Is Frankenstein's monster the villain of the novel?

In Charlotte Gordon's reading, no. She notes only Victor Frankenstein calls the creature a 'monster.' The creature begins benevolent and turns violent only after repeated rejection, so the maker who abandons him comes closer to being the villain.

Why does Charlotte Gordon say 'we are all the cottagers'?

When the creature approaches the kind cottage family hoping to be received, they beat him and flee. Gordon argues most of us would react the same way to a frightening stranger — making the novel a mirror for how ordinary people manufacture the monsters they fear.

What does Frankenstein's creature actually want?

To be loved and received. Gordon frames Victor's original crime as a parent's failure: 'the first thing you're supposed to do is love that child.' The creature teaches himself language, reads Paradise Lost, and finds he belongs to no category — neither Adam nor Satan.

Charlotte Gordon on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Is Frankenstein's Monster Really the Villain?

By John Kaag

with commentary by Charlotte Gordon

Ask most people what Frankenstein is about and they will describe a green-faced brute with bolts in his neck, lurching after villagers. Charlotte Gordon, who has lived with Mary Shelley's novel for years as a biographer, spends her Rebind Classics series dismantling that picture. Two centuries of movies have buried the actual book, and what they buried is stranger and sadder than the monster myth: a story about a creator who abandons what he makes, and a creature who turns violent only after the world refuses him every kindness. Gordon's answer to the title's question is no: the creature is not the villain of Frankenstein, and the man who made and deserted him comes far closer to earning the word.

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Charlotte Gordon

Biographer

Charlotte Gordon is an award-winning author and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Endicott College. Her dual biography Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her other books include Mistress Bradstreet: The Untold Story of America's First Poet and The Woman Who Named God. Her work focuses on revolutionary historical figures, particularly women who challenged social convention, combining rigorous research with an engaging narrative style. Gordon's deep understanding of both Mary Shelley and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, offers crucial insight into the personal and intellectual influences that shaped Frankenstein.

How We Make Monsters: Charlotte Gordon on Frankenstein

Frankenstein is about what a creator owes his creation, Gordon argues — Victor's crime is not making the creature but abandoning it.

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The Abdicating Creator: What You Make and What You Refuse to Claim

Victor flees his creature; Dimmesdale hides his child. Gordon and Marshall read both novels' verdict: what a maker refuses to claim festers and returns.

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Who Was Mary Shelley? The Teenager Who Wrote Frankenstein

Mary Shelley was eighteen: Wollstonecraft's daughter, cast out for eloping with Percy Shelley, grieving a dead child — and writing Frankenstein.

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The Monstrous Woman: Art, Sin, and the Women Who Refused to Break

Shelley was called perverse, Hester branded a sinner — Gordon and Marshall trace one machinery punishing women who broke the rules and didn't break.

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How We Make Monsters: Charlotte Gordon on Frankenstein

The Abdicating Creator: What You Make and What You Refuse to Claim

Who Was Mary Shelley? The Teenager Who Wrote Frankenstein

The Monstrous Woman: Art, Sin, and the Women Who Refused to Break

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Come in as a Founding Reader.