There are few stories in the English language as timeless as “Frankenstein.” Since its publication in 1818, Mary Shelley’s horrific tale of the man who made a monster defined a genre and has inspired countless adaptations and allusions in other media. Hollywood currently has two “Frankenstein” projects in the works: “Lisa Frankenstein,” from writer-producer Diablo Cody, and “Dr. Frankenstein,” from auteur Guillermo del Toro. Frankenstein’s monster is inescapable.
A key to the novel’s enduring brilliance is its exploration of a range of complex themes — questions of science and progress, life and death, right and wrong. Perhaps the novel’s most important question is what makes a monster. It’s on this question that its most famous adaptation, Universal’s 1931 film, departs too far from Shelley’s answer. While Shelley cites misery as the Creature’s call to violence, the film points to his nature.
Near the beginning of the film, Henry Frankenstein (originally Victor in the book) tasks his hunch-backed assistant Fritz with obtaining a brain for the Creature. Fritz sneaks up to the window of a university medical lecture and watches as the professor shows off a brain in a jar, labeled “normal brain.”
“Here we have one of the most perfect specimens of the human brain that has ever come to my attention at the university,” he says. Then he gestures to another jar. “And here, the abnormal brain of a typical criminal.”
The professor points to physical signs which supposedly indicate the nature and character of each brain. Once class is dismissed, Fritz sneaks in to snatch the “normal brain.” But a loud sound scares him. He drops the jar. It explodes on the floor. Fritz then grabs the “abnormal brain” and heads off.
There is no comparable scene in the book. Shelley mentions Victor Frankenstein “dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave” and “collected bones from charnel houses,” and that “the dissecting room and the slaughterhouse furnished many of [his] materials.” It doesn’t seem to matter to Frankenstein the character of his Creature’s brain. From his creation, the Monster of the novel is something of a blank slate. Although we may suspect horrible things to come, monstrosity is not yet a certainty at his conception, whereas the film tells us before he’s born that the Creature shall possess the abnormal brain of a criminal.
Shelley’s novel gives the Creature not only a brain but a heart and a voice. The Creature learns to speak and articulate his feelings, while his film counterpart doesn’t learn any words until the 1935 sequel. During his education, observing the De Lacey family in their cottage, the Creature proves himself to be caring. Realizing that the family was poor and hungry, the Creature decides to no longer steal their food and instead gather it from a nearby wood. Seeing that the youth collect wood for the fire, he goes out at night to collect more firewood for them. There is no reward for these good deeds, but he does them anyway.
His stay in the hovel is a wonderful education in compassion and humanity. The Creature has been abandoned by his creator and constantly rejected, met with screams by each of the few strangers he’s encountered. In this cottage, for the first time in his life, he observes love. He later recounts to Frankenstein, “I looked upon crime as a distant evil; benevolence and generosity were ever present to me, inciting within me a desire to become an actor in the busy scene where so many admirable qualities were called forth and displayed.” The De Lacey family has inspired him to strive for good. Violence is an impossibility for this creature. Despite his previous treatment and his monstrous appearance, all he desires is virtue and society.
The Creature doesn’t turn to violence until feelings of betrayal overwhelm him. It is only after he is rejected by the De Lacey family, his greatest hope for love, that he seeks revenge against his creator. Then he becomes a tragic figure. Like Lucifer in “Paradise Lost,” to which Shelley refers several times, the Creature is forsaken by his creator. He has no home, no friends. He has lost his innocence and is condemned to Hell. This is what breaks him. This loneliness is what makes him a monster.
By giving the movie’s Monster a criminal brain, the Monster is born condemned. There is no innocence, no redemption or absolution, only eternal damnation from his genesis.
The novel and film also differ in how they characterize the Monster’s first act of homicide. In search of his creator in Geneva, the Monster encounters a young boy, William, whom he initially hopes to make a friend. When the Monster seizes William, the boy begs to be let go, threatening to tell his papa — syndic Monsieur Frankenstein. Realizing that the boy is related to Victor, the Monster decides to begin his revenge against his creator by slaying the boy.
In the film, the Monster’s first victim is a young girl who he similarly tries to make a friend. Little Maria is collecting flowers by a lake when the Monster approaches. She asks, “Will you play with me?” and takes his hand. She shares her flowers with him, and they throw them into the water to watch them float. The Monster, unable to speak, still squeals with delight, until he runs out of flowers. Then he throws Maria. Unable to swim, she drowns.
In both works, the Creature exhibits a desire for friendship, one that suggests there is some good in him. In the film, the Monster’s first kill is an accident. Perhaps this change evokes sympathy from the audience, but it deprives the Creature of agency. He doesn’t understand the game they’re playing. He doesn’t seem to understand life at all. His killing seems the result of childish ignorance, not his own fault. He is a killer by fate.
In the novel, the Monster’s first kill is a choice, albeit one driven by rage. Shelley grants her Monster agency and intelligence. Her Monster is one with complex feelings and motivations, a very human character in desperate circumstances who chooses violence.
The text of the film reads as an essentialist position, that violence is a natural tendency of certain people, be it a certain race or class. Degenerates, criminals or monsters — whatever we choose to call them — are born evil and can’t be saved, or so we’re told.
The notion that brains, their size and shape, can yield information about character traits is the basis of the pseudoscience phrenology, part of a greater cultural movement of race science in the 19th century, to quantify and categorize variation in human beings, to prove white supremacy. It is an understatement to say these ideologies are false and harmful.
Universal’s “Frankenstein” is not a bad film. James Whale’s direction has influenced an untold number of filmmakers that followed. The appearance of the Monster, brought to life by actor Boris Karloff and makeup artist Jack Pierce, is the Monster’s definitive look. They made the Monster an icon. And who can forget the electrifying scene when a mad Colin Clive delivers his most famous line: “It’s alive!” “Frankenstein” is a classic for a reason.
Still, Shelley’s original text is more politically complex than the Universal picture. Frankenstein’s Creature is not born a monster; it’s misery that made him a fiend, he tells us. That’s the truth Shelley wants us to confront. Maybe evil comes from distant, idiosyncratic scientists in dismal laboratories, or maybe evil comes from benevolent people, like you or me, abandoned and pushed into darkness. Isn’t that more horrifying? The truth is any one of us could have been made a monster.
