The Secret Gospel of Frankenstein
What If the Creature Had Remained Uncorrupted?
The 1818 novel Frankenstein was written by Mary Shelley, the daughter of two idealists and pacifists. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), while her father, William Godwin, was a pacifist-anarchist philosopher who believed deeply in human rationality and the perfectibility of mankind. Shelley grew up in the long shadow of her parents' progressive politics and was proudly influenced by them.
Yet, the creature she created, intelligent, articulate, emotionally aware, is pushed to become a killer. The being fashioned by Victor Frankenstein begins as a blank slate, yearning for love and inclusion, but, due to his grotesque appearance, becomes shunned, ridiculed and hated, ending up as a fugitive, hunted and hunting, overcome by bitterness and vengeance. But did he have to become a murderer? If Shelley had stuck truer to her pacifist roots, instead of aiming to entertain her husband and Lord Byron and the general reading public, might the novel have followed another path?
Her father had argued that individuals are shaped by their experiences and surroundings rather than by innate moral failings or fixed, intrinsic character traits. In his work An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), Godwin suggested that criminal behavior arises because of ignorance, poor education and adverse social conditions.
So to Mary Shelley, perhaps the worst horror story would be of, basically, a good man who loved humanity and wished to be a productive member of human society, being shunned purely because of his appearance and then turning evil because of this. Victor Frankenstein, obsessed with pushing the boundaries of science and anatomy, and acting in haste, does make his creature 8 feet tall and not even resembling the proportions of the golden mean.
Therefore, we get a being who looks the part of the ultimate social misfit. He is so grotesque and intimidating as to make others feel that he poses an immediate threat to them. Despite his initial goodwill he is subjected to being ostracized. The evil of the monster comes from his reactions to unjust social rejection. But, could the “monster” not have become a monster?
This is not a facetious question. It touches on what literature is for, what morality it can embody, and what kinds of resistance it can imagine. Mary Shelley’s creature has become a universal metaphor for the outsider, for the misunderstood genius, for the failed child of science, but there is still room to ask whether the road he took was inevitable. Perhaps it was chosen for him by a culture that could not yet imagine nonviolent resistance in the face of extreme adversity. Let’s imagine an alternative.
The Refusal to Hate
In Shelley’s novel, the creature begins with innocence. He observes a rural family, learns their language through observation, reads Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives and The Sorrows of Young Werther. He educates himself toward the purpose of virtue. But when he finally tries to join humanity, he is beaten, shunned, and reviled. “I am malicious because I am miserable,” he tells Victor Frankenstein. What if he had said, instead: “I am miserable, but I am self-aware enough that I refuse to become malicious. I will fight against giving in to anti-social emotions. I will strive not to return hate for hate.”
Frankly, this would have been the true test of Godwinian pacifism. One refuses to become evil in response to evil in the world. Imagine the creature, despite rejection, still finding ways to show his love for those who do not love him: quietly repairing things in the night, fixing roofs, leaving firewood, guiding lost travelers. He would be a hulking ghost of goodness. Villagers would whisper of a mysterious helper. The world might never embrace him, but some might begin to question their fear of others based merely on appearance.
There is a possible archetype here of the silent, rejected saint, the unthanked helper, the monk in exile. We don’t see the arc of revenge, but the arc of mercy. In some ways, this alternative would be more revolutionary than the actual Frankenstein novel, because it resists the common and accepted logic of grievance and retaliation. It would be harder to write, because rage is easier to dramatize than quiet virtue. But it would also offer a deeper challenge to the reader.
The Political Imagination of a Monster
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein during a time of revolutionary backlash. The French Revolution had devolved into terror. The Romantic dream of liberation had come to nothing. Her own life was marked by grief, e.g. the loss of children, exile, poverty. Pacifism, in literature, often gets mistaken for naivety, but what if it is the opposite? What if it takes more courage to show a character who does not break under pressure, who refuses to be twisted by pain?
We admire Gandhi and King and Mandela precisely because they did not answer hatred with hatred. Had Shelley imagined her creature in this way, she would have had to ask a deeper question: What does goodness look like in exile? Can a being remain good without reward, without recognition?
Job is the original prototype of goodness in exile. Everything is taken from him: his wealth, his health, his family, even his sense of justice in the universe. And what’s left? A man sitting in ashes, scraping his skin with broken pottery, refusing to curse God, refusing to surrender his sense of dignity, even when no explanation comes.
Job asks the terrifying question: Can a person be good despite everything? Can I be good, even when I am never embraced, never welcomed, never seen? Can I be good even when I am being abused by society? Interestingly, Harriet Beacher Stowe answered this question in Uncle Tom’s Cabin through the character of Uncle Tom.
Frankenstein’s creature suffers rejection, loneliness, and abuse and chooses vengeance. Uncle Tom, by contrast, is brutalized and dehumanized, but steadfastly refuses to return evil for evil. He can save himself by whipping a woman also languishing under slavery, but he chooses death by whipping to harming her. Stowe presents him as a man whose moral integrity and sacrificial love are meant to shame the society that enslaves him. In this way, Uncle Tom’s Cabin might even be read as offering an idealized counterexample to Shelley’s bleak moral realism.
While Shelley explores the consequences of social and emotional abandonment, Stowe offers a vision of redemptive endurance designed to provoke guilt and inspire reform. Tom becomes the moral high ground that Shelley’s Creature never reaches. Although Uncle Tom has been relegated to the back bins of the library, it was the most read novel of the 19^th^ century for a reason. Abraham Lincoln sincerely believed this book pushed the nation closer to a war to finally end the evils of slavery.
And if the answer is yes, even sometimes, even just barely, we can be good under extreme pressure to become evil, then we have something profound: a deeper ethic than reward-and-punishment, one rooted in the quiet choice to be merciful, to endure, to give without applause.
Gandhi, King, Bonhoeffer, The White Rose Organization, Mandela… all of them lived this: cast out, imprisoned, mocked, yet still believing in the long arc of goodness. Perhaps such a novel would not have achieved Frankenstein’s explosive drama, but it might have made another kind of history: a parable of radical kindness.
A Kind Heart Unsullied by a Cruel World
I think of the creature, not the one who kills, but the one who might have been able, instead, to serve, quietly and lovingly, in the shadows. In the world Shelley imagined, the creature is excluded because of his appearance. We, too, exclude people for reasons just as arbitrary: gender, accent, class, skin color, disability, difference in general.
The novel’s tragedy is not that a monster kills, but that a society fails to recognize that everyone has a soul and everyone would, if they had the choice, like to serve. Some people become criminals, perhaps, because the opportunity to serve is denied them. Frankenstein is an allegory about this type of societal failure.
If Shelley had written a different ending, we might have had a different metaphor to live by, not one of vengeance, but of persistent gentleness. Imagine students reading a version of Frankenstein where the creature, denied love, gives it anyway, where he builds a secret life of service, where his story becomes less a horror story and more of a secret gospel.
Final Thoughts
Mary Shelley gave us a monster who becomes a murderer because the world would not let him be a man. But what if he had remained a man, no matter what the world did? That would have been the greater tragedy and the greater triumph. Perhaps, somewhere in her imagination, Mary Shelley saw this version too, but due to the adversity she faced in her own life, died too young to bring this version to fruition.
Maybe, frankly, she didn’t believe the world was ready for it. Maybe it still isn’t. But I’d like to think, as I sip coffee under florescent lights in Hanoi, an expat far from my home, in a thriving land my homeland once mercilessly bombed and raped with chemicals, that Frankenstein has been rewritten several times in history, and someone out there is writing Frankenstein again. The other doesn’t break.
They endure, they contribute, they love, they heal.
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