How Victor's Parents Tutelage Affected How Role as a Father

The family is a very important staging point in the lives of children. The role of the parents is to inspire and guide their children’s young and easily manipulated minds and set them on the right paths to become active and productive members of society. When this important role isn’t performed to the best of the parents’ ability, then their children have the potential to become “menaces” to the society they live in; their children will also pass on this fault to their offspring. This was what happened in Frankenstein. The negligence of Victor Frankenstein’s parents towards Victor influenced his future role in society and caused Victor to be unprepared for when he had his own “child”.

Victor Frankenstein was born into a prominent family in Geneva, Switzerland. After the death of his best friend, Victor’s father married his daughter, Caroline Beaufort. So there was a significant difference between their ages. This may have contributed to the faults that they failed to correct in young Victor. The lure of a young, beautiful woman by Victor’s father, and the attraction of Victor’s mother to her protector created a special love between them, “…this circumstance seemed to unite them only in them only closer in the bonds of devoted affection.” (Frankenstein 18) Young Victor also noticed this separate love that they shared only between themselves.

This separate love of theirs even incited Victor to tell Robert Walton, in the telling of his tale, that he was their “plaything and their idol” (Frankenstein 19). The definition of an idol is an image of perfection, usually in the form of a god, which is worshipped and is an object (Agnes). An idol is not something that can be loved, nurtured, or guided. The implied meaning of an idol is that it is something that should be looked up to. To be a child and to be viewed perfect is a very dangerous thing. This means that there aren’t values which parents can teach you to show you the right from the wrong, because to society, you already have them. Gods are also capable of being wrong, but ordinary people aren’t in a position to contradict them or show them the error of their ways. Therefore, if Victor was his parents’ idol, they were physically and spiritually unable to teach their child the error of his ways. Later on in the book, Victor creates his own child so that they will worship him as God.

The other part of the excerpt stated that Victor was his parents’ plaything. The definition of a plaything is something that is meant to be used and manipulated and fussed over as a separate being or object. It has no real emotional meaning to the user or owner, it is something that will be missed if broken, but can still along the same lines be replaced. This replacement could have been in the form of Victor’s adopted sister Elizabeth. So, if Victor was his parents’ playmate, then he was held aloof and was treated differently than others in his family. Maybe this was why he was allowed to pursue the knowledge that he craved, even though it eventually led to his downfall.

As Victor grew older, he craved knowledge, and his parents let him pursue whatever information he wanted. They even let him go after information from forbidden authors of the time such as Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelus, (Frankenstein 24,31) who were all members of the old scientific order that was bent on altering and gaining insight into the human body and how it worked, stated by Mr. Kasell in his lecture. The influence of these natural philosophers and his teacher at the University of Ingolstadt, Professor M. Waldman, drove him to pursue his dreams and create for himself a human being.

This detached instruction, or lack thereof, from Frankenstein’s parents led to his creation of the Creature and then to his subsequent flight and neglect of him. All of Victor’s life, he had never been given proper instruction from his parents and so therefore had no knowledge, in his vast expanse of it, of how to raise a child of his own, the Creature.

“For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect