Frankenstein

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is the novel Mary Shelley began at eighteen during the wet, dark summer of 1816 at Lake Geneva, in a ghost-story contest with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and published anonymously in January 1818. It tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant young student who discovers how to give life to dead matter, assembles a man from parts of corpses, and recoils in horror the moment it opens its eyes. Abandoned by its maker, the nameless creature — gigantic, hideous, intelligent and at first gentle — educates itself, seeks love and companionship, is rejected by every human being it meets, and turns to vengeance against its creator’s family. Victor pursues it to the polar ice, where both die.

The novel founded a genre — Brian Aldiss called it the first work of science fiction — and created one of the most powerful myths of the modern age, the scientist who creates what he cannot control. But the book itself is stranger, sadder and more philosophical than the films: its “monster” speaks in eloquent, Miltonic prose, quotes Paradise Lost, and asks why the being who made him has abandoned him.

At a glance

Written	June 1816 – May 1817, in Switzerland and England
Published	1 January 1818, anonymously, in three volumes; revised edition 1831 with the author’s introduction
Setting	Geneva, Ingolstadt, the Alps, the Orkneys, Ireland and the Arctic, in the 1790s
Narration	Letters and three nested first-person narratives (Walton, Victor, the creature)
Epigraph	“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me Man? Did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?” — Paradise Lost X.743–5

The story

The novel begins with letters from Robert Walton, an ambitious English explorer, to his sister Margaret in England. Walton is sailing towards the North Pole, hoping to discover the passage to the Pacific and the secret of the magnet, and longs for a friend who would share his dreams. His ship becomes trapped in ice. One day the crew see, far off, a gigantic figure on a dog-sledge crossing the ice; the next morning they rescue a half-frozen, emaciated man drifting on an ice-floe — Victor Frankenstein, who has been pursuing that figure. Recognising in Walton his own fatal ambition, Victor tells him his story as a warning.

Victor was born into a wealthy, loving Genevan family. His parents adopted an orphan, the beautiful Elizabeth Lavenza, whom he regards as his “more than sister” and destined wife. His closest friend is the gentle Henry Clerval. As a boy Victor became obsessed with the outdated alchemists — Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, Albertus Magnus — and their search for the elixir of life; seeing a tree blasted by lightning, he became fascinated by electricity. His mother dies of scarlet fever caught nursing Elizabeth, and, grieving, he leaves for the university of Ingolstadt in Bavaria.

There, guided by the chemist Professor Waldman, who praises modern scientists who “penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding-places”, Victor throws himself into chemistry and anatomy. He studies the decay of bodies in charnel-houses, and after nearly two years “succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.” He does not reveal how. Intoxicated, he resolves to create a being: “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.” To simplify the work he makes it eight feet tall. For months he labours, pale and feverish, collecting materials from dissecting rooms and slaughterhouses, cutting himself off from family and nature.

On “a dreary night of November”, by the light of a half-extinguished candle, he infuses “a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet”, and sees “the dull yellow eye of the creature open”. Its yellow skin barely covers its muscles and arteries; it has lustrous black hair, pearly white teeth, watery eyes and black lips. “The beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” Victor flees to his bedroom, dreams that he kisses Elizabeth and she turns into his mother’s corpse, and wakes to find the creature at his bedside, a hand outstretched, its mouth muttering inarticulate sounds and grinning. He runs out into the rain. The creature disappears. Clerval arrives and nurses Victor through months of nervous fever.

Victor recovers and prepares to go home. A letter from his father brings terrible news: his youngest brother, William, has been found strangled near Geneva. Returning at night in a thunderstorm, Victor glimpses the gigantic figure among the trees by a flash of lightning, and knows at once that the creature is the murderer. But Justine Moritz, a beloved servant of the family, is accused, because a locket of William’s has been found in her pocket. Victor, sure no one will believe him, says nothing. Justine is condemned, falsely confesses under pressure from her confessor, and is hanged. Victor is tortured by guilt.

Seeking relief, Victor climbs into the Alps to the glacier of Montanvert below Mont Blanc. Across the ice comes the creature, at superhuman speed. Victor curses him; the creature answers with dignity:

Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.

He asks Victor to listen to his story. In a hut on the mountain, the creature speaks.

His first memories are confused sensations — light, darkness, hunger, cold. He wandered into the forest, discovered fire, learned what food was, and was attacked with stones by villagers who saw him. He took refuge in a hovel attached to a cottage, where through a chink in the wall he secretly watched a poor, exiled family: the blind old De Lacey, his son Felix and daughter Agatha, gentle and loving to one another. Moved by their poverty, he secretly gathered firewood for them at night. He learned their language by listening, especially when Felix taught it to Safie, a young Turkish-Arab woman who arrived to join him, and from the books he found — Volney’s Ruins of Empires, which taught him the history of human cruelty and injustice; Plutarch’s Lives; Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther; and Milton’s Paradise Lost, which he read as true history. He identified with Adam, but “Adam had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous… but I was wretched, helpless, and alone. Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition.” In the pocket of the clothes he had taken from the laboratory he found Victor’s journal, and learned how he was made, and that his creator had turned from him in disgust.

He saw his own face reflected in a pool and was horrified. Still hoping, he resolved to approach the blind old man first, while the others were out. De Lacey received him kindly — but Felix, Agatha and Safie returned, saw him, and Felix beat him with a stick. The family fled the cottage for ever. In despair and rage, the creature burned it down and declared “everlasting war against the species”, and above all against his creator. Making his way to Geneva, he saved a girl from drowning and was shot for his pains. Near the city he met a beautiful little boy and thought to take him as a companion, untainted by prejudice — but the boy screamed that his father was M. Frankenstein and he would punish the monster. The creature strangled him, took his locket, and planted it on a sleeping girl, Justine.

He ends his story with a demand: Victor must create a female companion, “of the same species, and with the same defects”, with whom he will go to the wilds of South America, live on acorns and berries, and never trouble humanity again. Moved by his eloquence, Victor agrees.

Victor travels to England with Clerval, ostensibly for study, then goes alone to a remote island in the Orkneys to work. As the female body nears completion, he begins to reason: she might be more malignant than her mate; she might refuse the compact; they might breed “a race of devils… upon the earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror.” Seeing the creature’s face at the window, grinning, he tears the half-finished female to pieces. The creature howls and vows: “I shall be with you on your wedding-night.”

Victor rows out to sea at night to sink the remains, is carried by the wind to the coast of Ireland, and is arrested for murder: a young man has been found strangled on the shore. It is Clerval. Victor falls into a fever and is acquitted when his father arrives. He returns to Geneva and marries Elizabeth, convinced the creature’s threat is aimed at himself, and on the wedding night, at an inn on the shore of Lake Geneva, he sends her to their room while he patrols with pistols. He hears a scream: Elizabeth lies strangled on the bed, and at the window the creature grins and points at the corpse. Victor’s father dies of grief soon after.

Victor, now alone, vows revenge and pursues the creature across Europe, through Russia and north into the Arctic, the creature always ahead, leaving taunting messages and food to keep him going: “My reign is not yet over… you live, and my power is complete.” On the ice, Victor’s sledge breaks up, and he is rescued by Walton.

Victor’s story ends. Walton’s crew, fearing death in the ice, demand to turn back; Victor, dying, urges them to be men and press on to glory, but then, at his end, warns Walton: “Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.” Victor dies. Walton, who has agreed to turn south, hears a sound in the cabin and finds the creature mourning over his creator’s body. The creature speaks of his remorse and misery — “I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on” — and declares that he will build his own funeral pyre at the northernmost point of the globe. “He sprang from the cabin-window… He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance.”

Themes

Knowledge and ambition. Victor and Walton are both “Promethean” seekers — Prometheus, in Greek myth, stole fire from the gods for mankind and was punished eternally. The novel’s subtitle asks whether modern science is a new Promethean transgression. Victor warns: “Learn from me… how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.” The science of the novel draws on real research of the time — Luigi Galvani’s experiments making frogs’ legs twitch with electricity, his nephew Giovanni Aldini’s public attempts to animate the corpses of hanged criminals in 1803, Humphry Davy’s chemistry.

Creator and creation. The novel is a parable of responsibility. Victor’s great failure is not the act of creation but his immediate abandonment of the creature. The creature’s appeals echo Adam’s to God and Satan’s against him; Victor is a creator who refuses to be a father. The novel thus questions both scientific hubris and divine justice.

Nature and nurture. Echoing Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, the creature’s story suggests that beings are born good and made evil by society’s cruelty: “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.” His violence is a response to rejection — though the novel also lets us doubt this, since he murders a child.

Isolation and sympathy. Every central figure is isolated: Walton longs for a friend; Victor cuts himself off from his family to work and is destroyed by secrecy; the creature is utterly alone. The novel argues for “the tenderness of friendship” and the domestic affections that ambition destroys.

Monstrosity and appearance. The creature is judged by his hideous appearance; only the blind man receives him kindly. Who is the monster — the being who kills, or the man who made and abandoned him and let innocent Justine hang?

Doubling. Victor and the creature mirror each other — each pursues the other; each destroys the other’s hopes of a mate; each ends alone and desolate. Many readers have read the creature as Victor’s dark double, the embodiment of his repressed guilt and desire.

Interpretations

The novel has been read in innumerable ways: as a Romantic critique of Romantic ambition (Victor as Percy Shelley or Byron); as a political allegory of the French Revolution (the creature as the rebellious mob, created by an oppressive society, which then devours its makers); as a feminist “birth myth” (Ellen Moers, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar) about a man who usurps female creativity, written by a young mother who had lost a child; as a psychoanalytic drama; as a fable of colonialism and race; as a warning about modern technology, from nuclear weapons to genetic engineering and artificial intelligence.

The two texts

Mary Shelley revised the novel for the one-volume edition of 1831, adding her famous introduction. The changes make Victor more a victim of fate and less responsible for his own choices, and make Elizabeth a foundling rather than his cousin. Many modern editions return to the 1818 text.

Afterlife

The creature’s image owes more to the stage and screen than to the book. Richard Brinsley Peake’s play Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein (1823) made the monster mute and gave Victor a comic assistant. Thomas Edison’s studio made a short film (1910). James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), with Boris Karloff, created the iconic monster — square head, bolts in the neck, lumbering walk — and the cry “It’s alive!”; Bride of Frankenstein (1935) gave him a mate. Mel Brooks parodied it in Young Frankenstein (1974); Kenneth Branagh filmed a more faithful version (1994); Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation came in 2025. The story underlies Blade Runner, Ex Machina and countless debates about the ethics of creating artificial minds.

In conversation

• “It’s alive!” — the film’s cry (not in the book) at the moment a creation first stirs.
• “I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel” — the creature’s charge against his maker.
• A Frankenstein’s monster — any creation that escapes its maker’s control, from technology to institutions.