Victor's sin

Victor Frankenstein is guilty of sinning against nature in his refusal to accept human limitations and the prosing powers outside human control.
Victor Frankenstein place himself above the rest of humanity, beyond humane morals and the laws of nature. He creates his own man, from the bits and pieces of the dead. This act in its self is one
of extreme hubris, to think one man might be master over life and death. Victor goes even further;
it is not good enough that his creation be of normal proportions; he must be of
giant proportions. Victor is attempting to prove his power over the forces of
nature, to the point, one might say, of putting nature to shame, in his attempt
to create something greater and more beautiful than nature could ever have. His
actions are motivated not by a desire to learn, but an insatiable lust for
power over the forces beyond man’s control. The end product of Victor’s hubris
is the creation of a hideous and unnatural man. As Victor says of this monster,
he was terrible to look upon. In the hideous and misproportioned form of Victor’s
monster, we see the manifestation of his own inflated hubris. The punishment for Victor’s
sin, like that in the inferno, is one of ironic cruelty. Victor sought to have
power over nature through his creation, and as his punishment is made a slave
to the cruel actions of his own monster. Victor’s punishment is the exact opposite
of what he sought, a complete, and for him, horrible reversal of fortunes. The monster
ultimately seeks revenge against his creator, Victor, for abandoning him in a
world which rejects him completely. The monster thus sets about killing all of
Victor’s loved ones, one by one, and in so doing ever tightening his hold over
Victor’s life. The murder of his brother William, and the family servant Justine,
by the monster, drives Victor to near madness, placing him in ever greater
control of his monster. Victor becomes so bound by the actions of the monster
that he attempts the creation of a female counterpart to appease him. As the
monster states after Victor refuses to make him his female companion, “You are
my creator, but I am your master;—obey!” (Shelly, 146). Finally, with the
murder of his childhood love and short lived wife Justine, we see Victor
completely pass in to the power of the monster, following him through unbearable
sufferings to the edge of the north pole. By his hubris, Victor made for
himself his own living hell, enslaved by his own creation and forced to watch
on as his loved ones were murdered. Such poetic cruelty would probably be appreciated
by Dante and is summed up best by Victor himself: “Like the archangel who
aspired to omnipotence, I am chained in an eternal hell” (Shelly, 180). Victors
sin of believe himself master of the powers of nature in the novel Frankenstein,
carries with it the same weight as believing one’s self master over the will of
god in the Inferno. Such a sin can only lead to a punishment worse than death,
as Victor came to know all too well.