Frankenstein Is a Breakup Novel and I Will Not Be Taking Questions

Victor Frankenstein spends two years building a person and roughly four seconds deciding he wants nothing to do with him. That is not a horror premise. That is a group chat.

Most people walk into Frankenstein expecting bolts, torches, and a guy groaning in a doorway. What they get instead is a 200-year-old novel about what happens when you make something, panic, and leave it on read. The lab scene everyone imagines takes about a paragraph. The fallout takes the rest of the book.

The worst first date in literature

Here is the timeline. Victor obsesses over his project for two years. He skips meals, ignores his family’s letters, and gets visibly ill. Then the creature opens its eyes, and Victor does what any emotionally stable scientist would do: he runs out of the room, goes to bed, and then flees the building when his creation shows up smiling at the side of the bed.

The creature’s crime, at this point, is existing and wanting a hug.

Everything terrible that follows starts here. Not with lightning. With abandonment.

The most English-teacher thing to ever happen in fiction

My favorite stretch of the novel is the part movies always skip. Alone and rejected by every human he meets, the creature hides in a lean-to next to a cottage and learns to speak and read by eavesdropping on the family inside through a crack in the wall.

Then he finds an abandoned leather case of books in the woods and reads Paradise Lost, Plutarch, and The Sorrows of Young Werther. That is a demanding reading list. Most college freshmen would negotiate.

And it changes him. Milton gives him a framework for understanding himself, and it is not a comforting one. He sees himself in Adam, made by a creator, except Adam was loved. So he lands on Satan instead. Reading doesn’t make the creature a monster. It makes him articulate about why he’s miserable, which is arguably worse.

I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.

If you want one sentence to put on the board and argue about for fifty minutes, that’s the one.

And then the second breakup

Halfway through, the creature corners Victor on a glacier and makes a calm, reasonable request: build me a companion, and we’ll disappear forever. Victor agrees. He even starts the work.

Then he looks at the half-finished woman, imagines everything that could go wrong, and tears her apart while the creature watches through the window.

I’m not saying Victor was wrong to worry. I’m saying he managed to make the same mistake twice, in the same way, and still narrates the whole thing like he’s the injured party. The man has the self-awareness of a decorative gourd.

So who’s the monster?

That’s the question Shelley wants you sitting with, and she doesn’t make it easy. The creature does horrific things. He kills people Victor loves, and the novel never pretends otherwise. But Victor builds a living being, refuses responsibility for it, and then lets an innocent woman hang for a murder he could have explained.

Ask a room of teenagers who the real monster is and you will get a fistfight. That’s the sign of a great book.

The verdict

Half a star off for the framing letters. The novel opens and closes with Robert Walton, an Arctic explorer writing to his sister, and he is essentially a personal podcast nobody asked for. I understand what Shelley is doing (Walton is another ambitious man chasing glory at any cost, and Victor is his cautionary tale), but the first twenty pages are a lot of weather.

Everything else? Required reading. Especially for anyone who has ever made something and then panicked about it, which is every writer, every teacher, and every parent I know.

Read it if: you like books that argue with you, you teach argument writing, or you think you know this story from the movies. You don’t.

Skip it if: you need a laboratory explosion by page ten.

Pair it with: a conversation, at the dinner table or in a classroom, about what we owe the things we create.