Why does Victor Frankenstein create his monster? No one in the novel, least of all Victor, seems to know. The inspiration for Frankenstein came to Mary Shelley in a dream, and it is dream-logic that governs Victor’s scientific pursuit. For two years, the man works on his patchwork cadaver in a fever of intensity. He sutures limbs. He labors “among the unhallowed damps.” Then in the final, reeling moment of success, the monster opens his eyes—and Victor, horrified, flees. It is one of the swiftest and cruelest stories of postpartum depression ever written.
Nothing about Victor’s biography could have portended a future grave-robber. To be sure, there were the unsettling boyhood obsessions—much squirrelly time spent off by himself, reading books of ancient and esoteric knowledge. There’s also the early death of Victor’s mother, though if that has any connection to his creepy inquiries into the “decay and corruption of the human body,” Victor does not mention. On the whole, Victor describes himself as a well-adjusted, even blessed individual. He grows up in a happy family in Geneva—a bright and alpine childhood. His parents adopt a beautiful blonde orphan, Elizabeth, who later becomes Victor’s betrothed. Everyone in the Frankenstein household adores each other; they adore Victor, the eldest son, most of all.
Could it be possible that Victor creates the monster in order to be alone? Victor characterizes his period of creature-making as one of social “neglect,” in which he “procrastinate[d] all that related to my feelings of affection,” meaning all that relates to his family. The young man secludes himself to perform his experiments, plundering anatomy for its profane insights. He does not see anyone, does not respond to nervous letters from home, does not visit. “I knew my silence disquieted them,” he says. Obsession has its affordances, chief among them that it rescues you from the melee of human contact. At home Victor is “surrounded” (a claustrophobic word) “by amiable companions.” But the monster becomes Victor’s excuse to withdraw; he avoids his relatives to tend first to his foul science, then to its lethal aftermath. He does not say why; all we know is that Victor prefers “deep, deathlike solitude,” and in the workshop, he doesn’t have to speak to anyone, not even his own monster.
There are many lonely men in Shelley’s novel: the monster, after years of exile from human contact, hunts Victor down and makes the incel-y demand that he invent for him a wife. Roger Walton, Arctic explorer and Frankenstein’s first narrator, complains to his sister that he “bitterly feel[s] the want of a friend.” (Sisters do not count, apparently. Also—if you’re so lonely, what are you doing in the Arctic?) But only Victor makes a purposeful craft of his solitude. He is pathologically reclusive: many times in the novel, we see him travel long-distances across remote, natural locales, or shut himself up in dark rooms, or dawdle and stall before visits to family. On a high, misty plateau of domestic affection and harmony Victor lives, and fails to enjoy himself.
He invents the monster; the monster kills everyone he loves, strangling Victor’s brother William and his closest friend, poor Henry Clerval. Victor knows the monster has vowed revenge yet never tells his family the truth, an evasion that possibly enables the monster to murder Elizabeth on their wedding night. It is a flagrant and slow-moving act of self-sabotage, one that causes us to wonder whether aggression might not course, like a secret river, beneath every appearance of care. Victor’s need for his loving family is inseparable from his desire to get away from them, from his desire maybe, even, to kill them. It makes no sense, or perhaps too much sense: the true horror of Shelley’s novel is the suggestion that domestic life always succumbs to the ugly curdle of urges and emotions—violence, resentment, anger—that it is meant to exclude, but only ever patinates. To be loved can be an unbearable experience, especially when it’s so unearned. Victor himself speculates that the creature is “my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me.” It is perhaps what Victor wants all along.
•
In Guillermo del Toro’s new adaptation, made for Netflix more than two hundred years after the novel’s initial publication, the answers are clearer and simpler. Every age gets the Frankenstein it deserves, and del Toro has refitted his for the snug confines of the trauma plot. The scientist and his creature are now supplied with tender and revelatory backstories: Victor, once the beloved son, becomes the mistreated victim of a despotic father. He conducts this historico-familial violence onto the creature, who reacts poorly in turn. All the movie’s brutality ensues from this premise: two mishandled adolescences.
Like its source text, del Toro’s movie begins in the Arctic. A sea explorer (Lars Mikkelsen) has grounded his ship and crew on a bank of polar ice. He is determined to keep sailing; his men wish to return home. In these mutinous conditions the monster (Jacob Elordi) first appears—he is in crazed search of a man recently sequestered on board, a certain Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac). Victor admits that he is the monster’s maker and that the situation is badly zero-sum: one of them will have to die. It looks to be Victor. Handily, the monster kills several of the ship’s men, whipping their bodies across the screen in a manner most unsympathetic.
But del Toro grants us reprieve from the gore-blasted Arctic. The film soon makes use of a tried technique of the trauma plot: the flashback. We see Victor’s childhood, that haunted construction site of personality, and his bully of a father, who “bent the entire household to his will.” Herr Frankenstein tutored young Victor in medicine, striking him with a cane to memorialize any wrong answers; the Genevan manor was cavernous and hostile to life. Victor’s only succor was his mother, who later dies giving birth to a second son. After realizing his father’s medical negligence was responsible, Victor becomes an unpleasant and vainglorious scientist, seeking power “over the forces of life and death.” This leads to predictable courses of action, such as buying human corpses and rigging them together with electrical wiring. “God is inept!” Victor screams at one point. “And it is we who must amend his mistakes!” They fuck you up, your mom and dad.
Unlike in the novel, Victor—having succeeded in his necrotic exercises—stays with his monster. This is because, in del Toro’s retelling, he must show himself to be a bad parent. We watch as he fails to love his progeny, as he chains and derides the creature for lacking any “spark of intelligence.” When the monster displeases, Victor wields a metal rod against him, and it is basically galling how the movie leverages this instrument of abuse for its burdensome meaning: Victor, too, once suffered blows from a similar shape. Do you get it now? This is less the logic of the Gothic tale than the easy murder mystery, in which weapons present only as clues.
Shelley wrote such that neither Victor nor the monster were redeemable; in the novel, both are zealots of hate, brokering shared vows of vengeance and pain, wrestling together in a screaming trajectory hellwards. “If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear,” the monster declares, before beginning his project of assassinating Victor’s family members. Narrative in Shelley’s novel is meant to terrify. In the movie, it rehabilitates: the monster is revealed to be an innocent who hides from humans while performing pretty charities. He feeds berries to deer, collects wood for a struggling family, then becomes caretaker of an old man.
Unlike in the novel, the monster does not kill Victor’s loved ones: William and Elizabeth both die in accidents whose ultimate cause is Victor. The movie’s violence is only the result of his cruelty, which is itself the impersonal force of fatherhood. In a final deathbed scene, the two protagonists reconcile, and Victor therapizes the monster by asking for his forgiveness. We are not spared the bad philosophy of the trauma arc. “Consider this my son,” Victor poses ponderously and tautologically. “Wherever you are alive, what recourse do you have but to live?”
•
If I sound bored that’s because, for most of the movie, I was. Frankenstein is two and a half hours long. Like many Netflix productions, it is difficult to look at: its colors are those of cheap satin, its cinematography overwrought—the movie is sunk in weedy darkness when it’s not billowing with sudden, gaseous flares of light that literally hurt the eyes. What is meant to be mise-en-scene, in the movie’s rooms, becomes aesthetic gadgetry: medusa heads, leather-bound books, so much clutter and none of it signifying. It is unreality without any fantasy, which means without any vision.
One has the impression that del Toro is selling the novel for parts. Characters reappear in swapped or distorted places, like an event whose details have been unsettled by the failing effort to remember it. The creature is no longer the novel’s hideous shambles of “yellow skin” and “watery eyes”—he is Jacob Elordi. Most importantly, the deaths in the Frankenstein family, now repurposed by del Toro into accidents, lose their moral weight. Though there is plenty of violence and gore in the movie, there is little responsibility. Such are the measly verdicts of the trauma plot: the monster, through his suffering, is innocent; Victor, once a terrorized child, is absolved.
Like much of our post-Marvel zeitgeist, del Toro’s movie seeks to explain characters rather than witness them. The villain origin story in its blockbuster form (Maleficent, Birds of Prey, Joker, Wicked) works to show us how people’s personalities are foisted upon them by circumstance and past injury. Loss, abuse, death, an early life scoured clean of love—these diagnostics of the trauma plot serve bad guys particularly well, for they make deeds legible and inevitable. In our era of rampant evil, we’ve become obsessed with giving villainy its ironclad reasons. The best way to forgive a monster is by understanding him.
Shelley, meanwhile, avoided any precise explanation for Victor’s behavior. Instead, the novel only concludes that “the different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature.” In other words, people act poorly because they obey fickle and contradictory impulses. Both Victor and the creature are born with equal propensities for hate and love. Hate wins. The monster and maker end up annihilating what they cannot do without: other people. Even in the healthiest of scenarios, which this is not, people can be very brutal to those they care for. One need not be traumatized to travesty one’s obligations to others; intimacy always involves its inflamed alchemies of hostility and need, love and repulsion.
Scholars have speculated that Shelley intended Frankenstein to satirize the outlandish ideas of her father, who vigorously opposed her elopement with Percy Bysshe Shelley while hounding them both for money. The anonymous 1818 edition bears a rather passive-aggressive dedication to him. The 1831 contains the famous preface in which Shelley discusses, acknowledges, and then disavows her husband’s slight role in inspiring the fiction. She sounds kind of annoyed: “I certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling, to my husband.” Yet without Percy’s incitement, she admits that Frankenstein “would never have taken the form in which it was presented to the world.” No matter which end you’re on, dependency can prickle. The names, as usual, give it away: Percy had a known habit of calling himself “Victor” as a boy. William, the child-character who is slain with such stunning swiftness and ferocity in the novel, bears the name of Shelley’s father and son.
•
Trauma is not by itself an unconvincing phenomenon—in real life, it can explain and clarify many catastrophes, both personal and familial. But the meaning of trauma is transformed by its inclusion in narrative, for the trauma plot bears a particular relation to shame: it demands that what is most secret must always become known, and must always be forgiven. Redemption can only come post-exposure. Under these conditions of compulsory confession, what could one possibly be ashamed of? Nothing: shame is the only sin that the trauma plot recognizes and deplores. All actions are fated and none are disagreeable, except the refusal to be seen.
If guilt is the recognition of wrongdoing, and shame is our inability to withstand the gaze of others, the trauma plot rejects both. We cannot help who we are, and it is our right to say who we are, again and again, to anyone who will listen. There can be a moral seriousness, even dignity, to feeling guilt without shame, and there is an inevitability to feeling shame without guilt. The penitent who accepts judgment, or the neurotic who feels himself perpetually unworthy, still understand themselves in the context of other people. But to dismiss both shame and guilt, as the trauma plot does, is to lose all touch with social life. It is to demand an audience whose judgment one refuses to acknowledge.
At the novel’s end, the monster gives an account of himself—“I have murdered the lovely and the helpless”—and then sets himself on fire. It is an attempt to enact some final proximity with humanity, which has thoroughly shunned him, by complying with its code of deed and punishment. Victor created a being who succumbed to his worst impulses, whose grace was measured by his fall, who felt the most human of emotions—remorse—at the most human of moments—when it was too late. “I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched.” His is a figure of intolerable contradiction. His guilt is recognizable as real, because it is so intolerable.
Zoe Hu
Zoe Hu is a writer and doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center.