Victor Frankenstein Is the Real Monster: MARY SHELLEY'S MISUNDERSTOOD MASTERPIECE TURNS 200.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald

CONCEIVED AND WRITTEN 200 years ago by the 19-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley during a dreary summer sojourn to Lake Geneva, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus is the story of a scientist who, seduced by the lure of forbidden knowledge, creates new life that in the end destroys him.

When the novel debuted, it created a stir for its lurid gothic style and unusual conceit. Early reviewers scolded the then-unknown author, complaining that the slim volume had "neither principle, object, nor moral" and fretting that "it cannot mend, and will not even amuse its readers, unless their taste have been deplorably vitiated."

Yet almost from the moment of its publication, Shelley's narrative has been pressed into service as a modern morality play--a warning against freewheeling scientific experimentation. That reading is pervasive to this day in policy conversations and popular culture alike, cropping up everywhere from bioengineering conferences to an endless string of modern cinematic reboots. There's just one problem with the common reading of Frankenstein as a cautionary tale: It flows from a profound misunderstanding of the original text.

'I SAW AND HEARD OF NONE LIKE ME'

IN THE ANONYMOUSLY published 1818 edition of the book, an adolescent Victor Frankenstein dreams of discovering the elixir of life, imagining "what glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!" Later, enraptured by the study of natural philosophy at the university in Ingolstadt, he devotes himself to the question of whence the principle of life proceeded. "Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world," he exults.

Frankenstein's arduous study of physiology and anatomy are eventually rewarded by a "brilliant and wondrous" insight: He has "succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life" and is "capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter."

Working alone and in secret, Frankenstein sets about creating a human being using materials gathered from dissecting rooms and slaughterhouses. Because it is easier to work at a larger scale, he decides to make his creature 8 feet tall. (The average height of Englishmen was then about 5 and a half feet.)

After two years of work, Frankenstein on a late night in November ignites "a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet." Although he "had selected his features as beautiful," in that moment he is overcome with revulsion and runs out into the city to escape the "monster" he has brought to life. When Frankenstein slinks back to his lodgings the creature is gone, having taken his coat. Frankenstein promptly succumbs to a "nervous fever" that confines him for several months.

Later we learn that the creature, whose mind was as unformed as a newborn baby's, fled to the woods where he learned to survive on nuts and berries and enjoy the warmth of the sun and birdsong. When the peaceful vegetarian encountered for the first time people living in a village, they drove him away with stones and other missiles.

He found refuge in a hovel attached to a cottage. There he learned to speak and read while observing from his hiding place the gentle, noble manners of the De Lacey family.

The lonely creature comes to realize that he is "not even of the same nature as man." He notes: "I was more agile than they, and could subsist upon coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded their's. When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me."

The fact that the creature learned to speak and read in a period of just over a year indicates that he is far more intelligent than human beings, too. In any case, he eventually unravels the mystery of his origins by reading notes he finds in the coat he took from Frankenstein.

After even the De Laceys reject him as monstrous, the creature despairs of ever finding love and sympathy. He vows to seek and enact revenge on his creator for his abandonment.

Nearing Geneva some months later, he by chance encounters Frankenstein's much younger brother, William, in the woods. Thinking a child will be "unprejudiced" with regard to his "deformity," the creature seeks to whisk him away as a companion. But the boy cries out, and in an effort to silence him, the creature chokes William to death. He subsequently frames the family servant for his crime, leading to her execution.

When Frankenstein and the creature meet again, the latter justifies his actions on the grounds that all of his overtures of friendship, sympathy, and love have been violently rejected. He then persuades his creator to agree to fashion for him a female companion. Seeking "the affections of a sensitive being" like himself, he vows that "virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal." He pledges that he and his companion will lose themselves in the jungles of South America, never to trouble human beings again.

Only after Frankenstein betrays his promise does the creature retaliate by killing all the people closest to his creator. The two eventually perish chasing one another across the ice floes of the Arctic Ocean.

'IT'S ALIVE. IT'S ALIVE!'

"ON THE BASIS of its prevalence in culture, it may be presumed that Frankenstein is one of the strongest memes of modernity," argues the Polish literary critic Barbara Braid in a 2017 essay. "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is one of the most adaptable and adapted novels of all time, spurring countless renditions in film, television, comic books, cartoons, and other...