Welcome to day three of Frankenstein Week here on White Rose of Avalon, my Darlings.   For today’s post, I will be looking at Victor Frankenstein as the true villain of the story!   As I mentioned in my first post in this theme week, on Frankenstein’s Monster, I think that many of us view Victor Frankenstein himself as the true villain.   We see this truly exemplified in the 2025 Guillermo del Toro film adaptation, which takes all of the implicit villainy of Victor and makes it explicit.

However, this is not something that was pulled out of thin air because Guillermo del Toro famously always preferred the Monster.   The novel makes it quite clear that Victor has made terrible mistakes, some of which he owns, but not all.   You see, the majority of the story is told through his perspective in notes taken by Captain Walton, as Frankenstein lay gravely ill after having followed the Monster into the treacherous icy wilderness.   Victor blamed himself for the creation of the Monster and therefore was eventually able to take accountability for the deaths of his youngest brother William, Justine (who was executed for William’s murder, although she was innocent), his best friend Henry Clerval, and his wife Elizabeth.   He even felt guilt for the death of his aged father, which was spurred on by the knowledge of Elizabeth’s murder on her and Victor’s wedding night.

Yet, there are so many things which Victor never seems to be able to see as truly his fault.   It was his abandonment of the Monster that caused his own creation to feel so terribly lonely and hated by the whole world.   If not for this intense loneliness, the Monster would never have done these monstrous acts.   Victor does state that he knows he is guilty for that reason, but then he still did not do the one thing the Monster asked of him to hopefully heal all of this loneliness Victor had caused.   Yes, he begins the creation of the female Monster so that his first creation will finally have one like himself to live with.   That is what the Monster wants, love, companionship, to not be so wholly alone!   Of course, Victor is so repulsed by the process of creating another Monster, a process only he knows (which he even refused to share the details of with Captain Walton as he relayed the story), and he destroyed all of the work.   In that one act, he ensured that the Monster would forever be alone.   It was then that the Monster fully chose villainy as a way to get revenge after having found only hatred when all he wanted was love and acceptance.   Before then, the Monster had tried to reason with Victor, but not anymore.

Of course, Victor explained his reasoning for destroying his work on the female Monster.   The reasoning was that although the Monster had promised to take the female Monster with him and go live in a remote area and never harm people, Victor believed that he could never know if the female creation would be even more bloodthirsty than his first Monster.   Now, this seems like sound reasoning on the surface.   Yet, when we peel back the layers, we see that Victor would certainly want to punish the Monster for the atrocities committed against Victor’s family already.   Making sure the Monster was alone surely does just that.   Even the fact that Victor refused to share how he could create these Monsters shows that not only does he not want his Monster to have a companion, but he also pridefully did not want anyone else to have the knowledge and ability to create these creatures!   He can frame it as protecting society, and in many ways it is, but it is also ensuring that his discovery dies with him.

Then, there is the case of Elizabeth’s death.   This is the death that Victor really does have the most blame in.   The Monster had warned him that he would come again on Victor’s wedding day.   Elizabeth herself wrote a letter giving Victor a clean way out of their engagement.   You see, at the time, she believed he may no longer love her, or he viewed her as just a sister.   As a sidenote, they were cousins who were raised together, which is often left out of adaptations for its strangeness to a modern audience.   However, in the time period when the novel was written, it was not really all that odd for even first cousins to marry, and we see this same dynamic in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.    In any case, back to Victor.   He was given a way out to protect himself and his family.   If he broke Elizabeth’s heart, he could have saved her life.   Instead, he chose to go through with the wedding, assuming it was he the Monster would kill that day.   Even that is horrific, to knowingly make Elizabeth a widow on her wedding day!   So, the reasoning falls flat either way.

Of course, the Monster killed Elizabeth because Frankenstein had ensured that he would be alone forever, taking his potential wife, so he made sure to take Frankenstein’s.   It truly is darkly poetic justice in the Monster’s eyes.   Yet, again, it could have been prevented.   Victor’s ego and maudlin self-recrimination led him to assume he would die, and maybe he even thought he deserved it for creating the Monster.   When you read the novel, it truly seems that Victor did not consider for a second before the wedding who the true victim was to be.   In this height of hubris, Elizabeth was the victim.   The Monster even showed remorse and self-loathing for all of his actions once he came to collect Victor’s body from Captain Walton at the end of the novel.   And, to me, that passage rings far truer when it comes to taking accountability than anything Victor had stated earlier!   The Monster even stated that he planned to end his wretched existence by throwing himself on a funeral pyre.

So, yes, Victor was the true villain all along, but not just because he created the Monster that committed the atrocities in the novel by playing God.   Victor Frankenstein was the villain because he could never cease to let his pride get in the way, and always seemed to only take accountability in a very performative way.   He seemed to be saying what he believed should be said rather than meaning it.

I hope that you have enjoyed reading my thoughts on Victor as a character.   What do you think of Victor Frankenstein?   Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!    

Note on Image: The image at the top of the post is an image from Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (Revised Edition 1831), which I have added text to.   I found the art on https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frankenstein,_or_the_Modern_Prometheus_(Revised_Edition,_1831)_006.jpg.

LINK TO AVALONIAN ROSE FAERY MYSTERIES PATREON: patreon.com/AvalonianRoseFaeryMysteries

Further Reading

• Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley