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It is unfortunate that the phrase “Frankenstein's monster” has, in the popular imagination, become associated with the lurching, inarticulate being portrayed in numerous films by Boris Karloff and others. In the novel that inspired those films, written by a teen-aged Mary Shelley, the creature is highly articulate and intensely self-analytical about his poignant situation. So is the novel's protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, the tragic overreacher who brings to life and then attempts to destroy his creature.
From its first publication early in 1818 Frankenstein has excited interest and curiosity, but in recent years the work has, justly, received serious scholarly attention for its brilliant foreshadowings of numerous modern concerns. Frankenstein has been interpreted as a tale of excessive ambition, a social critique, a warning about the dangers of technology, and a myth of creation. Psychological and psychoanalytical interpretations have also been offered: the novel has been read as a tale of the “double,” in which Victor and the creature are seen to be aspects of the same being; the monster has been characterized as a projection of the raging id, carrying out its creator's forbidden, destructive, unconscious wishes. In recent years, feminist scholars have been attracted to the work as a reflection of birth trauma and as a male appropriation of female functions and texts. The novel's ability to generate and sustain such a range of views amply demonstrates the suggestive richness of its artistic texture.1
In these pages, I would like to discuss the novel from a different and, I think, especially apt perspective. The aspirations and interactions of the major figures of the story—Victor Frankenstein, his nameless creature, and the young sea-captain to whom he tells his story—prefigure and exemplify Karen Horney's account of the destructive effects of self-idealization, pathological vindictiveness, and the “search for glory.” In turn, Horney's views provide excellent ins