Monsterpiece Literature: Frankenstein

illustration via the great Bernie Wrightson, available via Nakatomi Inc.*

Back in fall of 2025, when the Guillermo del Toro movie of Frankenstein, I decided to give Mary Shelley's novel a spin one more time before the movie arrived.  I've read it probably four times previously, but with so much Frankenstein media out there, it's easy to get details confused or forgotten.

Rather than look at paper, I picked an audiobook narrated by Dan Stevens, a favored actor, and decided I'd listen while walking Emmylou.  But mid-way through the book - and I cannot remember the circumstances -  it disappeared from my audible library.  I shrugged, gave up, and moved on.  I know the book, I was prepped for the movie in any case.

I certainly had *opinions* about del Toro's film.and spoke about how it confused me that we've never actually seen the book interpreted as it is on page.  Large chunks always get reimagined and changed.  I'm not really sure why that is, as every change seems to morph what author Mary Shelley was doing and saying.  And while I didn't find del Toro's version *offensive*, I found it was changing the course of events in a way that never added up for me.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, the audiobook of Frankenstein re-appeared in my Audible library, and I decided to finish it up before I select a new book for Hallow-read.

There's a lot of ideas and interpretations about Frankenstein floating around, things I've folded into my own thought process on the book and its characters.  I am not immune to the common wisdom of the people. And so I looked to see what was striking me now.

First, yes, of course, the novel originally appeared in 1818.  I believe that the audiobook version is the 1831 text that most of us got in school.  What is considered "good writing" changes every few decades, and this book first appeared more than 200 years ago, so don't expect the text to follow the rules of writing as we know them now.  

The prose is...  a lot sometimes, chasing in every $0.25 cent word when modern rules would say "use the nickel word."  And, yes, Victor laments often and at length, and at some points you wish he'd maybe stop feeling to bad for himself.  But that is also the character, through and through.

As is everything, the book is a reflection of the author, and this author was from society (though how Shelley fit into society is its own story).  Every once in a while you're reminded of the social dynamics taken for granted by the literate masses of early 19th Century writers, so I am sure the kids are pearl-clutching about that.

It is curious to think that James Whale's Frankenstein met American cinema audiences in 1931, roughly a hundred years later, and we're now at 95 years since that film's release.

Coming back to the novel now, I don't know how I feel about Victor Frankenstein.  

When we were taught the book as high schoolers, we had to be told not to necessarily trust the narrator, that Victor had failed his creation.  And that's certainly true.  We needed to understand that just because Victor decried his own creation as wicked and a monster, as an audience we need to show some empathy.  The Monster of Frankenstein in pop culture is a dullard, operating from instinct - and given to fits of murderous rage.  And so that first reading is a revelation as the creature speaks eloquently for itself.  I suspect people have a chance to know this, and willfully misread the films as well as the book to keep the brainless version going.

And it is true that Victor, despite his fury at the creature, fails him over and over throughout the book, and continually pays the price.  It is a book about a guy who simply will not take responsibility for what he's done or the lives he's impacted.  He is, in a very real way, responsible for the deaths of the supporting cast of the novel.

But he's also nuts.  

Like, in a way where no one helps him.  Maybe Henry Clerval sometimes.  But mostly he's a maniac living in his own head from the point of childhood.  He doesn't see anyone as a persecutor, necessarily, until the creature shows up and is seeking its revenge.  He may feel he's unfairly judged or maligned, but he's also *right*.  Say what you will, Victor Frankenstein made a being superior to men with the very alchemy he was mocked for.  

What he could not do was look into the eyes of the thing he made and offer a life for his creation.  

I hate to say it, but he was so preoccupied with whether or not he could, he didn't stop to think if he should.  And once he did succeed, he was utterly unprepared for caring for a *life*.  Whether he's concerned with what others will think enters into it only through the fact he tells *no one*.  There's a shambling giant of a creature loosed, and he just hopes it will go away and he can go back to living in a castle and being rich.

At least Henry Frankenstein of the 1931 movie freaks out and puts the monster in a dungeon while he tries to sort it out (it goes poorly).

But Victor is in that skull all alone until arriving on the ship at the novel's opening.  His own lies by omission, his awareness of what he did, the drive that made him work day and night for months.  But that drive is... bad?

This is the first time I read what he said about finally marrying Elizabeth, and it seemed to me on this go-round that he finally married as he knew it would drive the monster to him.  After all, the monster promised Victor he'd see him on his wedding night, and Victor used the event to lure the creature in - believing himself to be the target and not Elizabeth.  It was supposed to end that night, not lead to years of questing after the creature.

Also, as he's on the verge of death at the novel's end, Victor springs to life for one last rousing speech to Walton's ship's men - urging them on to what would be almost certain death in their trip to the north pole (it would be 1909 before anyone actually reached the North Pole).  Does he really care if they push the boundaries?  Probably.  Does he want a boat to take to catch the creature who is headed to Santa Land?  100%.

Frankenstein is about many things, but it is largely about a doctor with obsessive compulsive issues.  And his son who came up maladjusted thanks to his father's mental illness.  Yet, Shelley frames Frankenstein as tragic, as he is seen through the ideas of kindred spirit Walton, the ship's leader, who - even at the novel's end - exalts Victor, believing him a prince among men.  Were it not for what is very obviously about to be a mutiny, Walton would have driven a shipload of men to their death. 

It also did strike me in the last 3/4ths that we really cast the monster as blameless in a modern reading, but after gaining reason and literacy and understanding of humans, he decides to kill William and frame Justine.  I mean, you can be sad and not murder, or so they tell me.

But that's how white hot the wretch's fury is at Victor, he can't stop at just one.  I recalled he killed Elizabeth, but forgot that he killed Henry Clerval (spoilers) as well, not exactly framing Victor, but close.  

In the final pages the creature reflects on those murders with Walton, and admits he had no control over himself in those moments.  It's a reading I take as true, as he's also reminding Walton that Victor merely paraphrased his sense of loneliness and isolation, and barely understood his fury at being brought into being only to have no place in the world - that Victor intellectually understood his isolation, but never truly understood how the creature felt.  

It is hard to ignore the elephant in the room that none of this would have happened if Victor hadn't rejected his child.  

But in accepting blame and seeing Victor as his final victim, the creature goes north to hide his own body from mankind, and plans to self-immolate.  It's justice of a sort.

Where del Toro and I part is his decision to bring Elizabeth into knowledge of the creature, which makes Victor's decisions more mustache-twirlingly obvious and evil in the film.  And maybe make less sense.  Del Toro is superimposing King Kong onto Frankenstein, and the two stories diverge in Victor's own solitude, something he seems to share with the creature as he removes himself repeatedly from the comforts of family and friends.  The creature does not ever receive the hint of comfort Elizabeth likely would have afforded him - and does not know her when he strikes her down.

But, hey, at least del Toro seemed to know the basic beats unlike many other adaptations.  I just get cranky when I think about The Bride.

I have a few books I check in on at different points in my life, and Frankenstein has been one of them since I was 14.  I suspect I'll be reading it again in a decade.  But I suspect that I will seek out the original 1818 version sooner than later.

Whether Percy Shelley helped craft the novel or not, in any form, is not moot, entirely.  I am romantic about the idea of a spooky 19 year old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley conceiving and writing the book.  All books have editors, so it doesn't make her efforts any less-than.  And that such a young mind would deliver this story that speaks to so much about the human condition as unwanted beasts and glorious beings driven mad by our own ambitions has never failed to speak to me in the way few other creators do. 

And, in this new era as we unleash machines that can speak to us people, can look and act and sound like us across screens...  and one day in person, I dunno.  This book is always worth returning to, I think.

BTW:  If you have a suggestion for a Halloween-Read, preferably something not of the 21st century, now is the time!

*Nakatomi Inc., local to Austin, is the source for officially licensed Bernie Wrightson Frankenstein prints.  Available here.