Victor becomes obsessed with “infusing” life into a dead body, when he finds a way to do
it; he becomes fully obsessed with doing so. He pursues his obsession; he works very late into the night collecting the human materials from graves. “And the moon gazed upon my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness I pursued nature to her hiding places.” “As I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave.” Victor is going grave digging and late hours and stealing fresh body parts for his monster. He is totally obsessed at this point. “I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit.” He realises the level of obsession that he has for his creation, but shows no signs of remorse or stopping.
“In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase I kept my workshop of filthy creation.” Victor now sees his house and workshop as a prison, almost admitting that he is disgusted by what he is doing. By the end of chapter four, Victor is becoming increasingly paranoid. “I became nervous to a most painful degree; the fall of a leaf startled me.” He has isolated himself from his friends and family for a long time and is showing signs of a mental breakdown. He is trying to kid himself into thinking he will be able to go back to normal when his creation is finished but the likelihood is that he won’t be able to. “And I believed that exercise and amusement would then drive away incipient disease; and I promised myself both of these when my creation should be complete.” His mind is unstable and he is possibly insane.
The atmosphere at the beginning of chapter five is very “dark”, it causes you to assume something bad is about to happen. “It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.” Frankenstein tells us of his anxiety of his experiments end result. “With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony.” When Victor created the monster, he was attempting to create a new species and be hailed for it. “A new species would bless me as its creator and source.” He thought the new species would see him as its “father”. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.”
When the experiment had been completed, Victor was horrified by the result, everything that he has anticipated would happen; didn’t. “I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! – Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the muscles and arteries beneath.” Victor wanted his creation to look beautiful, but the end result was quite the opposite. Victor was definitely disappointed, just like anyone who had put so much time and effort onto a project would be. “I felt the bitterness of disappointment; dreams that had been my food and pleasant rest for so long were now to become a hell to me.” Victor is very disappointed in his creation and himself because he worked for so long and so hard for nothing but a hideous being to be the end result. “I nearly sank to the ground through languor and extreme weakness.” Victor has deprived himself of sleep; the visions of a beautiful human crafted by his own had kept Victor going for two years, “I had worked hard for nearly two years.” But now, devastated, Victor is very weak.
At the beginning of chapter four, Victor was a bright but arrogant man that was very enthusiastic about science, mainly biology and chemistry. Further into the chapter he starts to become obsessed with finding the secret to infusing life into a dead body, he was arrogant and believed he was better and smarter than the professors at his university (Ingolstadt). By the end of chapter four he is completely obsessed with trying to bring a dead body to life. “Sometimes I grew alarmed at the wreck I perceived I had become” Victor realised that he had a big problem but because he was so engrossed in his project. Eventually the very thing that had kept him going scared him enough to realise that he had a problem with his obsession.
I do not agree with Victor’s methods or what he did to himself, but I understand why he did it and to see that he was regretful in the end makes his case a lot easier to understand. However what Victor did was not only immoral, it was illegal, His obsession drove him to commit a crime that was against the ethics of his community. In my opinion, Victor, in personality was more of a “monster” than the creation itself. The creation didn’t choose to live, it was Frankenstein that thought the creature would be happy and would hail him as its father.
