Mary Shelley

The Argument

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at nineteen, and it is one of the most theologically loaded novels in the English language. The subtitle — The Modern Prometheus — signals the argument: Victor Frankenstein is the man who steals fire from heaven, who crosses the boundary between creator and creature, and who discovers that the crossing cannot be undone. The novel asks what happens when human beings claim the prerogative of God, and it answers with systematic catastrophe.

The creature's complaint against his creator is one of the most morally serious passages in English fiction. He was made without being asked, abandoned without reason, denied companionship, and driven to violence by the rejection of the one being who owed him care. His argument against Frankenstein is the argument of the creature against the inadequate creator — and it raises, by implication, the question of what an adequate creator would look like.

For literary apologetics, Frankenstein is the novel that most directly addresses the question of what it means to be made in someone's image, and what it costs when the image-maker fails the image. It is a novel haunted by the absence of God — which is to say, by the question of what a world looks like when the only creator available is a brilliant, irresponsible young man from Geneva.