The moment Victor's ambition curdles into ruin
There is a moment early in the novel where Victor Frankenstein, flushed with the thrill of discovery, tells us: "Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world."
It is a beautiful line. It is also, I think, the most dangerous sentence in the whole book. Notice that there is no mention of consequence in it, no thought of what comes after the breaking-through. Victor is not thinking about the being he will create. He is thinking about the glory of the breaking.
That is the peril at the center of this story — not the stitched-together body, not the laboratory, but the blindness that ambition produces. Victor does not set out to make a monster. He sets out to conquer death itself, and he is so consumed by the grandeur of the goal that he never once asks himself what he owes the thing he is about to bring into the world. By the time he does ask, it is far too late.
I find this more unsettling than any Gothic trapping in the novel — more unsettling than the ice, or the graveyards, or the flashes of lightning. Knowledge pursued without responsibility does not stay contained in the laboratory. It walks out the door. It has a face. It remembers being abandoned.
What follows from that single-minded pursuit is a chain of grief that touches nearly everyone Victor loves, and a question that the book never quite lets you set down: what do we owe the things we create, once we've made them?
If you haven't spent time with Victor and his creation, or if it's been years since you did, I think this is a good week for it. The full text is free to read here: Frankenstein.
Mary
