Key Terms for Victor's Character

📖 Key Terms for Victor's Character

Tragic hero

A central character of noble qualities whose downfall results from a fatal flaw (hamartia). Victor's hamartia is ambition uncoupled from moral obligation — specifically, the refusal to accept responsibility for what he creates.

Hamartia

Greek: the fatal flaw that brings about a tragic hero's downfall. In Aristotelian tragedy, hamartia is not a moral failing but an error of judgement. Shelley complicates this: Victor's hamartia is both intellectual (he misjudges the consequences) and moral (he refuses responsibility when the consequences become clear).

The double (doppelganger)

A character who mirrors another, often representing their repressed or shadow self. Victor and the Creature are Shelley's central double: both isolated, both seeking companionship they cannot sustain, both destroyed by the same original rupture. Critics sometimes argue the Creature represents what Victor would become without civilisation's constraints.

Pathetic fallacy

The attribution of human emotions to the natural world. Shelley uses weather, landscape, and season to externalise Victor's psychological states — storms accompany moments of decision; the Arctic's blankness mirrors Victor's final moral emptiness.

Gothic protagonist

A central character in Gothic fiction who transgresses moral or natural limits and suffers the consequences. Victor is the Gothic protagonist in the classical mode: his transgression (creating life) is the engine of everything that follows.