As the air finally chills, the Halloween decorations fly out of the garage. There are the usual ghosts and skeletons and the witches maydaying into trees. And there’s another old reliable: green face and yellow eyes, flat head with matted black hair and a bolt sticking out of his neck. This is Frankenstein as imagined by our popular culture — not just Party City but Hollywood too, whose 1931 classic film Frankenstein had Boris Karloff looking much the same. And for the life of me, I’ve never been able to figure out why. The monster in Mary Shelley’s novel is so hideous that immediately after he’s brought to life, Victor Frankenstein rushes out of the room, fleeing “a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived.” I always imagined him with filthy hair and sunken eyes and a disfigured mouth. How did we turn him into some half-reptilian John Kerry?
Who knows? Among the many other popular misrepresentations of Frankenstein is that he’s called “Frankenstein,” which is the name of his creator; the monster is referred to by Shelley’s characters as “the creature” or “the fiend.” The original Frankenstein was conceived under fittingly fiendish circumstances. In 1816, Mary, her lover Percy Shelley, their 4-month-old baby, and Mary’s stepsister Claire arrived for a vacation at a lake house near Geneva. They were joined by Lord Byron as well as his doctor. What followed was an ordeal of bad weather and unwanted sexual advances that culminated in a suitably gloomy challenge from Byron: Everyone should write a ghost story.
Most of them never finished the assignment, but Shelley did, even if her tale featured not a single ghost. The result was arguably the most famous (and infamous) Gothic tale in the Western canon. If you want to feel unaccomplished, consider that Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was only 19 years old. It was published when she was 20.
Frankenstein received mixed reviews when it came out, with critics attacking it as derivative and speculating (wrongly) that it had been written by Percy. Contemporary reviewers have been kinder — Harold Bloom praised it as “plangent” and “Promethean” — but you can understand some of the pushback. Frankenstein can be overwrought in the manner of many Victorian novels, with long woe-is-me diatribes from both Victor and the monster. There are plot holes and decisions that make no sense. (Why would Victor leave his wife alone in their honeymoon suite when the creature promised to pay a visit on his wedding day?)
But, then, the real genius of Frankenstein has little to do with this. It also has little to do with the book’s horror elements despite some genuinely terrifying imagery and literary jump scares. (A scene where the monster suddenly appears grinning through a window is more unsettling than it has any right to be.) What makes Frankenstein great is how it explores the ideas of creation and human frailty.
While Frankenstein is often considered the first science fiction novel, Shelley never resorts to the kind of technobabble featured in many sci-fi works today. We never learn exactly what Victor gets up to in his lab. Instead, the book focuses on the stress and violence associated with creation, both before the spark of life and afterward. “Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?” muses Victor.
Shelley was writing during the Romantic era, a time of reaction against the Enlightenment and its callsigns of rationality and progress. Percy Shelley was a leading Romantic writer, and Mary’s father, William Godwin, to whom Frankenstein is dedicated, was a novelist and established Enlightenment philosopher. These were the ideas swirling about her own creative lab. Victor is thought to have been based on Percy, who could be neglectful of his wife and child when engaged in his writing, his own act of creation. Likewise does Victor summon up an almost monomaniacal focus both when working on the creature and working afterward to destroy him. He’s so absorbed in his experiment as to be blind to its potential consequences.
At first, the monster he makes isn’t so much evil as childlike. Having been abandoned by Victor, he heads into the woods and observes a family living in a cottage, whose simple virtues he comes to adore. It’s only after realizing his ugliness means no man will ever treat him the same way that he declares “everlasting war against the species, and, more than all, against him who had formed me.” He isn’t irredeemable; he has a child’s striking sense of morality. But he’s orphaned, rejected, and alone. “Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded,” he laments.
Frankenstein is subtitled “The Modern Prometheus,” but the more obvious influence is Paradise Lost: The novel begins with a stanza from Milton’s masterpiece, and the monster at one point discovers a copy and reads it. He finds symmetry in Adam, the first man, who also had no father and mother, but he comes to think he’s more like Milton’s Satan, cast out and bitter. His quest is to bridge the gap between the two. When he finally meets his maker, his only demand is that Victor create a bride, an Eve. Victor at first accepts and then inevitably reneges, unable to bring another monster into the world. The enraged creature then exacts his revenge by killing those close to Victor, isolating him in turn, making him a little more like Milton’s Old Scratch. “Like the archangel who aspired to eternal omnipotence,” muses Victor, “I am chained in an eternal hell.”
The idea of sympathy for the devil is old, and no one captured it better than Milton. Yet while Shelley uses it effectively too, the forces that ultimately consume both man and monster aren’t supernatural but natural. God and Satan are silent in the book, but nature is very much not. Enlightenment thinkers like Francis Bacon had sought to liberate man from nature and even suggested human nature could be molded and changed. Man remains as he was. He still needs friendship, community, nobility, warmth, love, beauty. Deny him these things, repurpose him as so much clay on a lab table, and who knows what he might do?
The accusation of being “anti-science” is a funny thing and one often heard in today’s day and age. It’s not hard to imagine Frankenstein being called “anti-science” since Victor’s experiment is the entire origin of the problem. This has led some Enlightenment-loving liberals to swoop in and try to rescue the novel from the Christian fundamentalists under their beds. The late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay on Frankenstein in which he pronounced, “The text is neither a diatribe on the dangers of technology nor a warning about overextended ambitions against a natural order.” In fact, notes Gould triumphantly, “we find no passages about disobeying God.”
It is a false binary: Frankenstein doesn’t have to be a Christian tale to question whether scientific progress can go horribly wrong. Michael Crichton was irreligious and wrote constantly on this theme. Gould correctly notes that the monster’s problem hangs somewhere between nature and nurture, between its ugliness and Frankenstein’s refusal to raise it. But then he clears his throat again and says, “Victor’s sin does not lie in misuse of technology or hubris in emulating God.” He adds, “Victor failed because he followed a predisposition of human nature — visceral disgust at the monster’s appearance – and did not undertake the duty of any creator or parent: to teach his own charge and to educate others in acceptance.”
He’s right about that last bit, but it doesn’t mean Victor’s scientific hubris wasn’t part of the problem. The sharpest authority on Victor, Victor himself, laments, “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.” If that isn’t a rebuke of the Enlightenment, then the Enlightenment never happened.
The monstrosity in the book isn’t that Frankenstein is a mad scientist a la the Hollywood stereotype that Gould rightly decries. It’s that he’s a good scientist who is nonetheless prone to the same foibles and failings as the rest of us. Frankenstein is a rebuke to those who believe they can trespass the limits of human nature. In this age of transhumanist temptation, it’s as relevant as the inflatable ogre billowing in the front yard.
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Matt Purple is a writer and editor whose work has been featured in the Washington Examiner, the American Conservative, the Spectator, and many others. He lives in Virginia with his wife and two children.