Frankenstein — themes & analysis

The novel's subtitle is "The Modern Prometheus." Prometheus, in the Greek myth, stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind, who were not ready for it. Victor Frankenstein steals the secret of life and uses it on a creature who is not ready for the world he is born into. The parallel is Mary Shelley's diagnosis. The disaster is not the technology. The disaster is ambition pursued without the moral framework to handle what the technology produces.

Victor's ambition is the novel's first character. He describes his early years in Geneva as a constant search for hidden knowledge — alchemy, electricity, anatomy, eventually the deepest secret of all, the principle of life. The University of Ingolstadt sharpens it. Two years of obsessive work in his laboratory, sometimes forgetting to eat, never going home, leaves him on the verge of the breakthrough. Then he makes the leap. The leap itself is barely described in the novel; what is described is Victor's reaction the moment the Creature opens his eyes.

He runs. Out of the room, into the night, eventually to bed where he sleeps and has nightmares of his dead mother. The act that should have been the climax of the ambition is its collapse. Victor has spent two years building toward a moment, has produced the moment, and at the moment of producing it he discovers he wants nothing to do with what he has made. He has not thought about what kind of being he will be making. He has not thought about whether he is a fit guardian. He has not thought about whether his ambition is the kind of ambition that should be pursued at all.

The novel's argument is that this is what ambition without conscience always produces. The thing you make is more than you bargained for. You did not prepare. You will not stay. The Creature follows Victor through Europe demanding that the maker take responsibility for what he made. Victor refuses, again and again, until he has driven the Creature to ruin and then dies pursuing him. The fire was stolen and the household burned down. Mary Shelley wrote this when she was eighteen and lived in a household full of geniuses; she had been thinking carefully about the costs of being a genius near other people.

Where to follow it: Chapter 4 (the obsessive work), Chapter 5 (the creation), Chapter 20 (the second creation refused).

The popular image of Frankenstein's Creature — the inarticulate green-skinned giant of the films — is almost the opposite of the figure in the novel. Mary Shelley's Creature is articulate. He learns French by overhearing the De Lacey family teach Safie. He reads Paradise Lost, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Plutarch's Lives. His narration in the middle six chapters of the novel is among the most lucid prose in the book — sometimes more lucid than Victor's. He is also, until repeated rejection breaks him, gentle.

The novel's central argument is structural: who is the monster. The Creature is hideous to look at — Victor describes him in revolting detail at the moment of creation — but his ugliness is purely cosmetic. His acts, in the first months of his life, are entirely human. He learns. He helps the De Laceys with their firewood, secretly. He saves a drowning girl. He longs for a friend. The acts that make him violent are produced, one by one, by the rejection of every person who has met him. The novel is careful about the order of cause and effect.

Victor, by contrast, is presented as a man who can pass as normal but is morally hollow. He runs from his creation. He lets Justine — innocent of William's death, framed by the Creature — go to the gallows rather than tell the truth. He destroys the female creature partway through her construction, knowing the Creature is watching, knowing the Creature has just done him the favor of asking instead of taking. He marries Elizabeth and brings her into the line of fire of a being he has refused to manage. He pursues the Creature into the Arctic and dies obsessed.

The novel never spells the inversion out. It does not need to. By Volume III the reader who started the book ready to fear the green giant has come around. The being to fear is the man in the lab coat — and behind him, the social order that taught the man to value his own ambition above the lives of everyone he claims to love.

Where to follow it: Chapter 10 (the meeting), Chapter 11 (the Creature's awakening), Chapter 15 (the rejection).

The Creature's grievance, in the novel's most famous passage, is not that Victor made him. It is that Victor made him and walked out. "Remember that I am thy creature," he says when the two finally meet on Montanvert. "I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed." The line cuts through every later horror. The whole catastrophe of the novel is, the Creature is arguing, a parental failure.

Mary Shelley was a mother twice over by the time the novel was finished. Her own mother — Mary Wollstonecraft — had died of childbed fever days after Mary's birth. Her first child, a daughter, died in infancy in 1815, the year before the Geneva summer. The novel is sometimes read with this in mind, and the reading does not feel forced. There is a specific kind of grief and rage in the Creature's speeches about being unloved by the man who made him; it is grief and rage written by someone who has thought a great deal about what it means for a child to be unwanted.

The Creature's argument is also patient. He is not asking Victor to undo the creation; he knows that is impossible. He is asking, in Volume II, for one specific thing: a companion of his own kind. If Victor will make him a mate, the Creature will leave the human world entirely; the two of them will live in the wilderness of South America and never trouble Europe again. It is a reasonable request from a creature who has been refused every other form of companionship. Victor agrees, and then halfway through the work tears the female apart in front of the Creature's eyes.

The novel suggests that the rest of the catastrophe — the murder of Henry Clerval, the murder of Elizabeth on the wedding night, the death of Victor's father from grief, Victor's own death pursuing the Creature into the Arctic — all of it follows from this second refusal. A parent who could not even accept the child has now refused the child the one accommodation that might have made his life livable. The Creature kills everyone Victor loves because Victor will give him no one of his own. The novel is unflinching about how much of the violence is, finally, Victor's.

Where to follow it: Chapter 10 (the meeting), Chapter 17 (the demand), Chapter 20 (the refusal).

Almost every character in Frankenstein is alone. Walton is on a ship at the edge of the world, writing letters to a sister who can barely answer; he tells her in the second letter that he has no companion among his crew with whom he can share his thoughts. Victor isolates himself for years in his Ingolstadt laboratory, then for months at a time in the Alps, then for the entire pursuit of the Creature across northern Europe. The Creature is unique in the world. He is the only being of his kind anywhere; he cannot, by definition, find another of his species; the rejection that breaks him is partly that no one will keep him company.

The frame story makes the loneliness audible. Walton, whose isolation is the lightest of the three, looks at Victor and sees what loneliness can cost. Victor, dying, looks at Walton and warns him to give up the polar expedition before it consumes him. The Creature, in the final scene, rises out of the cabin where Victor has just died and tells Walton he is leaving for the unmapped north to die alone. Each voice, in this novel, addresses the next about the unbearableness of having no one to speak to.

The De Lacey episode is the novel's case study. The Creature spends months hidden in a hovel attached to a peasant family's cottage, watching them through a chink in the wall. He learns their names, their histories, their language. He learns to love them. When he finally reveals himself and asks to be admitted into their society, the youngest son's first reaction is to beat him from the cottage. The Creature flees into the forest and burns the cottage down. The arc of his moral collapse begins precisely at the moment he is rejected by the only humans he has ever wished to belong to.

The novel suggests, without philosophizing, that being known by another mind is the basic condition of a livable life — and that almost no one in the book gets that condition met. Victor cannot be known because he refuses to be known. The Creature cannot be known because no one will look at him. Walton may be saved because, in the end, he turns the ship back. The novel ends with him sailing south. He at least understood the warning.

Where to follow it: Letter 2 (Walton alone), Chapter 12 (the De Laceys), Chapter 15 (the rejection).

Frankenstein is one of the most carefully framed novels in English. The outer ring is Robert Walton's letters home to his sister Margaret, sent from his polar expedition — a real eighteenth-century literary form (the epistolary novel) that gives Walton's voice the apparent authenticity of correspondence. Walton picks up Victor on the ice and Victor begins his story. From Letter 4 onward, almost everything we read is Victor's words, rendered (the novel says) in Walton's faithful transcription.

Inside Victor's narration, in Chapters 11-16, comes a third voice: the Creature himself, telling Victor, on Montanvert, the story of his own short life. This is the deepest layer of the frame. The reader has been with Walton, then with Victor, and is now in the Creature's voice — and the voice, when it arrives, is the most articulate in the novel. The structural argument is built into the frame. Each voice claims the loyalty the previous voice claimed; each voice is partial; each voice contradicts the others on points of feeling. By the time the layers close back out — Creature back to Victor, Victor back to Walton, Walton back to his sister — the reader has been forced to think about which voice they trust and why.

The frame also creates the novel's most devastating ending. After Victor dies, the Creature appears in the cabin standing over Victor's body, and Walton — for the first and only time in the novel — speaks face to face with him. The being he has heard described as a monster from inside a story is suddenly real, in front of him, lit by a guttering lamp, weeping. The Creature gives his final speech and leaves. Walton writes one last letter to his sister and turns the ship for home. The frame closes. The reader is left with three rings of grief and no clean exterior.

Walton is the version of the reader the novel hopes will be created by reading it. He starts as a young man obsessed with glory; he listens to Victor's story; he is moved enough by the warning to give up his ambition and turn back. Mary Shelley is suggesting that the right response to a novel like this is the response the framing reader has — to recognize the cost of the path you have been pursuing and to choose another. The frame is not just a structural choice. It is the novel's argument about how reading should work.

Where to follow it: Letter 1 (Walton begins), Letter 4 (Victor arrives), Chapter 24 (the final scene).