Questions of responsibility run through nearly every major event in Frankenstein, from Victor's decision to abandon his creation to the creature's choice to seek revenge rather than continued attempts at connection. Essays on this topic are common precisely because the novel refuses to assign responsibility in a single, simple direction, which makes for genuinely interesting but genuinely challenging grading.

A common weakness in these essays is treating responsibility as a zero-sum question, arguing that either Victor or the creature bears full responsibility for the novel's tragic outcomes, without acknowledging that the text supports a more distributed and complicated account of causation.

A rubric for this essay type should reward students who trace a specific chain of choices and consequences, rather than simply asserting a verdict. An essay arguing that Victor's abandonment directly enables the creature's later violence needs to trace the specific steps in that chain, showing how each choice narrows the creature's options and pushes him toward the outcome the essay is discussing.

Essays that also consider secondary characters, such as the De Lacey family's rejection of the creature or society's broader failure to offer him any path toward acceptance, tend to demonstrate a more complete grasp of how responsibility is distributed across the novel rather than concentrated in a single character's choices.

Grading for Causal Reasoning, Not Just Moral Verdicts

The strongest responsibility essays function less like moral judgments and more like careful causal arguments, tracing specific decision points and their consequences through the text. A rubric that rewards this kind of causal precision, rather than simply the confidence of the moral verdict delivered, tends to produce more textually grounded essays.

• A specific chain of cause and consequence traced through the text, not just a verdict
• Consideration of secondary characters' contributions to the novel's outcomes
• Acknowledgment of moments where responsibility might be shared or ambiguous
• Evidence drawn from multiple points in the novel supporting the causal chain
• A conclusion that reflects the complexity established earlier in the essay, not a simplified restatement

Handling the Victor-as-Villain Essay

Many students land on a straightforward reading of Victor as the primary or sole villain of the novel, which is defensible but requires the same evidentiary rigor as any other claim to earn a strong score. Essays that simply assume Victor's culpability without engaging with his own moments of genuine remorse, or with the creature's own choices once abandoned, tend to be thinner than their confident tone might suggest.

Reward essays that hold this position while still grappling with complicating evidence, since genuine engagement with the text's ambiguity, even in service of a clear position, is a mark of stronger analytical writing.

The Creature's Agency as a Grading Consideration

Essays that argue for shared or distributed responsibility often need to address the creature's own agency directly: at what point, if any, does he become responsible for his own choices, separate from the circumstances that shaped him. This is a genuinely difficult philosophical question, and essays that engage with it thoughtfully, rather than avoiding it, should be rewarded even if they do not reach a fully settled answer.

A rubric criterion that credits genuine grappling with this tension, rather than requiring a definitive resolution, allows for more honest and more sophisticated student thinking than a rubric demanding a clean answer to a question the novel itself leaves open.

Feedback That Encourages Nuanced Argumentation

When an essay presents an overly simplified verdict on responsibility, the most useful feedback points to a specific piece of textual evidence the essay has not addressed that complicates its claim, rather than a general note to "consider other perspectives." Naming the exact evidence gives the student a concrete starting point for revision.

This kind of specific, evidence-based feedback also models the exact skill these essays are meant to develop: the ability to hold a position while genuinely engaging with what complicates it, which is a skill that extends well beyond this single assignment.