> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.rebindclassics.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # How We Make Monsters: Charlotte Gordon on Frankenstein - URL: https://www.rebindclassics.com/how-we-make-monsters-frankenstein/ - Published: 2026-07-28T22:09:23.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-02T18:28:53.000Z - Description: Frankenstein is about what a creator owes his creation, Gordon argues — Victor's crime is not making the creature but abandoning it. - Author: John Kaag - Tags: Charlotte Gordon on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, #essay Strip away the laboratory and the lightning, and *Frankenstein* turns out to be a book about parenthood gone catastrophically wrong. That, at least, is the heart of [Charlotte Gordon's Rebind Classics reading](https://www.rebindclassics.com/gordon-biography-as-incarnation/), which treats Mary Shelley's novel less as a fable about the dangers of science than as a searching inquiry into what a creator owes the thing it creates. The famous question is not whether Victor Frankenstein should have built the creature, but what he owed it once he had. ## **How We Make Monsters** Gordon's organizing claim about the novel is compact and recurring: the book "is about [how we make monsters](https://www.rebindclassics.com/frankenstein-creatures-education/)." The creature, in this reading, is not a monster by nature but one manufactured by the conduct of others, beginning with his maker. Victor assembles a living being over months of obsessive labor and then, the instant it stirs, recoils and flees. The being is left to face the world with no guide, no protector, and no name, and what happens next is the working-out of that abandonment. The novel makes the abandonment a deliberate moral failure rather than an accident, and Gordon insists on the comparison to parenthood. A maker's first obligation, she says, is the same as a parent's: "[the first thing you're supposed to do is love that child](https://www.rebindclassics.com/team-monster/)." Victor performs the opposite of love. His revulsion at the creature's appearance overrides any sense of duty toward a being he willed into existence. Gordon reads Victor as a study in self-absorption, a man so consumed by his own feelings that he never registers the needs of the life he has made, a temperament she compares, cuttingly, to certain modern titans of self-regard. ## **The Creature's Unanswerable Case** Against Victor's self-pity, Gordon sets [the creature's astonishing case](https://www.rebindclassics.com/frankenstein-monster-villain/) for himself. When the two finally meet on the ice, the creature does not roar; he reasons. He recounts how he began benevolent and was driven to violence only by relentless rejection, summarized in the novel's line "I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend." Gordon finds the argument unanswerable: the creature "did not ask to be made," and having been made, he asked only for companionship and care. The tragedy is that his reasonableness goes unrewarded. The middle of the book, where [the creature educates himself](https://www.rebindclassics.com/frankenstein-creatures-education/), deepens the question of responsibility. Learning language and reading *Paradise Lost*, the creature searches for his place in the order of things and discovers he has none. He is, in Gordon's words, exiled from both Adam and Satan, belonging to no category the culture provides. This homelessness is not his fault; it is the direct result of having been created and then disowned. Shelley, Gordon argues, uses his reading to show that the creature understands his own condition far better than Victor ever understands his. ## **We Are All the Cottagers** What makes the novel morally serious, rather than merely sad, is that Gordon refuses to let the reader stand safely apart from the cruelty. When the gentle cottagers the creature has come to love beat him and flee, the reader wants to believe they would have behaved better. Gordon denies them the comfort. "[We are all the cottagers](https://www.rebindclassics.com/greet-the-stranger/)," she says; presented with a terrifying stranger, most people reach for the stick. The book implicates its audience in exactly the rejection that produces its monster, which is why it refuses to settle into a simple lesson about scientific overreach. The responsibility theme even reaches outward into the novel's wider concerns. The creature's first history lesson, from Constantin de Volney's account of empires, sets his personal abandonment against the rise and fall of civilizations and the violence done to conquered peoples. Gordon hears in this an enlargement of the book's central question: humanity builds and destroys, welcomes and rejects, on every scale. The creature's individual ruin becomes a small instance of a much larger human pattern of creating things and then failing to care for them. So what is *Frankenstein* about? In Gordon's account it is about the duty a creator cannot escape and the disaster that follows when he tries. The science is a vehicle, not the subject. What endures, and what makes the book feel urgently contemporary, is its insistence that bringing something into being is the beginning of an obligation, not the end of one, and that the refusal of that obligation is how monsters are made.