Today marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, one of the most haunting and enduring works ever written in English, and arguably our greatest tale of horror. Below, Susan Wolfson and Ronald Levao, whose widely celebrated annotated edition of the novel we published in 2012, reflect on Shelley’s creation, Frankenstein’s “Creature,” and the work’s lasting cultural legacy.
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Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus was published January 1, 1818, and since then has never been out of print, or out of range. The range is more than the book: it is a fable and a language. On December 21, 2017 (the darkest night of the year), Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, denounced the recently passed unilateral tax bill this way: “It’s a Frankenstein. Anybody who’s familiar with Frankenstein knows it was… a monster that was created… Do you know the ending of Mary Shelley’s story?” she exclaimed. “The monster comes back to destroy.” Her reference needs some nuance: Frankenstein was the creator, not the creation. And the creation was not “a monster,” but deemed so on the basis of a physical appearance outside or beyond the normative range. And the Creature (let’s call him) was abandoned and abused, and miserably lonely, before he became a vengeful destroyer. Such reservations aside, we can marvel at the readiness of the reference, needing no footnote 200 years on: who is not “familiar with Frankenstein”?
The novel main-titled Frankenstein told a terrific tale, tapping the idealism in the new sciences of its own age, while registering the throb of misgivings and terrors. The publication of 1818 was anonymous, from a down-market press. It was a 19-year-old’s debut in print. She proudly signed herself “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley” when it was reissued in 1823, in sync with a stage confection at London’s Royal Opera House in August—running for nearly 40 nights in this debut. Scarcely a month goes by now without some development earning the prefix Franken-, a near default for anxieties about or satires of new events.
The dark brilliance of Frankenstein is both to expose “monstrosity” in the normal and, conversely, to humanize what might seem monstrously “other.” When Shelley conceived Frankenstein, Europe was scarred by a long war, concluding on Waterloo fields in May 1815. “Monster” was a ready label for any enemy. Young Victor Frankenstein begins his university studies in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. In 1790, Edmund Burke’s international best-seller Reflections on the Revolution in France recoiled at the new France as a “monster of a state,” with a “monster of a constitution” and “monstrous democratic assemblies.” Within a few months, another international best-seller, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, raged against “the monster Aristocracy” and cheered the American Revolution for overthrowing a “monster” of tyranny. Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, called the ancien régime a “ferocious monster”; her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, pointed out that the system of monarchy was an “artificial monster,” a “luxurious monster,” and its despots a “race of monsters in human shape.”
The language of “monster” had another stage, with heightened interest in the era of the rights of man, when large populations of human beings were systematically brutalized. With much controversy, and against the lobbying of wealthy plantation owners, England outlawed participation in the slave trade in 1807; but slavery in its colonies was legal until 1833. (Frankenstein reaches its third and most popular edition in 1831). Who was a “monster”? Abolitionists saw the capitalists, investors, and slave-masters as the moral monsters of the global economy. Defenders of slavery cast the Africans as monsters: subhuman, improvable perhaps by conversion to Christianity and disciplined work, but a threat, especially the men, if freed. “In dealing with the negro,” ultra-conservative Foreign Secretary George Canning lectured Parliament in 1824, “we are dealing with a being possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child. To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical strength…would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance.” The reference was transparently Frankenstein, not only the novel but also the recent stage-plays, which stripped the Creature of the eloquent and moving language Mary Shelley wrote for him, and rendered the familiar or cinematic tradition: a mute, lumbering, physical threat.
Mary Shelley was mindful of another more invisibly marked slave class, most women, treated as creatures of body rather than mind—the justification for denying participatory citizenship and most legal rights, and for a systematic subjugation. This was the subject of her mother’s most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), its title framed to indicate the unfinished business of the French Revolution, and its slogan of “Liberty, Fraternity, Equality.” Shelley was rereading this when she was writing Frankenstein. Unorthodox Wollstonecraft herself was branded an “unnatural” woman, a monstrosity. Shelley had her own personal ordeal, which surely imprints her novel. Her parents were so ready for a son in 1797 that they had already chosen the name “William.” Even worse: when her mother died from childbirth, an awful effect was to make little Mary seem a catastrophe to her grieving father. No wonder she would write a novel about a “being” rejected from its first breath—and whose first (accidental) victim was a boy named William.
Frankenstein the creator pleads sympathy for the “human nature” in his revulsion at a creature whom his hopeful science designed to be “beautiful”: “I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health... but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” It was hate at first sight: “Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room.” Frankenstein is a force field for judgments of beings that seem outside any possibility of social sympathy. Called a “catastrophe,” a “wretch,” and soon a “monster,” the Creature never has a name, just these epithets of contempt. Repelled by its betrayal of “beauty,” Frankenstein never feels responsible, let alone parental. Shelley’s genius is to understand this ethical monstrosity as a nightmare extreme of common anxiety for expectant parents: what if I can’t love a child whose physical formation is appalling—deformed, deficient, or even, as at her own birth, just female? She decided to have the only person in the novel to address the Creature with sympathy be a blind man, spared the shock of the “countenance.” This was quite shrewd, not only for the internal dynamics of her story but also for its extension to her readers, who are “blind” this way, too; to the extent that readers find themselves pitying the Creature and thinking ill of his abusers, they also have to reflect on the fact that they are “blind” to his physical threat. Although he is described as terrifying, he gains sympathy through the power of his own words.
The Creature’s advent in the novel is not, however, in the famous scene of animation. It comes in the initial frame narrative, a set of letters written by the captain of an icebound polar exploration (another potentially fatal adventure). Far off on the ice-plain, his crew has beheld “the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature,” driving a dogsled. Three paragraphs on, there is a report of another man-shape, who has appeared off the side of the ship on a fragment of ice, alone but for one sled-dog. “His limbs were nearly frozen, and his body dreadfully emaciated by fatigue and suffering,” the captain writes; “I never saw a man in so wretched a condition.” This dreadful apparition focuses the first scene of “animation” in Frankenstein: “We restored him to animation by rubbing him with brandy, and forcing him to swallow a small quantity. As soon as he shewed signs of life, we wrapped him up in blankets, and placed him near the chimney of the kitchen-stove. By slow degrees he recovered...” The re-animated being turns out to be Victor Frankenstein. A crazed wretch of a “creature” (so he’s described) is cared for as a fellow human being.
When he recovers sufficiently to tell the tale of how he came to this pass, its events are scored with tremendous irony. He recoils in physical revulsion from the helpless being he has brought to life, with no sense of care or responsibility. The name “Frankenstein” first appears in his narrative the morning after he has abandoned his creation. It is a historical irony that (as Representative Pelosi shows) cultural history has given the Creature the name of his creator. When the Creature gets to tell his tale, the deepest disturbance turns out to be his innate “humanity”: he speaks—in a common language that appeals to fellow-human attention—of his longing for a family and social acceptance; his first social interactions come from an intuitive benevolence that has him caring for those in trouble; his bitterness about his abuse is compelling. Even as the lumbering, speechless brute in James Whale’s 1931 film, there is pathos in Boris Karloff’s performance: fearsome and fearful, with pleading gestures, whimpering moans, and painful shrieks. If Frankenstein continues to register the shock, 200 years on, of human science miscarried into monstrous outcomes, Shelley’s novel also shocks us with the volatility of the word “monster” itself, in its distribution to an array of characters and forces beyond the Creature so labeled.