Frankenstein

About Frankenstein

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was eighteen years old, during a wet summer in Geneva when a house party challenge, write a ghost story, produced one of the most durable works of imagination in the English language. She published it in 1818, anonymously, because the world was not ready to credit a teenage woman with a serious novel. The first reviewers who knew the author was a woman generally treated that as relevant to their assessment of the book’s quality. They were wrong.

Frankenstein is not a horror novel in the way the cultural shorthand suggests. It is a philosophical novel that has been simplified by two centuries of adaptations. The creature in Shelley’s book is not a shambling monosyllabic monster. He is eloquent, intelligent, sensitive, and radicalized by rejection. He reads Plutarch and Milton and Goethe. He watches a peasant family through a wall for months, learning to love them before they see him. He has a fully articulated account of why he became what he eventually becomes, and that account is more persuasive than anything Victor Frankenstein says in his own defense.

What Shelley was writing about, at eighteen, was creation and the responsibility that comes with it: the creation of life, of children, of intellectual work. Victor makes something he cannot control and then abandons it because it horrifies him. The novel is about what that abandonment produces, both in the abandoned and in the man who abandoned. The question it asks has not stopped being relevant.

Plot Summary

The novel is structured as nested narratives. Robert Walton, an English explorer attempting to reach the North Pole, rescues a half-frozen man from the Arctic ice. The man is Victor Frankenstein, who tells his story to Walton, who writes it down in letters to his sister. Victor’s story includes the creature’s own account of his history, which Victor relates verbatim. The effect is a story that has to be heard through three different tellers before you arrive at anything like the truth.

Victor Frankenstein is a scientist from Geneva, brilliant and obsessed from childhood with the question of what animates life. He studies at the University of Ingolstadt, discovers the principle of life through a synthesis of old alchemy and new chemistry that the novel carefully refuses to specify, and constructs a human body from charnel houses and dissection rooms. When he succeeds and the creature opens its eyes, Victor is immediately and completely appalled by what he has done. He flees. The creature is left alone in the laboratory.

The creature’s story, delivered in the novel’s central section, covers his first months in the world: his discovery of fire and food, his retreat into the forest, his observation of the De Lacey family through a hole in the wall of their cottage, his slow self-education in language and feeling and human history. He saves the family’s crops in secret. He rescues a drowning girl. He is kind. He approaches the blind old man, De Lacey, and is having a real conversation with him when the family returns, sees a creature of grotesque appearance pawing at their father, and attacks him. He flees.

He finds Victor and demands that Victor make him a companion. Victor agrees and then, midway through creating a female creature, destroys his work, fearing what a pair of creatures might produce. The creature, watching through a window, swears revenge. He kills Victor’s friend Henry Clerval, then his new wife Elizabeth on their wedding night. Victor, now obsessed with revenge as the creature is, pursues him across Europe and into the Arctic. He dies on Walton’s ship. The creature appears at Victor’s body, tells Walton he has no pleasure in the destruction he has caused, and says he will go north to make a funeral pyre for himself.

Key Themes

Creation and Responsibility

The novel’s subtitle is “The Modern Prometheus,” and the Prometheus myth is the relevant frame: a figure who seizes fire from the gods and gives it to humanity, and is punished forever for it. Victor seizes the secret of life and creates something with it, and is punished by having everything he loves destroyed. But Shelley complicates the myth: the punishment is not simply divine retribution. It is the direct consequence of Victor’s abandonment of what he made. The creature would not have become a murderer if Victor had not fled the laboratory in horror. The creation of life is not the crime. The failure of care that follows is.

Isolation and Belonging

The creature’s tragedy is a tragedy of exclusion. He wants, with devastating simplicity, to belong somewhere. He wants to be loved or at least accepted, to have one person willing to know him. He is not asking for much. What he gets is universal rejection on the basis of his appearance, which is all anyone can see. Shelley was writing in a tradition that used physical difference as a marker of moral difference, and she systematically reversed it: the creature is morally superior to almost everyone in the novel, and the source of his violence is not a corrupted nature but a human society that refused him. That is a more disturbing argument than the horror genre has usually been willing to make.

Ambition and Its Blindness

Victor is not a bad person. He loves his family, he is a loyal friend, he is genuinely brilliant. What he lacks is any ability to think past his own excitement. He pursues the creation of life because it is possible and because he wants to be the one who achieves it, and he does not at any point seriously ask himself what creating life actually requires. The moral failure is not the experiment. It is the complete absence of thought about what comes after the experiment succeeds. Shelley draws this with precision: Victor is voluble about his suffering but almost entirely silent about his creature’s.

What Makes Us Human

The creature reads more widely than Victor does. He reads Paradise Lost and Plutarch’s Lives and Goethe’s Werther, and he uses those books to understand his situation with an accuracy that is painful. He identifies with Adam, made without consent and then abandoned; he identifies with Satan, who was good until rejection and injustice made him otherwise. He is more self-aware than the humans around him. He feels more acutely. He articulates his own suffering with more precision than Victor articulates anything. The novel asks, through him, what the definition of humanity actually is, and consistently suggests that the creature meets the definition better than his creator.

Meet the Characters

Victor Frankenstein is one of literature’s most frustrating narrators, and that is part of the point. He is genuinely brilliant, genuinely suffering, and genuinely unable to take responsibility for what he did. His account of events is self-serving in ways he does not notice. On Novelium, talking to Victor means engaging with a man who will describe his suffering at great length and deflect, persistently, from the question of what his creature needed from him. Pressing him on that gap is one of the most interesting conversations the novel makes possible.

The Creature is one of literature’s most articulate and self-aware characters, which is not what the cultural image of Frankenstein’s monster suggests. He can tell you exactly what happened to him, exactly why he made the choices he made, and exactly what he would have needed to make different ones. On Novelium, talking to the creature means encountering someone who has thought more carefully about his situation than anyone else in the novel. He may be the most honest voice available.

Elizabeth Lavenza is Victor’s adopted sister and intended wife, and she is largely defined in the novel by her relationships to others: daughter, sister, bride. She is also, within those limitations, genuinely perceptive about Victor. She senses something wrong long before the end. On Novelium, she can speak from a position the novel does not fully give her: her own account of what she observed in Victor’s behavior, and what she did not let herself believe.

Henry Clerval is Victor’s closest friend and, in many ways, his moral opposite. Where Victor is inward-looking and obsessed, Henry is open, affectionate, and interested in the world for its own sake rather than for what he can extract from it. He is killed specifically because Victor failed to protect him, and talking to him on Novelium, before the ending, means encountering someone who represents what Victor could have been if ambition had not consumed him.

Robert Walton is the frame narrator, writing letters to his sister from the Arctic. He is, at the start of the novel, in a state of Frankenstein-ish obsession: he wants to be the first man to reach the North Pole, he is driving his crew into danger in pursuit of that goal, and he will not acknowledge what that costs them. Victor’s story is a warning that arrives just in time. On Novelium, talking to Walton means talking to someone who is watching himself almost repeat Victor’s mistake and deciding, slowly, whether to stop.

Why Talk to Characters from Frankenstein?

Frankenstein is a novel about conversations that never happen. Victor never has a real conversation with the creature after the initial meeting in the mountains. He never tells his family what he is afraid of. He never allows anyone to actually help him. The catastrophe is as much a product of silence and avoidance as it is of anything the creature does.

When you talk to book characters from Frankenstein on Novelium, you can have the conversations the novel withholds. You can ask the creature what he would have needed Victor to say in that first meeting on the glacier. You can ask Victor why he destroyed the female creature when he had already agreed to make one. You can ask Elizabeth what she actually knew. The voice conversations on Novelium give the characters the space for honesty that the novel, by design, denies them.

About the Author

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born in 1797, the daughter of the philosopher William Godwin and the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who died eleven days after Mary was born. She grew up in an intellectually intense household, eloped with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when she was sixteen, and spent the years of the Geneva summer (1816) in the company of Percy, Lord Byron, and Byron’s physician John Polidori, which was one of the more remarkable concentrations of literary talent in history.

She wrote Frankenstein at eighteen, revised it substantially for a second edition in 1831, and published several other novels afterward, of which The Last Man (1826) is the most remarkable. She spent much of her later life editing and promoting Percy’s work after his drowning in 1822. She died in 1851 at the age of fifty-three, old enough to see Frankenstein become a cultural fixture but not to see what it would become in the following century. The Boris Karloff film, the bolt through the neck, the flat-topped head: none of that is in her book. Her creature is something more frightening, because he is more human.