I just finished reading a 2015 reprint of the 1831 edition (i.e. the revised version of the original 1818 story) of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
I picked this one up largely because the story is one that I knew through cultural osmosis, picking up the story through its innumerable references in contemporary culture without ever actually having read the original work, and so sought to remedy that. In that regard, I didn't realize that the 1831 edition wasn't the first published version of the story, but some checking revealed that it's the iteration which has become the one we all know, which is good enough for me.
What struck me most about this story was how much the "insightful" understanding of the tale—another artifact of its being a common point of contemporary culture—is itself a shallow take. This idea, which is held to be clever, is that seeing Victor Frankenstein as a tragic figure and his monster as the villain is a shallow take, and that the monster is in fact the far more sympathetic character, with Dr. Frankenstein being the more callous of the two.
Having read the book, I find myself in disagreement with this take. While the monster is certainly a tragic villain, he's still very much the villain of the tale, and far more evil than whatever can be said of his creator. While Victor Frankenstein can be justly castigated for failing to live up to his duty of care toward the being he created (and in all honesty, that's the weakest part of the story; that although he strove for two years, letting his health decline and his social obligations languish, in the instant that Victor Frankenstein beheld the living thing that he'd created he was so stricken with horror that he had to flee to his room, and when he awoke and saw his creation standing over him, fled his house entirely, being overcome with what was essentially PTSD so bad it required his friend Henry Clerval to spend roughly another two years taking care of him...if this were D&D, I'd say that the monster had to have some sort of fear aura to evoke that level of revulsion), the monster's vengeance against Frankenstein is entirely out of proportion to what can essentially be called parental neglect.
Consider that, when the monster seeks out Frankenstein two years after being created and abandoned, the first thing he does is strangle Victor's younger brother (who, from what I can tell from the text, is somewhere around seven years old) to death, and then frame a close family friend for the crime, causing her to be hanged. Only after that does the monster approach Frankenstein and ask him to build a mate for him, telling of the miserable loneliness and rejection that he's encountered due to his hideous countenance.
I suspect that Victor Frankenstein would have been more amenable to that if the monster hadn't already murdered his kid brother and caused a friend who was practically family to be executed. Certainly, that the monster's initial reacquaintance with Victor was made only after killing two people, one of whom was a child, is enough to make me cast him as the villain of the story. No matter how miserable your life is, killing people (especially people who've never even met you, let alone done you no harm) is inexcusable.
And of course, the monster's subsequent path of revenge when Victor (after initially agreeing to build the monster a companion) declines to make another monster is likewise littered with innocent people, as he kills everyone Victor cares about, not to change his mind, but simply to hurt the person whom he blames for his woes. Even the monster, by the end of the book, agrees that he's the villain of the story, and in this regard I can't disagree.
It's a powerful tale, and Gothic in the truest sense of the word, and I'm quite happy to say that I don't regret having gone back to the source material on this one.
