How Frankenstein drew on Genesis
A documented line of influence: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley demonstrably engaged Moses’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Genesis
Moses · c. 550 BCE
BibleThe influenced
Frankenstein
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley · 1818
RomanticismRelevance
4/10
On Frankenstein’s page
- Frankenstein's monster keeps measuring himself against the first man — created, then cast off, demanding an account from the one who made him
- The route runs through Milton (the epigraph is Adam's protest, and the creature reads Paradise Lost), but the original pattern is here in Genesis: knowing Adam's making sharpens the creature's bitter inversion of it
On Genesis’s page
- The creature's deepest grievance is a Genesis grievance — like Adam, he was made and then abandoned by his maker, and he wants to know why
- Shelley reaches it by way of Milton (the creature reads Paradise Lost, and the epigraph is Adam's complaint), but the wound underneath is the oldest one: a creation turning to face its creator