Victor Frankenstein — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Victor Frankenstein
Characters
What you need to know
How Shelley presents Victor Frankenstein, and how the character develops across the text: from a curious, much-loved child to an obsessive creator who abandons his creature and is destroyed by guilt and revenge.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'The world was to me a secret which I desired to divine', 'more, far more, will I achieve', 'I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation', 'A new species would bless me as its creator and source', 'my workshop of filthy creation', 'I shunned my fellow-creatures as if I had been guilty of a crime', 'the living monument of presumption and rash ignorance which I had let loose upon the world', 'I bore a hell within me, which nothing could extinguish', 'I, not in deed, but in effect, was the true murderer', 'I am the assassin of those most innocent victims', 'like the archangel who aspired to omnipotence, I am chained in an eternal hell'.
Context: the Romantic overreacher and the myth of Prometheus, and Victor as the modern Prometheus of the subtitle.
Structure: Victor as a narrator who tells his story with hindsight, blaming destiny while he hides the truth from his family.
Edexcel's novel question has two parts, and neither marks context: part (a) on the printed extract marks language, form and structure (AO2); part (b) on the novel elsewhere, from memory, marks the argument and its references (AO1), not language analysis. Use context only where it explains a reading, and say which part each worked paragraph and exam tip is for.
