The Use of Morally Ambiguous Characters in Shelley’s Frankenstein

Evaluation of the Use of Morally Ambiguous Characters in Shelley’s Frankenstein Student’s Name Institution Affiliation Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein surrounds the creation of a monster by the leading character in the story, Victor. The play focuses on demonstrating how people can become indulged in their self-preservation and gratification to the level that they defy the moral standing that they claim to have (Shelley, 2016). Victor, the leading character in the story, sets out to peruse a medical experiment in Ingolstadt, forgetting that he has a role to play in the lives of his family and his fiancée. To the readers, Victor demonstrates increasingly ambiguous character traits, and these are seen in other characters in the story as the plot unfolds. In this light, this paper will evaluate how Shelley uses morally ambiguous characters. The use of morally ambiguous characters in Shelley’s novel Frankenstein first surfaces in Victor’s dangerous pursuit for knowledge (Shelley, 2016). Shelley portrays Victor as an intelligent character who is obsessed with accessing secrets to life in his experiments with Frankenstein’s heart. Victor Frankenstein is obsessed with his scientific studies and experiments that he forgoes his health and the social needs of relating to his family members and fiancée. At this point, it clear that Shelley uses an ambiguous character in Victor actions because is it not clear why one would focus on studying the secrets of life while destroying the traditional fabric of human living. At first, Shelley portrays Victor as an ambitious character who is driven to improving human medicine through his studies and experiments with the human heart. Ambiguity in his character however quickly sets in when he denounces his family relations in his efforts to create a monster, which he seems to favor relating with (Shelley, 2016). Even if Victor succeeds in creating a living creature from a dead body, the height of his ambiguous character is reached when the same monster kills him and his family. The latter indicates that Victor’s character, as seen in his ambitions and actions throughout the novel, are a mixture of good and evil, thereby ambiguous to those he interacts with and ultimately to the readers. Shelley’s use of ambiguous characters is also profoundly evident in Frankenstein’s monster. When Victor first succeeds in creating the ‘being’ its conversations, and he reveals that it ‘yearned for...