What Does Frankenstein’s Creature Expect from a Friend?

In this article

Spoilers for Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

The creature helps his neighbours by leaving their supper alone.

Watching the cottagers in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, he discovers that they are hungry. He has been taking their food. Now he leaves it alone and finds his own; he also brings wood for their fire, working at night without introducing himself. He enjoys seeing the difference his help makes. Later, he imagines winning their affection. [1]

The kindness and the hope of belonging can both be sincere. Wanting a place in this household is an understandable response to watching its members care for one another.

Later, his search for company takes him from hopes of acceptance to attempts at coercion. That change deserves attention. He seeks a place in a household, a friend and a female companion. These are different relationships, each involving somebody whose wishes may differ from his own.

A friend by force

The creature’s early history comes to Victor through his own account. Among its most painful episodes is his rescue of a girl from a river. A man carries her away; the creature follows, and the man shoots him. He describes the wound as the reward for his benevolence, then extends his hatred to humanity at large. [2]

The injustice is easy to grasp. The extension takes more work. One man’s attack becomes a charge against people who had no part in it. Sympathy with the injured creature can carry us past that change almost before we notice it.

His next attempt to acquire company makes the problem concrete. Seeing a young boy, he imagines a child too young to have learned prejudice against his appearance. He could seize the boy and educate him as a friend. That is the plan: companionship beginning with a kidnapping.

The child struggles and demands release. The creature refuses. When he hears that the boy belongs to the Frankenstein family, he identifies a target for revenge. He grips the child’s throat, kills him and rejoices at the misery the death will bring his enemy. [2]

The sequence matters. The wish for friendship precedes the discovery of a useful victim. Even at that earlier point, the boy’s freedom has barely entered the creature’s proposal. He has imagined the comfort of having a friend more fully than the business of being one.

The companion who has not agreed

At the end of his recollection, the creature asks Victor to make a female companion. The ensuing conversation is narrated by Victor, with the creature’s demands, promises and threats given in dialogue. He argues that someone sharing his condition will share his life, and promises a peaceful existence away from humanity. [3]

It is a persuasive prospect, especially after all that has happened. It also gives an absent person a remarkably full itinerary.

He has selected her circumstances, her partner and the life she will lead. Shared exclusion, in his reasoning, will produce mutual attachment. Yet having something terrible in common does not settle whether two people will like one another. The proposed companion is being asked to solve a problem before she exists to have an opinion about it.

Victor later imagines that she might refuse the agreement or reject the creature. He destroys the unfinished female. These are Victor’s fears about a future being, not a rejection she actually performs. [4]

His recognition of that uncertainty does not resolve his own responsibility as a creator. Nor does his frightened account establish what she would have become. Both speakers can make plans around her while she has no opportunity to answer.

Karloff’s creature has different problems

The black-and-white films directed by James Whale give Boris Karloff’s creature a different set of encounters. Shelley’s elaborate reasoning cannot simply be attached to him because the face is familiar.

Writing for the BFI about Frankenstein (1931), Vic Pratt describes the creature’s confusion after he throws a little girl into a lake, expecting her to float like a flower. [5] That account gives the harm a different basis from the novel’s attack on the boy. Play has become lethal through a mistaken expectation about another body. We lose something essential if every child harmed by this character becomes evidence of the same motive.

The American Film Institute records an agreement to remove the tossing of Maria into the water for the 1937 reissue, followed by a later restored video release containing recovered material. The action described by Pratt should not be assumed to appear in every print. [6]

The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) supplies a relationship that briefly works. In the AFI’s synopsis, a blind hermit welcomes the creature and teaches him speech. The creature becomes calmer before hunters intrude. [7]

Here, companionship has something better than a proposed contract going for it: someone is already offering it. The relationship gives the creature a place with another person. It also gives us a reason to resist reading all his desire for company as a disguise for control.

Someone else’s answer

The same film makes coercion part of obtaining a companion. At Pretorius’s command, the creature abducts Elizabeth to force Henry Frankenstein to cooperate. When the new being comes alive, she is frightened of her intended partner. [7] Richard T. Jameson’s essay describes the Bride’s rejection and the creature’s destructive response. [8]

The proposed solution to his loneliness has acquired a will of her own. Calling her the Bride does not make her consent part of the equipment.

It is possible to feel the force of his disappointment while noticing how little opportunity she has had to decide anything. Her refusal belongs to her. The destruction belongs to the creature who brings it about.

Even that ending contains a choice which complicates a neat verdict. The AFI’s account records him urging Henry and Elizabeth to escape before destroying the tower. [7] He distinguishes between people in the midst of his despair. That selective mercy deserves to remain in the account, alongside the lives he destroys.

His loneliness gives him a powerful claim on our attention. It gives him no authority to supply another person’s answer.

For the separate question of how adaptations change the creature’s voice and narrative authority, see Who Gets to Tell Frankenstein’s Story?.

Sources and editions

The novel passages follow the 1818 text in the scholarly Pittsburgh Bicentennial Edition, not the revised 1831 text. The film discussion draws on the attributed BFI, AFI and Jameson accounts below. No direct viewing of a specified film edition or comparison with a screenplay was undertaken for this essay; claims about exact shots, delivery and editing are therefore outside its scope.

1. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), vol. II, ch. IV, pp. 56–58, 66–67. Pittsburgh Bicentennial Edition, edited by Elisa Beshero-Bondar and Rikk Mulligan; introductory note amended 18 March 2018. The digital edition identifies its source as the first edition, published in three volumes by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, London.
2. Shelley, Frankenstein (1818), vol. II, ch. VIII, pp. 133–139: the river rescue and the later encounter with the boy are separate episodes.
3. Shelley, Frankenstein (1818), vol. II, ch. VIII, p. 141, and ch. IX, pp. 142–149. The chapter boundary marks the end of the creature’s recollection and the return to Victor’s narration of their conversation.
4. Shelley, Frankenstein (1818), vol. III, ch. III, pp. 40–44. The prospective female’s refusal is Victor’s prediction; he destroys the unfinished being.
5. Vic Pratt, ‘Boris Karloff: 10 essential films’, BFI, 9 October 2012, Frankenstein (1931) entry.
6. American Film Institute, Frankenstein (1931), AFI Catalog of Feature Films, History: censorship, reissue and restoration passages.
7. American Film Institute, Bride of Frankenstein (1935), AFI Catalog of Feature Films, expanded Synopsis: the hermit, Elizabeth’s abduction and the ending. James Whale directs; Boris Karloff plays the creature, Colin Clive plays Henry and Elsa Lanchester plays the Bride. The catalogue also records revisions and a laboratory continuity problem in its History.
8. Richard T. Jameson, ‘Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein’, first published in The A List (2002), reprinted by the Library of Congress, PDF p. 3, final main-text paragraph. Critical interpretations are Jameson’s, rather than institutional conclusions of the Library of Congress.

Sources accessed 4 October 2026.