Its complex emotions, intelligence, and ability to plan vengeful tactics awaken greater fears than the stumbling and grunting of a mindless beast. A closer look at Shelley’s singular description of the monster’s features reveals its likeness to a newborn infant rather than a “fiend” or “demon”: Consider its “shrivelled complexion,” “watery eyes,” and “yellow skin [that] scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath” (p. 51) . The emotional range of De Niro’s monster, the gentle childish expression in Karloff’s eyes, even the actor Cooke’s “seeking as it were for support—his trying to grasp at the sounds he heard” (Letters, vol. 1, p. 378), suggest that we have sensed the monster’s humanity all along.

Another trend in the way the monster has been reinterpreted is equally suggestive. Movie titles such as Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) , and Dracula Vs. Frankenstein (1971) testify to the fact that the monster has taken on the name of his creator in popular culture. In Frankenstein, the monster is called plenty of names by his creator, from at best “the accomplishment of my toils” to “wretch,” “miserable monster,” and “filthy daemon”; significantly, Victor never blesses his progeny with his own last name. Our identity of the creature as the title character does, of course, shift the focus from man to monster, reversing Shelley’s intention. Reading the book, we realize that Frankenstein‘s lack of recognizing the creature as his own—in essence, not giving the monster his name—is the monster’s root problem. Is it our instinctive human sympathy for the anonymous being that has influenced us to name him? Is it our recognition of similarities and ties between “father” and “son,” our defensiveness regarding family values? Or is it simply our interest in convenience, our compelling need to label and sort?

Our confusion of creator and created, as well as our interest in depicting the creature’s human side, indicate an unconscious acknowledgment of a common and powerful reading of Frankenstein: that the monster and his creator are two halves of the same being who together as one represent the self divided, a mind in dramatic conflict with itself. Walton notes to his sister the possibility of living a “double existence” (pp. 24—25), bringing to mind his and Frankenstein’s struggles between their creative and self-destructive energies. The monster/ creator conflation most forcefully conveys this idea of humanity’s conflicting impulses to create and destroy, to love and hate. Shelley could not have chosen a subject with more relevance to twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers than humankind’s own potential inhumanity to itself. Our ambitions have led us to the point where we, too, can accomplish what Victor did in his laboratory that dreary night in November: artificially create life. But will our plan to clone living organisms or produce life in test tubes have dire repercussions ? We build glorious temples to progress and technology, monumental structures that soar toward the heavens; and yet in a single September morning, the World Trade Center was leveled—proving once again that man is his own worst enemy.

In Frankenstein, Shelley exhibits a remarkable ability to anticipate and develop questions and themes peculiarly relevant to her future readers, thereby ensuring its endurance for almost 200 years. To understand why and how this ability developed, we must take a closer look at her life, times, and psychological state. Certainly, Frankenstein details a fascinating experiment, introduces us to vivid characters, and takes us to gorgeous, exotic places. But this text, written by a teenager, also addresses fundamental contemporary questions regarding “otherness” and society’s superficial evaluations of character based on appearance, as well as modern concerns about parental responsibility and the harmful effects of absenteeism. Anticipating the alienation of everyday life, Robert Walton and the monster speak to those of us who now live our lives in front of screens of various kinds—computer, television, and film. Other readers may feel stabs of recognition when confronting Victor, a perfectionist workaholic who sacrifices love and friendship in the name of ambition. Frankenstein is a nineteenth-century literary classic, but it is also fully engaged in many of the most profound philosophical, psychological, social, and spiritual questions of modern existence.

“… the spirit of the age …”

The endurance of Frankenstein has much to do with the particular circumstances under which the text was written: the moment in history and place in time of its creation, as well as the particular background and preparations of its creator. In the years leading up to the story’s conception on a June evening in 1816, Europe and America experienced a profound shift in sensibility that initiated the modern era. Romanticism had its beginnings in the democratic idealism that inspired the French and American Revolutions, and in the progressive thought that brought on the industrial and scientific revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Though most historians cite the movement’s end-dates as somewhere around the mid-nineteenth century, the strength and appeal of the “spirit of the age” (as identified by Percy Shelley in A Defence of Poetry) continue to affect our present political, social, and intellectual lives. Those exemplifying the spirit during Shelley’s time railed against authoritarian government, conservative morality, classical models, personal insincerity, and moderate, “safe” behavior. In the arts, Romantics brought into their work a new emphasis on individualism, personal feelings, and expression, as exemplified by Goya’s Black Paintings and Cho-pin’s Preludes; a focus on emotional, subjective response rather than the objectivity and intellect favored during the Age of Reason, which can be detected in the difference between Beethoven’s earliest and later works; a celebration of spontaneous expressive intensity, seen in Turner’s oil paintings and heard in Bellini’s operas; and a keen interest in the exotic and erotic, as in Delacroix’s scenes inspired by his North African travels.

In Britain, the literary response to the movement was particularly intense. Starting in the second half of the eighteenth century, English writers were strongly affected by the spirit of change in France and America and envisioned nothing less than “the regeneration of the human race,” according to poet laureate Robert Southey.