When you hear "Frankenstein," what comes to mind?
Probably the monster. That giant figure with bolts in his neck, lumbering across the screen.
But here's the thing. That's a big misunderstanding.
Frankenstein isn't the monster's name. It's the name of the scientist who created it. The doctor.
I honestly believed it was the monster's name until I actually read the book. Embarrassing, I know.
And when I read it, I found something that wasn't a horror novel at all.
It was a deeply philosophical work, one that keeps asking a single question all the way through: what does it mean to be human?
I loved it far more than Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the first book I read for this project.
The Real Protagonist Is a Monster You Pity
"If there's a monster, it must be a scary story, right?"
That's what I assumed too. But no.
The story begins when Dr. Frankenstein, driven by the ambition to create life, brings a creature into being.
And then. Horrified by how hideous his creation turns out to be, the doctor panics and runs away. He can't bear the weight of what he's done.
The abandoned creature is utterly alone from the moment of its birth.
Every time it tries to approach a human, it's feared, beaten, chased off, because of how it looks.
Reading it, I never once felt scared.
What I felt was pity. Just pure, aching pity.
And it hit me hard: people really do judge by appearance.
Who Is the Real Monster?
"So in the end, it's just a scary monster on a rampage, right?"
Not that simple.
The creature tries, again and again, to speak with humans. But every attempt is rejected on sight alone. And finally, it turns to violence.
Here the book throws a question at the reader.
Who is the real monster?
Sure, a creature that kills people can be called a monster.
But then. Isn't the doctor who created it and then abandoned all responsibility also a monster?
And going further, aren't the society and the people who rejected it on looks alone, who drove it toward becoming a monster, monsters too?
So there isn't just one monster in this book. There are many. And anyone can become one.
What the doctor did feels a lot like a parent who has a kid because it seems fun, then abandons the child because they don't like how it looks.
Abandoning the responsibility of what you created. At the core, it's the exact same thing.
Two hundred years old, and it still cuts deep.
Is Knowing Really Happiness?
The abandoned creature, after being brutalized by humans, finally finds a hiding place.
Near it lived a family.
Quietly, unnoticed, the creature watches them, and slowly learns language, culture, and how human society works.
And here's what I kept thinking.
Sometimes, not knowing is where happiness lives.
The more it learns about human life, the more the creature understands one thing: that happiness will never, ever be its own. So it begins to long for a companion of its own.
And it begs its creator to build one just like it.
Knowledge gave birth to desire.
Doesn't this sound exactly like our social media world?
Everyone else's shiny lives scroll past our timelines all day long.
And out of that comes comparison, and out of comparison comes envy.
We soak in a suffering, every single day, that we'd never have felt if we simply hadn't seen it.
The creature, too, gained not happiness but suffering by knowing.
Knowing, it turns out, can be a kind of sin.
The Timeless Motif: What You Create Destroys You
Do you know the subtitle of Frankenstein?
It's "The Modern Prometheus."
At the root of this book runs one motif.
What you create eventually turns to threaten its maker.
And this theme has been inherited by countless modern works.
Take the anime Psycho-Pass. A special AI judges people's careers and their potential to commit crimes, managing all of society. A pure AI dystopia. And that AI is built using human brains. Just like Frankenstein's creature, it's assembled from human parts. Chilling, isn't it?
Or take the American series The Boys. Homelander is an artificially engineered superhero, created to protect people. But once he gains overwhelming power, he kills the very people who once treated him like a lab rat, and comes to crave becoming a dictator. Unlike Frankenstein's creature, Homelander has a beautiful appearance and enormous popularity. Yet the structure is the same: a being created by humans threatens its creator and society.
Interestingly, I think RoboCop flips the Frankenstein story and gives the "creature" its justification. A fallen police officer is rebuilt as a cyborg and fights the corruption of the company that made him.
A novel written nearly two hundred years ago still speaks to a present shaped by AI, genetic engineering, and social media. That truly amazes me.
When a Title Becomes Culture Itself
Here's one more thing I noticed.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Frankenstein have something in common.
In both, a character's name is right there in the title. And that name itself has become a cultural icon.
Say "Alice," and you picture a girl and a rabbit hole.
Say "Frankenstein," and you picture the monster (even though it's really the doctor's name!).
Even people who've never read the story know the name and the image.
That's an incredible thing.
The name leaps beyond the work itself, takes on a life of its own, and settles into the culture.
Harry Potter is the same in our era. Title and character name align, and it becomes a symbol of a whole culture.
As a writer, I envy that. A name becoming culture. Isn't that the highest place you can reach?
The Shock That She Wrote This at Nineteen
The author, Mary Shelley, was English, and she wrote this book at around nineteen years old.
Nineteen. Nineteen!
Her father was a renowned thinker, her mother an activist. She grew up in an extraordinarily rich cultural environment.
Frankenstein carries the deep influence of classic literature, like Paradise Lost.
I once tried to read Paradise Lost myself. I gave up after a few pages.
That experience made me feel something too.
To truly savor a work like this, you need a certain amount of cultural capital and education.
The environment you're born into really does matter. No fair, Mary.
The Hint for Creating Is Hidden in Play
What sparked Frankenstein?
It was, of all things, a ghost-story writing game among friends.
It kept raining, so they couldn't go outside, and everyone said, "let's make the scariest story we can." That game gave birth to a masterpiece.
Which makes me think the hint for becoming a writer might be this.
Take play seriously.
And there's another one: taking a classical motif and transplanting it into the present. Here, that motif is Prometheus.
That's a huge hint for creation too.
Classical motifs never fade, no matter how the times change.
Which is exactly why knowing the myths at their source carries such meaning.
Honestly, my own creative work is stalled right now.
The challenge of reading 100 debut novels and the actions I need to take to become a writer, I still haven't connected them.
I keep getting satisfied just by reading.
First, I have to start by carving out real time to write.
Next: The Iliad
The strongest thing I felt after finishing Frankenstein was this.
Modern entertainment is, in fact, an extension of classic literature and myth.
Which is exactly why I want to keep reaching toward Greek mythology and the classics.
So next, I think I'll read The Iliad.
"Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley
Originality: ★★★
Impact: ★★★★
Craft: ★
Structure: ★★★
Resonance: ★★★★