Frankenstein: Creation, Abandonment, Responsibility, and Two Editions

Geoffrey Chen

100 Works of World Literature · Article 30

# Frankenstein: Creation, Abandonment, Responsibility, and Two Editions

This factual guide introduces the composition and editions, complete story, nested narration, characters, and major themes of Frankenstein. It does not replace the novel. The one-minute introduction avoids the ending; the full guide includes anatomical materials, a child's death, wrongful execution, murder, destruction of a companion, and the ending.

One-minute introduction

Arctic explorer Robert Walton writes to his sister about pursuing an unknown route and glory. His crew see a gigantic figure driving a sledge across the ice, then rescue a dying European man in pursuit. Victor Frankenstein hears Walton's ambitions, recognises the danger of his own youth, and explains why he has reached the end of the world.

Raised in a wealthy Geneva family, Victor studies natural philosophy, chemistry, anatomy, and the principle of life at the University of Ingolstadt. He assembles an approximately eight-foot human form from anatomical remains and gives it life, but runs when the being opens its eyes. The created person has no name, language, care, or social place and must educate himself. Rejected repeatedly for appearance and discovering that his maker already described him as abhorrent, he demands that Victor accept responsibility. The question is not only whether humans can create life, but who is accountable afterwards, how appearance becomes verdict, whether abandonment explains violence, and whether inquiry can be separated from relationship.

Essential facts

  • Full title: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Prometheus is associated with shaping humans, stealing fire, and suffering punishment for transgression.
  • Author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851), British novelist, biographer, and editor.
  • Conception: in the wet summer of 1816, eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin stayed near Lake Geneva with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Claire Clairmont, joining Lord Byron and his physician John Polidori. Reading ghost stories indoors, the group accepted Byron's challenge to write one.
  • First edition: anonymously published in London in three volumes on 1 January 1818 by Lackington and partners, in five hundred copies, dedicated to Mary's father William Godwin. Mary was twenty.
  • 1823 edition: after the success of the stage melodrama Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein, William Godwin arranged a two-volume edition whose title page first named Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
  • 1831 edition: Mary heavily revised the novel for Bentley's Standard Novels, adding the famous account of its origin. Published in October 1831, it long became the common text but is not simply the one corrected final authority.
  • Form: four letters from Walton to his sister Margaret Saville surround Victor's autobiography; inside Victor lies the Creature's long narrative, containing the De Lacey and Safie history; the ending returns to Walton's record.
  • Genres: Gothic novel, Romantic formation narrative, epistolary exploration, scientific thought experiment, and early science fiction overlap.

The Year Without a Summer and the ghost-story challenge

The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 disturbed global climate, contributing to the cold, wet European summer of 1816. The travellers at Geneva did not know the distant cause; they experienced darkness, indoor reading, and discussion of the principle of life. In her 1831 introduction, Shelley remembered conversation about Darwinian experiments, whether a corpse might move again, and galvanism. She then had a waking dream of a pale student watching the human thing he made begin to stir.

The story expanded into a novel. Surviving 1816–17 draft material covers most of the 1818 text and is overwhelmingly in Mary's hand. Percy read the manuscript, proposing verbal, structural, and stylistic revisions, and wrote or substantially shaped the first preface. Bodleian analysis estimates about four thousand words of intervention in a text of more than seventy thousand. Erasing collaboration is inaccurate; reassigning authorship to Percy contradicts the manuscript.

Mary was the daughter of feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and political philosopher William Godwin. Wollstonecraft died from infection after giving birth to her. Around composition Mary also experienced pregnancy, infant loss, and difficult family relations. Creation, birth, lost motherhood, and revival were present in her life, but the novel is not a code for one private trauma. It also systematically engages scientific lectures, philosophy, travel writing, Paradise Lost, and revolutionary politics.

Scientific context: electricity matters, but there is no lightning switch

In the late eighteenth century Luigi Galvani stimulated frog legs electrically and theorised animal electricity. His nephew Giovanni Aldini applied electrodes to newly executed bodies, causing muscles, eyelids, and limbs to move. Humphry Davy's chemistry lectures, debate over whether life was a separately added principle or an effect of organised matter, and techniques for resuscitating the apparently drowned made the border between life and death a public scientific question.

Shelley knew of these debates and refers to galvanism in the 1831 introduction. The novel itself says Victor infuses a spark of being but withholds machine, voltage, stitching, and lightning procedure. Tower, assistant, metal bolts, and switches derive mainly from theatre, the 1931 film, and later visual tradition. Saying Victor simply uses a lightning strike converts ethical absence into a technical manual.

Victor first adores Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus. Professor Krempe ridicules the old study, while Waldman respects his enthusiasm and redirects him towards modern chemistry. Disaster is neither superstition losing to science nor knowledge being inherently evil. Victor separates investigation from friendship, open criticism, bodily limit, and aftercare. Secret work ruins his health; he pursues whether it can be done and excludes why or how to remain responsible.

1818 and 1831 are both important texts

The anonymous three-volume 1818 version has chapter divisions and language different from 1831. Its politics retain stronger Godwinian attention to choice and social formation; Victor more visibly makes decisions and carries responsibility. The 1831 edition rewrites early family history and causation, adds vocabulary of fate and irresistible circumstance, and makes him appear more driven by predetermined tendency.

Elizabeth's origin offers a clear example. In 1818 she is the daughter of Alphonse Frankenstein's sister and an Italian nobleman, hence Victor's first cousin, and enters the household after her mother dies. In 1831 she becomes an unrelated orphan of an Italian noble family, fostered by poor people and adopted by Caroline. The change removes consanguineous marriage but retains a mother presenting a girl as a future gift to Victor.

The 1831 introduction is the best-known origin story and a retrospective account written fifteen years later. It is valuable primary evidence, not a daily transcript. Readers need not select a “true” version: 1818 preserves a younger writer's sharper agency and social critique, while 1831 reveals revision after bereavement, political change, and professional experience. Identify an edition before comparing details.

Walton's letters: the captain is not disposable framing

From St Petersburg, Archangel, and the Arctic Ocean, Walton addresses Margaret in England. He hopes to discover a northern passage, understand magnetism, and achieve unprecedented honour. Self-educated, Romantic, and lonely, he longs for a friend who understands him; competent shipmates do not satisfy the imagined spiritual equal.

Rescued Victor fills that desire. Walton sees a noble sufferer, transcribes the narrative, and allows Victor to revise or supplement it. We receive an admirer-arranged warning, not unmediated confession. Victor tells Walton to avoid ambition, yet when trapped sailors demand return he urges them to persist for glory. Contradiction survives to the end.

Margaret receives every word but no reply appears. She anchors explorer and story to European domestic life while representing those excluded from the speaking centre of male projects. The entire record finally depends on an absent woman to preserve it.

Victor's childhood and Ingolstadt education

Victor grows up in a wealthy, affectionate Geneva family beside Elizabeth and friend Henry Clerval. He narrates home as a perfect origin while treating Elizabeth as a beautiful being belonging to him. Henry loves language, heroic story, and human culture, offering a mode of learning unlike Victor's isolated control.

In 1831 Elizabeth contracts scarlet fever. Victor's mother Caroline nurses her despite warnings, catches the illness, and dies after expressing a wish for the young couple's future marriage. Victor enters university carrying grief. Old natural philosophy had promised the abolition of disease and death; modern chemistry and anatomy supply method and confidence.

He studies decay, bodily change, and life organisation. Finding small anatomy difficult to manipulate, he constructs a form about eight feet tall. Materials come from charnel, dissecting, and slaughter spaces, though no reproducible inventory appears. Secret labour removes him from family, seasons, health, and ethical exchange. The ideal of a beautiful new species contracts into completion of the project.

The birth night: failure follows technical success

On a rainy November night the being opens a dull yellow eye, breathes, and convulses. Victor selected black hair and white teeth as beautiful components, but their relation to yellow skin, visible musculature, and watery eyes repels him. He runs to bed, dreams that a kiss transforms Elizabeth into his mother's corpse, then wakes to the Creature reaching and making inarticulate sound. He flees again.

The experiment works; relationship fails at once. The first gestures may request contact, but Victor treats appearance as threat. He supplies no name, language, food, boundary, or safe space and seeks no assistance. Henry arrives the next morning; Victor collapses and receives months of care from the friend, while his new dependent vanishes alone.

Frankenstein is the creator's family name. The being has no proper name and is called demon, fiend, wretch, monster, or Creature. Popular culture transferred the surname to him. Character lists should distinguish Victor and Creature, though the confusion aptly reflects how creator and creation shape one another.

William's death and Justine's execution

Victor learns that youngest brother William has been killed near Geneva. Approaching home, he sees a gigantic figure in lightning and concludes the Creature is responsible. Justine Moritz, a servant treated almost as family, is accused when William's miniature portrait is found on her. Under religious pressure she makes a false confession in hope of absolution, yet is executed.

Victor believes nobody will accept his explanation and remains silent. He did not murder William, but holds material knowledge and permits an innocent person to carry the consequence. The trial shows how a vulnerable young woman, circumstantial object, and coerced confession produce certainty.

Victor calls both deaths his crimes, recognising indirect responsibility; he also turns guilt into personal suffering around which the victims orbit. Confession without action can be another kind of self-absorption.

Meeting on the glacier: the Creature demands a hearing

Victor seeks temporary relief in Alpine sublimity and meets the Creature on the Montanvert glacier. He curses and attempts attack, while the other speaks in controlled, elaborate language and demands that the maker fulfil obligations and hear experience before judgment. Physically faster and stronger, he first proposes a narrative compact.

The shift turns an observed monster into autobiographical subject. Because Creature speaks to Victor, Victor to Walton, and Walton to Margaret, it is not unmediated fact. Yet eloquence itself disproves the equation of visible difference and base nature.

Sensation, fire, and first social experience

At awakening, the Creature has no concepts, only mixed light, cold, hunger, thirst, and sound. He learns to distinguish senses and discovers fire warms and cooks but burns. A thing that benefits and injures becomes a model for technique: ethical meaning lies in experience, judgment, and use, not fire alone.

He seeks food in a village and is screamed at, struck, and chased before harming anyone. Society judges his body. Hiding in a lean-to beside the De Lacey cottage, he observes blind father, Felix, and Agatha. Exiled and poor, they care for one another. He stops stealing their food, secretly gathers firewood, and learns benevolence from affection.

His longing and idealisation coexist. Observation educates without consent: he knows intimate life while they do not know a watcher occupies the wall. Sympathy does not remove potential intrusion.

Safie's arrival: language, history, and Europe

Safie, daughter of a Turkish merchant and an Arab Christian mother, arrives to join Felix. Felix had helped her father escape an unjust French imprisonment in expectation of marriage and thereby brought exile on the De Laceys. The merchant later tried to remove Safie from Europe and prevent the union. Following her mother's teaching about female independence, she travels by her own decision.

Felix teaches her French while the hidden Creature learns words, history, government, property, and hierarchy. Through Volney's Ruins of Empires he hears of conquest, riches, and inequality, then realises he has no relation, money, or recognised category.

Safie acts rather than merely awaits rescue. Nonetheless, the subplot contrasts a free Christian-European future with a despotic and treacherous Turkish father, using Orientalist conventions. The novel criticises European injustice without entirely escaping European self-idealisation.

Three books and a creator's laboratory journal

The Creature finds Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, Plutarch's Lives, and Milton's Paradise Lost. Goethe gives private feeling and despair, Plutarch civic virtue and legislators, Milton a cosmology of creation, fall, and rebellion. Treating poem as history, he understands himself between Adam and Satan.

Like Adam he is made alone by a creator but receives no garden or companion. Like Satan he is excluded from happiness and turns envy into revolt. He is neither exactly; reading supplies identities to a nameless life and scripts of absolute conflict.

Victor's laboratory notes were also left in clothing. The Creature reads a record of his assembly and his maker's disgust. The most painful education is not epic but a father's description of him as failed material. Text explains origin without granting belonging.

Rejection by the De Laceys and the collapse of benevolence

When the younger family members leave, the Creature approaches the blind father, hoping voice will precede sight. De Lacey listens and promises help to a lonely stranger. Felix, Safie, and Agatha return; Felix knocks him down, Safie flees, and Agatha faints. The family permanently abandons the cottage.

The Creature despairs and burns the empty home. Later he rescues a girl from drowning but is shot by the man who arrives. Rejection develops violence rather than revealing an innate program. Causal explanation does not erase agency: he later decides to use innocents as revenge against his creator.

At Geneva he seizes William, hoping a child lacks prejudice. William insults his appearance and invokes the Frankenstein name; the Creature strangles him and plants the portrait on sleeping Justine. Exclusion explains rage, while child murder and framing remain deliberate moral choices.

The demand for a female companion

The Creature proposes a compact: make a female like him, and the pair will withdraw into South American wilderness, never approaching society. He presents companionship as a basic claim and observes that every other being has a kind. Victor initially refuses, then agrees through sympathy and hope of stopping violence.

The claim and risk coexist. No one can promise that an unborn woman will love him or accept exile. He treats her as a custom solution to loneliness, repeating Victor's treatment of life as project. The female Creature is promised in a male negotiation without consent.

Victor again responds through secrecy, seeking no family, legal, scientific, or civic counsel. The pair monopolise a reproductive decision that might affect the world.

Britain, Orkney, and the torn second body

Victor travels from Geneva with Henry through the Rhine country, London, Oxford, and Scotland, allegedly to study. Henry attends to language, culture, and people while Victor withdraws into the task. Alone on a remote Orkney island among poor residents, he begins assembling the female.

He imagines she might be more malicious, reject the Creature, or reproduce a new population. Seeing the Creature at the window, Victor tears the unfinished body apart before him. The act can be read as precaution for humanity and fear of female autonomy and reproduction. His first terror is that she may not obey a compact men made for her.

She never receives voice, name, or completed body, yet becomes the novel's sharpest absence. Victor transgressed natural limits to make a male and invokes natural order to destroy a female. The Creature promises to be with Victor on his wedding night; Victor assumes he himself is the target.

Henry, Elizabeth, and the destruction of the family

Victor places the remains in a basket and dumps them from a night boat. Drifting to Ireland, he is arrested for murder and shown Henry's strangled body. Magistrate Kirwin behaves relatively fairly, establishes Victor's absence from the scene, and summons Alphonse to nurse him through illness.

Back in Geneva, Victor still does not disclose the danger to Elizabeth. Alphonse assumes another love prevents marriage, and Elizabeth offers him freedom to withdraw. Victor proceeds, confident he can fight the Creature on the wedding night. Interpreting “I will be with you” as threat to himself, he again excludes a woman from information about her own safety.

At the inn he patrols with weapons, leaving Elizabeth alone. Her scream reveals her strangled body, while the Creature grins at the window. Alphonse dies from grief. The maker denied his Creature family, and the Creature destroys the maker's family. Symmetry is not justice; revenge uses innocents as substitutes.

Arctic pursuit and ending

Victor asks a Geneva magistrate to pursue the Creature but receives little support for an incredible account. He swears revenge at the graves and follows across Europe and Russia into the Arctic. The Creature leaves tracks, food, and taunts, simultaneously escaping and maintaining the only relationship either has. Creator pursues creation; creation manufactures a pursuer.

After ice breaks, Walton rescues Victor. The exploration ship becomes trapped and crew demand a promise to return if freed. Victor addresses them in the language of glory, repeating the ambition behind catastrophe. Disappointed Walton nevertheless agrees to turn back. He fails at geographical discovery and achieves something Victor never did: he listens to those endangered by his choice and changes course.

After Victor dies, Walton finds the Creature mourning over the body. He admits murder gave no satisfaction and says each crime increased his suffering. He does not establish innocence, but explains the movement from longing for love to hatred. He plans a funeral pyre farther north, where his body cannot be copied, then leaves through the window and disappears on dark ice.

No witness confirms his death. The Creature is the last speaker but Walton the last recorder. Self-destruction may occur or remain another unverifiable promise. The scientist's death does not automatically settle the consequences of created life.

How three narrative layers distribute sympathy and responsibility

Walton, Victor, and Creature are eloquent, lonely men seeking exceptional meaning. Each makes a listener into an ideal friend and beautifies motives. Victor warns ambition but recentres victims as his pain; the Creature exposes abandonment but uses misery to explain innocent murder; Walton admires Victor yet finally chooses differently.

Readers are not asked to locate one absolutely reliable narrator. Victor calls the Creature demon; the Creature remembers benevolence. He calls companionship a right; Victor imagines species risk. Walton preserves both. Ethical judgment arises between voices rather than from a final narrator's decree.

Story layers also resemble creation. Margaret preserves Walton, Walton reconstructs Victor, Victor relays the Creature, and the Creature assembles himself from books. Each uses others' materials to make a narrative life and acquires responsibility for shaping and omission.

Creation, parenting, and research responsibility

Victor's central failure is not only crossing a line in the laboratory but treating the successful result as waste. He performs no needs assessment, care, naming, social integration, or shared governance. Innovation ethics does not end when a device activates.

The Creature's tragedy cannot be wholly assigned to his maker. Self-education in language, work, and sympathy proves moral capacity; that capacity also makes planned murder accountable. Both propositions stand: abandonment and prejudice push him towards violence, and he chooses violence.

Victor and Creature both seek sole control of life. One creates without relationship; the other demands a woman destined to love him. Each makes another person the answer to desire. Walton's return is a real alternative: responsibility allows affected people to veto the project.

Appearance, language, and the monster identity

Victor selected beautiful parts but the whole is condemned instantly. Villagers, Felix, William, and the creator react before knowing conduct. Blind De Lacey briefly accepts voice, proving the force of sight prejudice; lasting membership still requires a community's decision, not merely the absence of eyes.

The Creature speaks more elaborately than most characters. He reads classics, analyses institutions, and argues ethics, unlike the speechless cinematic zombie. Films of the 1930s made square head, bolts, and limited language standard; Shelley's being is fast, cold-resistant, sensitive, and highly literate.

Monster is not a stable biological class. It emerges through appearance judgment, namelessness, expulsion, and subsequent crime. Recognising social manufacture neither denies victims nor makes every danger a misunderstanding.

Women, reproduction, and excluded care

Male exploration, science, and revenge occupy the centre, while women absorb consequences. Caroline dies nursing, Justine is executed, Elizabeth is arranged as wife and killed through informational exclusion, Agatha loses home, Safie flees paternal control, and Margaret receives but never speaks.

Victor bypasses women's bodies to produce life and cannot parent. Confronting a female creation, he treats desire and fertility as uncontrolled threat and destroys her before birth. The novel offers no simple woman-scientist alternative, but exposes the result when creation separates from care, consent, and relation.

Safie is an active border-crosser, rejecting paternal plans, learning, and choosing a relationship. Her liberty remains bounded by a Eurocentric and Orientalist frame.

Nature, sublimity, and environmental scale

Alps, Rhine, Scottish islands, and Arctic are structural rather than decorative. Sublime landscape temporarily lifts Victor beyond guilt and gives the Creature mobility and expression. Both speak through nature; it does not belong exclusively to civilised humanity.

Victor treats nature as maternal therapy while ignoring material environments when taking remains, making life, and dumping waste. He seeks mastery over law and calls consequences fate. Nature neither convicts nor absolves him.

The Arctic scales private experiment into global risk. Walton claims discoveries will benefit humanity while endangering a crew; Victor claims conquest of disease while producing abandonment. Public good defined only by the glory-seeker makes actual others pay.

Principal characters

  • Victor Frankenstein: brilliant and sensitive Genevan scientist, benevolently ambitious, secretive, avoidant, and controlling. Creation succeeds while care fails.
  • The unnamed Creature: about eight feet tall, developing senses, language, and morality alone. Abandonment warrants sympathy; deliberate murder requires accountability.
  • Robert Walton: Arctic explorer and letter writer, Victor's double, who ultimately listens to the crew and turns back.
  • Elizabeth Lavenza: Victor's domestic companion and fiancée. Her origin differs by edition, while her care and counsel remain excluded by male secrecy.
  • Henry Clerval: Victor's closest friend, lover of language, literature, and human intercourse, who nurses him and represents knowledge not aimed at mastering life.
  • Alphonse and Caroline Frankenstein: loving parents who also participate in arranging Elizabeth as future partner.
  • William and Justine: murdered child and wrongfully executed young woman, carrying a private experiment into public legal consequences.
  • The De Laceys: family from whom the Creature learns affection, language, and society at a distance; the blind father receives him before the others reject him.
  • Safie: daughter of Turkish merchant and Arab Christian mother, actively crossing borders to Felix within a Eurocentric narrative frame.

Major themes

Responsibility after creation. Ability to make does not confer a right to abandon. Care, naming, integration, risk governance, and listening belong to the act.

Isolation and companionship. Walton, Victor, and Creature seek one perfect understanding person. Making someone necessary to cure solitude converts companionship into possession.

Appearance, prejudice, and social manufacture. The being is attacked for appearance before becoming a killer. Monstrosity forms through prior judgment and later choice.

Knowledge, ambition, and public scrutiny. The novel is not anti-science in general; it opposes secret, limitless innovation that seeks priority without consequences.

Education and reading. Language and books create the Creature's self while supplying scripts of Adam, Satan, and despairing lover. Reading liberates and patterns conflict.

Gender, reproduction, and consent. Men bypass women to create life and decide whether a female may exist. Missing care and voice form part of catastrophe.

Law and innocence. Justine's execution shows evidence, religious coercion, and class vulnerability manufacturing wrongful judgment. Victor's secrecy turns private choice into public death.

Nature, fate, and free will. The 1818 text emphasises agency; 1831 adds fate. In both, people decide within constraints and cannot use destiny as complete excuse.

Common oversimplifications and reading suggestions

Frankenstein is the scientist's surname and the original Creature is unnamed; popular usage has blended them, but plot discussion benefits from distinction. The book does not specify a lightning machine, although electrical science informs its context. The Creature is neither born evil nor an innocent without agency: learned benevolence and chosen murder coexist. The message is more precise than “do not play God”, concerning secrecy, abandonment, consent, and consequence. Victor does not possess sole authority, because Walton and Creature challenge him. Finally, 1818 and 1831 both carry authorial authority; details should not be mixed as though there were one text.

Before reading, identify the edition. Draw three frames: Margaret receives Walton, Walton records Victor, Victor relays Creature, and mark whether each listener can answer. Follow fire, light, eyes, hands, ice, and books. Whenever Victor says fate, list available decisions; whenever the Creature says misery compelled him, separate social cause from choice. After the destroyed companion, revisit the first birth: both crises centre on whether an emergent life receives autonomy.

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