" 'Frankenstein' is about the risks of excessive ambition."

Ambition is central to ‘Frankenstein’. By usurping the role of God as creator of human life, Victor Frankenstein’s endeavours are both ‘excessive’ in principle, and destructive in their consequences. It thus seems congruous to conclude that the novel stands testament to the risks of such ambition. However, the question demands a consideration of how ‘excessive’ ambition can be defined. The aspirations of Walton and Frankenstein are motivated by an egotism which overrides their scientific intentions. It is perhaps against this unrestrained egotism that the novel provides its greatest warning. Aspiration in the novel is afforded significance by the frame narrative. Victor and Walton are characterised by their respective ambitions – Walton in his arctic expedition, and Victor in his scientific experimentation. as it is presented as the embodiment of the principles of each character. By placing Walton’s letters about his interactions with Victor around Victor’s own narrative, Shelley allows Walton to become a figure of comparison and contrast to Victor. Initially, Shelley employs the Gothic technique of the Dopple Ganger to highlight parallels between the aspirations of the two characters: compare Walton’s ‘I preferred glory to every enticement wealth placed in my path,’ with Victor’s admission ‘wealth was an inferior object, but what glory would attend the discovery if I could banish disease from the human frame.’ Whilst it is, on one level, admirable that these scientists disregard monetary gains in their experiments, it is an aspiration for personal glorification that motivates their academic ambition. Frankenstein, in particular, allows his desperation for public recognition to take precedence over his altruistic intentions of ‘banishing disease from the human frame.’ In this way egotistic desire is critiqued to a greater extent than exorbitant ambition by the death and destruction which results from his attempts. Whilst Victor advocates glorification to his dying day, imploring Walton and his crew to ‘return as heroes who have conquered all.’ Walton finds it ‘terrible to reflect’ that the ‘lives of his crew are endangered’ through his endeavours. In choosing to turn back from his exploration, Walton does indeed abandon his ‘excessive ambition’ as he recognises his responsibility for the lives of his crew. Whilst Shelley’s contemporary critics in the ‘Quarterly Review’ propounded that the novel ‘inculcates no lesson of conduct, manners or morality’, their interpretation ignores the change in Walton’s plans as a result of hearing Victor’s tale. Walton realises, after hearing Victor’s story, that the safety of human lives must take precedent over his own aspirations. Parallels between the novel and its eponymous myth, ‘the modern Prometheus’, are manifest in Victor’s ambition. The reader is immediately encouraged to consider the aspiration of Victor, to create ‘a new species’ through science alone, as a modern modification of the Prometheus myth. However, ambiguity is highlighted by such an allusion; whilst Prometheus deliberately transgressed the word of the Gods for the benefit of the rest of mankind, the world of Frankenstein is in the most part, secular, and it is not explicitly clear how his ambitions will actually benefit humanity. Indeed, Punter argues ‘whilst the classics offered clear rules and limits, Gothic represented excess and exaggeration.’ This interpretation is supported by the complicated syntax Victor often employs in his narrative. For example, his explanation of ‘that deadly passion,...I find it rise within me, like a swelling mountain river, from unknown and ignoble sources’, uses simile, multiple clauses and dramatic language to explain the feelings which govern his ambition. Using simile, Victor relegates any notion of personal responsibility for the consequences of his ambition to irrelevances. He compares his emotions to overwhelming forces of nature – ‘a swelling mountain river’, implying he cannot control these impulses. However, unlike Prometheus, Victor is not punished by God explicitly, but rather, by the tangible results of his work. It is, therefore, Victor’s failure to apply his understanding of nurture and responsibility to his own prodigy of science that decrees his demise. The novel also stands testament to the distinctions between different forms of ambition; the ‘excessive ambition’ in question, and humble, domestic ambition. Victor entertains vision of divine grandeur in aspiring towards ‘a new species’ which ‘would bless me as their creator and source’. His creature however, has values and aspirations which lie elsewhere. He considers the Delacey’s humble domestic set-up to be a utopia to which he aims – to have the Delacey’s ‘looks directed towards me with affection was the utmost of my ambition.’ As the critic Baldrick propounds, ‘Victor is motivated only by himself, the creature’s aspirations are the result of natural human sensibility.’ While Victor consciously rejects the domestic, familial support of his relatives in favour of isolation, the creature, whose isolation is forced upon him, desires only human company. The violent acts the creature then commits are a product of his retaliation against social seclusion. Shelley therefore uses her novel to illuminate the dangers of ambition in isolation –though the conditions of their isolation are very different, the ambitions of the creature and Victor, when secluded, are destructive in their expression. ‘Frankenstein’, therefore, is not exclusively concerned with the ‘risks of excessive ambition’, but rather the risk of ambition that is entirely isolated and egocentric. It is ambition at the expense of empathy against which the novel presents the greatest warning.