Every Version of Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus

Born in a storm, never quite buried

In the summer of 1816, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, eighteen years old, found herself stranded in a rented villa near Lake Geneva with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and John Polidori during an unseasonably cold, volcanic-ash-darkened season. A ghost-story competition between the housebound writers produced the first draft of what would become Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. It was published anonymously in January 1818, then revised and reissued under her own name in 1831. The novel is an epistolary frame story: explorer Robert Walton transcribes the account of Victor Frankenstein, a Swiss student of natural philosophy who assembles a living creature from exhumed body parts and galvanic electricity, then rejects it on sight. The creature, eloquent and self-educated, begs for a companion; Victor refuses; catastrophe follows on both sides.

Shelley borrowed liberally from the Prometheus myths (the Titan who stole fire from the gods and suffered for it), from the alchemist-as-overreacher tradition, and from the early electrical experiments of Luigi Galvani and Erasmus Darwin. What made the novel durable was its refusal to assign simple villainy: Victor is arrogant and cowardly; the creature is monstrous partly because his maker made him so. That moral ambiguity is why every generation keeps re-staging it.

The story reached the stage almost immediately. By the 1820s there were popular theatrical adaptations in London, most notably Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein in 1823. Cinema found it in 1910 with an Edison Studios short, and again in 1931 when Universal Pictures cast Boris Karloff and produced the definitive popular image: the flat-topped skull and neck bolts that have since overwhelmed Shelley's text in the public imagination. Since then the story has been retold as horror, comedy, soap opera, anime, video game and literary experiment. No two versions agree on what the creature looks like, what he wants, or whether he deserves sympathy. That is the whole argument.