by Gene Michael Stover
created Saturday, 2026 September 19
updated Monday, 2026 September 21
original at cybertiggyr.com/d9s4y.html
Published in 1818, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel by Mary Shelley.
I'm writing these thoughts here because I recently heard someone say that the horror of the book is the horror of Victor Frankenstein's creation.
I disagree with that interpretation. My book club read it in 2021, & our discussion back then would imply that we all disagree with that.
The artificial person is often incorrectly called Frankenstein. He's also called “Frankenstein's monster”, which is more accurate. A yet more accurate term is artificial person. My book club felt that an appropriate but shorter term for him nowadays is the Replicant. That's how I'll refer to him for the rest of this file.
Referring to Victor Frankenstein's creation as a Replicant risks invoking some unrelated issues from Blade Runner, but it emphasizes that Frankenstein's creation is an artificial person with an inner world & that the personal & society-wide ethical & legal questions surrounding him are significant.
I'm sure that if you could ask Victor Frankenstein what horrified him, he'd say that it was the monstrosity or forbidden nature of his creation. Nevertheless, Victor was an aristocrat & an emotionally immature young man. What really horrified him was responsibility, though I doubt he realized that.
As soon as Victor Frankenstein activated the Replicant, he ran away for days. We learn later that the Replicant woke up with no knowledge & no guidance. He had to make his way through a mostly unfriendly world with no help, which gave him a grim outlook on the world.
When he sought help from Victor Frankenstein, Victor betrayed the Replicant, refusing to admit that the Replicant was a kind of offspring of Victor's. He denied the Replicant's inner world & that his person-hood. Victor even destroyed what would have been a female Replicant, a partner for the first Replicant, that Victor had agreed to create.
So the first horror of the book is the harm that a privileged aristocrat did to another person & to his own family by refusing to accept his responsibilities as a kind of father.
The second horror takes up most of the action of the book. It's how 2 men keep ratcheting-up the cruelty to the other. They make each other's life more painful, thereby creating more resentment in the other, motivating the other to return the cruelty. The origin of this feedback loop lies in Victor Frankenstein's rejection of his responsibilities. The Replicant's initial grievance might be justified, but after that, he participates in the malignant feedback as much as his creator does.
Victor could have avoided the entire conflict simply by being present when the Replicant awoke first, greeting him into the world, & helping him work through life.
The horrors of the novel aren't the horrors of creating artificial persons. The horrors are about the harm done by rejection of responsibility & by malignant relationships. I think that one reason it still speaks to us today is that, though technology & lifestyles have change, those horrors haven't.
Frankenstein created the most active discussion of any of the books my book club has read. I don't mean that we all loved it; I mean that it got us talking the most. (I believe we all liked it.)
That especially impresses me when I remember that it was written more than 200 years before we read it, by a woman on another continent who never saw anything like the lifestyle we all live now (including all 4 of my book club members: Software engineers in our 50s.) She created a message that was meaningful to people hundreds of years later who live very different lives from anything she ever saw.
That is some damned respectable writing.
My book club discussed Shelley's description of the aristocratic society from which Victor came / in which his family existed. To us, it was a polite but sarcastic & condemning description of people who were priviledged & didn't realize it. We debated whether Shelley intended it that way, as sarcasm & condemnation. None of us was sure either way, though since I respect her so much for this message in a bottle that spoke to us so well, I chose to give her the benefit of the doubt, in other words, to believe that she did intend the sarcasm & condemnation.
I've also heard complaints that the book doesn't explain how Victor Frankenstein created the Replicant.
Think about that for a moment, please. Of course the book doesn't tell exactly how Victor did it. If it did, we'd have Replicants walking around. It's impossible for Mary Shelley to have told us how to create a Replicant without being remembered as the greatest medical practitioner of her time.
Also, the book does tell us how in as much detail as it could: Victor combined alchemy with the most modern (at his time) medical knowledge. He is smug that his teachers & fellow students have rejected the knowledge of the alchemists without ever learning it in the first place.