The Birth of Monsters: Frankenstein and the First Thought Experiment

The Birth of Monsters: Frankenstein and the First Thought Experiment

A Stormy Beginning

The year was 1816. The place was Lake Geneva, Switzerland. And the weather was terrible.

For months, rain had hammered the Swiss Alps, turning the usually pristine Lake Geneva into a churning gray expanse. Volcanic ash from the massive eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the previous year had spread across the atmosphere, blocking sunlight and producing what historians now call "the year without a summer." Temperatures across Europe plummeted. Crops failed. People froze.

But inside the elegant Villa Diodati, a group of writers had found an unusual way to pass the time.

The villa belonged to Lord Byron, the most famous—and most scandalous—poet in England. He'd invited his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley, a brilliant but perpetually struggling poet, to stay with him. Percy brought along his young wife, Mary Godwin. And Mary brought something that would change literature forever: a question that had been gnawing at her since she was a child.

What would happen if someone could create life?

The atmosphere inside the villa was thick with intellectual intensity. Byron, Shelley, Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, and a physician named John Polidori gathered around the fire as the storm raged outside. They read ghost stories to each other—German tales of the supernatural translated into French—and discussed philosophy, science, and the nature of the soul.

After one particularly vivid reading, Byron proposed a challenge: each of them should write a ghost story. The one who wrote the best tale would win a prize.

Everyone set to work. Byron wrote a fragment about a skull-headed lady. Polidori began a story about a skull-headed figure that would eventually become the first vampire tale in English. Percy Shelley scribbled poetry, as he often did, and produced little in the way of narrative.

Mary Godwin sat by the fire, watching the flames, thinking.

Days passed. She couldn't think of a story. Everyone else seemed to be making progress except her. She watched the others writing, heard them talking about their ideas, and felt a growing panic. What would she write? What story did she have to tell?

And then, on the evening of June 17, 1816, something extraordinary happened.

The Girl Who Wouldn't Sleep

Mary later described the moment in her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein. She couldn't sleep. She lay awake, watching the fire, listening to the rain, thinking about everything she'd heard the men discussing—about galvanism, about the nature of life, about what makes something alive or dead.

Galvanism was a scientific phenomenon named after Luigi Galvani, an Italian physicist who had discovered that applying electrical current to the legs of a dead frog could make them twitch. The implication was electrifying: electricity might be the spark of life itself. If you could stimulate a dead muscle with electricity, could you stimulate something larger? Could you bring a corpse back to life?

The young woman from the firelight wasn't just an observer—she'd been thinking about these questions since childhood. When she was only five years old, her mother Mary Wollstonecraft had died giving birth to her. Her father, the philosopher William Godwin, had raised her on stories of brilliant, unconventional people. She had read widely in science, philosophy, and literature. She understood the excitement that surrounded new discoveries in electricity and biology.

But she also understood something deeper: what it meant to be created by someone who then abandoned you.

When Percy Shelley proposed marriage, she was only sixteen. He was already married to his first wife. They lived in poverty, traveled constantly, and faced scandal wherever they went. By the time she sat by that fire in 1816, she had already lost a child—a daughter named Clara who died at just two weeks old. Another child, William, was only three years old.

She understood, perhaps better than anyone at that table, what it meant to be brought into the world by someone else's decision—and how terrifying it would be if that creator simply walked away.

As Mary Godwin sat by the fire that June night, her mind conjured a vision. She saw a pale student kneeling beside a figure he had made. She saw the figure's eyes open—dead eyes suddenly filled with life. She saw the student recoil in horror at what he had created.

The story came to her almost complete: Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist from Geneva who discovers the secret of life, assembles a creature from stolen body parts, brings it to life—and then abandons it in disgust and terror.

Over the next several months, Mary Shelley wrote. She filled notebook after notebook. The story grew beyond a simple ghost story—it became something no one had quite seen before. A novel. A warning. A question disguised as a narrative.

When Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was finally published in 1818, it introduced the world to a new kind of story: science fiction.

The Monster and His Maker

To understand why Frankenstein remains relevant two centuries later, we need to look closely at what the novel actually says—and what it's really asking.

Victor Frankenstein is not, as many people assume, the monster. He's the creator. He is the one who stitches together body parts from charnel houses and graveyards. He is the one who spends months in isolation, working feverishly to bring his creation to life. And he is the one who, when he finally sees what he has made, runs away in terror.

Let that sink in for a moment. The man who created a living being—who had complete control over this act of creation—abandons his creation the moment it opens its eyes.

When the monster first awakens, he is innocent. He doesn't know what he is or where he came from. He doesn't know that humans will recoil from him in horror, that his own creator will reject him, that the world will never accept him. He stumbles out into the cold, wet world with no clothes, no knowledge, no one to help him.

> "I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous."

These are the monster's words to Victor, spoken after the creature has saved a girl from drowning and been shot for his trouble. He is pleading for the basic human kindness that every person deserves: someone to see past his appearance, someone to accept him, someone to love him.

But Victor refuses. Again and again, he refuses.

When the monster approaches Victor and begs for a companion—someone like himself who might understand him—Victor initially agrees. He works for months to create a second creature, a female version of the monster. But at the last moment, fearing what two monsters might do in the world, Victor destroys his creation. He tears apart the female monster just as she's about to come to life.

This is the final betrayal. The monster had hoped for a companion, someone to share his exile from humanity. Victor has denied him even that.

What follows is a descent into violence and tragedy that seems inevitable. The monster kills Victor's younger brother William. He frames the family's innocent servant Justine for the crime. She is executed. Victor does nothing to save her. The monster kills Victor's best friend Clerval. He kills Victor's new wife Elizabeth on their wedding night. He pursues Victor to the Arctic, where Victor finally dies.

And the monster, standing over his creator's body, makes a decision.

> "I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these bleeding miseries will be monstrous and empty trace, if you merge with nature; go out of memory and you will become as you had never existed. Disasters follow upon my head, more bitter as death is solaced; a fiend has manifold murders in his thought; angels and spirits, which you summoned, are the ministers that will pursue me."

He climbs a glacier, intending to end his own life. But first, he gathers