Frankenstein’s Monster

Also Known As: unnamed in the novel, where his maker calls him the creature, the fiend, the wretch and the daemon; popularly and loosely called Frankenstein, which is the surname of the man who built him
Region/Culture: Global
Mythos: Literary Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: An artificial man of great size, speed and strength, he endures cold and hunger that would kill a human and teaches himself to speak, read and reason within about a year.
Role in Mythos: He is the nameless being given life by the student Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s novel of 1818, who is abandoned at the moment of his waking and destroys his maker’s family in return.
Relation to Humans: He begins by helping people in secret and wanting nothing more than their company. Every person who sees his face attacks or flees him, and the violence that follows grows out of that rejection.

Rain taps at the window of a rented room in Ingolstadt. It is one in the morning in November and the candle is almost gone. On the table lies a body eight feet long, and in the last of the light a dull yellow eye comes open. The chest drags in a hard breath. The limbs jerk. The young man who has spent the better part of two years building this figure looks at it once, properly, and runs out of the room.

That is the whole of the birth, and it has an author and a date. The creature belongs to no inherited folk tradition. He comes from a novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published without its writer’s name in London on 1 January 1818, in three volumes. The writer was Mary Shelley. She began it in June 1816 on the shore of Lake Geneva, when a run of foul weather shut a small party indoors at Lord Byron’s rented Villa Diodati with a French volume of German ghost stories, and Byron proposed that each of them write one. She was eighteen. Her own account of that summer was written fifteen years later, for the revised edition of 1831, and every later version of the creature descends from her book.

Nobody ever gives him a name. His maker calls him creature, fiend, wretch and daemon, depending on how the day is going. Frankenstein is the maker: Victor Frankenstein, a student from Geneva, whom the novel never once calls doctor. Within a decade or so of publication audiences had started handing the surname down to the thing he built, and the habit has outlasted every correction since.

The book is deliberately quiet about how it was done. Victor studies decay until he finds the cause of life, then collects bones from charnel houses and takes further material from the dissecting room and the slaughterhouse. He builds large because the fine parts of a body slowed his hands. On the night itself he gathers his instruments to pass a spark of being into the form at his feet, and that is all the reader is told. There is no lightning bolt in the novel and no tower laboratory.

He chose the features to be beautiful. What opened its eyes had yellow skin drawn so thin that the working of muscle and artery showed through it, long black hair with a gloss on it, teeth of perfect white, pale watery eyes almost the colour of their sockets, a shrivelled complexion and straight black lips. The flat-topped skull and the electrodes in the neck are not Shelley’s. They are the work of the make-up artist Jack Pierce on the actor Boris Karloff, in the Universal film of 1931. The silence is older still. In 1823 Richard Brinsley Peake put the story on the London stage as Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein, with T. P. Cooke playing the creature mute and painted a pale blue-grey. In the book he is the most eloquent speaker in it.

His own account of his first days is the heart of the novel. Left alone, he stumbles into the woods outside the town with his senses arriving all at once, light and hunger and cold in a single blur. He finds a fire left burning by travellers, is delighted by the warmth, and pushes his hand into the embers to learn the rest. A village meets him with stones. He goes to ground in a lean-to against the wall of a cottage and watches the family inside through a crack: a blind old man called De Lacey, his son Felix and his daughter Agatha.

Through one winter he is their unseen servant. At night, when the house is dark, he takes Felix’s tools into the forest and comes back with enough cut wood for several days, stacks it at the door, and clears the snow from the path before dawn. He learns to speak by listening while Felix teaches a foreign guest, Safie, and to read over the same lessons. A lost bag in the woods gives him Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch’s Lives and The Sorrows of Young Werther. In the pocket of the coat he took from the laboratory he finds Victor’s own journal of the making. He reads Milton as history and sees himself first in Adam, then, with more conviction, in Satan.

He plans his introduction carefully and goes in when the blind father is alone. It nearly works. Then the young people come home, Agatha faints, and Felix beats him with a stick while he clings to the old man’s knees and does not strike back. The family leaves the district. He burns the empty cottage. On the road south he pulls a drowning girl from a river and her companion shoots him for it. Outside Geneva he catches a small boy, learns that the child is William Frankenstein, Victor’s brother, and strangles him. He slips the boy’s locket into the pocket of a sleeping servant, Justine Moritz, who hangs for the murder.

Maker and creature meet at last on the sea of ice above Chamonix, where he asks for one thing: a female made as he was made. The two of them would go to the wilds of South America and live on acorns and berries, out of sight for good. Victor agrees, sets to work on a remote island in the Orkneys, and then tears the half-finished body to pieces with the creature watching at the window. The answer is a promise to be present on Victor’s wedding night. Victor’s friend Henry Clerval is found strangled on the Irish coast. His bride Elizabeth is killed in her room on the night of the wedding. His father dies of grief soon after, and Victor follows the creature north until the land runs out.

The end comes in a ship’s cabin, in the pack ice of the Arctic, where the explorer Robert Walton has taken the dying Victor aboard. Walton hears a voice and finds the huge figure bent over the corpse, one hand stretched toward it, grieving aloud. The creature says he will travel to the farthest northern point of the globe, build his own funeral pyre and burn. Then he goes out through the cabin window onto a raft of ice, and the dark takes him. The book never shows the fire.

What he can do follows from how he was built. He is far larger and stronger than a man, crosses broken glacier at a run, and goes up the near-vertical face of Mont Saleve faster than anyone could pursue. He bears heat and cold with little harm and lives on coarse food. His mind is the real surprise: a full language in about a year, three difficult books, and arguments his maker cannot answer.

His limits are just as plain. A bullet tears him open and takes weeks to heal. He weeps. He cannot make another of his kind and depends for that on the one man who hates him. Above all there is his face, which ends every conversation before it starts, so that the only person who ever hears him out is a man who cannot see. He is alone. And he is mortal by his own reckoning, since his last plan is to die.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Frankenstein the name of the monster?

No. Frankenstein is the surname of Victor Frankenstein, the student who builds the creature in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. The creature himself is never given a name in the book, where his maker calls him the creature, the fiend, the wretch and the daemon. Audiences began applying the name Frankenstein to the creature within a decade or so of publication.

What does Frankenstein’s Monster look like in the original novel?

In Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein’s Monster is about eight feet tall with limbs in proportion. He has thin yellow skin that shows the muscle and arteries beneath, long glossy black hair, white teeth, pale watery eyes, a shrivelled face and straight black lips. The flat head and neck electrodes come from Jack Pierce’s make-up for Boris Karloff in the 1931 Universal film, not from the book.

How was Frankenstein’s Monster created?

Victor Frankenstein builds the body in a rented room in Ingolstadt from bones gathered in charnel houses and material from the dissecting room and the slaughterhouse. On a rainy November night he uses his instruments to pass a spark of life into it. The novel does not explain the method further, and there is no lightning bolt in the book.

Can Frankenstein’s Monster speak?

Yes. In the novel Frankenstein’s Monster teaches himself to speak and read in about a year by secretly listening to the De Lacey family, and he reads Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives and The Sorrows of Young Werther. The silent version of the creature began with Richard Brinsley Peake’s 1823 stage play Presumption, in which T. P. Cooke played him mute.

What happens to Frankenstein’s Monster at the end?

After Victor Frankenstein dies aboard Robert Walton’s ship in the Arctic ice, Frankenstein’s Monster appears in the cabin and grieves over the body. He says he will go to the farthest north and burn himself on a funeral pyre. He then leaves through the cabin window on a raft of ice and disappears into the dark, and the novel never shows his death.