Who Is Victor Frankenstein Romanticism

Romanticizing Romanticism: How Idolizing a Culture leads to Blind Ignorance

Shelley uses Victor Frankenstein within the novel Frankenstein to demonstrate how blind faith in a cultural thinking leads to blind trust in an established system and fails to recognize the flaws within it. Victor’s perception of the world and its beauties demonstrates the Romantic image of the Earth. Victor places worth and value in the natural world, while the man-made world torments him physically and psychologically. It is through Victor that Shelley demonstrates the views of romanticism. Shelley uses Victor’s actions to demonstrate how blind allegiance to a cultural idea leads to a lack of empathy and a loss of humanity. Romanticism, an artistic, literary, and

Whenever Victor speaks of his cousin Elizabeth he speaks of her natural beauty. Within Romantic culture people place worth in beauty sculpted naturally rather than by hand. So when Victor recognizes his cousin's natural beauty in how she “shone like a shrine” it symbolizes how natural beauty is holy and good (Shelley 19). Shelley uses Victor’s love for natural beauty present itself largely in his passion for his family because it is the same passion that is present in his hatred of the unnatural world. Romanticism has the fatal flaw of being a double sided sword. If a deep love relies on a polarized issue then all that is left for the other side is hatred. But because Victor’s views mirror Romanticism he dooms himself to fear and hate the unnatural

Romanticism urges humanity to seek out the beauty of the natural world and separate from the horridness of the man-made world. Yet Victor still creates a creature that because of his cultural identity he can never love. Juxtaposing a parent’s love for their child Victor feels wretched upon witnessing the life he created Victor’s “dream of beauty” vanishes to “breathless horror” (Shelley 32). Romanticism strangely values raising a child because of love. In the era in which romanticism was most prominent such an idea was absurd. Yet Victor doesn’t fulfill all the characteristics of romantics, because of his hatred for the unnatural world. Romanticism places such a value on natural world over unnatural world that it fails to exercise its own practices. Victor’s blind hate for his own creation leads to a separation from the human relationship that is present between a parent and child. By embracing his love for humanity he loses an aspect of his own. Victor’s culture prevents him from feeling empathy towards his own creation because loving his own creature would be embracing the unnatural world. Yet the creature only causes the destruction it does because of Victor’s rejection. Shelley demonstrates that culture must not superceed empathy for the fellow man because if it does then it leads to