This blog is a part of the assignment of Paper 103: Literature of the Romantics
Academic Details
- Name: Sandhya Bhut
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Assignment Details
- Paper Name:Literature of the Romantics
- Paper No.: 103
- Paper Code: 22394
- Unit: 2 - Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
- Topic: The God Complex: Victor Frankenstein and the Ethics of Creation
- Submitted To: Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
- Submitted Date: November 10, 2025
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Abstract
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) endures as a haunting meditation on the perils of intellectual arrogance and the moral cost of human ambition. Through the figure of Victor Frankenstein, Shelley dramatizes the timeless struggle between knowledge and responsibility, between the human desire to transcend natural limits and the ethical obligation to care for what we create. Victor’s obsession with mastering the secret of life transforms him into a “modern Prometheus,” one who steals divine power only to unleash misery upon himself and the world. This essay explores the complex moral and philosophical dimensions of Frankenstein’s pursuit of creation. It argues that Shelley’s novel functions as a critique of Enlightenment rationalism and a defense of Romantic humanism a vision where emotion, empathy, and moral conscience must temper the pursuit of scientific truth. Ultimately, Shelley reveals that the true monstrosity lies not in the creature but in the creator’s refusal to accept responsibility for his creation. The ethical questions raised in Frankenstein about the limits of science, the nature of humanity, and the danger of “playing God” remain powerfully relevant in our contemporary age of artificial intelligence and genetic engineering.
Keywords:
Frankenstein, ethics of creation, Romanticism, Enlightenment, Prometheus, scientific ambition, morality, God complex, responsibility, Mary Shelley.
Table of Content :
Introduction
The Context: Science, Philosophy, and the Birth of the Modern Prometheus
The God Complex: Victor Frankenstein’s Desire to Transcend Humanity
The Ethics of Creation: Responsibility, Rejection, and Consequence
Romanticism vs. Enlightenment: Emotion, Reason, and the Fall of the Creator
The Modern Relevance: Frankenstein and the Age of Technology
Conclusion
References
1. Introduction
Few works in English literature have achieved the mythic resonance of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Written when Shelley was barely nineteen, the novel is far more than a Gothic tale of horror; it is a profound philosophical inquiry into the human condition. It stands at the crossroads of two great intellectual movements: the Enlightenment, with its faith in science and reason, and Romanticism, with its insistence on emotion, imagination, and moral responsibility. Shelley’s genius lies in her ability to weave these competing worldviews into a single narrative that is at once visionary and cautionary.
At the center of the story stands Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant scientist whose thirst for knowledge turns into a destructive obsession. His creation of life becomes both an act of supreme achievement and of moral failure. In seeking to transcend the boundaries of human limitation, Victor becomes consumed by his own godlike ambition a psychological state often described as a “God Complex.” His desire to create a new species that would “bless him as its creator” exposes his pride and his blindness to the ethical consequences of his actions.
This essay examines Victor’s tragic trajectory as a reflection of the ethical dilemmas inherent in the pursuit of knowledge. It explores how Shelley positions him as a modern Prometheus, a figure who steals fire from the heavens only to suffer eternal punishment. Through the interplay of creation and destruction, reason and emotion, Shelley invites readers to question the very foundation of scientific progress. Her narrative warns that knowledge, ungoverned by compassion, leads not to enlightenment but to moral darkness. Frankenstein thus becomes both a mirror and a prophecy, a timeless reminder that the pursuit of godlike power can strip us of our humanity.
2. The Context: Science, Philosophy, and the Birth of the Modern Prometheus
To understand Victor Frankenstein’s ambition, one must first consider the intellectual atmosphere of the early nineteenth century. Europe was in the grip of revolutionary scientific thought. Electricity, chemistry, and anatomy were transforming humanity’s understanding of life itself. Experiments by scientists such as Luigi Galvani, who used electric currents to stimulate the muscles of dead animals, gave rise to the tantalizing idea that life could be reanimated by human hands. For the first time, it seemed possible to challenge the divine monopoly on creation.
Shelley was deeply aware of these developments. Her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and their circle of Romantic thinkers discussed science not as cold empiricism but as a spiritual and philosophical pursuit. Against this backdrop, Frankenstein emerged as a symbolic response to the era’s conflicting ideologies. The novel’s subtitle, “The Modern Prometheus,” explicitly links Victor to the Greek titan who defied the gods to bring fire symbol of knowledge and power to mankind. Like Prometheus, Victor acts out of a desire to elevate humanity, but his defiance leads to suffering and exile.
Prometheus’s myth was, in Shelley’s time, interpreted both as a story of heroic enlightenment and as a cautionary tale of overreaching pride. Shelley combines both readings. Victor is initially driven by noble curiosity an almost sacred desire to uncover the principles of life. Yet this noble quest degenerates into hubris. He seeks to become “greater than his nature will allow,” to fashion life in his own image. His crime, therefore, is not creation itself but the arrogance that accompanies it: the assumption that knowledge can exist without moral responsibility.
This conflict reflects the broader philosophical tension between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The Enlightenment celebrated reason, progress, and the mastery of nature. Romanticism, reacting against these ideals, emphasized emotion, intuition, and reverence for the natural world. Shelley, positioned between these two currents, portrays Victor as the embodiment of Enlightenment excess the man who seeks dominion over nature and consequently falls victim to its retribution. Through Victor’s tragedy, Shelley reasserts the Romantic belief that wisdom without empathy becomes destructive.
In this sense, Frankenstein is not merely a story of scientific failure but of moral collapse. It reveals how the pursuit of absolute knowledge when severed from ethical consciousness leads inevitably to alienation, madness, and ruin. The Promethean impulse, once a symbol of human advancement, becomes a curse when guided by pride rather than compassion.
3. The God Complex: Victor Frankenstein’s Desire to Transcend Humanity
Victor Frankenstein’s journey from curiosity to catastrophe unfolds as a psychological study of obsession. His thirst for discovery begins innocently enough, rooted in an intellectual fascination with the secrets of nature. But beneath this curiosity lies an unacknowledged desire for power. He does not simply wish to understand life he wishes to command it. His language reveals this hidden motive: he speaks of “pouring a torrent of light into our dark world,” and of a new species that would “bless me as its creator.” Such declarations betray the unmistakable signs of the God Complex a delusional belief in one’s own omnipotence and moral exemption.
Shelley constructs Victor’s descent with remarkable psychological precision. His ambition isolates him from family, friends, and society. The more he pursues his work, the more detached he becomes from human feeling. This isolation is not accidental; it reflects a deeper moral blindness. By excluding love and empathy from his creative act, Victor transforms his laboratory into a tomb. The moment of success the animation of the creature is immediately followed by horror. “The beauty of the dream vanished,” he confesses, “and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” The contrast between his exalted ambition and his immediate revulsion underscores Shelley’s central argument: creation divorced from moral intention results in monstrosity.
What Victor fails to understand is that creation implies responsibility. To act as a god is to bear the burden of care for what one brings into existence. But Victor’s pride forbids such humility. Instead of nurturing his creation, he rejects it, condemning both himself and his creature to mutual destruction. In this rejection, Shelley locates the true moral failure. The creature’s subsequent violence is not born of inherent evil but of loneliness and despair. He becomes the mirror of his creator’s sins a living embodiment of neglected responsibility.
Shelley’s portrayal of Victor’s ambition anticipates modern discussions about the ethics of technology. The desire to create artificial life, to manipulate the code of existence, continues to haunt scientific endeavor. Yet Shelley’s insight is timeless: the danger lies not in knowledge itself but in the arrogance that assumes mastery without accountability. Victor’s tragedy is thus both personal and universal. His fall dramatizes the collapse of moral boundaries under the weight of human pride.
Through Victor, Shelley exposes a paradox at the heart of modernity. The same impulse that drives progress curiosity, innovation, imagination also carries the seed of destruction when it becomes detached from empathy. In the end, Victor’s God Complex destroys not only the creature but his own humanity. His ambition to transcend mortality leads instead to his isolation, guilt, and death a fitting punishment for one who sought to rival the divine.
4. The Ethics of Creation: Responsibility, Rejection, and Consequence
If the act of creation defines Victor’s grandeur, his response to that act defines his fall. The moment the creature opens its eyes, Victor’s triumph collapses into terror. His first impulse is not compassion but flight. He abandons his creation, leaving it to fend for itself in a world that sees only its deformity. This rejection is the moral center of Frankenstein. Shelley transforms the scientific experiment into an ethical allegory: to create life without assuming responsibility for it is to commit the greatest sin against humanity.
The creature’s story, told in his own voice, reveals the depth of Victor’s moral blindness. Left alone, he teaches himself language, ethics, and emotion. He learns compassion by observing a poor family, and he yearns for connection. When he finally confronts his creator, his plea is heartbreakingly simple: “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel.” In this single line, Shelley encapsulates the tragedy of moral failure the creature seeks love but receives only rejection.
Victor’s refusal to grant his creation companionship or understanding drives the creature toward vengeance. Yet even in his violence, the creature retains a moral awareness that his creator lacks. He recognizes the injustice of his existence, lamenting that he was made “miserable beyond all living things.” Shelley uses this inversion the monster as moral being, the man as moral coward to challenge the reader’s assumptions about humanity. The real monster is not the grotesque creation but the creator who denies his moral obligations.
This ethical theme resonates beyond the confines of the novel. Shelley’s narrative anticipates the dilemmas of modern science the creation of technologies that exceed our moral capacity to control them. Whether in genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, or nuclear power, humanity continues to grapple with the consequences of its own ingenuity. Frankenstein thus stands as an enduring moral fable: every act of creation entails responsibility, and the refusal of that responsibility leads to disaster.
Victor’s tragedy is intensified by his awareness of guilt. He recognizes, too late, that his suffering is self-inflicted. His horror at the creature’s crimes mirrors his unacknowledged sense of complicity. The deaths of William, Justine, and Elizabeth are not random misfortunes they are the price of his neglect. In pursuing godlike power, he forfeits his humanity. The ethical lesson is clear: knowledge becomes destructive when divorced from conscience.
Shelley’s insight remains strikingly modern. In an era defined by technological acceleration, Frankenstein continues to speak with prophetic urgency. It reminds us that ethical reflection must accompany every act of innovation, that the pursuit of progress without compassion risks creating monsters both literal and metaphorical that we cannot control.
5. Romanticism vs. Enlightenment: Emotion, Reason, and the Fall of the Creator
The conflict at the heart of Frankenstein is not merely scientific or moral it is philosophical. Shelley stages a confrontation between two worldviews: the Enlightenment’s faith in rational mastery and the Romantic conviction that emotion and nature embody moral truth. Victor’s tragedy lies in his allegiance to the former at the expense of the latter. He seeks to “penetrate into the recesses of nature,” treating the natural world as a machine to be dissected and dominated. His laboratory becomes a space of cold calculation, devoid of feeling or reverence.
By contrast, nature in the novel is presented as a moral and emotional force. Whenever Victor encounters the sublime landscapes of the Alps or the Arctic, he experiences moments of humility and clarity. The grandeur of nature reminds him of his limitations, offering glimpses of redemption. Yet these moments are fleeting; he cannot reconcile his intellectual pride with the moral order embodied in the natural world. Shelley uses this opposition to critique the Enlightenment’s mechanistic view of life. In her vision, true wisdom lies not in control but in harmony.
The creature’s emotional sensitivity reinforces this Romantic ideal. Though born from unnatural science, he exhibits an instinctive connection to nature and empathy. He marvels at the moon, the seasons, and the kindness of humans he observes. His moral development, however, is crushed by rejection. In his suffering, he becomes a symbol of Romantic humanity feeling, imaginative, and wounded by a world that values reason over compassion.
The novel’s layered narrative structure further deepens this philosophical contrast. Robert Walton, the Arctic explorer who frames Victor’s story, mirrors the scientist’s ambition. His desire to reach the North Pole and uncover its mysteries reflects the same Enlightenment hunger for discovery. Yet by the novel’s end, Walton learns from Victor’s ruin. He turns back, choosing life over glory. Through this narrative symmetry, Shelley reaffirms the Romantic value of emotional wisdom over intellectual conquest.
In this light, Frankenstein becomes more than a Gothic fable it is a manifesto for moral imagination. Shelley insists that emotion and reason must coexist, that science requires the tempering influence of empathy. Her message transcends her time: progress devoid of conscience is regression in disguise. Victor’s downfall is thus not merely the punishment of one man’s hubris but the inevitable consequence of a worldview that elevates intellect above humanity.
6. The Modern Relevance: Frankenstein and the Age of Technology
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Two centuries after its publication, Frankenstein continues to resonate with astonishing immediacy. The questions Shelley raised about creation, responsibility, and the limits of human ambition have become the defining moral issues of the modern age. From artificial intelligence to genetic cloning, humanity stands once again on the threshold of “creating life.” Each new technological advance echoes Victor’s dream of mastery, and each carries the same ethical dilemma: can we control what we create?
Modern society often celebrates innovation as inherently good, but Shelley’s warning remains clear. Progress without reflection leads to peril. The figure of Victor Frankenstein haunts the laboratories of the twenty-first century the scientist, the engineer, the entrepreneur who believes that invention alone will save humanity. Yet the novel teaches that the real measure of creation lies not in power but in responsibility.
The so-called “Frankenstein complex” described in modern discourse the fear of human-made intelligence turning against its maker reveals the enduring power of Shelley’s vision. Her novel foresaw the anxiety that technological creations might surpass human control and moral comprehension. More importantly, she understood that such fears arise not from the creations themselves but from the creators’ failure to anticipate the ethical implications of their actions.
In this sense, Frankenstein is prophetic. It anticipates the moral confusion of an age in which the boundaries between human and machine, natural and artificial, are increasingly blurred. Shelley’s warning is not anti-scientific; rather, it is profoundly humanist. She demands that knowledge be guided by empathy and humility. Science, she suggests, must serve life, not dominate it.
The enduring relevance of Frankenstein lies in its insistence that moral awareness is the essence of humanity. Whether we create through scientific experiment, technological innovation, or artistic imagination, our responsibility remains the same: to ensure that our creations do not destroy the values that define us. Shelley’s vision, born from the anxieties of the Industrial Revolution, speaks with renewed urgency in the digital and biotechnological age. The novel stands as both a warning and a plea a reminder that to play God is to risk becoming less than human.
7. Conclusion
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein remains one of the most profound explorations of human ambition ever written. Through the tragic figure of Victor Frankenstein, Shelley exposes the peril of a mind that seeks divine power without divine compassion. Victor’s God Complex his obsessive desire to transcend human limitation leads him to moral and emotional ruin. His creation, conceived without love and abandoned without care, becomes the instrument of his destruction.
Shelley’s message transcends time and genre. She reveals that the true danger of science lies not in discovery but in disconnection the separation of intellect from empathy, of reason from responsibility. In the end, Victor’s punishment is fitting: he becomes the victim of his own creation, condemned to wander through desolation, pursued by the echo of his own conscience.
Frankenstein endures because it speaks to the eternal human conflict between aspiration and humility. It reminds us that the power to create is inseparable from the duty to protect, that every act of innovation carries an ethical shadow. Shelley transforms the myth of Prometheus into a modern moral parable: to steal fire from the gods is daring; to wield it without wisdom is fatal.
In the final reckoning, Shelley’s novel is less about monsters than about morality. It is a call to balance the intellect of the scientist with the heart of the humanist, to remember that the act of creation, however divine it may seem, binds us to a sacred responsibility. As long as humanity continues to chase the dream of godlike power, Frankenstein will remain its mirror reflecting both our brilliance and our blindness, our promise and our peril.
8. References:
Back, Kurt W. “Frankenstein and Brave New World: Two Cautionary Myths on the Boundaries of Science.” History of European Ideas, vol. 1, 1995, pp. 327–332. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/0191-6599(95)92959-X.
Dutoit, Thomas. “Re-Specting the Face as the Moral (of) Fiction in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” MLN, vol. 109, no. 5, 1994, pp. 847–71. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2904709. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.
Goldberg, M. A. “Moral and Myth in Mrs. Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein.’” Keats-Shelley Journal, vol. 8, 1959, pp. 27–38. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30210049. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.
Hogsette, David S. “Metaphysical Intersections in ‘Frankenstein’: Mary Shelley’s Theistic Investigation of Scientific Materialism and Transgressive Autonomy.” Christianity and Literature, vol. 60, no. 4, 2011, pp. 531–59. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44314873. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.
Hustis, Harriet. “Responsible Creativity and the ‘Modernity’ of Mary Shelley’s Prometheus.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 43, no. 4, 2003, pp. 845–58. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4625101. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.
Poorghorban, Younes, and Ali Taghizadeh. “The Monstrosity of Knowledge: Mary Shelley’s Symbolic Encounter with the Enlightenment and Industrialisation in Frankenstein.” Anglo Saxonica, vol. 22, no. 1, 14 Aug. 2024, doi:10.5334/as.144.
REESE, DIANA. “A Troubled Legacy: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Inheritance of Human Rights.” Representations, vol. 96, no. 1, 2006, pp. 48–72. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2006.96.1.48. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.
SHELLEY, MARY. Frankenstein. Latest ed., FINGERPRINT! PUB, 2015, Amazon, Accessed 06 Nov. 2025.
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