Theme Of Ambition In Frankenstein

Billionaire businessman Shiv Nadar once exclaimed, “If you are calm about your ambitions, you become confident of achieving what you set out to do”. Opposingly in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Victor is frantic about his goals and ambitions to create a massive super-human that will be forever indebted to it’s creator. Victor’s also unconfident and avoids telling anyone about his work, the creature, until after completion. Mary Shelley uses Victor to emphasize that one should possess less ambition, as when acted upon too prominently it degrades people’s physical and mental health. While working on the creature, Victor Frankenstein ignores his own physical health due to his overpowering ambition to keep working. At first, he believed his health would merely ‘fix itself’ as he continued on, “The energy of my purpose alone sustained me: my labourers would soon end, and I believed that exercise and amusement would then drive away my incipient disease” (Shelley 42). Obviously Victor’s health wouldn’t miraculously get better with time or once he finished the monster; therefore his ambition lead him to disregard his declining physical health. Furthermore, Victor supplemented his physical health concerns to put more time, energy, and focus into 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” (Shelley 43). If Frankenstein wasn’t as obsessive