Ambition
Ambition is the engine of catastrophe in Frankenstein, the quality that elevates its protagonists to moments of transcendent vision and then hurls them into abysses of remorse and desolation. The novel treats ambition not as a simple vice but as a profound and perilous orientation of the soul — a hunger for knowledge, glory, and dominion that, when severed from domestic affections and ethical limits, becomes indistinguishable from madness. Through the parallel arcs of Robert Walton and Victor Frankenstein, the narrative demonstrates that the same ardent desire to surpass ordinary human bounds can produce either heroic enterprise or monstrous ruin, and that the line between them is terrifyingly thin.
The Shape of Ambition: From Childhood Dream to Fatal Vocation
Victor Frankenstein's ambition is rooted in his earliest memories. As a child, he recalls, "the world was to me a secret which I desired to divine" and he felt a "gladness akin to rapture" when the hidden laws of nature were unfolded to him. This intellectual passion was not indiscriminate: he confesses that neither languages nor governments nor politics attracted him — only "the secrets of heaven and earth." His father's dismissive remark about Cornelius Agrippa, instead of redirecting him, only deepened his commitment to the forbidden and the arcane. The turning point came during a thunderstorm when he witnessed an oak tree utterly destroyed by lightning; a visiting natural philosopher explained the principles of electricity and galvanism, and Victor felt the old alchemists — Agrippa, Paracelsus, Albertus Magnus — overthrown in his imagination. Yet this overthrow did not lead him to moderation; it merely redirected his intensity. He abandoned natural history with contempt and turned to mathematics, but the pattern of extreme, exclusive devotion was already set. When he arrived at the University of Ingolstadt, a lecture by M. Waldman ignited his ambition into a conflagration. Waldman's words — that modern philosophers "penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding-places" and "command the thunders of heaven" — struck Victor like a revelation. He felt his soul grapple with a palpable enemy; chord after chord was sounded, and soon his mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose. "So much has been done," he exclaimed inwardly, "more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation." This moment sealed his destiny.
The Consuming Fire: Ambition as Isolation and Self-Destruction
Victor's ambition, once ignited, became a tyrannical force that severed every human tie. He spent two years in Ingolstadt without visiting Geneva, engaged "heart and soul" in his pursuit. He describes his labors with a mixture of horror and compulsion: he collected bones from charnel-houses, disturbed with "profane fingers" the secrets of the human frame, and kept a workshop of "filthy creation" in a solitary cell at the top of the house. The summer months passed while he was "heart and soul" in one pursuit, yet he was insensible to the charms of nature — the fields bestowed a plentiful harvest, the vines yielded a luxuriant vintage, but his eyes saw none of it. He forgot his family, knowing his silence disquieted them, but could not tear his thoughts from his employment, which had taken "an irresistible hold" of his imagination. His health collapsed: his cheek grew pale, his person emaciated, and he became nervous to a painful degree, startled by the fall of a leaf. He shunned his fellow creatures "as if I had been guilty of a crime." The very energy of his purpose alone sustained him. When the creation was finally complete — on a dreary night of November, with rain pattering against the panes and his candle nearly burnt out — the beauty of the dream vanished, replaced by "breathless horror and disgust." The ambition that had driven him to the summit of his desires had produced only a nightmare. He fell into a nervous fever that confined him for months, and the sight of a chemical instrument could renew all the agony of his symptoms. The ambition that had promised glory had delivered only horror, isolation, and a lifelong curse.
The Parallel Ambition: Walton's Voyage and the Mirror of Ruin
Robert Walton's ambition mirrors Victor's in its structure and intensity. From his first letter, Walton declares that his expedition has been "the favourite dream of my early years." He had read accounts of voyages with ardour, and though his father's dying injunction had forbidden a seafaring life, he later inherited a fortune and turned his thoughts back to their earlier bent. He spent six years preparing: he accompanied whale-fishers to the North Sea, voluntarily endured cold, famine, thirst, and want of sleep, worked harder than common sailors by day and studied mathematics and medicine by night. He twice hired himself as an under-mate in a Greenland whaler and acquitted himself so well that his captain offered him the second dignity in the vessel. Walton confesses that he would "sacrifice my fortune, my existence, my every hope" to the furtherance of his enterprise, and that "one man's life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought." When he speaks these words to Victor, the effect is immediate and devastating: Victor sees in Walton his own former self, and a dark gloom spreads over his countenance. "Unhappy man!" Victor cries. "Do you share my madness? Have you drunk also of the intoxicating draught? Hear me; let me reveal my tale, and you will dash the cup from your lips!" Walton's ambition, like Victor's, is intertwined with a "love for the marvellous" and a belief in the marvellous that hurries him "out of the common pathways of men." Yet Walton is also different: he possesses a capacity for friendship and a willingness to listen that Victor lacked. When his sailors demand to return south, Walton hesitates but ultimately consents, choosing the lives of his men over the glory of discovery. Victor, on his deathbed, urges Walton to "seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries." Walton's decision to turn back represents the one path not taken — the possibility of ambition tempered by human responsibility.
The Cost of Overreaching: Ambition's Harvest of Death
The novel traces the consequences of Victor's ambition through a chain of deaths that leaves him utterly desolate. His brother William is murdered by the creature; Justine Moritz is executed for the crime; his friend Henry Clerval is strangled; his bride Elizabeth is killed on their wedding night; and his father Alphonse dies of grief. Victor himself recognizes that he is the true author of these catastrophes. "I, not in deed, but in effect, was the true murderer," he reflects. The ambition that had seemed so noble — to "banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death" — had produced only a demon. Victor's pursuit of the creature across the frozen north becomes a grotesque parody of his earlier scientific quest: now he is driven not by the desire to create but by the need to destroy, and the same relentless energy that once animated his laboratory work now propels him across ice fields and through blizzards. He describes himself as "hurried away by fury; revenge alone endowed me with strength and composure." The ambition that began as a dream of beneficence ends as a monomaniacal hunt that consumes his last reserves of life. Even in his final moments, Victor cannot fully renounce his driving passion; he tells Walton that he feels "justified in desiring the death of my adversary" and that his duties toward his own species were paramount. Yet he also acknowledges that his judgment is "disturbed by the near approach of death" and that he may still be "misled by passion." The novel leaves the reader with the haunting question of whether ambition can ever be safely exercised, or whether the very desire to transcend human limits carries within it the seeds of destruction.
The Thematic Architecture: Ambition as the Novel's Moral Center
Ambition in Frankenstein is not merely a character trait but the organizing principle of the novel's moral universe. The book's subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, explicitly invokes the myth of the Titan who stole fire from the gods and was punished eternally — a figure of overreaching ambition whose gift to humanity came at an incalculable personal cost. Victor's ambition is presented as a kind of madness, an "intoxicating draught" that clouds judgment and annihilates proportion. He himself reflects that "a human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity," and that if a study "has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful." Yet this wisdom comes too late, learned only through the devastation it describes. The novel does not condemn all ambition — Walton's desire to discover a northern passage and benefit mankind is treated with sympathy — but it insists that ambition must be yoked to affection, humility, and a recognition of human limitation. When Victor warns Walton, "Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow," he articulates the novel's central thesis: that ambition divorced from moral and emotional grounding is a form of self-destruction. The creature himself echoes this theme when he tells Victor, "I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend." The tragedy of Frankenstein is that ambition, which might have been the engine of benevolence, becomes instead the engine of misery — for the creator, for the creature, and for everyone they love.
