Who Made the Monster

The motion: “The creature's violence is the direct product of Victor's abandonment, and the novel holds Victor responsible.”

Your opponent: Mary Shelley · Assessment objectives: AO1, AO2, AO3

The creature learns to speak by watching a family through a wall. Then it asks for one thing. Mary Shelley wants to know what you think it deserved.

What you are asked to argue

Argue for or against. Shelley will move the blame one step further back each time you place it.

The frame narrative: Walton, Victor, the creature, and back out again
The creature's education at the De Lacey cottage
The demand for a companion and Victor's decision
Romantic and Enlightenment ideas about nature, education and ambition (AO3)
Galvanism as it was understood in 1818, and the novel's refusal to explain the method

Disagreeing with the figure is not an error. Any of these can score full marks if argued well:

That both are responsible and the novel's frame exists to prevent a single verdict
That the novel indicts the pursuit of knowledge without responsibility, so society shares the blame
That the creature's eloquence undermines the neglect argument, and the novel knows it

Wrong: The creature is called Frankenstein.
The correction: Frankenstein is Victor. The creature is unnamed throughout, and the fact that it has no name is part of the argument about abandonment.
Wrong: The novel is simply a warning about science going too far.
The correction: Victor's fault is not that he creates but that he flees. The novel spends far more time on abandonment than on the laboratory.

An argument about responsibility built on the frame narrative and the creature's own language, that meets the murder objection directly.

Read the life before you argue with it — the case you are about to meet was built by a real person, over a real career:

Prepare for this debate → — the motion, the rounds and the marking descriptors, then the debate itself. Free, no account needed.