“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.”
Mary Shelley’s Introduction to Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus.
The ‘Year Without a Summer (1818)’ might not have been a good year for sunshine and warmth, but was certainly good for horror. A group of young people were holed up in Villa Diodati in the Swiss Alps thanks to the torrential downpour. Inspired by reading translated ghost stories, one of them, Lord Byron, proposed an interesting solution to combat the restlessness that follows the rain: they would all write ghost stories. The competitors were: Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Lord Byron’s physician, John Polidori. At first, Mary struggled to come up with something sufficiently spooky — ghosts were frightening enough. But possessed by a waking nightmare, she found her answer: galvanism, a corpse known for its “yellow, watery but speculative eyes,” and an artist terrified of his own creation.
And thus, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus was brought to life.
What started out as a short story transformed into the first-ever science fiction novel. And it did so while simultaneously dipping into the genre of gothic horror fiction.
The other competitors did come up with their own stories — Lord Byron wrote Fragment of a Novel, a vampiric piece which Polidori would later cannibalize into creating The Vampyre (which went on to lay the foundations of all vampire stories). Percy Shelley, on the other hand, drew inspiration from his own life to conjure his work. Suffice to say, 18-year-old Mary was the victor. Fitting that she named her protagonist Victor, though that wasn’t the actual inspiration for his name.
“Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of these, various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated.”
Mary Shelley’s Introduction to Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus.
They discussed at length the current breakthroughs and experiments of the 19th century. One of them was Dr Erasmus Darwin, who had supposedly preserved a piece of the microscopic organism Vorticella (Mary misheard it as vermicelli!) in a glass case until it began to move. In truth, his experiment proved that rehydrating Vorticella could cause it to survive if it was ever dried out. Another topic that piqued her attention was galvanism. Galvanism is the convulsion of organic muscle tissue upon contact with an electric current, as well as the electric current generated within biological organisms. Luigi Galvani, the physicist and biologist who inspired the term, discovered that a deceased frog’s legs still moved if it came into contact with an electric current.
Just as Victor Frankenstein cobbled together an undead creature comprising the most beautiful parts, so did Mary while writing Frankenstein. It was only natural that writing was her calling — both her parents were writers, and their influence is one among many that permeate her story.
Prometheus was the Titan who stole fire from Olympus and gave it to humanity. Ovid’s Metamorphoses has a slightly different take. Here, Prometheus fashions humanity out of clay, giving them a warm gift far more valuable than flame —life itself. Either way, he’s condemned by Zeus, King of the Greek Pantheon, to an eternity of torment for his transgressions. Prometheus is chained to a rock, and an eagle (the symbol of Zeus) pecks at his liver. As a Titan, his liver grows back each night, and the agonising pain begins all over again the next dawn — a vicious cycle from which there is no escape. It is Ovid’s Metamorphoses from which The Modern Prometheus is derived. Victor, like Prometheus, bestows the ultimate gift on his creation, only to be tormented by it. Another Greek myth that served as inspiration was the Pygmalion, a man who fell in love with a statue of a woman he’d carved. This story is present in the Metamorphoses, but Mary had already come across this in Pygmalion et Galatée by Madame de Genlis.
John Milton’s Paradise Lost was such a strong influence that it explicitly appears in the book. The creature reads it and identifies with Satan, who, like himself, was cast out by his creator, God (Victor). The themes of loneliness and despair in both works run parallel to each other, with both the creature and Satan forced to choose the path of evil.
Aside from literary influences, Mary drew from her own life. Percy Shelley had once used the pen name Victor for the poetry collection he had written with his sister Elizabeth (whose name is also used in the book), Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire. Shelley had, during his time at Eton, dabbled with the sciences — electricity, magnetism, chemical reactions. He even kept scientific instruments in his room while at Oxford. Victor and Percy both came from similar aristocratic backgrounds as well.
A mere three years before she wrote Frankenstein, Mary gave birth to a premature baby girl who died shortly after. Her own mother had died at childbirth, and while she was writing this book, her step-sister — Claire Clairmont, who introduced the Shelleys to Lord Byron — was pregnant. Her tumultuous relationship with birth, death, the span of time in between, as well as the responsibility of creating a life, is laid bare for the reader in her book.
“Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?”
The Creature cries in despair, Chapter 15 of Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus.
The themes in Frankenstein are reflective of its inspiration. Like Prometheus, Victor’s unchecked hubris leads to his eventual downfall. Responsibility, namely parental, is one of the overarching themes of this book, or rather, the lack thereof. Victor is horrified by what he believes to be an abomination of his own making and shuns the creature. The prejudice the creature faces due to its appearance causes it to be isolated and angry. Victor’s actions are unfathomable to the creature — why create life only to abandon it?
The namelessness of the creature is another fascinating device Mary employs to emphasize its alienation. Throughout the book, he is only referred to as “creature”, “ogre”, “dæmon”, “wretch” and other derogatory derivatives. Being occasionally addressed as “thing,” the intelligent being is reduced to an object. The vilification of a person is based solely on appearance; the creature can read, is well spoken, and has the ability to be kind, but no one will look past his terrifying visage. The creature, as a result, refers to himself as “monster,” as do the townsfolk who see him. Ironically, in the present day, more people believe the creature’s name is Frankenstein and the creator, Victor, is largely forgotten.
Mary’s competition entry was not a ghost story in any sense of the term. There are no ghosts here, nor any hauntings to speak of. Only a man and his offspring, tethered by an umbilical cord that is prematurely torn to shreds. The creature haunts Victor as revenge for bringing him to a world where he is unwanted and unloved, leading to themes of revenge and retribution. Victor is the creature’s primary tormentor and vice versa. That is where the crux of the terror lies.
“Soon I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony of the torturing flames.”
The Creature in Chapter 24 of Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus.
Frankenstein has received numerous adaptations across different mediums in the two centuries following its publication. The earliest were stage plays, which featured a blue-skinned toga-clad monster.
The first time Victor and his creation appeared on screen was in 1910, in a silent horror film produced by Thomas Edison. It was not until the 1931 Universal film Frankenstein, which had Boris Karloff’s iconic portrayal of the creature, that the story took the public imagination by storm. Not only did this film cement the creature as a pop-culture icon, but it also gave rise to the Frankenstein film franchise. It also added iconic characters like The Bride and Victor Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant, Igor. The trope of the ‘mad scientist’ also strongly inserted itself in the minds of the general public, despite Victor’s character in the book being the opposite of that archetype.
Even today, Victor and his monster continue to come alive on screen, the latest being Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025) — set to release for digital audiences on Netflix on Nov. 7, 2025 — which heralds in the new era of the galvanic man.
There have been graphic novel adaptations of Frankenstein, and the Classics Illustrated series in 1945 has the story in comic book form. More recently, in 2018, horror manga artist Junji Ito gave it a manga adaptation, going on to receive the Eisner Award. These adaptations are perhaps the closest to Mary Shelley’s original work.
It is prudent at this juncture to mention one of the most flattering depictions of the creature where he gets a happy ending — Mel Brooks’ iconic 1974 classic Young Frankenstein. This is a parody film that follows Frederick (Gene Wilder), who carries on his grandfather, Victor’s, experiment along with his faithful assistant Igor (aka Eye-gore). The infamous “Abby-normal” brain scene is from this adaptation. Young Frankenstein utilised a lot of laboratory set pieces from Universal’s 1931 Frankenstein franchise and is shot entirely in black and white. A prequel titled Very Young Frankenstein is currently in development at FX.
Frankenstein has evolved over time. Today, the name Frankenstein will conjure the image of a gargantuan, green-skinned corpse, with bolts on his neck stapled together, terrorising hapless passersby by shouting in slurred, indecipherable, and stilted statements. No longer do people think of a tortured scientist who thought he could play god. The progeny has finally overshadowed the sire.
It’s strange because the actual description of the creature is very different.
“How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.”
Clearly, Victor meant for the creature to be beautiful — it was to be the new ‘Adam’, named after the first man created by god in the bible. Unfortunately, a beautiful person is just going to turn into a beautiful corpse, and a corpse is still a corpse. No matter how one dresses it up, it will still be unnerving to see it move. It is the unnatural and “wrong” air about the creature (namely, the eyes) that takes away from any charm it has. It further emphasizes the point that disturbing the natural order of things is not going to end well, no matter what precautions are taken or what lengths one goes through.
“In other studies you go as far as others have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder.”
Victor, Chapter 4 of Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus.
Victor may have been punished for his actions but one cannot deny that his subject of study is fascinating. How viable is galvanism? Is it truly possible to reanimate the dead? Can slotting in a functioning brain resuscitate a person?
Galvanism today comes under the umbrella of electrophysiology. It hasn’t been successful in bringing the dead to life, but it is presumed to be effective in treating clinical depression. Defibrillators are quite possibly the closest thing we have, in theory, to jump-start a body from death’s cold grip. These devices have been around since 1899. But they have their limitations: one cannot exactly dig up a corpse, outfit it with a defibrillator, and joyously exclaim “It’s alive!”
While heart surgeries are possible, brain surgeries are sadly not viable at the moment. People have been unsuccessfully trying their hand at this, right from the early 1900s. Partial brain transplants in mice have been proven to be possible, but anything larger winds up dead. The closest we have come to resuming brain activity is a 2019 experiment carried out by the Department of Neuroscience in the Yale School of Medicine. To summarise, brain circulation and basic cellular functions resumed in the brain of a slaughtered pig. The porcine seat of thinking can’t technically be categorised as being alive or fully conscious, but it was no longer considered “dead-dead.” Of course, the ethics of applying this to human test subjects is morally ambiguous, and the implications will no doubt have messy consequences.
Despite the advances in modern science since the time of publication of the novel, the answer is no. But science is rapidly evolving, so perhaps in the distant future, we might see an actual case of Frankenstein’s experiment succeed. In such a scenario, it’s fortunate that there’s a readily available guide on how not to treat your creation.
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