Frankenstein
Based on Wikipedia: Frankenstein
On a stormy night in the summer of 1816, an eighteen-year-old woman who had already buried her first child sat awake past midnight, her mind racing with visions of a pale scientist kneeling beside the thing he had made. She couldn't sleep. The image wouldn't leave her. By morning, Mary Shelley had the seed of what would become one of the most influential novels in the English language—a book that would give birth to an entire genre and permanently alter how we think about science, creation, and the responsibilities we bear for the things we bring into existence.
The remarkable thing about Frankenstein isn't just that it endured. It's that a teenage girl, surrounded by some of the greatest literary minds of her era, produced something that none of them could match.
The Summer That Gave Us Monsters
The year 1816 was no ordinary summer. It was, in fact, barely a summer at all.
The previous year, Mount Tambora in Indonesia had erupted with catastrophic force—the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history. The explosion hurled so much ash and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere that it dimmed the sun across the entire planet. Crops failed. Snow fell in June. Newspapers called it the "Year Without a Summer."
In Switzerland, a group of young English writers had come to enjoy the Alpine scenery around Lake Geneva. Instead, they found themselves trapped indoors by relentless cold and rain. The group included Lord Byron, already famous as a poet and infamous for his scandals; Percy Bysshe Shelley, a radical thinker and poet who had abandoned his first wife to run off with the young Mary Godwin; and John Polidori, Byron's personal physician, who harbored literary ambitions of his own.
Mary was eighteen. She and Percy weren't yet married. Her stepsister Claire had tagged along because she was pregnant with Byron's child.
Stuck inside, the group read ghost stories aloud from a French translation of German tales called Fantasmagoriana. One evening, Byron made a proposal: each of them should try to write their own ghost story.
Byron himself managed only a fragment about vampires. Percy started something and abandoned it. But Polidori took Byron's discarded vampire idea and turned it into "The Vampyre," which became the first vampire story in English and the direct ancestor of Dracula. And Mary, after days of anxiety and false starts, created Frankenstein.
Two of the foundational texts of horror literature—the vampire tale and the mad scientist story—emerged from that single rainy summer.
The Waking Dream
Mary Shelley didn't find her story immediately. Each morning, her companions asked if she had thought of anything. Each morning, she had to admit she hadn't.
The breakthrough came after a late-night conversation about the nature of life itself. The group discussed galvanism—the idea, named after the Italian scientist Luigi Galvani, that electricity might be the animating force of living things. Galvani had made dead frogs' legs twitch by applying electrical current. His nephew Giovanni Aldini had gone further, publicly applying electricity to human corpses in attempts at reanimation. If electricity was the secret of life, could it be used to create it?
"Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated," Mary recalled of that conversation. "Galvanism had given token of such things."
She went to bed but couldn't sleep. And then the vision came:
I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.
An astronomer named Donald Olson later determined, by analyzing the positions of the moon and stars, that this waking dream occurred between two and three in the morning on June 16, 1816.
Mary had found her story. What terrified her wasn't the monster. It was the creator.
A Young Woman's Inheritance
Mary Shelley was perhaps the only person alive who could have written Frankenstein. Her parents had given her the intellectual tools, even though neither of them raised her.
Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," one of the founding texts of feminist philosophy. Wollstonecraft died from infection eleven days after giving birth to her daughter. Mary never knew her, but she knew her mother's ideas intimately—she would visit her grave to read and study.
Her father was William Godwin, a philosopher and novelist whose "Enquiry Concerning Political Justice" had made him famous as a radical thinker. Godwin raised Mary in an extraordinary intellectual environment. Writers, scientists, and political reformers gathered at their home. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge visited and recited "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" while young Mary hid behind the sofa to listen.
But Godwin remarried a woman who resented Mary's closeness to her father, and the household grew complicated. When Percy Bysshe Shelley appeared—older, married, handsome, and full of revolutionary ideas—Mary fell in love. She was sixteen. They ran away together to France, beginning a relationship that would bring her both great passion and tremendous grief.
Their first child, a daughter named Clara, was born premature and died after just two weeks. When Mary began writing Frankenstein, she was nursing her second child, a son. By the time the book was published, that child too was dead.
The themes of Frankenstein—creation, abandonment, the relationship between parent and child, the monster who has no mother—emerged directly from Mary Shelley's life. She was a motherless daughter writing about a motherless creation.
The Story Itself
Frankenstein is structured like a set of nesting dolls. The outer layer is a frame narrative: an Arctic explorer named Robert Walton, on an expedition to the North Pole, rescues a dying man from the ice. That man is Victor Frankenstein, and he tells Walton his story. Within Victor's story, the creature himself tells his own tale. Each narrator has his own perspective, his own blind spots, his own reasons for telling his version of events.
Victor Frankenstein is a young man from Geneva who becomes obsessed with the secret of life. At the University of Ingolstadt in Germany, he discovers a method for animating dead matter. Working alone, in secret, he assembles a being from parts stolen from charnel houses and graves. He chooses to make it large—about eight feet tall—because smaller features are too difficult to work with.
The moment of creation is not triumphant. It's horrifying.
Victor has labored for two years on this project. He has isolated himself from family and friends. He has worked with death so intimately that he has lost all perspective. And when his creation opens its eyes, Victor cannot bear to look at it. He flees. He abandons his creation on its first night of existence.
This is the original sin of the novel. Everything that follows flows from this moment of rejection.
The Education of a Monster
The creature—never named in the novel; "Frankenstein" is the scientist, not the monster—wanders into the world knowing nothing. He is like a newborn in a giant's body. He discovers fire and burns himself. He approaches humans and is driven away with screams and stones.
Eventually he finds a hiding place in a small hovel attached to a cottage, where he can observe a family without being seen. This family, the De Laceys, is poor but loving. They are teaching French to a young woman named Safie, an Arabian who has joined their household. As they teach her, the creature learns too.
He learns to speak. He learns to read. He discovers a cache of books including Milton's "Paradise Lost," which he reads as if it were true history. He identifies with Adam, created perfect and then abandoned. But increasingly he identifies with Satan: "I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed."
The creature finds papers in the pocket of the coat he took from Victor's laboratory. They explain his origin. Now he knows who made him—and who abandoned him.
He reveals himself to the blind father of the cottage family, who cannot see his horrifying appearance and treats him kindly. But when the others return, they react with terror. The family flees. The creature burns their cottage in rage and sets out to find his creator.
The Violence Begins
What happens next is often misremembered. In popular culture, Frankenstein's monster is a mindless brute. In the novel, he is eloquent, intelligent, and profoundly wounded.
Traveling toward Geneva, the creature encounters a young boy and seizes him, thinking perhaps a child too young to have developed society's prejudices might accept him. The boy screams that his father is Alphonse Frankenstein and will punish anyone who harms him. The creature realizes this is Victor's brother. In a surge of rage and despair, he kills the child.
Then, finding a locket with a portrait of a beautiful woman around the boy's neck, the creature plants it on a sleeping servant girl named Justine. She is tried for the murder, convicted, and executed.
Victor knows—or strongly suspects—what really happened. He says nothing. He lets an innocent woman die rather than tell a truth no one would believe.
High in the Alps, on the glacier called Mer de Glace, Victor and his creation finally confront each other. The creature makes a demand: create a female companion for him. He promises that if Victor does this, he and his mate will disappear into the wilderness of South America and never trouble humanity again. If Victor refuses, the creature will destroy everyone Victor loves.
Victor agrees. He shouldn't have.
The Second Creation
Victor travels to a remote island in Orkney, off the northern coast of Scotland, to build his second creature. He works alone in a isolated hut. But as the female takes shape, Victor's imagination begins to torture him.
What if the female creature is as violent as the first? What if she rejects her intended mate? What if they breed? Victor envisions a race of monsters spreading across the earth, and his descendants cursing him for having unleashed such horror.
The original creature is watching through the window when Victor tears the female to pieces.
The creature's response is measured and terrifying: "I shall be with you on your wedding night."
Soon after, Victor's closest friend Henry Clerval is found murdered, strangled by the creature's massive hands.
The Wedding Night
Victor returns to Geneva a broken man. His father, hoping to restore his spirits, urges him to marry Elizabeth Lavenza, the young woman who has been part of their family since childhood. Victor agrees, though he is haunted by the creature's promise.
On their wedding night, Victor arms himself and patrols the grounds, certain the creature has come to kill him. He has completely misunderstood the threat. The creature has always been more cunning than Victor. He doesn't want to kill Victor. He wants Victor to suffer as he has suffered.
Elizabeth dies in their wedding chamber. Victor's father, overwhelmed by grief at losing so many of his family, dies shortly after.
Victor has nothing left but revenge. He pursues the creature north, across Russia, into the Arctic wastes. The creature taunts him, leaving food to keep him alive, leading him ever onward into the frozen wilderness.
The Arctic
This is where the novel began: with Victor, dying of exhaustion, rescued from the ice by Robert Walton's expedition ship. Victor tells his story as a warning. He begs Walton to continue the pursuit if he dies before catching the creature.
But Walton's crew has had enough. The ice threatens to crush their ship. They vote to turn back. Victor, too weak to leave his bed, rages at their cowardice. He dies aboard the ship, his vengeance incomplete.
The creature appears one final time. He climbs through the cabin window to mourn over his creator's body. He tells Walton that Victor was wrong—that he, the creature, has suffered more than anyone. He has committed terrible crimes, but he was made for goodness. It was rejection and isolation that drove him to evil.
"I shall collect my funeral pile and consume to ashes this miserable frame," the creature says, preparing to kill himself now that his creator is dead. He springs from the window onto an ice raft and drifts away into darkness.
The novel ends ambiguously. We never see the creature die. We only have his promise that he will.
What Frankenstein Is Really About
There are many ways to read this novel. It's a Gothic horror story. It's an early work of science fiction. It's a Romantic meditation on the relationship between nature and human ambition. It's a critique of science without conscience. It's a story about parenthood and abandonment.
Most fundamentally, it's about responsibility. Victor Frankenstein creates a life and refuses to take responsibility for it. Every tragedy in the novel flows from that refusal. The creature isn't born evil—he becomes evil because the only person who could have taught him to be good abandoned him in terror and disgust.
The subtitle of the novel is "The Modern Prometheus." In Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity. For this transgression, Zeus chained him to a rock where an eagle would eat his liver every day, only for it to regenerate each night. Prometheus was punished for giving humans power they perhaps weren't ready to wield.
Victor Frankenstein is a new Prometheus. He has stolen not fire but the power of creation itself. His punishment is to watch everyone he loves destroyed by the thing he made.
The Novel's Strange Afterlife
Frankenstein was published anonymously on January 1, 1818. Percy Shelley wrote the preface, leading many readers to assume he was the author. It wasn't until the second edition in 1821 that Mary's name appeared.
The novel was controversial. Some critics attacked it as gruesome and immoral. Others recognized its power. Sir Walter Scott, the most famous novelist of the age, praised it, though he too initially assumed Percy had written it.
In 1831, Mary Shelley published a revised edition with significant changes. The new version softened some of Victor's responsibility—making his creation of the monster seem more like fate than choice—and added a more explicitly moral framework. Scholars still debate which version is "definitive."
What really transformed Frankenstein into a cultural phenomenon, though, was theater. Stage adaptations began appearing almost immediately, and they made crucial changes. The creature, eloquent in the novel, became mute. Victor's ethical complexity was simplified. The horror became more visceral, less philosophical.
When Universal Studios made the 1931 film with Boris Karloff as the monster, these stage traditions solidified into the image we know today: the flat-topped head, the bolts in the neck, the shambling gait, the groaning monster who can barely speak. It's a brilliant piece of visual design, but it's not Mary Shelley's creature.
Her creature is a reader of Milton. He can argue philosophy. He is more eloquent than his creator. His tragedy is that the world cannot see past his appearance to recognize his soul.
The Name Problem
One of the oddest facts about Frankenstein is that almost everyone gets the names wrong. "Frankenstein" is not the monster. It's the scientist. The monster has no name at all.
This confusion began almost immediately and has never stopped. Even people who know better slip up. There's something about the story that makes us want to call the creature by his creator's name.
Maybe it's appropriate. The creature is, after all, Victor's son—or his darker self made visible. In refusing to name his creation, Victor refuses to acknowledge the relationship. The rest of the world, unconsciously, makes the connection he won't.
Mary Shelley was twenty years old when Frankenstein was published. She would go on to write other novels, including "The Last Man," an apocalyptic tale of plague that wipes out humanity. But nothing matched the success of her first novel.
Percy Shelley drowned in 1822 when his sailing boat capsized in a storm off the Italian coast. Mary was twenty-four, a widow with a young son. She spent the rest of her life editing and promoting Percy's work while continuing her own writing.
She died in 1851 at the age of fifty-three. When her desk was opened, her family found a silk parcel containing locks of her dead children's hair, a notebook she had shared with Percy, and what may have been his calcified heart, wrapped in a copy of his poem "Adonais."
She had carried these relics with her for almost thirty years.
The Questions That Don't Go Away
We keep returning to Frankenstein because its questions never become obsolete. Every advance in science and technology raises them anew.
What do we owe the things we create?
What happens when creation outstrips wisdom?
Is the monster's violence his own fault, or his maker's?
When Mary Shelley imagined scientists reanimating dead tissue, it was fantasy. Now we clone animals, edit genes, and build increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligences. The distance between fiction and reality keeps shrinking.
The novel doesn't offer easy answers. Victor Frankenstein is not a simple villain—he's a young man whose curiosity and ambition lead him somewhere he cannot handle. The creature is not a simple monster—he's a being who desperately wants love and connection and, when denied them, becomes what the world already saw in him.
Between them, they destroy everything and everyone around them.
Shelley wrote in her 1831 preface that she wanted to write a story that would "curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart." She succeeded. But she also wrote something that makes us think—about responsibility, about consequence, about what it means to bring new life into the world and then refuse to care for it.
That's why, more than two hundred years later, we still know the name Frankenstein. Even if most of us get it wrong.