Mary Shelley
Frankenstein

It has become one of the most representative novels of the nineteenth century. Frankenstein, often mistakenly identified as the monster, owes its strength and importance to the depiction of human fears through the creation of the "monster," a creature that man cannot comprehend.

Geneva, late 1700s. Victor Frankenstein, after the death of his mother, decides to dedicate himself to creating a perfect being, a being that surpasses man in intelligence and physical abilities. The result of his studies will be a "demon" that his own creator will renounce. How can one be surprised that he is evil, he to whom happiness is denied by birth? The monster is actually a romantic hero, a Prometheus: his story is a tragic passion. Romantically, the monster would like communion: he would like to belong to a community, to be common. His exceptionality weighs on him. His uniqueness is a burden. It makes life impossible for him. And goodness. How can someone be good who is alone in the world, has no one similar to mirror and love himself in? Who is abandoned, rejected?

He is not inherently evil; he asks for sympathy: if it were shown to him, he would be good. But for others to show him love, the monster must wait for the confusion between good and beautiful to dissolve, which consequently condemns the ugly and the bad starting from the alienation from the realm of the beautiful and the good. In other words, he should educate his contemporaries to open their eyes and perceive another beauty, which offends proportions, which transgresses old harmonies: an unexpected, new beauty. If this does not happen, if the monster can only kill his creator, it is because no one sees his beauty, no one believes in his goodness. And so love is transfigured into hatred, dedication into aggression, gratitude into envy. The only embrace allowed between him and his creator is that of death. Right at the end, when the monster throws himself on his creator's corpse, he reveals the great affection that binds him to the one who gave him life.

Even years later, Frankenstein remains one of the most chilling gothic novels ever written. It can strike a somewhat academic tone, a certain tendency to scatter perhaps overly learned quotations here and there; it may seem unconvincing, even make one smile that the monster educates himself until he becomes capable of reading Milton's "Paradise Lost," Plutarch's "Lives," Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther." But beyond the emphatic tone that distances it from our taste, the novel is very modern. It vibrates with anticipations of new harmonies that will resurface in Poe and Melville, not to mention the science fiction to come. Because the novel will start something absolutely new, namely, the sci-fi tale that will become in the following century a true literary genre. Certainly, here the horror is not social, nor political. It is moral, religious: the horror resonates with accents that evoke much more the devil rather than the combinations between science and power. It remains that Frankenstein is a scientist, his aim is the artificial creation of a human being. Isn't that the dream of scientists? Isn't it still a dream and a taboo?