Literary Works That Shape Our World: A Critical Analysis - Sykalo Evgen 2023

Analysis of “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley

Monsters Don’t Just Happen: Thinking (Too Much) About Frankenstein in 2025

Let’s just get this out of the way: Frankenstein isn’t the book you think it is. Unless you’re already a fan of Mary Shelley and her ghost-story-on-steroids, chances are you’ve been tricked by pop culture’s Frankenstein Industrial Complex—green guy, bolts in the neck, monosyllabic rage. It’s like watching a friend get turned into a meme. Actually, not like—it is that. The creature (not Frankenstein, by the way—how are we still doing this?) has been flattened into a Halloween costume. A tragic metaphor for “don’t play God” or “technology bad” or whatever message 1930s Hollywood needed. But when you actually read the book, something happens. Something uncomfortable, a little too close for comfort.

Because it turns out Mary Shelley wasn’t just writing about horror. She was writing about loneliness. About abandonment. About men with too many ideas and too little empathy. About what happens when ambition outpaces responsibility. Which is to say—yes, she was writing about science. But she was also writing about now.

I mean, the historical context is already wild. Shelley was a teenager—a teenager—when she wrote Frankenstein, during what basically amounted to a goth writing retreat in 1816 with her boyfriend Percy (yes, that Percy Shelley) and Lord Byron, who was kind of the literary equivalent of a Reddit comment section in human form. A volcano had just erupted in Indonesia, the sky went dark across Europe, and “The Year Without a Summer” was born. People thought the apocalypse might be nigh. Crops failed. The weather got creepy. Everyone was sick and depressed.

So, you know—perfect vibes for a horror novel.

But even with the storm clouds and the poetry bros circling, Frankenstein wasn’t just some fever-dream one-off. Shelley wasn’t writing into a vacuum. This was the golden age of “man conquering nature” science—the same early 19th-century moment when electricity was making its way into labs, and guys like Luigi Galvani were electrocuting dead frogs to see if they’d twitch. Spoiler: they twitched. Everyone lost their minds. Suddenly electricity was life, or close enough. Resurrection was (maybe?) real. So when Victor Frankenstein assembles a corpse from body parts and zaps it to life, that wasn’t fantasy. That was extrapolation.

It’s like if someone now wrote a novel where a guy trains an AI on the entire human internet and then accidentally creates a god who texts him at 3 a.m. That feels like science fiction. Until you check the news.

So yes, Frankenstein is a scientist. But he’s also a narcissist, and a coward, and a very bad dad. One of the most surprising things about reading Frankenstein now, especially if you’ve grown up with the idea of the “mad genius,” is how deeply annoying Victor is. He builds this being—this poor stitched-together, sentient patchwork of limbs—and then abandons it the moment it breathes. Like, literally runs out of the room. Has a panic attack. Doesn’t even name it.

Imagine giving birth and ghosting your child. That’s what Victor does.

And then he acts surprised when things go wrong.

The creature, meanwhile, does his best. He teaches himself to read. He watches a family from afar. He tries—really tries—to be good. But no one gives him a chance. Everyone screams, throws things, beats him. He’s ugly, yes, but he’s also articulate, gentle, curious. (Before he turns vengeful, he’s honestly kind of a nerd.) It’s not until he’s completely, systematically dehumanized that he starts to act like the monster he’s accused of being.

And that’s where the book hits a nerve. Because it’s not just about science or hubris or even creation. It’s about the failure to care for what you bring into the world. It’s about moral responsibility. It’s about what happens when you make something—or someone—and then treat it like trash when it doesn’t conform to your fantasy.

Frankenstein’s creature is the original ghosted child. The original incel. The original AI bot gone rogue. And he is so much more articulate than you remembered.

There’s a passage late in the novel where the creature confronts Frankenstein in the Arctic, and it’s the closest the book comes to a true reckoning. He basically says: You made me. You abandoned me. You hated me. And now you act like I’m the problem? It’s not subtle. But Shelley doesn’t need it to be. What she’s doing is laying out the terms of the emotional transaction. It’s a book that forces us to look at the consequences of what we create—not just whether it “works,” but whether we’re ready to be responsible for it.

And the answer, at least in 1818, was a resounding: nope.

The creature never gets a name. I keep coming back to that. It’s one of the most brutal and quiet cruelties in the book. To name is to recognize. To give context. To admit relation. And Victor refuses. He doesn’t even try.

And isn’t that a little too real in 2025? We love to build things we can’t control—apps, algorithms, movements—and then act all surprised when they become something else, something unmanageable, something human. We ghost what we don’t like. We block, we log off, we say “this isn’t what I meant,” as if that erases the consequences. Victor Frankenstein is every tech CEO who launched a platform and then shrugged when it got people killed. He’s every parent who can’t look their kid in the eye after saying “you were a mistake.” He’s every artist who disowns their work the moment it makes someone uncomfortable.

But he’s also… us. He’s the part of us that wants control without intimacy. Innovation without guilt. Creation without complication.

And that’s why Frankenstein still matters. It’s not just an old horror novel. It’s an emotional map of moral failure. It’s a mirror, and not a clean one.

And okay, yes, structurally it’s a mess. There’s a frame narrative inside a frame narrative inside a letter. People monologue like they’re on molly. Everyone is always collapsing or falling into fevers or telling someone else’s story for them. Shelley wasn’t too concerned with plausibility. (The creature teaches himself to speak perfect French by eavesdropping on a family in the woods—sure, Jan.)

But that’s part of the weird, baroque charm. The book feels like it’s alive in the way Victor’s creature is alive—stitched together from mismatched pieces, full of longing, trembling with rage.

Which makes it even more painful when we reduce it to a cliché.

Because Mary Shelley didn’t give us a neat moral fable. She gave us a crisis. A question: what do we owe what we make? And what happens when we refuse to answer?

We’re still not answering.

And maybe that’s the most terrifying part.

The Monster Was the Scientist All Along: “Frankenstein” and the Glorious, Terrifying Birth of Modern Science

So here’s the thing about Frankenstein: you think you remember it. Lightning. Screaming. A stitched-together guy with bolts in his neck. Maybe a fever dream from that one high school English class where someone called it “Gothic” and then moved on. But actually sitting down and reading Frankenstein—Mary Shelley’s slippery, unsettling, intensely weird 1818 novel—is something else entirely. It’s less of a horror story and more of a science-fueled existential crisis, disguised in the rotting skin of a monster tale.

And no, Victor Frankenstein is not the monster. If you’re still making that mistake, we have bigger problems.

What Shelley did—accidentally iconically, I might add—was write the first real science fiction novel before that term even existed. And not in the shiny-spaceships-and-laser-guns kind of way. This is proto-science fiction as dread: the anxious, gothic cousin of Enlightenment optimism. A “what if” that feels less like imagination and more like prophecy. You want to know what science looked like in the early 1800s? Imagine a candlelit basement, frogs twitching on dissecting tables, a suspicious number of electrical experiments happening way too close to the rain. That was the vibe.

Let There Be Light—and by Light, I Mean Electricity

Let’s back up. It’s the early 19th century, and science—actual science—is just beginning to feel like magic that works. People are cutting open bodies, measuring storms, bottling gases, and, crucially, zapping dead frogs with sparks of electricity. Luigi Galvani had already done his infamous frog-leg twitching experiment by the 1790s. His nephew, Giovanni Aldini, took it further. And by “further,” I mean he applied electrical currents to the corpses of recently executed criminals to make their limbs jerk and faces contort in front of live audiences. (Try un-seeing that next time you blink.)

This is the world Mary Shelley was writing in. She was nineteen. She was watching these experiments. And she was probably asking what a lot of us would ask if we weren’t distracted by the flashing spectacle: just because you can bring flesh to life… why would you?

That’s what Frankenstein taps into. Not the science itself, but the vibe. The audacity. The male hubris humming just beneath every volt. Victor is obsessed not with helping anyone, not with curing disease or ending suffering—he just wants to know. To rip the curtain off life and see what’s behind it. And if that means cobbling together a corpse baby from graveyard leftovers? Sure. He’s in. And he never—not once—thinks through the ethics of it. Or, god forbid, the feelings of the being he creates.

Which is really the entire point.

Enlightenment, But Make It Sad

Shelley grew up surrounded by brainy men: her father William Godwin, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron with his very loud brooding. All these men, drunk on reason and theory, talking about progress like it’s an inevitable upward slope. Science was having a moment. Chemistry, anatomy, biology—disciplines were still being invented as they went. But with that came a kind of intellectual swagger: the belief that reason could conquer anything. Death? Just another puzzle to solve.

Shelley wasn’t so sure.

She took that idea—that Enlightenment confidence—and twisted it until it cracked. Frankenstein reads like a rebuttal to scientific arrogance. A revenge fantasy where the experiment talks back. The creature doesn’t just shamble around and grunt. He reads. He learns to speak. He gets ghosted by humanity and comes back with receipts. He’s lonely, articulate, desperate—and that makes him infinitely more haunting than any silent monster.

The real horror isn’t the reanimation—it’s what happens after. The complete failure to take responsibility for a new form of life. Victor brings a thinking, feeling being into the world and immediately panics. Like a Reddit user who builds an AI girlfriend and then deletes her when she asks too many questions.

Mary Shelley wasn’t inventing evil robots. She was inventing consequences.

Science, but Also Sex, but Also Death

There’s no getting around it—Frankenstein is drenched in anxiety about bodies. Making them. Destroying them. Owning them. The novel is a funhouse mirror of creation myths: God made man in his image, but Victor makes a man out of corpses and abandons him like a broken iPhone. There’s no woman involved in this act of creation, which is kind of the point. It’s man trying to outdo nature, to one-up biology. And it backfires spectacularly.

It’s not subtle. Victor spends half the book in some kind of gothic fever state, writhing in laboratories, hallucinating in forests, running from responsibility like it’s catching. There’s a deep, gnawing fear in the novel that science can become too intimate, too invasive. That creation isn’t a triumph, but a form of trespassing. And that trespass will echo—through grief, through guilt, through generations.

Shelley knew what she was doing. She’d lost a child by the time she wrote Frankenstein. She’d seen death up close. The novel keeps circling back to that raw, pulsing nerve of loss. Victor doesn’t just fail as a creator. He fails as a human being. And the people around him—Elizabeth, Justine, William—they suffer for his delusion of grandeur.

And somehow, this makes the creature more sympathetic. He never asked to exist. He just wants kindness. Or, barring that, revenge. He’s not born a monster. He’s made into one. And if that doesn’t feel like a 21st-century metaphor for everything from toxic masculinity to algorithmic bias, I don’t know what does.

The Future Is Already Dead

So let’s talk science fiction again. Shelley didn’t know the word, but she basically invented the genre. Not with ray guns or space wars, but with a deeply specific question: what if science, instead of saving us, made everything worse?

This is the ancestor of Black Mirror, of Ex Machina, of every emotionally fraught robot in pop culture. You know the type. Too smart, too self-aware, built by someone with a god complex and no exit plan. Shelley did it first. And better.

Because here’s the real kicker: Frankenstein doesn’t offer a solution. There’s no neat fix. The novel ends in the Arctic, cold and bleak and endless, with the creature vowing to destroy himself. It’s not hopeful. It’s not resolved. It’s haunted. Like a warning written in frostbite and hubris.

And it still hits. Maybe now more than ever. Because we’re living in an age where the line between creation and control is blurrier than ever. AI, bioengineering, CRISPR, deepfakes—we’re all Victor now, playing with forces we half-understand and pretending we’re prepared for the fallout.

Spoiler: we’re not.

But Is It Even Fun to Read?

I mean... sort of? It’s not a beach read. The prose can be dense, looped with 19th-century formality. People faint. A lot. The word “wretch” gets a workout. But there’s something magnetic about the rhythm. Once you get into it, the drama builds like a storm front—slow at first, then absolutely relentless. And the emotions are huge. This is not a chill book. It’s all agony and yearning and icebergs and howling into the void.

Also: it’s kind of meta. A story within a story within a letter. It’s framed like a Russian nesting doll of male narrators, each one more unreliable than the last. The creature’s own account is the most gripping, which maybe tells you something. He’s the one who actually understands what’s going on. Victor’s just trying to outpace his own consequences, like a guy deleting his browsing history while the house is on fire.

If anything, Frankenstein is better when you stop thinking of it as a dusty “classic” and start reading it as a messy, emotional, intellectually punk book written by a nineteen-year-old woman who had absolutely had it with men playing god.

Which, I guess, is still a pretty relevant genre.

That’s the trick of Frankenstein, and maybe the reason it’s survived longer than any of its stitched-together parts. It isn’t really about monsters. It’s about what happens when curiosity loses its conscience. When progress forgets its purpose. When someone creates something powerful, and then disappears when it becomes too human.

It’s not a warning. It’s a mirror. And we’re all standing in front of it now, holding wires.

The Mad Scientist as Ethical Warning

Victor Frankenstein doesn’t just test limits. He dives headfirst into the abyss without a rope. Graverobbing, corpse-patching, two years of clandestine body-building—all to crack the code of life. And the moment he succeeds? He bolts. He ghosts his runaway creation. I mean—who even talks like that anymore? But that’s the point. He births a thinking, feeling being, then flees, leaving him to fend for... well, society's prejudices.

In Shelley’s time, folks were freaking out about corpses and body-snatching (Burke and Hare, anyone?). Anatomy classes were sensational; public dissections were morbid theatre. People genuinely wondered if too much meddling might invite disaster or cosmic punishment . Shelley picked up those whispers and tuned in. She looked at experimental science and saw negligence wrapped in white coats. Victor isn't just a genius—he’s reckless. He prioritizes discovery over moral responsibility. He is that guy who pushes the code to production without thinking through edge cases, then pretends his app didn’t wreck lives.

Ethics, Experimentation, and Abandonment

All these voices from the era—Bichat’s anatomy, Davy’s electricity, the early bioethics debates—they swirl in the book. Shelley layers that charged aesthetic so seamlessly it feels accidental . But underneath, Frankenstein is a manual of what happens when ethics don’t keep pace with innovation. There’s even a bright pink line in a BMC Medical Ethics paper: Frankenstein is useful to discuss “personal and social limits of science, the connection between curiosity and scientific progress, and scientists’ responsibilities”.

The creature learns language, literature—Paradise Lost, the works—he is articulate, yearning, morally aware. And he’s denied acceptance at every turn. So he becomes resentful, even vengeful. But Shelley doesn’t craft him as inherently evil; he becomes monstrous through neglect and cruelty. That’s a seismic inversion of the usual monster trope. The real failure is not creation; it’s refusal to care.

Stick to the Social—Shelley as Rumination

There’s more. Shelley, daughter of feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and philosopher William Godwin, knew loss. She was orphaned, then lost her own children. Guilt and grief track her through the book—Victor abandons the creature like a wronged spouse, and the monster retaliates like a scorned lover. The narrative doubles as a meditation on rejection, responsibility, consequences .

Plus, Shelley wrote during the tumult: post-Revolutionary anxieties, Industrial Revolution anxieties, the “Year Without a Summer” volcanic winter in 1816—all a cultural pressure cooker . The political undercurrent—man vs. nature, man vs. god, man vs. man—is thick. She doesn’t necessarily condemn progress, but she questions who gets to progress and at what cost. Victor chases ambition, but wanders into isolation, paranoia, grief. The language is Romantic, but her critique is razor-sharp.

Galvanism, Resurrection, and the Limits of Creation

Remember Aldini electrifying bodies? That really happened—he jolted Forster’s corpse in London, and Shelley likely heard whispers.

Her creature isn’t resurrected by sorcery but by science. Which is dark. And plausible. And… terrifying. Because that means human hands holding the switch.

That’s what adds so much nuance: this isn’t a monster narrative with predictable stakes. It’s proto-science-fiction with emotional stakes stacked on top. The question shifts from if we can to should we. The public then and now still roars the latter, but we keep messing with things—CRISPR, AI, biotech—before asking how to care for what’s born.

Now: Why It Still Matters

Re-read with an internet critic’s eye and you see echoes of influencer platforms, AI bots, synthetic biology. We build, we scale, we abandon. We launch something reckless and then hide behind terms of service when it catches fire. Frankenstein’s creature is every algorithm gone rogue, every app that snowballs, every tech founder who vanishes when things spiral.

Shelley’s novel may be 200+ years old, but it's not dusty. The narrative rhythms—nested letters, frame stories, Victor’s mania, the creature’s tragedy—they mimic how we mediate responsibility: through screens, through filters, through layers of blame. We disconnect from the thing we made. We refuse to name it. We refuse to own our power.

Not Just a Caution, But a Cry

Let me be clear: Frankenstein isn’t just a cautionary tale. It’s an emotional plea. Shelley didn’t give us a neat ending. There’s no victory. The Arctic fades out, the creature limps into the unknown—intelligently, remorsefully, unresolved.

That is the point: scientific ethics aren’t theoretical. They're contingent, ongoing, emotional, human.

So let’s maybe borrow her honesty. Let’s build, but let’s also stay. Name what we make. Love—or at least care for—it. Because if we don’t—well, the creature won't just fade away. But we’ll have nobody to blame but ourselves.

Frankenstein’s Main Themes: A Crackling Mess of Ambition, Abandonment, Identity

Knowledge is electric—until it zaps you
First off, dangerous knowledge isn’t just a sidebar. It’s the electric hum that pulses through Frankenstein: Victor Frankenstein doesn’t just chase science—he chases creation. Galvani’s frog leg experiments happen in labs, but Shelley reanimates them in a basement, snowing us with electricity and ambition. That moment, when Victor sees the creature open its yellow eyes—it’s not just shock. It’s epistemological dread. Because once he knows how to power life, he’s lost. No cooling-off period. No ethics check. Just wires and screams and regret.

Ambition as a one-way street
Ambition is a theme that runs hot and cold across the novel. Victor and Walton chase absolutism—Walton wants to dominate the North Pole, Victor wants to dominate nature. And sure—they both get what they want. But at what cost? Walton learns, and steps back. Victor doesn’t ever learn—he spirals into grief, obsession, and isolation.

Isolation: not tragic, but deadly
Family? Community? Not Victor’s style. Once he starts his experiment, he ghosts Clerval, Elizabeth—he ghosts everyone. Then the creature gets ghosted too: no name, no love, no welcome. Isolation is not metaphor—it’s a slow death. Both creator and creation drown in loneliness.

Nature as both balm and beast
Modern readers might skip the Alps, but Shelley didn’t. Nature in Frankenstein isn’t just window dressing. It’s a character. It speaks, it consoles, it judges. Victor hikes Mont Blanc or chases storms because only the sublime world can drown out his guilt. But even nature betrays him in the end—Arctic ice isn’t healing. It’s a mirror of his frozen heart.

Otherness and the search for belonging
The creature isn’t born bad. He’s eloquent, he’s caring—he just wants company. He observes the De Laceys, picks up words, feels empathy. And then he gets rejected over and over. It's a brutal inversion: the real monster is society’s reflexive horror at the unfamiliar. Isolation breeds resentment. Resentment incubates rage.

Revenge is education—learned, not innate
Revenge in Frankenstein isn’t primal—it’s pedagogical. The creature doesn’t commit atrocities until he’s had no choice but wrath. Sympathy gives way to vengeance when no door opens. The result is cycles of murder that feel tragically logical . Shelley doesn’t glamorize revenge. She shows us how impotent neglect shapes it.

Parenthood without parenthood
Is Victor the mother? Or the father? There’s no nurturing. No compassion. He creates life without creating kinship. Feminist readings argue Frankenstein is a birth myth without birth—a man reaching through the natural order, but failing the emotional one. When you read it that way, the novel shakes. It feels less gothic and more domestic horror.

Identity, otherness, and monstrous reflection
The creature is a mirror—of Victor’s unresolved contradictions, of a society mastering bodies but refusing empathy. His body is grotesque, but his mind is aligned with humanity. That blur—the gap between appearance and essence—is the existential core of the story . He’s not an alien. He’s an Other who reflects society’s refusal to see him as himself.

The moral burden of creation
Shelley punctures Enlightenment hubris: logic needs ethics. Otherwise it becomes a one-way ticket to ruin. Victor pursues knowledge like it's a game—then pretends it’s not his fault when things unravel. The consequence? Death and regret, not progress. Frankenstein doesn’t ask can you do it—it asks should you do it. And then who will live with that choice?

Dualities: creative and destructive
From light and fire to ice and shadow, Shelley threads duality through every metaphor: knowledge becomes flame, chance becomes curse. The creature loves fire one day, burns lashes the next. Victor finds comfort in mountains, but they reveal his insignificance. That tension, between creation and destruction, is the novel’s heartbeat.

Why it matters now
These themes—responsibility, ambition, isolation, identity, creation—aren’t just period motifs. They’re unsolved problems of the digital age. We push code into the world and ignore the bugs. We ghost algorithms, platforms, users when consequences get messy. We still create and abandon. And then we act surprised when the thing we made has teeth.

Shelley doesn’t offer catharsis. She leaves us in the Arctic with Victor’s corpse and the creature vowing self-immolation. No neat wrap-up. No moral uplift. Just frigid resolution—and a warning that cuts deep .