In Mary Shelley’s gothic novel Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein’s immature yet brilliantly scientific mind leads him to make and bring a creature to life in order to better the human race. Though this scientific feat was extraordinary, Frankenstein abandons this creature because of its looks and demonstrates how passion can overshadow the responsibility of what passion can create. Victor Frankenstein lacks responsibility towards his creature and shows how everyone has a passion, but not everyone has a passion for responsibility. A small yet strong passion can easily become an obsession that leads to unforgettable repercussions. Early in life, Victor is deprived of parental love and unsure of what love really was, making his passion for science a later obsession. In an article, Botting says, “The joy, the ecstasy of love is the consummation of the self in a passion that takes it outside itself towards its object which is neither being nor nothingness..” (Botting 4). This quote explains Victor’s passion of science and his obsession with making something incredible. In his childhood, his love is Elizabeth, where she is also seen as an “object” because she was gifted to him. In the novel, it reveals this as, “And when, on the morrow, she presented Elizabeth to me as her promised gift, I, with childish seriousness, interpreted her words literally, and looked upon Elizabeth as mine–mine to protect, love, and cherish” (Shelley 21). This granting of Elizabeth to Victor marks the first love of Victor’s life, yet is not a true symbol of love. Victor’s interpretation of love is misguided and he is now skewed to think that love is something you are given rather than something you feel. Once he starts school, he describes it as, “…but while I followed the routine of education in the schools of Geneva, I was, to a great degree, self-taught with regard to my favourite studies. My father was not scientific, and I was left to struggle with a child’s blindness, added to a student’s thirst for knowledge” (Shelley 25). Victor explains that though he went to school like everyone else at this time, he continues other studies at home that interests him more. His father’s indifference in his interests also shows his will to learn more in order to somewhat disobey him and show his own independence. As Victor experiences his new freedom at the University, he soon realizes how his scientific interests change and begins to find a new passion in the realms of other parts of science. Victor’s first encounter with this is shown when he says, “Such were the professor’s words—rather let me say such the words of the fate—enounced to destroy me. As he went on I felt as if my soul were grappling with a palpable enemy; one by one the various keys were touched which formed the mechanism of my being; chord after chord was sounded, and soon my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose” (Shelley 33). This shows how influential Victor is and his gullible personality. He takes his passion for science to an extreme where he hatches his idea of creating the creature to be better than all humans. Victor considers a lecture “words of fate” (Shelley 33)  in where he takes his ideas literally and completely changes his course of action. This shows the madness that overtakes him in the time after his mother died and how isolation affects him. As he listens to his professor, the obsession with something new entrances him and he cannot help but to completely overtake the idea into something much more than intended. The passion seen in Victor as he builds and creates his creature is one of love and hope to not only improve the human race, but to be credited with the most incredible scientific feat.  Once almost done creating the creature, he says, “After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter” (Shelley 38). This powerful quote shows his complete insanity in his project of two years. After ignoring his health as well as his family, Victor becomes completely invested in the making of this creature. The way he describes himself is like God, being able to create life from inanimate objects, and shows his arrogance in a new light. A critic comments on this by saying, “A strange love quivers between Victor Frankenstein and the unnamed monster, producing a movement that absorbs subject and object in a terrifyingly reversible relation where ideal unity cedes to nothingness. For them, love leaps beyond limits but also encounters absolute difference: the excesses of sublime passion loose the monstrous figures. Opening up questions of the self, its being, life, objects and language…” (Botting 1). This new love Victor introduces to his life is one that he made himself, unlike the given love of Elizabeth or the secluded love his parents provided him as a child. Victor did have a love for his creation before its birth and still loved it even after its awakening, just in a different way. Some could relate the after-birth love Victor gives the creation to the same love his father gave him, where his father loves him until he realizes Victor was nothing like him, thus weakening the love his father has towards him. All of these examples mark the beginning of where Victor’s passion for science and the Creature came to be as well as why he reacts the way he does when it comes to life. Passion is only as long as the love put into it. Victor’s passion for the creation  abruptly changes as he realizes the creation he built was unattractive in appearance. Victor’s words about the creature are negative when he says, “I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created” (Shelley 44).  After all of Victor’s hard work over the past two years, he finally sees his creation come to life and instead of being in awe, he judges it based on its hideous looks. This shows how close-minded Victor is about science in which he ignores the extraordinariness of bringing something dead to life and instead only sees it for what it looks like, abandoning it even though Victor is technically his father. The creature is not taught anything except that his own father does not want him.  After seeing him, Victor runs away and explains it as, “I took refuge in the courtyard belonging to the house which I inhabited, where I remained during the rest of the night, walking up and down in the greatest agitation, listening attentively, catching and fearing each sound as if it were to as if it were to announce the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life” (Shelley 44). Instead of helping and guiding the creature to this new world, he cowardly abandons the creature and leaves him to learn the world for himself. This marks the first mistake Victor makes in which he should take responsibility of the situation rather than ignore it. Victor’s use of language changes dramatically as he realizes the actions the creature took on his family in order to get back at him for abandoning him.”A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy daemon, to whom I had given life” (Shelley 62). This marks the point in the story where Victor realizes he has repercussions for his actions yet still focuses on the monster’s image rather than the actions he just commited. The change of the monster being now a daemon and wretch shows just how enraged Victor is at the creature. Once the trial begins, Victor says, “This speech calmed me. I was firmly convinced in my own mind that Justine, and indeed every human being, was guiltless of this murder. I had no fear, therefore, that any circumstantial evidence could be brought forward strong enough to convict her. My tale was not one to announce publicly; its astounding horror would be looked upon as madness by the vulgar” (Shelley 66). Victor refuses to talk or confess about his monster because he is afraid that people will mock him or even say he is crazy. This would ruin Victor’s reputation and so, instead, he convinces himself that Justine will not be charged for the murder because there is not enough evidence. This is now a continuous pattern with Victor in which he does not take responsibility for his actions. By making the creature, abandoning it, and now not admitting to it being alive, this shows Victor;s lack of responsibility with the situation at hand. While talking with the creation, Victor’s opinion of this ‘monster’ changes and his passion is somewhat revived. Victor talks to his creation and hears him say, “He easily eluded me and said, “Be calm! I entreat you to hear me before you give vent to your hatred on my devoted head. Have I not suffered enough, that you seek to increase my misery? Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it. Remember, thou hast made me more powerful than thyself; my height is superior to thine, my joints more supple” (Shelley 86) Once the monster begins to talk, Victor realizes that he has become very advanced compared to normal humans at that part of their life. The language the creature uses is one sounding of high importance and vocabulary in which only people who have money use. As the creature threatens Victor with his size to listen, Victor feels his passion that he once had to make the new female creature because he is proud of himself. “Rousseau in his Essay states that “speech differentiates man from the other animals” (240) and that, unlike animalistic utterances, human language is a learned behaviour that evolves, slowly progressing from inarticulate cries to melodious song, from melodious song to articulate speech, from articulate speech to written transcription” (Bok 2). Victor sees his creature not as a person as he intended but as a monster or animal until he is confronted by him on the ice. Once the creature speaks, Victor is completely overtaken by pride in his creation once again for being able to learn a whole language in a matter of months. This sparks Victor’s old passions for the future of his creation and takes him back to a moment of joy when the creature was made. “Rousseau begins his narrative of linguistic development by asserting that “the passions wrung the first utterings” (245), and that “to move a young heart, to repulse an unjust aggressor, nature dictates accents, cries, plaints: here then are the oldest invented words, and here is why the first languages were songlike and passionate before they were simple and methodical” (245-46; brackets in original)” (Bok 2). Because Victor abandons the creature, the creature’s new passion is to find Victor and make him pay for how he made him look. Passion is what lead the creature to learn about his surroundings and what is going on in the world. The first words that he read, said, and thought, were short and adolescent, yet passionate because he was learning something new and challenging. Now when he talks, he’s fluent and calm with what he says, showing Victor how smart he has become and that his science worked. Victor only takes responsibility for the good qualities of the creature rather than his appearance and ignores the other negative qualities about the creation because he is too proud to take responsibility for the whole creation. Victor lacks responsibility for deaths that occurred because of the passion that consumed him. Victor does not realize that all the creature wants is love, and will do anything to get it. “You must create a female for me, with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being. This you alone can do; and I demand it of you as a right which you must not refuse to concede” (Shelley 133). This is a turning point in the novel where Victor is forced to pick between making another creature for his first one, or refusing and dealing with the consequences. Victor, of course, decides to make the new woman creature for the man but does not follow through due to his fright of what they could do to the world. This leads the creature to break into a rage in which he starts to go after the ones Victor cares for most. Once Victor saw how smart his creature was, his passion for creating the impossible returned to him and explains why he agrees to create the new woman creature. The destruction of her is the point where Victor realizes he could impact the whole world rather than his own life. A source says, “‘When the monster tells Victor that he must have a female “of the same species, and . . . the same defects” as himself (F, p. 139), he inverts Diotima’s definition of love as the yearning not for one’s other half (Aristophanes’ theory) but for the good (see B, pp. 200-201). Love, says Diotima, “embraces those bodies which are beautiful rather than those which are deformed” (B, p. 204). Ironically, the monster’s instincts confirm this axiom'” (Heffernan 5). The ‘monster’ wants a woman creature who is unattractive like him so that he would know that she would not leave him. All the creature wants is love in his life and to not be lonely. When the creature was first created, he wanted to please his creator until he realized that Victor abandons him because of the way he looked. He then had the passion to find Victor and make him pay for the life he had created for the creature. Now, his passion is focused on finding someone to have and love. Victor is naive towards his situation with the creature and what the creature is capable of.  “‘The examination, the presence of the magistrate and witnesses, passed like a dream from my memory when I saw the lifeless form of Henry Clerval stretched before me. I gasped for breath, and throwing myself on the body, I exclaimed, “Have my murderous machinations deprived you also, my dearest Henry, of life? Two I have already destroyed; other victims await their destiny; but you, Clerval, my friend, my benefactor—'” (Shelley 163). This is where Victor realizes that the creature is the one who killed his best friend Henry. Henry is the only one who Victor considered a real friend other than M. Waldman and knew him since his childhood. The betrayal he felt from the creature shows how serious the creature is about having a mate and being mad about the destruction of his half made woman creature. As Victor waits for the creature, he says, “But I discovered no trace of him and was beginning to conjecture that some fortunate chance had intervened to prevent the execution of his menaces when suddenly I heard a shrill and dreadful scream. It came from the room into which Elizabeth had retired. As I heard it, the whole truth rushed into my mind, my arms dropped, the motion of every muscle and fibre was suspended; I could feel the blood trickling in my veins and tingling in the extremities of my limbs. This state lasted but for an instant; the scream was repeated, and I rushed into the room. Great God! Why did I not then expire! Why am I here to relate the destruction of the best hope and the purest creature on earth? She was there, lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down and her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair” (Shelley 182). Victor, in this moment, realizes what the creature has done and is more distraught than when his mother died. Victor’s arrogance shows here as he believes the creature was coming for him, but instead goes for the people he loves like the creature has done in the past. The reason as to why the creature tortures Victor this way is because all he wanted from him is someone to love. After being created and then rejected to betrayed by Victor once he destroyed the soon to be female creature, the creature has nothing else to lose by making Victor as lonely as he is, stripping the only people Victor cares about from his life.      “‘Love’, as Bataille argues, ‘is a desire to possess an object as great as the totality of desire’ (Guilty, p. 152)” (Botting 4). The sole reason the creature goes after Victor’s friends and family is the passion he has for revenge. The creature only wanted a mate, someone who he could love and have for himself. Instead of Victor gifting this one thing to the creature, he denies it everything, leaving the creature no choice but to hurt Victor the same way he is hurting. Victor has a new passion towards the creature, but a passion of revenge. Victor says, “I was possessed by a maddening rage when I thought of him, and desired and ardently prayed that I might have him within my grasp to wreak a great and signal revenge on his cursed head” (Shelley 186). Victor has finally lost everything he cares about including his brother, his best friend, his wife, and his father. This all was at the fault of his creature in which he wanted revenge for the loneliness he has to endure for the rest of his life. This part of Victor has been seen before in the obsession he has for science and the creation of his creature, the same way he is now obsessed with revenge.  The theme of this novel can be summed up as the classic war between passion and a responsibility. Victor Frankenstein demonstrates this more than anyone in his cowardly actions, his immatureness, and the arrogance he holds in himself. As Victor transforms from a passion to an obsession, this marks just the beginning of Victor’s lifelong struggle to find and destroy the creature. Once people start dying, Victor lacks the conscience to take responsibility for those deaths and instead worries too much about his ego. Finally, Victor starts to actually care about what is going on, yet doesn’t realize the only thing that the creature wants is love, and takes it away from him forever. All in all, Victor Frankenstein lacks responsibility towards his creature and shows how everyone has a passion, but not everyone has a passion for responsibility.    Works CitedBotting, Fred. “Frankenstein, Werther and the Monster of Love.” Botting, “Frankenstein, Werther and the Monster of Love”, knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/botting.html.Bok, Christian. “Monstrosity of Representation.” Bok, “Monstrosity of Representation”, Dec. 1992,  knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/bok.html.Heffernan, James. “Looking at the Monster.” Heffernan, “Looking at the Monster”, knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/hefferna.html.Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus: with Connections. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1999.