Frankenstein
Mary Shelley (1818)
“A teenage girl invented science fiction, the ethics of creation, and the monster who is more human than his creator — all in one novel.”
Language Register
Formal, Latinate, and elevated throughout — but modulated across three distinct narrators whose prose registers encode their moral positions
Syntax Profile
Shelley writes long, cumulative sentences built on multiple subordinate clauses — a Latinate syntax reflecting her education in classical literature. The Creature's speech is the most syntactically elaborate in the novel, reflecting his textual education. Victor's syntax fragments progressively as his guilt increases. Walton's letters have the rhetorical structure of persuasion — he is always making a case for his own nobility.
Figurative Language
High, drawn primarily from two sources: Milton's Paradise Lost (the Fall, Satan, Adam, the expulsion) and the Romantic sublime (mountains, glaciers, the Arctic as moral landscape). Secondary sources: Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, Plutarch's Lives.
Era-Specific Language
The 1818 term for what we now call science — physics, chemistry, biology combined. Its replacement by 'science' reflects the professionalization and compartmentalization of inquiry.
A key Romantic concept: the experience of overwhelming natural grandeur that humbles human consciousness. Shelley uses it structurally — the Alps correct Victor, the Arctic destroys him.
A vault or building where bodies and bones are deposited. Victor's materials come from charnel-houses — the word carries the full Gothic weight of death and transgression.
Luigi Galvani's discovery (1780s) that electrical stimulation caused muscle contractions in dead frogs — the direct scientific basis for Shelley's premise. Shelley attended lectures on galvanism in 1814.
Shelley uses 'daemon' (Greek: spirit, divine being) rather than 'demon' when Victor addresses the Creature. The distinction matters: daemon implies a spiritual being of uncertain moral status, not simply evil.
The 1818 pseudoscience of reading character from facial features — widely accepted as legitimate. The Creature's 'monstrous' appearance is processed by everyone through physiognomic assumptions.
How Characters Speak — Class & Identity
Victor Frankenstein
Educated, elevated, classical references embedded naturally — 'I read with ardour the works of the greatest minds.' Switches to fragmented, exclamatory prose under moral stress.
Privileged education that gave him access to the tools of creation but no ethical framework for using them. His prose fluency masks his moral incoherence.
The Creature
More formally correct than any other character — Miltonic syntax, careful subordination, no contractions, no colloquialisms. Speaks entirely in the register of the books he read.
Education without socialization. He learned language from texts, not conversation, producing a register that is technically precise and humanly isolated. The most eloquent being in the novel is its most lonely.
Robert Walton
Enthusiastic, hyperbolic, given to superlatives — 'magnificent,' 'glorious,' 'divine.' His language is the language of a man performing greatness for an audience he cannot see.
Romantic hero in the making — or in the avoiding. His register is Victor's before Victor's catastrophe. The novel's structural warning is embedded in how similar they sound.
Henry Clerval
Warm, literary, imaginative — drawn to Persian poetry, human connection, sensory pleasure. His register is pastoral and present-tense.
The novel's moral counterweight to Victor. Clerval lives in the present; Victor lives in the future. The Creature kills Clerval first because removing him removes Victor's access to human feeling.
Elizabeth Lavenza
Gentle, emotionally direct, unironic. She writes to Victor about domestic life, small pleasures, the feelings of those around him.
The domestic world Victor has abandoned. Her letters are the novel's version of what Victor chose not to have.
Narrator's Voice
The novel has three narrators whose voices are formally distinct. Walton is enthusiastic and admiring — a Romantic hero who hasn't yet failed. Victor is retrospective, self-justifying, and increasingly fragmented — he narrates from his own catastrophe and cannot fully see it. The Creature is the most reliable of the three: he makes his argument clearly, acknowledges his crimes, and insists on the context that produced them. Shelley's genius is to give the most moral clarity to the voice we are most conditioned to distrust.
Tone Progression
Walton's letters / Victor's childhood
Elevated, optimistic, Romantic
The world is full of possibility. Natural philosophy will conquer death. The language of the sublime and the sacred applies to human ambition without irony.
Creation to abandonment
Gothic, obsessive, collapsing
Victor's register becomes nocturnal and fragmented. Horror displaces wonder. The prose darkens as the laboratory becomes a charnel-house.
Creature's narrative
Philosophical, elegiac, controlled
The tonal center of the novel — careful, measured analysis of suffering and its causes. The Creature's prose is the steadiest in the book.
Glacier to Elizabeth's murder
Tragic, inevitable, stripped
The sentences shorten as possibility closes. Victor's language loses its ornament. Events arrive without commentary.
Arctic chase and ending
Elegiac, mythic, irresolvable
The prose opens outward. The Creature's final speech reaches for universality. The ending refuses comfort or verdict.
Stylistic Comparisons
- Milton's Paradise Lost — the explicit structural and thematic template. The Creature is both Adam and Satan; Victor is both God and the fallen angel who overreaches.
- Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner — the sailor who violates natural law and suffers endlessly. Victor's guilt has the same compulsive quality.
- Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality — the philosophical backbone of the Creature's argument that nature is good and society corrupts. The Creature is Rousseau's natural man in a Gothic novel.
- Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther — the Creature reads this as part of his education; its obsessive, doomed romantic love maps onto his own impossible longing
Key Vocabulary from This Book
Notable words used in this text — click to see full definitions