This weekend I read the original Frankenstein, and it was absolutely brilliant. Mary Shelley – who’s a genius – created the story when she was even younger than I am. When I was the age Shelley was when she wrote Frankenstein, 19-21, I was travelling around Germany and Europe, working stupid part-time jobs, running long distances, making and losing friends, and biking across the country; basically, getting the kind of life experience that one typically would need to become a good writer. Life Experience which Mary Shelley seems to have been born with; she obviously had the most important thing that makes someone a good writer: the incentive to sit down and actually write, and the opportunity to do so.

Anyway, I was surprised to learn that Frankenstein’s monster is actually quite sophisticated; nothing like Boris Karloff’s interpretation, which turns the monster into an animalistic baffoon. The Monster of Shelley’s book learns to speak French eloquently and eventually learns to read and write.

Frankenstein’s monster is actually a very good anthropologist, far better than the actual “anthropologists” of the eighteen hundreds, who only did ethnographic research to prove their own superiority and to make sure their subjects were being exploited just as thoroughly as possible.

After the Monster wakes up, Frankenstein is so afraid of him that he screams and runs into his bedroom; the monster escapes the apartment (or, in Shelley’s 1800s language, he “quitted” the apartment) and runs away, experiencing the fear and terror on everyone’s face that he meets.

Eventually he ends up in the woods, where he takes shelter in a hut adjacent to a cottage where a family lives. By peering through a crack in the boards of the cottage, the Monster is able to observe the family’s behavior. He actually lives in that little hut, observing the ignorant family for over a year, living on a diet of nuts and berries and withstanding cold like only a monster can.

The Monster didn’t dare leave his little hovel (at least not in the daylight), after the way people treated him. The monster laments: “I remembered too well the treatment I had suffered the night before from the barbarous villagers, and resolved, whatever course of conduct I might hereafter think it right to pursue, that for the present I would remain quietly in my hovel, watching, and endeavoring to discover the motives which influenced [the family’s] actions.”

The pursuit of this specific knowledge, “the motives which influenced their actions,” is the central pursuit of anthropology. And doing so with minimal interruption to the research subjects is key. In this way, by watching the family through the crack in a wall in their cottage, the Monster is – despite his voyeurism, which is not characteristic of anthropology – an ethnographic observer, who learns from his subjects the language and customs of French domestic life. He pays attention when the son of the family teaches his foreign wife how to speak and read French, and he reads their literature and history books.

He grows to respect his research subjects and feel affection for them, as many ethnographic researchers do. It’s almost like Shelley understood anthropology even before anthropology became a real academic pursuit (which is relatively recently).

The way Shelley frames the story brings to light a big issue in anthropology: the reliability of informants. The reader experiences the story of Frankenstein’s monster through various degrees of separation. Dr. Frankenstein tells his story to an explorer; the explorer writes about Dr. Frankenstein in letters to his sister.

The reliability of these informants comes into question when Dr. Frankenstein includes letters from his father and sister in his narrative. It seems unlikely to me that Frankenstein would remember these letters word for word years after they were sent, and even more unlikely that the explorer would transcribe them word for word in his letters to his sister. Is it possible that the explorer – stuck for weeks on a ship that can’t move far because of the mountains of ice in the arctic, who already admitted to being lonely and wanting a friend – made the whole thing up to entertain himself and his sister?

Reliability of informants is a big issue in anthropology; just look at Margaret Meade, who was accused of being duped by her informants in Papua New Guinea. Several years after she did her field work, another anthropologist went to study the same people to see if her findings held up; they did not, indicating that the informants must have lied to at least one of the anthropologists and possibly both. This is why it’s important not to rely solely on what informants tell you, but to confimr information with other sources and through participant observation.

As an anthropology student, the most interesting aspect of Frankenstein is Shelley’s use of the concepts of social identity and agency.

Our social identity is our understanding of where we fit in society; having a social identity means being able to answer the question, “where do I belong?” For me, it’s easy: I belong in college. I fit in here, among my anthropology classmates, fraternity brothers, and food-service coworkers. I know my place in the future too: I will be a college graduate, among hundreds of thousands of college graduates my age, all searching for jobs and a way to pay off student loans and most likely resorting to a low-paying job in a field unrelated to the one we studied. Although it’s not ideal, it’s concrete in my mind.

Having agency means having the ability to act as an agent in one’s own life; in other words, the ability to choose what you want to do and to carry it out in the real world. I have a lot of agency; I was able to choose which college I wanted to attend, which major I wanted to study, which concentration in that major, and when I graduate I’ll be able to choose what I want to do from a large number of options.

Frankenstein’s Monster lacked a social identity of any kind; he belonged no place. Where he wanted to fit in, where he sought acceptance, he was turned away. He had no friends and no one to validate his existence; even his own creator rejected him.

He had no sense of agency whatsoever; he had very few options in life other than to live in solitude.

These are the things that turned him into a monster, not only in the physical sense that he was created into, but in the behavioral sense; lack of social identity and agency turned him into a murderer.

This is exactly the kind of thing we can see in the real world. People who lack a social identity and agency are the people who become criminals. Examples include LGBT youth whose family rejects them; they lack positive parental influence and, as a result of desperation, often resort to criminal behavior or recklessness with drugs, alcohol, and sex. The search for a sense of belonging is also what leads many people to join gangs or radical groups like the Klu Klux Klan or terrorist organizations.

I don’t know how Shelley managed to write Frankenstein. I’m an anthropology major, so in everything I do and everything I read, I’m always asking, “what does this have to do with anthropology?” But that’s me: other people with other backgrounds could find something totally different in this book. Someone with a background in psychology would have a field day with all of Dr. Frankenstein’s juicy soliloquies. Other people from other fields – history, science, English, anything! – would find something equally juicy for themselves in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

I don’t think Mary Shelley formally studied any of these pursuits other than literature, and if she did, it would only have been briefly, since she was a teenager when she conceptualized the story. I understand she was an avid reader and read books about science and works of literature to prepare for writing Frankenstein. But still: she was a teenager. Did I mention she was a genius?