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Mary Wollstonecraft, a teenager, was spending a vacation in Switzerland with her fiancé, Percy Shelley, their mutual friend, Lord Byron, and a few other people. Was the weather gloomy that summer of 1816? Were the companions bored to death? One evening, they challenged each other into writing the scariest ghost story they could come up with. No one remembers what the fellows wrote on that occasion. Except for the young woman’s literary creature and the misfortunes of Victor Frankenstein.

Since then, what was meant as an entertaining story, rose to the dimension of a myth. So much so that the original novel itself has been covered up by layer upon layer of external imagery, which has very little to do with it �� in particular, the heavily made-up face of Boris Karloff in the 1931 unfaithful film adaptation of this book. Nowadays, there are all sorts of adaptations (e.g. Kenneth Branagh’s movie, with De Niro, more on that below), parodies (Mel Brook’s Young Frankenstein), and probably even spooky porn versions.

However, Mary Shelley’s novel is not so much about ghosts or monsters, as it is a meditation on the Biblical theme of Creation and Fall. Naturally, the idea of creating a living being �� using some human technique instead of natural reproduction ��, comes from the 16th-century Jewish narrative of the Golem of Prague. The subtle hints and overt references to Milton’s Paradise Lost are also quite noticeable �� the “daemon��, rejected from the start as an ugly duckling, learns to read with a copy of this book (?). At any rate, Frankenstein is a brilliant and existential reverie on the theme of God and Satan (Frankenstein and the “daemon��) and Adam and Eve (Frankenstein and Elizabeth / the monster and the potential lady-monster).

Another striking aspect of Frankenstein’s narrative is the Russian-dolls-like structure of the tales: first Captain Walton’s letters, which frame the whole novel, then Victor Frankenstein’s account and, finally, a tale within the tale, the daemon’s story. This particular form is in keeping with earlier gothic novels and harks back to the One Thousand and One Nights, to which Mary Shelley might have had access, through Antoine Galland’s translation into French. Incidentally, Safie’s story, around the middle of the novel (another embedded tale within a tale), has some oriental undertones.

Mary Shelley’s book is considered one of the earliest examples of the Science Fiction genre. However, there is not much science or technology to speak of in Frankenstein, apart from a few mentions of Paracelsus and a couple of other alchemists and astrologers. The minor references to electricity, magnetism and galvanism are in the spirit of the times. Still, Michael Faraday, who would soon bring significant breakthroughs in these fields, was about the same age as the precocious author of Frankenstein. Still, the presence of electromagnetism is not only a reference to the myth of Prometheus and the stolen fire. If anything, it expresses a fascination with landscapes: now sunny, beautiful and pleasant; now stormy, sublime and menacing, with ghastly thunderbolts ripping the clouds apart. Mary Shelley had a couple of predecessors �� Coleridge is quoted a few times in her novel ��, but that sort of imagery was, by and large, a novelty at the time. It might be interesting to note that while Mary Shelley was writing Frankenstein, Caspar David Friedrich was painting his famous Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (see below). This obsession with ominous landscapes would soon become a trope within the romantic and gothic literary tradition (cf. the often ridiculed Bulwer-Lytton’s “dark and stormy night��).

Frankenstein is also considered an early example of the modern Horror genre. However, the general impression is not exactly a feeling of terror. Rather a romantic and quite often bombastic expression of strong emotions: despair, anguish, despondency, melancholy, misery, wretchedness, affliction, etc., are words that come repeatedly under Mary Shelley’s pen. This accumulation of epithets might feel quaint and a little schmaltzy to a modern reader.

Even so, Frankenstein has probably been a significant inspiration to crime mystery novels, such as Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and later avatars of serial killers on a murderous rampage. It has probably also exerted a strong influence on scary adventure stories, such as Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Wells�� Island of Doctor Moreau, or Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. It might, nowadays, become once more a significant source of inspiration, as contemporary technology explores new forms of sentient and intelligent beings, out of GMO, silicon or some weird combination of the two.



(1994), directed by Kenneth Branagh, followed Francis Ford Coppola’s box-office hit Bram Stocker’s Dracula (1992). The cast is imposing: De Niro, Branagh, Hulce, Bonham Carter, Holm, Cleese. The screenplay (written by Frank Darabont, who would later develop The Walking Dead TV series) is, for the most part, faithful to Mary Shelley’s novel. However, while Coppola’s Dracula was darkly luxurious and decadent, the style of Branagh’s Frankenstein is loud and vehement, at times stomach-churning or downright silly.

The biopic (2017) by Haifaa al-Mansour, with Elle Fanning, is primarily a romance, recounting the complicated situation in which the young woman met her husband and how she got to write her masterpiece. The portrayals of Percy Shelley and Lord Byron are rather unflattering.