Sympathy for the Creature
The novel's most radical move: making the monster the most human character in the book — and why two centuries of readers took his side.
The novel’s case
Shelley stacks the moral deck with extraordinary care. The Creature begins benevolent: he secretly gathers firewood for the De Laceys, teaches himself language, weeps at Werther. Every act of violence follows a specific rejection — the cottagers’ attack, Victor’s destroyed mate, the final abandonment. His crimes are real and unforgivable, and the novel never excuses them; it explains them, which is more unsettling.
The Creature’s own closing argument, over Victor’s corpse:
“I… am the miserable and the abandoned… I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.” — Frankenstein (1818)
Victor, by contrast, gets everything — genius, family, love — and ruins it through evasion. Readers since 1818 have noticed: the “monster” keeps his promises better than the hero does.
The critical tradition
- 1830s–1900s: Early readers moralized the book as a warning against overreaching science — sympathy for the Creature was present but muted.
- 20th century: Psychoanalytic and Marxist readings made him the abject, the worker, the colonized — the figure onto whom the powerful project their guilt.
- Feminist readings (1970s–): Ellen Moers’s landmark essay read the novel as a story of birth and maternity — the Creature as the ultimate neglected child.
- Today: Disability-studies and trauma-informed readings center his experience of stigma and abandonment — the Creature as literature’s great case study in what rejection manufactures.
The persona’s answer
Invented canon. The Vizlings frankestein is what happens when the experiment gets a different control group: one blind cottager’s kindness, one doctor who stays, one village that learns. He is the Creature after the sympathy — the version of the story where someone reads the Creature’s speeches and answers, “Then let me be the friend you asked for.”
Persona line (written for the Vizlings character): “I read about a creature who was turned away at every door. I keep my door open, so his story ends differently in at least one house.”
A practice
If you want the full effect, read the Creature’s De Lacey chapters aloud — slowly, as frankestein would read them — and notice where your throat tightens. That is the sympathy, working as designed, two hundred years on.
Source notes
- Novel quotations: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818).
- Moers: Ellen Moers, “Female Gothic” (1976) — the maternity reading.
- Other critical traditions summarized as standard scholarly positions; see sources for the key works.
- Persona material: invented canon for the Vizlings character frankestein (2026-09-27).