Creator's Responsibility
The concept of Creator's Responsibility in Frankenstein is the novel's most urgent ethical question, one that Victor Frankenstein evades from the moment his creature opens its yellow eye. The book relentlessly tests what a creator owes to the being he has brought into existence, and the answer it supplies is devastating: the refusal of that duty does not merely harm the creature but unravels the creator himself, destroying everyone he loves.
The Duty Acknowledged and Immediately Abandoned
Victor's first response to his completed work is not care but flight. On the November night when the creature stirs to life, Victor is overcome by "breathless horror and disgust" and rushes from the room . That same night, when the creature approaches his bedside with one hand outstretched "seemingly to detain me," Victor escapes again, leaving the being alone, naked, and utterly without guidance . The abandonment is total: Victor never speaks a word to his creation, never names it, never offers food or shelter or instruction. The creature later recalls that his earliest memories are of confusion, pain, and isolation — he wandered from the apartment into a forest, knowing nothing of himself or the world, learning to distinguish hunger from cold only through prolonged suffering (E00402-E00404). Victor's initial flight thus constitutes the primal failure from which all subsequent horrors flow.
The Creature's Demand for Recognition
When the creature finally confronts Victor on the glacier of Montanvert, he frames his appeal explicitly in the language of owed responsibility. "Remember, thou hast made me more powerful than thyself," he says, but immediately adds, "I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou owest me" . He insists that Victor owes him justice, clemency, and affection — the duties of a creator toward his creation. "I ought to be thy Adam," the creature declares, "but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed" . The comparison is precise: Adam received a garden, a companion, and the direct care of God; the creature received nothing but rejection. Victor, for the first time, feels "what the duties of a creator towards his creature were, and that I ought to render him happy before I complained of his wickedness" . Yet this recognition is fleeting; Victor's horror at the creature's appearance overpowers any sense of obligation.
The Promise and Its Betrayal
Victor does, however, consent to the creature's demand for a female companion, and he swears to create one. But as he works on the second being in his remote Orkney laboratory, a new train of reflection leads him to reconsider. He imagines the female might prove "ten thousand times more malignant than her mate," that the pair might hate each other, or that they might produce "a race of devils" that would threaten the whole human species (E00665-E00666). "Had I right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations?" he asks himself . In a moment of revulsion, he tears the half-finished female to pieces. The creature, watching through the window, lets out "a howl of devilish despair and revenge" and withdraws . Victor has broken his solemn promise, and he does so not out of malice but out of a calculation that his duty to humanity outweighs his duty to this single being. Yet the calculation is itself a form of evasion: Victor never consults the creature, never explains his reasoning, never offers any alternative. He simply destroys the one hope the creature had.
The Inescapable Consequences of Abandonment
The creature's response to Victor's betrayal is to make the abstract principle of responsibility terrifyingly concrete. "Slave," he cries, "I before reasoned with you, but you have proved yourself unworthy of my condescension. Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master; obey!" . The roles have inverted: the creator is now the slave of his own neglected creation. The creature then delivers the novel's most famous threat: "I shall be with you on your wedding-night" . Victor understands this as a threat against his own life, but the creature's vengeance is more precise — he murders Elizabeth, Victor's bride, on their wedding night, ensuring that Victor suffers the same desolation he inflicted. The creature himself later explains the logic of his revenge: "I pitied Frankenstein; my pity amounted to horror; I abhorred myself. But when I discovered that he, the author at once of my existence and of its unspeakable torments, dared to hope for happiness, that while he accumulated wretchedness and despair upon me he sought his own enjoyment in feelings and passions from the indulgence of which I was forever barred, then impotent envy and bitter indignation filled me with an insatiable thirst for vengeance" . The creature's crimes are framed as a direct consequence of Victor's refusal to share any portion of happiness with the being he made.
Victor's Final Reckoning
On his deathbed, Victor revisits the question of his responsibility with a clarity that eluded him in life. He tells Walton, "In a fit of enthusiastic madness I created a rational creature and was bound towards him to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being. This was my duty, but there was another still paramount to that. My duties towards the beings of my own species had greater claims to my attention because they included a greater proportion of happiness or misery. Urged by this view, I refused, and I did right in refusing, to create a companion for the first creature" (E00883-E00884). Victor thus ends his life asserting that he chose correctly — that the greater good justified breaking his promise. Yet the novel's entire trajectory contradicts this self-justification. The refusal to create the female did not save anyone; it led directly to the murders of Clerval, Elizabeth, and Alphonse Frankenstein. Victor's final words to Walton — "Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition" — suggest a belated recognition that his original creative ambition, untethered from any sense of ongoing responsibility, was the root of the catastrophe. The creature, in his final speech, offers a mirror to Victor's failure: "I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous" . The novel never allows the reader to forget that the creature's evil was not innate but produced by the creator's refusal to accept the responsibility that creation entails.
