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What does the monster in Frankenstein represent?

May 27, 20266 min readbook-analysis

The creature in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein represents the consequences of creation without responsibility -- a being brought into existence by ambition and abandoned to suffer the results of that ambition alone.

Published in 1818, when Shelley was just twenty years old, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus remains one of the most argued-over novels in the English language. The creature at its center is not simply a monster in the gothic sense. He is a mirror -- and what he reflects changes depending on which part of the novel you are standing in.

What does the creature represent at the moment of creation?#

At the moment Victor Frankenstein animates his creation, the creature represents the dream of science unchecked by ethics. Victor has spent years assembling a human form from charnel houses and dissecting rooms, driven by the belief that he can defeat death itself. The moment the creature opens his yellow eyes, Victor feels not triumph but revulsion, and flees.

This is Shelley's first and clearest argument. The creature at birth represents the consequence of asking can we without first asking should we. Shelley was writing in the shadow of the early industrial revolution, when machinery was reshaping human life faster than society could adapt. The creature is that machinery: powerful, real, and utterly without a moral framework because the person responsible for providing one ran away.

What does the creature represent as he learns to speak and read?#

By the middle of the novel, the creature has taught himself to read by secretly observing the De Lacey family. He reads Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives, and The Sorrows of Young Werther. He understands his own situation with painful clarity: he is Adam without an Eden, or Satan cast out, depending on the page.

Here the creature represents the injustice of circumstance. He is articulate, feeling, morally serious, and completely alone. Every human who sees him recoils. The cottagers he has come to love drive him away without hearing a word he says. His appearance condemns him before he speaks. Shelley is asking a question that cuts: how much of character is formed by how we are treated, rather than what we are born with?

The literary critic Mary Poovey argued in her 1984 study The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer that the creature embodies the contradictions Shelley herself felt: the desire for connection and the experience of exclusion. Shelley was the daughter of the philosopher William Godwin and the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died giving birth to her. She knew something about being defined by circumstances beyond her control.

What does the creature represent in his relationship with Victor?#

The creature and Victor are doubles. This is the reading that has aged best. Victor is obsessed, isolated, and unable to accept the consequences of his actions. The creature becomes a dark reflection of Victor's own psychology: the part of himself Victor refuses to acknowledge.

When the creature demands Victor build him a companion, he is asking for the one thing Victor has failed to provide: relationship. Victor begins the companion, then destroys her, terrified of what two such creatures might produce. The creature's response -- systematic destruction of everyone Victor loves -- is the mirror image of Victor's original act. Victor destroyed the possibility of the creature's happiness. The creature destroys the possibility of Victor's.

This doubling is why the novel's subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, matters. Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. He was punished eternally. Victor steals the secret of life and gives it form. He is also punished eternally, chasing his creation to the Arctic, where both of them die. Whether Victor is Prometheus or the creature is the fire is a question the novel deliberately refuses to answer.

What does the creature represent to modern readers?#

Contemporary readers have found new dimensions in the creature that earlier generations missed. He has been read as representing the colonial subject: a being defined entirely by the gaze of a dominant culture, denied personhood by appearance alone, whose violence is the direct product of that denial. H.L. Malchow traced the influence of colonial imagery on Shelley's descriptions of the creature in Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford University Press, 1996).

He has also been read as the outcast of industrial society: the worker produced by a system that has no place for him once his use is exhausted. The creature is made, animated to serve a purpose, and then discarded.

The most emotionally direct reading is also the simplest. The creature is a child abandoned by a parent, asking why he was brought into a world that did not want him. Shelley, who had lost children of her own and whose mother died at her birth, knew this particular grief from several angles.

Is the creature a monster at all?#

This is the question the novel most wants you to sit with. The creature commits murders. He is capable of calculated cruelty. But Shelley presents every act of violence as the direct consequence of a prior act of abandonment or rejection. He kills Victor's brother William after William recoils from him in terror. He kills Victor's bride Elizabeth as the final act of a vendetta Victor himself escalated at every turn.

The creature says to Victor: "I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, kicked, and trampled on." He is not wrong about his situation. The question of whether that justifies what he does is the question the novel leaves open.

Shelley does not let the creature off. But she does not let Victor off either. The novel's moral weight falls on the act of creation and abandonment, not on what the abandoned thing became. Who the real monster in Frankenstein is -- Victor or the creature -- is worth reading alongside this piece, because the two questions are inseparable.

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