Did I request thee, Maker, from my Clay
To mold me Man, did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me…?

-Adam, in John Milton, Paradise Lost

A Tragedy For Our Time

In a recent interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, the filmmaker Guillermo del Toro discussed his new movie adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic 19^th-century horror story Frankenstein. He recalled the Sunday afternoon when he was a child, following Mass in Guadalajara, Mexico, in which he watched James White’s 1931 version of Frankenstein for the first time, and was utterly spellbound. It was on that afternoon that del Toro felt inspired to make movies, and vowed he’s one day make his own version of Shelley’s dark masterpiece. 

I’ve always loved stories that go bump in the night — I was the sort of kid who would purposely miss the bus some afternoons so I could hide out in Hainesport Elementary School’s library and read Edgar Allen Poe. But somehow, I’d never actually read Frankenstein. So, it being the week before Halloween at the time, I decided I’d find a copy from from my neighborhood bookstore and give it a try. And what I experienced was not some shlocky scare-story, but a prescient tragedy for our time.

Reading Frankenstein in 2025

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818, and it was first published when she was only twenty years old. Her Gothic story narrates the life of Victor Frankenstein, an ambitious scientist who discovers how to engineer the spark of life, and assembles a living being out of human body parts. The Creature horrifies his maker. Many of the people he first meets are revolted by his appearance, This, in turn, drives him to murderous ends, and drives Frankenstein to an obsession with destroying the monster he’s made. 

The terror that Frankenstein’s Creature evokes asks us honest questions about how we see each other. After his “birth,” the Creature lives for a time in a hovel adjacent to a cottage in the woods inhabited by an aged father named DeLacy and his two adult children. He watches them from a distance, learning language and human customs.

Eventually, he risks revealing himself to them to attempt human connection. And in that terrible encounter, the only person who treats him with kindness is the old man, who — tellingly — is blind. He can’t be disturbed by the Creature’s physical appearance, because he can’t see him. All he can do is listen and respond to the pleading voice he hears.

The humanity of DeLacy, the horrified response of his son and daughter, and the effect it has upon the Creature all invite us to have a look at how we view each other — and whether we can see the dignity and humanity that reside in those who might otherwise repulse us. 

Shelley’s tragic unnamed Creature also portrays the pain of isolation. As Frankenstein’s creation confronts his maker, he describes reading John Milton’s Paradise Lost while in hiding (the influence of Milton’s epic poem pervades the book). The Creature, taking in Milton’s blank-verse retelling of humanity’s genesis, sees himself as a wretched inverse of Adam. And he’s even jealous of Satan. Why? The Creature reasons that “Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and abhorred.”

The Creature then begs Frankenstein to construct for him a fellow-creature: as Adam lived with Eve, he’d have a companion with which to share his life. Frankenstein ultimately refuses, sealing both the Creature’s fate and his own. I found in Frankenstein’s “daemon,” as he often refers to him, an uncanny resemblance to the time we find ourselves in, residing as we do in an “epidemic of loneliness.”

Mary Shelley’s dark masterpiece has become a permanent fixture in our vocabulary — on stage, on the screen, and in pop culture. But I think, if you can banish the images of Boris Karloff with the bolt in his neck, her story is also a cautionary tale about the dangers of our mingled genius and arrogance. When a young Victor Frankenstein, studying science at university, vows to himself, “So much has been done. . . more, far more, will I achieve. . . I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation,” he sounds a bit like a Silicon Valley tech bro. By the disastrous end of his life, however, this product of Frankenstein’s ingenuity has killed his brother, his childhood best friend, his wife Elizabeth on their wedding night, and driven Victor to despair and death in the Arctic.

Centuries after Mary Shelley’s monster first found his way into print, Big Tech, AI, multinational pharmaceutical corporations, and more are still promising us they’ll “unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.” I think we still need the sober warning Mary Shelley offers. Victor Frankenstein’s Creature, perhaps, is the monster for our moment.