“All my many pages—future waste paper—surely I am a fool” (Journals, vol. 2, p. 489).

What did endure was her waking nightmare: Frankenstein. First published in 1818 when she was in her late teens, the novel is her only work to remain in print since its first publication. Frankenstein has lived on as Shelley’s self-proclaimed “hideous progeny” despite efforts to take it away from her by attributing its authorship to her husband. It has survived more than a century of academic scorn and neglect, gaining a place on college syllabi only in the 1960s. It is a tale that possesses the compelling quality of the ancient mariner’s saga, a story that nearly two centuries of readers have confirmed they “cannot choose but hear.”

“… go forth and prosper …”

Werewolves, vampires, witches, and warlocks have been the stuff of folklore, legend, and nightmare for centuries, yet none have so haunted the public imagination as the monster created by eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley in 1816. From the start, we have been eager to help the monster live off of the page, to interpret the tale for ourselves. Within five years of the novel’s initial publication, the first of what would eventually be more than ninety dramatizations of Frankenstein appeared onstage. Shelley herself went to see one of the thirty-seven performances of Presumption that played in London in 1823. Lumbering violently and uttering inarticulate groans, the monster attracted record numbers of theatergoers, as well as a series of protests by the London Society for the Prevention of Vice. Mary was pleased and “much amused” by Thomas Cooke’s attempts to portray the monster, and even made a favorable note about the playbill to her friend Leigh Hunt. “In the list of dramatis personae came,—by Mr. T Cooke: this nameless mode of naming the unameable [sic] is rather good,” she wrote on September 11 (Letters, vol. 1, p. 378).

A familiar yet ever-evolving presence on the Victorian stage, the monster also haunted the pages of newspapers and journals. Political cartoonists used Shelley’s monster as the representation of the “pure evil” of Irish nationalists, labor reformers, and other favored subjects of controversy ; it was often depicted as an oversized, rough-and-ready, weapon-wielding hooligan. In Annals of the New York Stage, George Odell notes that audiences were entertained with photographic “illusions” of the monster as early as the 1870s. And the cinema was barely ten years old before the Edison Film Company presented their version of the story, with Charles Ogle portraying a long-haired, confused-looking giant. Virtually every year since that film’s appearance in 1910, another version of Frankenstein has been released somewhere in the world—though the most enduring image of the monster was the one created by Boris Karloff in James Whale’s 1931 classic. The creature’s huge, square head, oversized frame, and undersized suit jacket still inform most people’s idea of what Shelley’s monster “really” looks like.

As strange and various as the interpretations of the creature have been, the monster has retained a surprisingly human quality. Even in its most melodramatic portrayals, its innate mortality is made apparent; whether through a certain-softness in the eyes, a wistfulness or longing in its expression, or a desperate helplessness in its movements, the creature has always come across as much more than a stock horror device. In fact, several film adaptations have avoided the use of heavy makeup and props that audiences have come to expect. Life Without a Soul ( 1915) stars a human-looking, flesh-toned monster; and in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), actor Robert De Niro, who is certainly neither ugly nor of great stature, did not wear the conventional green face paint and restored the monster’s eloquent powers of speech.

Like Satan in Paradise Lost, Mary Shelley’s monster was given a shadowy and elusive physical presence by its creator. It moves through the story faster than the eye can follow it, descending glaciers “with greater speed than the flight of an eagle” (p. 130) or rowing “with an arrowy swiftness” (p. 150) . The blurriness of the scenes in which the monster appears allows us to create his image for ourselves and helps explain why it has inspired so many adaptations and reinterpretations. Certainly, too, both Milton’s Satan and Shelley’s creature have been made more interesting, resonant, and frightening because they have human qualities. The monster possesses familiar impulses to seek knowledge and companionship, and these pique our curiosity and awaken our sympathies.