Frankenstein Summary: Mary Shelley's Gothic Novel Explained
What Frankenstein is about
Published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus follows a young scientist who makes a living, thinking creature out of parts taken from the dead, then cannot bear the sight of what he has done. Mary Shelley began writing it at 18, while staying in Bath, and was 20 when the first edition appeared. Her name was not on it. It surfaced first on a French translation published in Paris in 1821, and the revised English edition of 1831 carried her name along with a new preface and a more explicitly moral tone.
The story begins with Victor Frankenstein, born in late eighteenth-century Naples to an upper-class Genevese family. As a boy he is obsessed with alchemy. As he grows, he turns to chemistry and electricity. After his mother Caroline dies of scarlet fever, he leaves home for the University of Ingolstadt, where his studies lead him to a method of creating life. He assembles a large humanoid figure from body parts stolen out of charnel houses and fresh graves. When it opens its eyes, he runs. He returns the next day and the creature is gone.
From there the novel splits open. The creature teaches himself to speak, read and write by watching a family through the wall of a hovel, and by reading books including Paradise Lost. He learns who made him from papers left in the clothes he took from Ingolstadt. Every attempt he makes to join human company ends badly. The blind father of the household treats him kindly; the rest of the family chase him off. He pulls a drowning girl from a river and is shot by her father, who has misread the scene. What follows is a chase in both directions, across Europe and finally into the Arctic.
The main characters
Victor Frankenstein is the ambitious man at the centre, gifted, secretive and quick to flee the consequences of his own work. The creature, never given a name, is the novel's most articulate voice. He is intelligent, well read and lonely, and he turns violent only after repeated rejection. His request to Victor is simple: make me a female companion and I will go away.
Around them stand the people Victor loves and fails to protect. William, his younger brother. Justine, the family servant. Elizabeth Lavenza, his childhood friend, born in Italy, whom he marries. Henry Clerval, his friend and travelling companion. Alphonse, his father. Framing the whole book is Captain Robert Walton, leading an expedition to the North Pole, who finds Victor near death on the ice and writes down what he hears.
One note worth making, because it comes up constantly: Frankenstein is the maker, not the made thing. The name has been attached to the creature by mistake ever since the book appeared.
The themes
Ambition is the engine. Victor wants to do something no one has done, and the subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, tells you how Shelley reads that desire. The theft of fire has a price.
Identity runs alongside it. The creature has to work out what he is from scratch, assembling a self out of overheard language, borrowed books and a few documents. He reads Milton and sees himself in it. His appearance decides his fate before he can speak a word in his own defence.
Revenge binds the two together. Each wrong produces the next. And underneath all of it sits a moral question Shelley never resolves neatly: what does a creator owe the thing he creates? Victor's failure is not the experiment. It is the abandonment.
How it ends
Stop here if you want the ending clean. Victor agrees to build a female companion and sets up a laboratory in Orkney, then destroys the half-finished body, fearing what the pair might breed. The creature promises to be with him on his wedding night and murders Henry Clerval first. Victor marries Elizabeth; the creature kills her. Alphonse dies of grief days later. Victor pursues the creature to the Arctic, is rescued by Walton, tells his story, and dies aboard the ship in a weakened state. The crew turn back rather than press on to the Pole. The creature boards the ship, mourns over Victor's body, tells Walton he means to burn himself on a pyre, and goes.
Why it still matters
The book came out of a ghost story contest in 1816, proposed by Lord Byron, with Mary and Percy Shelley, Byron and John Polidori all taking part. Shelley's idea arrived after days of thinking: a scientist who makes life and is horrified by it. Her travels through Europe fed it, including a stop at Gernsheim near Frankenstein Castle, where the alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel had worked a century earlier, and the Geneva region where much of the novel is set.
It is now one of the best-known works in English literature, Gothic in machinery and Romantic in feeling, and it effectively started a genre. The horror story as we have it, in print, on stage and on screen, runs back to this book. Read it if you want the argument underneath the monster movies, or if you want to see how much sympathy Shelley gives the thing everyone else runs from.
