The Illusion of the Monster
The cultural memory of Frankenstein is loud, mechanical, and electric. We envision a dark laboratory, a flash of lightning, a stitched-together colossus on a slab, and Colin Clive’s Dr. Henry Frankenstein exulting over the success of his experiment in the famous 1931 film. We remember Boris Karloff’s flat-headed, nearly mute figure with bolts in his neck: a creature assembled from the dead and brought spectacularly to life.
But Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel contains no lightning, no bolts, and none of the elaborate electrical machinery that later became inseparable from the Frankenstein story. Shelley is interested in something stranger. She gives surprisingly little attention to the mechanics of Victor Frankenstein’s achievement. After months of obsessive labor, he succeeds in doing what should be impossible. Life appears where there was none.
And then Victor runs away.
The Moment After Creation
The most disturbing element of Shelley’s novel is not that Victor succeeds in conquering death. The true horror begins the exact second after he succeeds.
The Creature opens his yellow eye. He breathes. His limbs move.
Victor looks at the being to which he has just given life and is immediately horrified by him. The beauty he imagined while assembling the body disappears before the reality of a living creature. Rather than remain with him, understand him, teach him, or even attempt to discover what he has made, Victor abandons him. This is the first great failure of Frankenstein. Victor has devoted himself obsessively to the question of whether he can create life. He has given remarkably little thought to what he will owe that life if he succeeds. The Creature enters the world knowing almost nothing. He experiences hunger, cold, light, darkness, pain and pleasure before he has words for any of them. He does not understand who he is or why he exists. There is no creator beside him to explain either.
Victor has performed the act of creation without accepting the relationship that creation establishes.
Learning to Be Human
The Creature of Shelley’s novel is very different from the monster that survives in popular memory.
He observes.
Hidden near the De Lacey family, he watches human beings care for one another. He learns language. He discovers history and society. He reads Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, and The Sorrows of Young Werther. Through books and observation, he begins constructing an understanding of humanity—and eventually of himself. What he wants most is not destruction. It is recognition. But again and again, the world teaches him that there is no place for him within it. His appearance provokes terror and violence before anyone knows what he thinks or what he wants. Even the family he has secretly come to love rejects him.
Victor’s abandonment therefore matters enormously. So does humanity’s rejection of Victor being abandoned. But Shelley makes the problem more difficult than simply declaring the Creature innocent. He eventually chooses violence. He understands suffering well enough to inflict it deliberately. His abandonment helps us understand what he becomes; it does not erase his own moral agency. That is what makes Frankenstein more unsettling than a simple story about a wicked scientist and his unfortunate experiment.
Responsibility begins to spread. The Creature is responsible for what he chooses to do. The people who reject him participate in the world that shapes him. And standing at the beginning of that chain is Victor, who brought a vulnerable being into existence and then decided that what happened to it was no longer his concern.
Mary Shelley and the Act of Creation
Mary Shelley was only eighteen when she began the story that became Frankenstein. It is tempting to read the novel entirely through her biography. That would be too simple. But it is equally difficult to ignore how closely questions of creation, birth, parenthood and loss surrounded the young woman who imagined Victor Frankenstein. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died shortly after giving birth to her. Shelley herself experienced pregnancy and the death of an infant before Frankenstein was published, and motherhood and loss continued to mark her life.
Against that background, Victor’s great ambition looks different. He wants creation without dependence. He imagines bringing a new being into existence through his own genius, bypassing ordinary human reproduction altogether. Yet when creation actually produces a living being—needy, unpredictable and separate from himself—Victor cannot bear what he has made. He wants the triumph of creation without the obligations that follow it. That may be one reason Frankenstein continues to feel so modern.
What Does a Creator Owe?
Creation rarely ends at the moment something is made.
Parents bring children into the world knowing that those children will become autonomous people whose choices cannot be controlled. Writers release stories and ideas that acquire meanings their authors never intended. Scientists and engineers develop technologies whose consequences may extend far beyond the circumstances in which they were invented. In each case, the creation eventually acquires a life beyond the creator. That independence creates an uncomfortable problem.
If we cannot completely control what we create, how long can we be held responsible for it? Victor cannot determine every action the Creature will eventually take. No parent can dictate the life of an adult child. No writer can control every interpretation of a book. No inventor can foresee every future use of an invention. But inability to control something is not necessarily the same as freedom from responsibility for it. Victor repeatedly confuses the two. He sees that the Creature has become independent and treats that independence as permission to withdraw. Yet the Creature’s independence does not undo the fact that Victor created him, abandoned him, and left him entirely unprepared for the world into which he had been brought. Perhaps this is the more enduring warning of Frankenstein. The danger is not simply that human beings may become powerful enough to create something they cannot control. It is that we may fall in love with the act of creation and lose interest in the responsibility that comes afterward.
The Responsibility That Remains
There is no simple division of innocence and guilt in Frankenstein. The Creature suffers terribly, and he causes terrible suffering. Victor is horrified by what his creation becomes, yet repeatedly refuses opportunities to confront his own role in what has happened. Each becomes increasingly consumed by the other until creator and creation are almost impossible to understand separately.
Shelley does not give us an easy formula for deciding where one person's responsibility ends and another's begins. Instead, she leaves us with the relationship. To create something is to introduce something into the world that did not exist before. Eventually it may change, resist us, disappoint us, or become something we never intended. We may not remain responsible for everything it does. But Frankenstein asks whether we can ever become responsible for nothing it does.
More than two centuries after Mary Shelley imagined a young man standing before the living consequence of his own ambition, that question has lost none of its force. The Creature opens his eye. What happens next is no longer simply a question of creation.
It is a question of responsibility.
The first page of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Chapter V from the Archivist's desk
Read the whole book here:
Project Gutenberg — Frankenstein, 1818 edition
✦ Write Back to the Archive — No. 0002
What do we owe to the things we create?
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