I have always enjoyed Hollywood’s black and white version of Frankenstein and the many adaptations that followed like Igor, Edward Scissorhands, and Frankenweenie. I had yet to read the story, so I hadn’t known better than to trust the popular misinterpretation that Frankenstein was the monster created by the very mad and peculiar doctor with the help of his hunchbacked assistant Fritz or later named, Igor.

But now I think, “Hollywood! How dare you! How dare you ignore and obliterate such beautiful work as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein?”

I found this story to be both beautiful and heartbreaking. It was filled with themes of mortality, isolation, and evil. The story opens with several letters and you are introduced to the genius and driven Victor Frankenstein. This determined behavior comes off with a mad scientist-like focus which is necessary for him to accomplish his goals.

In the beginning, I saw him as respectable and decent but once his creation comes to fulfillment my view of him changed. Time and time again, when characters see life as though through a straw, they don’t often realize that it is themselves who create the “monsters” within their stories. That element is undeniable here. Frankenstein’s disregard of his creation left him despondent, desperate, and lonely as he wandered the world trying to find his place within it.

Even though I was saddened by the murders at the hands of the creation, I found myself wondering in the end, who the true monster of the story was.

“If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.”

 

For centuries, the story of Victor Frankenstein and the monster he created has held readers spellbound. On the surface, it is a novel of tense and steadily mounting dread. On a more profound level, it illuminates the triumph and tragedy of the human condition in its portrayal of a scientist who oversteps the bounds of conscience, and of a creature tortured by the solitude of a world in which he does not belong. A novel of almost hallucinatory intensity, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein represents one of the most striking flowerings of the Romantic imagination.