up, his life was faultless. However, the relationship with his parents–his father specifically–is the basis of his haunting mistakes and misfortune. Furthermore, the Frankensteins’ family troubles are the outcome of Shelley’s own burdened upbringing.

Victor’s relationship with his father is caring and supportive, and his treatment of Victor as a child greatly impacts his later decisions in life. Victor’s parents raise him with attention and lavish him with gifts but fail to raise him emotionally; they put pressure on him to fulfill their every wish. Victor describes his childhood as idyllic

Victor's ambition, or pressure to win his father’s approval, urges him to make a creature that would be “inferior, in size, to no one” (Claridge 18), and this action is one of anger towards his family and one to compensate for the insecurity he felt under the expectations of his father. Victor was driven by only retaliation and desperation, and so he was not considering all of the morals of science stacked against him: “Frankenstein, being a mere man and not God, was incapable of manufacturing the goodness-instilling portions of the soul” (Foht 84). He says his father never corrected his studies with modern science or limited his aspirations, so Victor says, “My dreams were therefore undisturbed by reality” (Shelley 26). Victor’s parenting is not much of a contrast to that of Alphonse Frankenstein. But how, when Victor fails to take responsibility and continuously runs away from his problems, while his father was a constant figure in his life? Victor abandons his creation, and in turn, leaves the monster to wander the countryside with no knowledge of the world. The monster becomes an outcast and unstable because he is “a person who lack[s] a moral upbringing and ties to family or community” (Foht 85). Similarly, Victor’s father insists that Victor leave for Ingolstadt–only just after Victor’s own mother passed away–and take on a new, strange country with no one to guide him. This abandonment leaves Victor confused and insecure in unfamiliar surroundings, but alone with reckless yearning and