The Journal
Who is the real monster in Frankenstein -- Victor or the creature?
The real monster in Frankenstein is Victor -- not because the creature is blameless, but because Victor is the one who had a choice.
This is the question Mary Shelley's 1818 novel is most designed to make you argue about, and it is a genuinely difficult argument to resolve. Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus presents both Victor and the creature as capable of terrible things. But the novel's moral architecture consistently points in one direction: the creature's violence is a response to Victor's, and Victor's refusal to take responsibility is the engine that drives everything that follows.
What makes Victor monstrous?#
Victor's monstrousness is not dramatic. It is a series of failures of responsibility dressed up as tragedy.
He creates a conscious being capable of suffering, then abandons him the moment he finds the result disturbing. He refuses to make the creature a companion, not because he weighs the ethics carefully but because he is afraid of what two such creatures might produce. He watches innocent people -- his brother William, the servant Justine -- die for crimes the creature committed while Victor stays silent, unable to admit what he has done. He pursues the creature to the Arctic, framing his obsession as justice, when it is really an inability to accept that he bears responsibility for what the creature has become.
His narration is, from beginning to end, a performance of victimhood. Victor frames himself as someone to whom terrible things happened. Shelley gives the creature his own voice, in the central chapters, and the creature's account is devastating in its clarity: Victor gave him life, gave him nothing else, and then spent the rest of his life pretending this was someone else's fault.
What makes the creature monstrous?#
The creature kills. There is no avoiding this. He murders William, a child. He frames Justine, knowing she is innocent. He murders Henry Clerval and Elizabeth. Each act is a deliberate choice to hurt the people Victor loves most, and the creature is fully aware of what he is doing.
His argument -- that Victor's abandonment made him what he is -- is not a complete defence. Many people suffer abandonment and do not become killers. The creature's intelligence and articulateness make his choices more morally significant, not less. He understands cause and effect. He understands that these people are innocent. He chooses to hurt them anyway.
But Shelley does not let the creature's violence exist in a vacuum. Every murder follows a specific act of rejection or betrayal. The escalation is systematic and mirrors Victor's own pattern of promising and then withdrawing. The creature is monstrous in the way that products of monstrous situations often become monstrous: not inevitably, but with a clear causal chain.
What does the novel itself argue?#
The novel's structure is the clearest guide to Shelley's own position. Victor is the narrator of the outer story, but his narration is embedded in Walton's letters, which are embedded in Walton's own voyage of dangerous obsession. Walton is pursuing the North Pole with the same recklessness Victor pursued his experiment. Victor serves as Walton's warning -- but also as his mirror.
The creature's chapters in the middle of the novel are the most formally significant element. Shelley gives him a voice that is articulate, philosophical, and emotionally coherent. She does not give Victor's victims their own chapters. The novel's formal generosity to the creature's perspective is Shelley's argument made structural.
For the specific question of what the creature represents beyond the question of who is worse, what the monster in Frankenstein represents covers the symbolic dimensions in full.
The question Shelley actually wants you to ask#
The most productive version of this question is not "who is worse" but "who had more choice." Victor, as the creator, had the power to act differently at multiple points. The creature, as the created, was responding to the situation Victor constructed.
This is why the novel's title page epigraph -- from Paradise Lost: "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me Man?" -- is Adam's question, not Satan's. The creature is asking the question of every person brought into existence without consent: why was I made, and by whom, and what do I owe you for it?
Further reading#
For the biographical context behind the novel, who Mary Shelley was and why Frankenstein still matters covers the personal history.
For the gothic tradition the novel sits in, the best gothic novels in the public domain includes Shelley alongside Stoker and the Brontes.
Frankenstein is free to read on Foxing.
Sources#
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, 1818
- Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters, Routledge, 1988
- Fred Botting, Gothic, Routledge, 1996