In June 1816, during a summer so cold and rain-soaked that it would later be called “the year without a summer,” a group of young writers found themselves confined indoors at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva. Among them were Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin, not yet married to Percy and not yet known to the world as Mary Shelley. To pass the time, Byron proposed that each of them write a ghost story. Weeks later, after nights spent listening to Byron and Percy Shelley debate the era’s cutting-edge science, including experiments said to reanimate dead tissue, Mary had a waking nightmare: a pale student kneeling over the thing he had made, watching it stir to life. That vision became Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published anonymously in 1818, when she was only twenty years old.
More than two centuries later, the novel remains one of the most influential works in the English language, widely regarded as the founding text of science fiction. It has never been out of print, has been adapted into film, theater, and countless retellings, and gave the world a name so recognizable that most people no longer remember it was ever meant to belong to a person rather than a monster.
That confusion says something about how thoroughly the novel has been reshaped by its own afterlife. The Frankenstein most people carry in their heads, a lumbering, green-skinned monster with bolts in its neck, bears little resemblance to what Mary Shelley actually wrote. In the novel, the creature has no name, no green skin, and no bolts at all. The name Frankenstein belongs not to the monster, but to Victor Frankenstein, the ambitious student whose obsession with conquering nature leads him to create a being he then abandons in horror.
Susan Wolfson, a professor of English at Princeton University, has spent much of her career restoring the novel Shelley actually wrote from underneath the myth that grew up around it. With her husband, Rutgers professor Ronald L. Levao, she co-edited The Annotated Frankenstein, a meticulously researched edition that traces the science, politics, and literary influences woven into Shelley's text. She has also edited a widely used teaching edition of the novel and, for its 200th anniversary in 2018, organized “Frankenread,” a multi-night public reading of the entire novel at Princeton. In the conversation that follows, we separate the real Frankenstein from its cultural shadow and explore why a young woman's ghost story has never stopped haunting us.
Charles Carlini: Most people think they know Frankenstein—the monster, the lightning, the bolts in the neck. How different is that popular image from the novel Mary Shelley actually wrote?
Susan Wolfson: Well, “most people”—myself and Ron included—first met “Frankenstein” not in Mary Shelley‘s novel, but through its popular culture evolution. For my generation, that meant James Whale‘s 1931 film, which, when Universal released it to television, was a frequent offering on the 5 p.m. “Early Show.” Not only was it in rotation, but when it was on, it was on for a whole week!
The novel is extraordinarily different in its structure, in its representation of the Creature, in its relationship to Milton‘s great epic, Paradise Lost, and in its involvement with key issues of Mary Shelley's life and her times.
Regarding structure: The title page features an epigraph from Paradise Lost Book IX, where Adam, having been punished for disobedience, complains to his Maker about not having been asked if he wanted to be created. It's almost a joke, something every parent is doomed to hear from an angry child, and something Adam will most likely hear from his own. Then there is a Preface that explains the novel's genre as philosophical, emphasizing the importance of “domestic affection” and aligning it with great works of imagination. Following this are a set of letters from the polar explorer Robert Walton to his sister, Margaret Saville. We realize that her full set of initials is M.W.S., exactly those of the author, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. These letters describe a dangerous, and perhaps dangerously deluded, Arctic quest to find an ideal Northwest Passage from the Eastern to the Western Hemisphere (thus avoiding the perilous trips around the tips of Africa or South America). It is not until Letter IV, with the ship ice-bound, that something truly unexpected happens. The crew sights two figures in sequence on a far horizon, both in sleds, one much larger. The next morning, a ravaged figure in one of the sleds pulls up alongside the ship and asks which direction it is headed. Captain Walton is astonished by this "wretch" and “wreck” of a near-dead man. He is brought on board, reanimated, and then tells his story. It is many pages before we find out his name is Frankenstein.
His story also contains the story of the Being he created, and whom he is now hoping to pursue to perdition. This is the core of Frankenstein, but not the entirety of it. Frankenstein hopes that when the ice breaks, Captain Walton will keep his course north so that Frankenstein can annihilate his Creature. He dies from exhaustion, however. Then the Creature arrives on board and tells his side of the story to Captain Walton, pledging to commit suicide by a funeral pyre, before disappearing into "darkness and distance."
That's the structure, artfully nested, with wild swerves of narrative authority. When Victor Frankenstein tells his side, he is the hero and tragic victim, and the Creature is always a “monster.” This is first based on the Creature's failure to meet his Creator's expectations of beauty, then on his actions against Frankenstein‘s family in revenge for his Creator's refusal to ameliorate his existential loneliness with a partner Creature, as God did for Adam (the Creature has become literate and knows Paradise Lost intimately). To return to that keynote epigraph from Paradise Lost, Adam whines to God. God put Adam in Eden, and when Adam complained of loneliness, God gave him Eve. Victor Frankenstein abandoned his Creature in his room of creation, leaving him to fend for himself in the November German woods. When the Creature, who has murdered to get his Creator's attention, agrees to stop if Frankenstein will give him a mate, Frankenstein refuses. This is not to excuse the Creature's violence. But he wasn't born bad; through a series of abuses from humans, from whom he hoped to be accepted, he descends into despairing violence. This descent, however, takes some time. When the Creature tells his story, we feel his pain, from his first hours to his last. We also come to see that Victor Frankenstein is a monster of irresponsible egotism and scientific hubris, of radical parental failure, of constant self-justification and self-exculpation. And this is not the only distribution of the word “monster.” The tyrants of the legal system are also called monsters.
So, even the default word for the Frankenstein-creation as “Monster” is prejudiced, partial, and tendentious. What makes a “monster”? Unacceptable physical appearance? Grotesque irresponsibility? Violent behavior? Shelley's novel challenges us about all this, especially in an age when large populations of enslaved Africans were regarded as subhuman monsters. But even more personally, she also hits the nerve of every parent's fears in pregnancy: what if the baby is a monstrous disappointment—deficient in parts or capacity, or even just the undesired sex?
CC: The story of Frankenstein’s origin—Byron’s ghost-story challenge, the Villa Diodati, Mary’s waking nightmare—has become almost as famous as the novel itself. How much of that origin story do we actually know to be true, and how much has become its own kind of legend?
SW: There‘s every reason to believe the origin story of Frankenstein is true. Mary Shelley's 1831 introduction to a new edition of her novel, recounting that pivotal night, is widely corroborated by others present, including Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John William Polidori, in their journals and letters. The origin story itself is quite compelling, a fact Shelley‘s publishers recognized when they pre-published it ahead of the novel.
CC: You've pointed out that Victor Frankenstein is a university student, not a doctor; his creature closer to what you’ve called “a thesis project gone horribly wrong” than a mad scientist's monster. Why do you think popular culture got that detail so wrong, and does it matter?
SW: It matters mightily. Victor Frankenstein was a brilliant 19-year-old undergraduate who went rogue on his ”independent study“ project. He failed to consult his professors, fellow students, or parents. But this isn't just a cautionary tale about unsupervised science. It taps into emerging anxieties about science—particularly electrical science—as both a promise and a peril. The question of “what's going on in the lab?” is an enduring one, relevant right up to COVID-19. It's no coincidence that “Franken-” has become a prefix for any novelty that didn‘t turn out as planned.
CC: Shelley’s creature is never given a name. What does that namelessness do to the way we're meant to see him—as monster, as victim, or as something in between?
SW: He is nameless because he has no name; he is not integrated into the social order. Popular culture half-mistakenly calls him “Frankenstein.” I say ”half-mistakenly” because while it's a technical error, it also ironically links him to his creator, a connection his creator desperately tries to deny. To be nameless is to lack an identity within the human world, the human community. Humans live with animals, but only those adopted as pets, companions, or respected workers are given names.
CC: You’ve noted that Victor creates life entirely on his own, with no mother involved, and that the novel treats nature as something to be mastered rather than cared for. What do you think Shelley, writing at just nineteen and already having lost a child of her own, was working through with that idea?
SW: The terrible event of Shelley‘s life was that her own birth led to her mother's death from postpartum poisoning. She grew up motherless and felt this profoundly. When she lost her first child, it was a horror in reverse. She had a dream that the infant hadn't died, and she brought it to the warmth of the fire, where the baby came back to life. Then she awoke to the reality of death. You can see this dream replayed when the nearly dead Frankenstein is warmed by the ship's stove and "animated" back to life.
As for Frankenstein, he follows Francis Bacon of the Renaissance and the dynamic nineteenth-century chemist Humphry Davy in describing nature as a “she” to be “penetrated” and “mastered” by he-science. This is a variation of the traditional trope of “Nature” as female (think “Mother Nature”) and of human genius in conquering nature as male.
CC: You and your husband spent years producing The Annotated Frankenstein, digging into the science and ideas on which Shelley built the story. What surprised you most in that process, something most readers miss without knowing the background?
SW: Well, not years. This was a project we worked on, mostly off and on, for two years. I think two things surprised us and were appreciated by our readers: the chronology we developed for the events of the novel and the parallel chronology of the years in the historical calendar. A lot of intriguing coincidences came up. Another was the “word-work”—tracking the career of keywords such as wretch and monster across the novel and seeing how they were attached to various situations and characters, not just the Creature. Actually, creature and fellow-creature were also key. And one that our readers really liked was frank words (frank as in honest, forthright), which were keyed into Frankenstein family values.
CC: Two centuries on, Frankenstein is still taught in classrooms everywhere. What is it about this particular novel that keeps it feeling alive and relevant, instead of just an old story from another era?
SW: Try to stop it! Every year, every month, newspapers use the word to describe some peril or other. Every few years, another director (most recently del Toro) takes another big swing at interpreting the novel. It is immensely readable. I've put it on a number of syllabi, from community classes to first-year seminars to my undergraduate courses on Paradise Lost, Romantic literature, Selves and Others, and Gender and Imagination. It lights up any syllabus and, in turn, is illuminated by different companion texts.
CC: Your broader work covers the whole Romantic era—Keats, Byron, the Shelleys, and their circle. How does knowing that wider world change the way we should read Frankenstein?
SW: This would take pages. But the three you mention have adjacent tales: Keats's Lamia is about an alluring woman who may or may not be a monster, and with whom romance is fatal; Byron's Vampyre tale (conceived the same night); the political monsters in Shelley's poetry; and then Coleridge's Christabel, with a woman (again!) who may or may not be a vampire. And this is just the literary world. As we read the literature of the French Revolution controversy, of slavery and the abolition movement, and of the emerging polemics for the rights of men and the rights of women, “what is monstrous” and “who gets to say so” are potent questions.
CC: If Mary Shelley could see what her creature has become—the movies, the Halloween costumes, the cultural shorthand for science gone wrong—what do you think would surprise her most, and what do you think she'd recognize as still true to her original intent?
SW: I think she'd be thrilled to see the durability of her fable in all its forms. She was quite impressed by the first stage version she saw in 1823 and appreciated the blank in the dramatis personae to signify the Creature. However, I think she might wish that the philosophical and ethical issues of her novel, and how narrative control affects our sympathy, hadn't been effaced by the rise of the “horror” genre. What she and I might wish for is a cinematic representation of her actual novel. This has yet to come.
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