Victor Frankenstein

Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein

The famous creator of the Frankenstein monster was a tragic, misunderstood man with a love for alchemy. He is the creator of Frankenstein’s monster, only to be horrified by it.

Victor Frankenstein is the eldest son of a wealthy, Genevese man, Alphonse, and his young wife, Caroline. Victor grows up in the perfect family with a happy childhood and a constant and devoted companion in his adopted cousin, Elizabeth. He is sensitive, intelligent, and passionate about his interests and becomes absorbed in the quest to find out what creates life.

While away at college in Ingolstadt, Victor creates a being from scavenged corpse parts and gives it life, but is repulsed by its hideousness once it lives. When the monster demands Victor creates a mate for it, Victor does so, only to change his mind and kill his newest creation, not wanting to create a world of monsters.The monster, in retaliation for Victor’s negligence, destroys his life by killing off those Victor loves. First his brother William and then his bride Elizabeth on their wedding night.

Victor chases him to the far reaches of the Arctic planning to destroy him and then die to escape his misery and remorse at his creation, but he dies aboard Walton’s ship before he can catch the monster. His creation commits suicide once it learns of his creator’s death. Victor was succeeded by his younger brother Ernst who carried on the family name.

Film Versions

The Universal Studios film version changes this character from the tormented and recklessly naive researcher of Mary Shelly’s novel into an archetypal mad scientist, not the cackling sort but the coldly monomaniacal sort and one of the major inspirations for all later depictions of scientists in horror and horrific SF films. The Rotwang character from Metropolis may or may not have been an inspiration.

In the Universal Studios canon and later Hammer Films canon, the character’s name is changed:

he becomes the Baron Henry (or Heinrich) Frankenstein. In the children’s puppetoon (3D animation) Mad Monster Party?, he is renamed Baron Boris von Frankenstein in honor of his voice actor and famed horror film star (and comic actor) Boris Karloff.

Marvel Comics and DC Comics

Both the Marvel Comics and DC Comics version of Victor is nearly identical to the original novel except it is stated he died of either exposure or despair searching for his creation in the Arctic. Neither the Marvel version nor the DC Comics version of the Frankenstein monster commited suicide; in Marvel Comics, the monster was later discovered by Robert Walton IV.