So what is the larger point of the novel Frankenstein? Let’s look back on the novel again. The doctor creates the monster and abandons it. The monster, far from being a mental idiot, teaches himself to speak in multiple languages and read. He saves a girl’s life, only to be chased away based on how he looks. When he meets the doctor, rather than seeking revenge, the creature asks for a mate. The monster only attack’s the doctor’s wife after being denied this one request. The creature is, if not always emotionally stable, a rational, self-interested person.

That term comes from economics, where it is assumed that human beings are rational self-interested people. I find it an appropriate term to use as the creature does not appear to me to be a symbol of God-playing-man. Rather, he represents man, full stop. The doctor is a symbol for God. Frankenstein is a story where God is the villain.

This may seem like an odd take to you, but think about the circumstances this book was written in. Mary Shelley was married to the poet Percy Bryce Shelley, who wrote pamphlets against Christianity and organized religion in general. I don’t subscribe to the belief that Percy Shelley was the real author of Frankenstein, but it would be normal for husband and wife to share beliefs. Mary Shelley was not an atheist, but she didn’t exactly have orthodox religious beliefs.

Furthermore, the book was written in the early Victorian era, after the Enlightenment turned God into a distant clockmaker, and a mediocre one at that. Prior to the Enlightenment, the rate of technological and economic progress in society was slow and halting, prone to sudden reversals like the fall of the Roman Empire. It was assumed that the amount of pain and pleasure in the world was a constant, and the amount of pain was pretty high. The Scientific Revolution was like discovering all the cheat codes for a video game, and the world that existed before it seemed to be a cruel joke where man, in possession of an injury and disease prone body, suffered endlessly for no reason.

Returning once again to the book, you have a creature with a flawed, deformed body, thrown into an uncaring world with a second-rate body constructed of dead parts abandoned by a creator who alternates between running from him and trying to destroy him. So, the story is not just about the danger of man playing God: it’s about the danger of God playing God.

Not quite, I would argue, as it is clear that if the creature had the right guidance in life, he could have done quite well for himself. Clearly, he’s intelligent. He also doesn’t strike me as particularly malevolent, as he doesn’t hurt anyone until the doctor destroys his Eve. The doctor’s main sin is not creating the monster, but in refusing to love his creation. He is like the distant, uncaring God painted by the Enlightenment, allowing his creation to suffer for no reason. If the doctor had acted like a loving God, raising the creature like a son and giving him a wife, things might have turned out differently.

This is cemented by the ending, whereby the creature weeps at the doctor’s deathbed, mourning the fact that his negligent, uncaring creator is dying, even after the doctor tried to kill him. Whatever else Frankenstein has done, he did give the creature life, which he considers to be intrinsically valuable. Or at least he did. Now that the doctor is gone, the creature decides to destroy himself. Man wants to be loved by God, and now that God is dead, he loathes his own existence.

The movie gets this idea fundamentally wrong. The doctor doesn’t abandon the creature. Instead, the creature kills somebody and runs. Then, he drowns a little girl. The creature is destroyed by an angry mob while the doctor lives to get married, an ending which implies that the creature’s existence is fundamentally bad while the doctor’s existence is fundamentally good. The creature appears to be bad from the start, which is necessary if you are asserting that the doctor’s main sin was in creating the monster in the first place, even if you do so badly, as the movie did by throwing that abnormal brain issue in there. The movie tells you the villain is right: the creature is bad so the doctor was right to abandon it. It gets the book exactly wrong and in doing so, ironically implies that man’s life is not worth living.

That being said, there actually is a movie that gets the book right. Which movie? Find out next time when I finally finish this winding thread of thought.