Mystical systems
Frankenstein
Direct answer
Frankenstein: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is Mary Shelley's novel of 1818 about a student who gives life to a creature built from the dead and then abandons it.
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At a glance
- Also called
- the modern prometheus
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- Galvanism, Prometheus, Hubris, The Sorcerer's Apprentice
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is Mary Shelley's novel of 1818 about a student who gives life to a creature built from the dead and then abandons it.
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Is Frankenstein the monster or the doctor?
Victor Frankenstein, a young Genevan studying at Ingolstadt, discovers how to animate lifeless matter and assembles a being of great size. At the moment it opens its eyes he is seized with horror and runs. The creature, left to itself, learns speech and reading in secret, is driven off by everyone who sees it, and asks its maker for a companion. When Victor destroys the half-made mate, it takes revenge on those he loves, and the two pursue each other to the Arctic ice.
Several things commonly believed about the book are not in it. Frankenstein is the maker, not the creature, which has no name. He is a student, not a doctor. The novel gives no method and no bolt of lightning; the laboratory scene comes from the stage and the film of 1931. Nor does it clearly condemn the search for knowledge. What it dwells on is a maker who would not care for what he had made.
On the tree of the hidden arts: Forbidden knowledge.
What sets Frankenstein apart
The novel is built as a set of nested testimonies, an explorer's letters enclosing Victor's story enclosing the creature's own, and the innermost voice is the most eloquent. That structure is the book's argument: the being everyone flees turns out to reason and feel more finely than its maker. The films reversed this by taking away its speech. Shelley's creature reads Milton and Plutarch and makes its case like an advocate; the screen monster grunts, and the moral weight moves from neglect to recklessness.
- Author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797 to 1851)
- First published: London, 1 January 1818, anonymously, in three volumes
- Begun: June 1816, near Geneva, in a ghost story contest
- Revised edition: 1831, with the author's introduction
- Creature's reading: Milton's Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives, Goethe's Werther
- Classic film: directed by James Whale, with Boris Karloff, 1931
Often mistaken for something else: Galvanism was the real science of stirring dead muscle with electricity, which Shelley names as a hint; Frankenstein is the fiction that imagined it carried through to a whole living being.
The story behind Frankenstein
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, later Shelley, began the story in June 1816 at the age of eighteen, during a wet summer by Lake Geneva when Lord Byron proposed that each of the company write a ghost story. The novel was published anonymously in London in three volumes on 1 January 1818. Her name appeared on the second edition of 1823, and she revised the text for the edition of 1831, adding the introduction that describes her waking dream. The film directed by James Whale, with Boris Karloff, appeared in 1931.
Why Frankenstein matters
Frankenstein is the founding story of the scientist undone by his own creation, and public debate about new science still borrows its name.
How to read Frankenstein
The title serves as shorthand for creations that escape control; readers of the novel turn to it to raise the duty owed to what one makes.
Frankenstein in practice: an example
A commentator calling a new biotechnology a Frankenstein project is borrowing the film's monster more than the novel's neglected creature.
Where readings of Frankenstein go wrong
The popular image comes largely from films, so arguments drawn from Frankenstein often rest on scenes Shelley never wrote.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- frankenstein meaning, frankenstein novel, the modern prometheus, mary shelley frankenstein, frankenstein's monster
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
Is Frankenstein the monster or the doctor?
Frankenstein is the creator, Victor Frankenstein. The being he makes is never named in the novel; it is called the creature, the wretch or the daemon. Calling the creature Frankenstein began on the nineteenth century stage.
Why is Frankenstein subtitled The Modern Prometheus?
Prometheus in one tradition shaped mankind from clay and in another stole fire for it and was punished. Victor does both in his way: he makes a living being and suffers for a power taken without thought for what follows.
How did Mary Shelley come to write Frankenstein?
In June 1816 she was staying near Geneva with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and John Polidori. Kept indoors by bad weather, they agreed to write ghost stories. Hers grew over the following months into the novel published in 1818.
