Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was written by Mary Shelley. Shelley (1797-1851) was a part of the famous storytelling contest at the Diodati involving herself, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori. During the contest Polidori produced “The Vampyre.” Shelley produced Frankenstein, a landmark work of science fiction.

The Swiss Victor Frankenstein is a bright young man is exposed to the likes of Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus. When Victor attends university at Ingolstadt he comes under the sway of more modern scientists and begins to develop intellectually as well as pursue his own area of interest: “whence...did the principle of life proceed?”¹ Victor eventually discovers this secret, and then, gripped by an obsession to put his new knowledge to use, spends months preparing to create life. He does, putting together a new man out of corpse parts, but when the Creature awakens Victor finds it so repulsive that he flees from it. The Creature, feeling rejected by Victor, takes this badly. Victor has a nervous breakdown and is gradually nursed back to health over the course of months. The Creature, meanwhile, wanders and encounters humanity on several occasions. He is rejected each time, even by a family he watched in secrecy and grew to love. The Creature feels alienated from and then hostile toward humanity in general and Victor in particular. The Creature goes in search of Victor, but finding Victor’s younger brother William instead, kills him and then frames the Frankensteins’ family servant Justine. The Creature confronts Victor and explains himself. Victor rejects the Creature’s affections but agrees to create a mate for the Creature as long as it stays away from “the neighborhood of man.”² The Creature agrees, and Victor then goes to the Orkneys to duplicate the creation of the Creature. At the last, however, Victor balks and destroys the mate for the Creature. The Creature is outraged by this and infuriated that Victor broke his word and promises misery and despair for him. The Creature then kills Victor’s friend Henri and Victor’s bride Elizabeth on their wedding night. A lengthy pursuit follows, ending in the Arctic, with Victor dying and the monster, wretched and sorry at the last, “borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.”³

More than most novels, Frankenstein is grossly misunderstood by the public. This is primarily due to the movies, whose faithfulness to the book is at best casual and at worst capricious. The movie portrayal of the Creature is almost always of an inarticulate, childlike brute, rather than the sophisticated and thoughtful being of the book. But that is only one of several aspects of Shelley’s creation which many people get wrong.

For one, the identity of the novel’s monster is misunderstood. Whether Shelley intended this or not, for most modern readers it is a fact that Victor is the monster, not the Creature. The Creature is the product of cruelty and abuse, while Victor is a weak, immoral person.

Most people also assume that Frankenstein is a horror novel. This is part of the problem of classification which Frankenstein suffers from. The movie versions of the novel are horror movies, but the novel itself has different concerns. Frankenstein has famously (and erroneously—see below) been called “the first science fiction novel,” but Shelley keeps the actual science to a minimum. The reader never learns just how Victor found the secret of life. Victor is simply an experimental doctor, and that is meant to explain everything, in the way that scientists of the pulps were Scientists practicing Science:

Victor Frankenstein's grave-robbing and organ manipulation was not Shelley's creation; the motif of the evil, grave-robbing, human-organ-manipulating doctor was well-established by 1818. In the 18th century, when medical students and doctors began using anatomical dissections for medical education and research, the public was horrified, and doctors became associated in the public's mind with organ theft.

Numerous urban legends sprang up about doctors killing people for their organs, and in 1768, in Lyon, France, a rumor ran riot that the local School of Surgery was sheltering a one-armed prince, and that every evening children were kidnaped from off the streets and had an arm cut off to see if it fitted the prince. The result was a riot in November, 1768 in which the rioters burned the School down. By the early 1800s the association between doctors and mad science was widespread in fiction as well as in reality. This association would linger throughout the century, and as late as 1887 Thomas Hardy, in The Woodlanders, has the amoral Dr. Fitzpiers terrorize one character into allowing Fitzpiers to buy her brain for dissection after she dies.⁴

The morality of Frankenstein is a third popular misunderstanding. The lesson of the novel is not to avoid meddling in things humans were not meant to know, but rather to embrace one’s creation instead of rejecting it. It is Victor’s rejection of the Creature and his cruelty toward it which produce the Fury-like monster of vengeance. The Creature wants to be accepted and loved by Victor, but he is too selfish to embrace his creation, which is what produces such misery later on. If Victor is a Faust-like (see: Faust: A Tragedy) character, it is a Faust who does not dare too much but rather acts from cruelty rather than kindness.

The novel does not have a high level of quality. Shelley was only twenty-one when she wrote it, and her inexperience as a writer shows in the novel’s immature and overwrought style. Frankenstein is dull in the beginning, and when Shelley pays attention to Victor rather than the Creature the novel drags. The Creature is the center of the novel. Without him, the reader’s interest flags. There is only so much of Victor’s emotional outbursts, his delicate, high-strung, neurasthenic disposition, and his self-conscious breast beating and shrieking that the modern reader can take. The novel has other flaws as well. Minor characters appear and disappear as needed, the Creature always seems to find exactly what it needs, Shelley assumes there is wood for a funeral pyre in the Arctic, and the Creature seems to have an uncanny ability to track Victor no matter where he goes. Characters do not so much speak as declaim. But these flaws do not negate the power of the novel’s ideas, nor render them, or the Creature, any less interesting.

One aspect of Frankenstein which is not so much misunderstood as unknown is the tie between the Creature and the myth of the Yellow Peril. The Creature is an early example of the Yellow Peril stereotype. The ethnic coding of the Creature was deliberate on Shelley’s part, and Creature’s role as a precursor to the Yellow Peril cannot be understated. The Creature was the first image of a Mongol in popular culture which portrayed an Asian not as a small figure but as a large one.⁵ The image of a large, dangerous Asian remained in British and American popular culture, becoming one of the common motifs of the Yellow Peril in the twentieth century.

Frankenstein has a number of the traditional Gothic motifs, including the dysfunctional family, the Oedipal conflict between father (Victor) and son (the Creature), the hints of late night hauntings of graveyards and other forbidden places, and the confrontation between an innocent maiden (Elizabeth) and a monster (the Creature). Frankenstein, though appearing late in the Gothic genre’s life, contributed two things to the Gothic: the mad scientist, in the figure of Victor, a more modern version of the over-ambitious (politically or sexually) villain of earlier Gothics, and the scientist’s laboratory, which replaces the storm-swept castle as the location of evil acts. Too, a good deal of the novel’s overblown rhetoric and turgid dialogue is straight from the Gothic tradition:

“You have destroyed the work which you began; what is it that you intend? Do you dare to break your promise? I have endured toil and misery; I left Switzerland with you; I crept along the shores of the Rhine, among its willow islands, and over the summits of its hills. I have dwelt many months in the heaths of England, and among the deserts of Scotland. I have endured incalculable fatigue, and cold, and hunger; do you dare destroy my hopes?”

“Begone! I do break my promise; never will I create another like yourself, equal in deformity and wickedness.”

“Slave, I before reasoned with you, but you have proved yourself unworthy of my condescension. Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master;–obey!”⁶

Frankenstein begins the transition in the Gothic from a past-oriented genre to one capable of featuring more modern characters and embracing modern trends, like scientific experimentation. Although the past-oriented Gothic would continue to appear—including Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, the Gothic’s apex, which appeared two years after Frankenstein--Frankenstein prepared the genre for the future.

Although some critics have noticed the debt that Shelley owed to the German Gothics, the degree to which Shelley was in debt to them has been overlooked:

Mary Shelley, for her part, had easy access to German Gothic. In addition to Goethe’s Faust with its man-made homunculus, to which she was clearly indebted, and to Lauckhard’s Franz Wolfstein, she may conceivably also have come across Gleich’s Udo der Stählerne; oder die Ruinen von Drudenstein (1799), perhaps via her husband: Udo’s stature and power anticipate the monster in Frankenstein, which prompted Tymms to suppose that Gleich’s novel might have had some influence on the making of Frankenstein’. More likely sources, however, are Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806), by which Shelley was ‘quite enraptured’ - his Zastrozzi and Ginotti both inherited Zofloya’s gigantic stature - and Kahlert’s The Necromancer. Back in 1915 Geoffrey Buyers pointed out resemblances between Mary Shelley’s monster and Schiller’s Christian-turned-criminal-hero Wolf in Der Verbrecher aus verlorenener Ehre, but the point remained theoretical since he was unable to show that Schiller’s tale was available to Mary Shelley (who is said to have read little German) in English. Now that we know that a translation of kinds was available to her in the guise of the final section of Teuthold’s version of The Necromancer, which her father used while working on St. Leon (1799), and presumably possessed, making it part of the intellectual furniture of Mary’s childhood, Buyers’ point gains the validity it originally lacked. It has not only a similar structure to Frankenstein, but a similar storyline: ‘Each tale dramatizes a monstrous metamorphosis: creatures with the potential for nobility are transformed by fellow humans into fiends.’⁷

Victor himself is a weak reed. He has a habit of fleeing when things get tense. When the Creature reaches out to him, just after being “born,” Victor runs. When Victor returns to his room, accompanied by Henri Clerval, and finds the Creature gone, Victor falls into a “nervous fever.” Victor flees from the courtroom during the trial of Elizabeth’s maid Justine. Later, after hearing of Henri’s death, Victor slips into a fever for two months, and after recovering develops a laudanum habit. He is high-strung, and while for Shelley this was an indication of his Sensibility (see: The Gothic), to the modern reader it makes Victor appear weak. Victor is capable of kindness to and friendship with Robert Walton. But much of the novel is an account of Frankenstein’s reprehensible actions and personality. His statements about Elizabeth are filled with condescension, and his thoughtless behavior toward her is no better. Victor is monstrously self-absorbed; his feelings are the only ones that matter to him. He never once considers the morality of his actions. He is filled with self-pity.

Worst of all is his treatment of the Creature. When it is created it reaches out, childlike, to Victor, only to have him reject it and flee. On hearing of William’s murder Victor is instantly convinced (without any proof whatsoever) that the Creature is responsible. (That he is correct in this assumption is beside the point). Later, the Creature pleads for kindness from Victor, calling him “my natural lord and king” and begging for “justice” and “clemency and affection.” Victor responds with abuse and hatred. Victor’s detestation of the Creature is, at least initially, wholly unearned; Victor reacts badly to it because it is ugly, and only because it is ugly, never considering its feelings. Even when the Creature vows to quit mankind altogether, if only Victor will create a mate for him–and Victor has no reason to believe the Creature would lie or not live up to his vow–Victor refuses to help him. The core of Frankenstein is not about Man meddling in matters he should not. The core of Frankenstein is about a cruel and abusive father passing on the lesson of heartlessness to his son and then being punished by him.

As for the Creature, he is no monster, but rather a mix of good and bad. His fall is much more tragic than Victor’s however. Victor’s conceit, thoughtless ambition, and basic cruelty, for that is what his rejection of the “infant” Creature is, lead him to his end. The Creature began as a tabula rasa, an innocent being of goodness, delighting in nature; Victor could have taught him to become an adult who knowingly chooses the right thing to do. Even after the murder of William, the Creature offers himself to Victor. But Victor has only rejection and hatred for the Creature, so the Creature reciprocates it, murdering those Victor cares for and then harrying him across the world to his death. But the Creature retains a sense of pathos. One of the scenes from Frankenstein that lingers in the memory is the lonely Creature watching the family he comes to love through the windows of their cottage, observing the love they have for each other, a love he lacks. (That latter point is important; the Creature’s lack of a mate–in other words, his sexual frustration–is much of what drives him, and why Victor’s destruction of his mate so outrages him).

While Frankenstein has been granted place in the literary canon since the middle of the twentieth century, the precise genre or genres in which to place it have been debated. As mentioned, it is a late-period Gothic novel. And the average person today would quickly call it a horror novel. But since 1947, when critics began to write histories of the science fiction genre, Frankenstein has also been called a science fiction novel. Moreover, it is commonly viewed as the first science fiction novel, a case most strongly put forward in 1973 and later qualified by Brian Aldiss:

The seminal point about Frankenstein is that its central character makes a deliberate decision. He succeeds in creating life only when he throws away dusty old authorities and turns to modern experiments in the laboratory¼Frankenstein rejects alchemy and magic and turns to scientific research. Only then does he get results.⁸

Aldiss’ viewpoint is well-argued, but ultimately incorrect, as he defines science fiction too narrowly and ignores Frankenstein’s science fictional predecessors.

The definition of science fiction is notoriously a difficult one to articulate to the satisfaction of the majority, and no such attempt will be made here.⁹ It will suffice instead to note that the genre of science fiction, as it has developed over the centuries, has customarily encompassed a number of different literary traditions: extraordinary or fantastic voyages; utopias; Future Wars; narratives set in the future; narratives involving inventive extrapolations from current or past technologies; narratives that involve the scientific mindset and scientific experimentation; narratives involving the exploration by extrapolation and/or experimentation about the nature “of universe, of man, or ‘reality;’”¹⁰ narratives involving the extrapolation of social phenomena or social changes; “the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould;”¹¹ and so on. Science fiction, like any literary genre, does not evolve neatly, from a single source or type of work, but instead is a river whose tributary streams are many, and whose generic borders are fuzzy at best.

In light of this truth, the idea of calling Frankenstein the first science fiction novel is foolish—there are a number of novels preceding Shelley’s work that meet one or more historical or modern definitions of science fiction. We can call them “proto-science fiction,” following the lead of Proto-Mysteries, but that assumes that the borders between science fiction and proto-science fiction are discernible. In truth, the best way to view science fiction is as a continuum using fuzzy logic, so that there is no pure science fiction, simply works that are more science fictional or less science fictional.

In any event, those looking for a “first science fiction” can go back to Lucian’s A True Story (second century C.E.), with its trip to the Moon, or before that to The Book of Enoch (oldest sections date from 300 B.C.E.), with its tour of the heavens: Enoch “anticipates other fantastic journeys, both mundane and celestial, from Faust and Gulliver’s Travels through H.G. Wells and H.P. Lovecraft and beyond.”¹² Alternatively, one can leap ahead to the seventeenth century and Charles Sorel’s La Solitude (1640), which predicts “airplanes, electric lights, and motion pictures,”¹³ or to Margaret Cavendish’s The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (1666), an extraordinary voyage to a utopia. Frankenstein was certainly influential on a type of modern science fiction, and deserves its canonical place as an important novel of science fictional Gothic horror. But to call it the first work of science fiction is to be mistaken.

Print: Mary Shelley and Leslie S. Klinger, The New Annotated Frankenstein. New York: W.W. Norton, 2017.

Christopher Frayling, Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years. London: Reel Art Press, 2017.

Susan Tyler Hitchcock, Frankenstein: A Cultural History. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007.

¹ Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus (Boston: Cornhill, 1922), 31.

² Shelley, Frankenstein, 201.

³ Shelley, Frankenstein, 332.

⁴ Nevins, “Organ Theft and the Insanity of Geniuses.”

⁵ Anne K. Mellor, “Frankenstein, Racial Science, and the Yellow Peril.” Nineteenth Century Contexts, 23, no. 1 (June, 2001): 1-28.

⁶ Shelley, Frankenstein, 235-236.

⁷ Bridgwater, The German Gothic Novel, 465.

⁸ Brian Aldiss, The Detached Retina: Aspects of SF and Fantasy (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University, 1995), 78.

⁹ The patient and the curious are directed to Brian Stableford, John Clute, and Peter Nicholls’ “Definitions of SF,” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, accessed Jan. 28, 2019, http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/definitions_of_sf.

¹⁰ Judith Merril, “What Do You Mean: Science? Fiction?” Extrapolation (May, 1966), 4.

¹¹ Brian Aldiss, The Billion-Year Spree (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973), 8.

¹² Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600 (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011), 71.

¹³ Gabrielle Verdier, Charles Sorel (Boston: Twayne, 1984), 102.