dont know if i’ve said this all here yet but i see very often people pointing out victor’s supposedly idealistic childhood in comparison to the creature’s early suffering, and it always comes off as some sort of “gotcha!” moment when i think really there’s room there to be looking at the WHY that is. why, despite supposedly having this ideal childhood, with good, caring parental figures in his life, he fails to give this same upbringing to his own child? the issue is that of those who bring this up, their perspective tends to be already inherently limited: that is, victor is a bad parent simply because he is a privileged asshole. by beginning his narrative by describing his family and childhood as perfect and ideal, victor sets an expectation for parents that is obviously impossible, yet people continue to hold him accountable to it.
and, really, what childhood is really as perfectly happy as victor’s description? his almost-desperate insistence that his childhood WAS perfectly happy is just that — desperate — and it makes it suspicious. this insistence suggests the opposite, and i believe this assertion is taken at face-value far too often; particularly when his childhood, even in-text, was objectively imperfect and troubled, and victor himself directly addresses in his narration to walton that his past recollections of his family and early childhood are idealized, even going so far as to describe them as "religious" and "sacred" in feeling: i think [among other things] that this suggests, like many victims of childhood trauma and abuse, now that there is physical distance between the memories as well as time having passed since then, he has sentimentalized this era of his life
if you step back take a moment and look at the maternal figures in his life as well (caroline, elizabeth, and to a lesser extent justine) an obvious pattern emerges - each one of them was orphaned, and then “saved” by becoming a member of the frankenstein family, where they are afforded an environment where they are able to become these motherly, nurturing caretakers. this pattern is broken with victor: when he is orphaned, instead of joining the family, he EXITS it — that is, he is sent off to ingolstadt, and completely stripped of this support system, leading to his “failure” as a mother.
in a similar vein, the same people who harp on and on about how victor is negligent and an unaccountable father fail to hold the creature accountable for his actions as well, and somehow the fault for the entire plot of the book (that is, the murders of the frankensteins and co) rests solely on victors shoulders.