Frankenstein (novel)/WMG
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.
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.
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 recieve messages from the brain, once Frankenstein finished fixing the brain and setting it up.
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.
- 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.