Dr. Frankenstein committed all of the murders, and the monster does not exist.
After all, all we have is his word to verify the monster's existence.- ...except that Walton and his sailors see an inhumanly large figure traveling across the ice at the beginning of the book, and Walton himself confronts the creature at the end.
- Maybe a compromise? Victor did create the monster but the experience destroyed his sanity. He then kills his friends and convinces himself the creature was the culprit. The creature's suicide at the end isn't over guilt but despair that he lost the only person who could have even theoretically loved him.
- The letter to Walton's sister was just a forgery written by Victor after killing Walton too.
- My theory was that the entire thing was made up by Walton to entertain himself - as he says how lonely he is - and his sister. Thus not only is the creature not real, nor is Victor.
- Victor couldn't have killed William, he was still recovering from his long illness under Clerval's care when the letter about his brother's death arrived.
- Simple. Justine was intentionally poisoning William so she could nurse him back to health. One day, she gave him too much and he died. Or he was never dead. Everything that happened after the creature's creation was a figment of Frankstein's addled brain. I prefer the latter, but this is Wild Mass Guessing.
Dr. Frankenstein is the monster.
How, you ask? Well, there's one good comparison that can be used...- Let's add another.
- No, really, this makes a lot of sense. The monster is the aggressive aspects of Victor's personality, which he has deeply sublimated until they became a separate persona. The elaborate description of how he "made" the monster? He was having a psychotic breakdown- this is a huge contrast to his attempts to make a female monster, which more or less consist of him saying "This is ridiculous, I can't make a person." And then there's the squick of the monster telling Victor he'll be there on his wedding night . . . because the monster is also Victor's sexual side- "Victor" is asexual, and possibly impotent.
- This was actually kind of used in the 2011 stage play, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, with them switching roles between Frankenstein and the monster each night.
The Galvanic reactions were not to bring the monster's body to life.
...but rather to exercise its muscles (think of the user-unconscious exercise vats in space epics and 1950s exercise machine ripoffs) and prepare them to receive messages from the brain, once Frankenstein finished fixing the brain and setting it up. Dr. Frankenstein didn't sew pieces of corpses together.
- If he had, the result would have been about the size of a regular human. But the creature is eight feet tall.
- Possibly Dr. Frankenstein ground the body parts up for cell culture.
Adam did not learn to speak from the family on which he spied.
He remembered how to speak. He was made using corpses, so who is to say that he did not have the speech memory of a formerly living human?- This actually seems very likely. If he didn't have any residual memories in his brain, then we're supposed to believe that he learned to speak that eloquently by spying on a single family for about a year.
- Even more likely when you consider that, if his brain hadn't retained at least some residual memories and processing functions, he shouldn't even have been able to see or control his own limbs.
- It's worth pointing out that Frankenstein making the creature from corpses is strictly fanon, perpetuated by the movie adaptations. He does mention visiting charnel-houses for research and slaughterhouses for raw materials, but he also calls his creation a new species and notes that he cannot, at present, return a corpse to life. He deliberately leaves out the details of his methods, lest the technique be used again.
Victor Frankenstein is gay.
Though he does speak, at points, of loving Elizabeth, they were raised as siblings and that love may well be entirely platonic. In the book, at least, he tried to make the monster beautiful. Perhaps he was trying to make a companion out of his hulking, beautiful reanimated corpse. Victor is a fairly cowardly character, and it stands to reason that he may have wanted a lover but was too afraid to come out of the closet. This may also be a source of some of his misery and revulsion when the monster first wakes up, because creating this monster would be the final moment of truth in admitting his sexuality to himself.- There's also the way he describes Clerval in the book, which this troper thought to be very much how someone would describe a romantic interest.
- In this case, the creature's unusual size might be for more than just convenience of assembly. Perhaps Victor has submissive tendencies and wants a companion who can physically dominate him, or simply finds bigger men appealing, just as many women do. If Victor himself is an average or larger man, his "big men" fetish might well extend to 8-footers.
In the Universal Films, the Monster has a Healing Factor on a From a Single Cell level
The monster appeared to be destroyed in each film. At the end of the third, he even appears to be melting in the molten sulfur pit. Yet in each film he returns seemingly intact, although weakened and needing a boost to get back to full strength. Some of Wolf's examination of the Monster suggests it is nearly indestructible, and some form of Healing Factor seems evident. But the films have a somewhat lax continuity, which can be explained away if one assumes that the monster can repair itself From a Single Cell. At the end of The Ghost of Frankenstein, Ygor has had his own brain implanted into the Monster's body, only to go blind due to the mismatched blood types. Although the Monster's next appearance in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man was originally going to follow up on this plot with an intelligent, blind monster, it was abandoned (although the monster still walks around with his arms outstretched; he actually didn't do this before the blindness). Instead the monster is its old dumb and sighted self, and remains so in future films.- This makes little sense; other entries on this wiki have assumed that Ygor was somehow rendered nearly mindless by having his brain in the monster's body, but this doesn't explain how he got his sight back. Or why he seems in all ways like the same monster he always was. Unless you assume that his Healing Factor is so strong that it somehow reverted the new brain into an exact duplicate of he old one, memories and all. He got his sight back, along with his old personality and mannerisms, because the creature always returns to the state it was in when first brought to life.
- This would also explain some other reversions, such as the creature learning to talk and deciding to destroy itself at the end of Bride of Frankenstein; future appearances have it mute and lacking such insight again. Every time it is destroyed, it reverts to its original self, losing any Character Development it got along the way.
- This becomes canon in the Japanese Frankenstein Conquers the World, since he regenerates from his disembodied heart.
- James Rolfe theorizes something very similar to this in this video
; that there is something inherent to the Monster as an individual that will basically overwrite any new identity forced upon it. - Surprisingly, there's no indication the Bride survived her introductory movie, even though she presumably would have been built the same way as Monster #1, if not better (it was Victor's second attempt, he had help, and she's certainly nicer to look at).
- Obviously the Bride did survive, escaped the ruins of the laboratory, and due to her far comelier appearance she didn't experience the hate and fear that the Monster did when she encountered other people. Eventually she learned to talk, and pieced together her history (and that of her predecessor) from stories told by the townsfolk. She took the name Mary and wrote it all down. Or did you think it was a coincidence that the Mary Shelley we see in the prologue looks so familiar?
Mary Shelley was a misanthrope.
Victor is the "God" of the monster, "Adam", but just as he's creating "Eve", he decides to destroy her so they wouldn't cause havoc and destroy the world. Maybe this is what Shelley thinks God should have done to mankind?- Considering that The Monster himself is an allegory for Shelley's own stillbirth, it could be a metaphor for considering having another child, but deciding not to risk that pain again. Or it could be reaffirming the Aesop of not playing God.
One of the reasons the Monster is so hideous is because it is malnourished.
The Monster admits that it has been living off of nuts and berries, and implies that it does not eat meat. It also has been living in ice caves and other inhospitable regions. Maybe if it got some sunlight, good food, and a warm place to sleep it could become just as good looking as Frankenstein intended.- Its eyes the most hideous part of it would still be the same, though.
Victor Frankenstein had bipolar disorder
Bipolar disorder can sometimes start in response to a sudden change in one's life, and the death of Frankenstein's mother followed by his leaving to college so soon after, which therefore removed him from the support that his family could have provided, may have triggered the beginning of his disorder. As he builds the creature, he displays typical symptoms of a manic phase, such as not sleeping, being reckless with his knowledge, and lacking attention, such as in his building of the creature as evidenced in how he overlooks detail in its limbs. He then shows many signs of depressive phases afterwards, such as his suicidal thoughts, lack of energy, and withdrawal from socialising and hobbies. The monster was ugly because of muscle memory
Because they were dead, the muscles were "slack" when Victor had sculpted the monster to be "handsome", but, when he brought it to life, the "muscle memory" effect came into play, all of the muscles flexing and relaxing into their "original" shape, disfiguring the Monster, had he used a method to keep the muscles taut while sculpting the Creatures features, the effect would have been much more pleasing to Victor.