Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is at once a pop-cultural phenomenon and a
subtle philosophical novel exploring the promises and pitfalls of a
revolutionary break with the past. Written in the aftermath of the French
Revolution, Shelley’s first novel tells the story of a man created from
scratch by a mad scientist, with neither a family nor a language to call
his own. As his life comes to mirror that of his creator and of a whole
array of other exiles and outcasts, the novel examines what it means to be
an outsider, not only to one’s culture and community, but even to nature
itself.
Though initially met with shock by readers who wondered how “the mind of
an eighteen year-old girl…came to dilate on so horrible an idea,”
Frankenstein would later be recognized as a keen literary diagnosis of the
pathology, not only of romanticism, but of the entire area of
technologically managed alienation that was to follow it, and which we
still inhabit.
