Frankenstein Taught Me the Classics Are Alive, They’re Really Alive!

I didn’t have to read Frankenstein—there was no assignment, no looming exam. I didn’t own a copy of it. In fact, I had only known Frankenstein as a movie monster or Halloween costume, never as a book. But when I discovered that the novel actually emerged from the Romantic period, the same cultural movement that produced the majestic and sublime landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich or J. M. W. Turner, I was surprised and intrigued. I wanted to understand what made the story so lasting and how the so-called monster, who wasn’t even named Frankenstein, came to be portrayed as a representation of fears and misunderstandings. So, I decided to read it.

At the time, this choice felt unusual for me. I love reading, but my first instinct is usually to pick up some lyric poetry, a memoir, or a book about history. I wouldn’t necessarily turn to a classic like Frankenstein, which I associated with schoolwork. In high school, whenever it was mentioned that we were about to read a classic, the room would let out a collective sigh. The consensus was that classics were full of jargon, outdated, and unrelatable to our present lives. The assignments that came with them, like analytical paragraphs and formulaic interpretations of literary devices, often felt mechanical rather than creative. I treated them like any other schoolwork and moved on.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818, follows scientist Victor Frankenstein, who creates a living creature from inanimate parts, only to abandon it. It is fundamentally an exploration of unchecked human greed, the desire for recognition and control over nature. Reading Frankenstein, I found myself genuinely enjoying a classic for the first time. I noticed many parallels to the rise in artificial intelligence and ChatGPT: the creature’s development of language, knowledge, and emotions mirrors how AI systems train on human data and networks. The novel’s questions about responsibility, risk, and creating a consciousness from inanimate constituents echo the ethical and legal dilemmas we are now facing with new technologies. Victor Frankenstein’s claim that “the world was to me a secret which I desired to divine” has never been more relevant: it captures our enduring fascination with the dangers of human overreach, an archetype that continues to underlie our decisions.

I saw other connections from pop cultural to academic. Movies like Spider-Man and Oppenheimer dramatize similar themes of responsibility and ambition, exploring the obligations that come with power. I could historicize Victor Frankenstein’s scenes of reflection and anguish by situating them within the Romantic era’s fascination with the sublime and analyze his emotional responses as emblematic of the tension between human ambition and nature’s power. I was also able to integrate my reading of Frankenstein into an English class project—I drew on Frankenstein’s portrayal of alienation as a force that drives characters toward both a yearning for belonging and a desire for revenge, using it as a framework to interpret The Tempest’s Caliban and offer another angle on his experience in exile.

That is what classics are: not standalone relics, but living entities embedded in an ongoing conversation across canons, genres, and intellectual frameworks. When we read a classic, we are stepping into a vast river of themes, symbols, and ideas that continues to shift with each new interpretation or text. This river is constantly reshaped as texts branch into new tributaries, meander across historical contexts, or diverge and reconnect into braided streams. We see how works influence and intersect with one another, shaping our understanding of the past, present, and future. Extracting the text from this flow, focusing too narrowly on just figurative language or analysis, diminishes its richness.

In my first year at university, I took a required seminar on Western classic texts. We read work by the French Renaissance thinker Michel de Montaigne, who wrote that to philosophize is to learn how to die. His interrogation of himself can serve as a model for individual or collective reflection. Similarly, St. Augustine’s practice of sortes biblicae (opening scripture at random and using lines from the text as a framework to solve his questions) in Confessions turns reading itself into a method for decision making. Classics provide not just stories but structures of engagement, ways of relating abstract questions to lived experience.

It’s the same reason we use fables to teach lessons: there’s a difference between learning a concept abstractly and experiencing it through a narrative. The Iliad might seem unrelatable with its gods and heroes, but its underlying themes of revenge and reputation are timeless. While it’s true that we are not pursuing glory and immortality by stealing someone’s armour, we are still chasing prestige and status through social media, something that will, in a way, make us more “immortal” because of the internet’s permanence. Even though our context has drastically changed, we still have the same drives, traits, and obsessions as they did in ancient Greece.

Mark Twain has often been credited (perhaps incorrectly) with saying that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Likewise, these underlying themes can rhyme by reappearing in new literary forms, narrative devices, characters, or settings. Literature becomes a vessel through which motifs travel, reinterpreted by different generations, yet bound by a shared pulse. We refer to journeys as “Odyssean” when they entail similar themes of returning home, self-reflection, and the passage of time. We continue reading classics because they are a blueprint or archetype, serving as foundations for creative reinvention, similar to how the Renaissance and Neoclassicism were sparked by a rediscovery of classical texts. In just one year at university, I read more classics than I did in all of high school, finding archetypes and meanings that fit into what I am going through today.

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Literature itself comes from humans. Each element, from plot to character, is the conscious result of human choice and allows us to explore our obsessions, stretch our flaws to their extremes, and imagine alternate scenarios. By analyzing literature as a written accumulation of how humans make meaning across time, we can trace how our values and choices change. In the Lais of Marie de France (twelfth century) by the poet Marie de France, the supernatural appears as external interventions and creatures that test loyalty and love. In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), these magical disruptions disappear, replaced by a world where reputation, class, and economics structure courtship. In Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), the “magical” returns, but in a transformed mode where myth, folklore, and magical realism are blended to restore ancestral histories that formal records cannot hold. Love is not just an emotion but something shaped by the stories, social structures, and history.

Literature is also a form of preservation. To write something down, to call something “classic,” is to declare it worth remembering, grounding our intangible or abstract thoughts in a written reality. Preserving something charges it with meaning and questions: Why was this preserved? Who was it preserved for? Has it maintained relevance? We can analyze writing not only as a product but as an action itself. Like a letter sent across time, a literary text remains static while we, the readers, grow and change. Someone can read the same text 500 years in the future and derive a completely different interpretation and meaning than we do now. As readers, we step into these historical objects, adopting their attitudes, challenging them anachronistically with present values, or holding both in tension. Literature becomes both a record and a test: it tells us who we were, and it can reveal who we are and what we are becoming.

When I finished my Western classics seminar, I was left with many unanswered questions. The texts I read have helped me grow as a thinker, but what actually makes a work a classic? We often identify classics by their influence on other writers, whether it was taught in school, and frequency of citation, but when Frankenstein was dropped from my Western classics seminar syllabus, I began to question who decides what counts as a classic. Many older texts carry outdated or harmful values. Can we engage with them without exalting them? What we call classics is also often limited to ideas of “Western” culture, which excludes many narratives. Defining a classic ultimately demands that we interrogate our history and values.

Today, the growing emphasis on “practical” fields, like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (or STEM), and finance have also led to a decline in the study of the humanities. Some of my friends in school still see classics as outdated, inaccessible, or irrelevant to real-world problems. After all, how will reading Frankenstein or the Iliad solve a math problem set or pressing issues like climate change?

While these texts don’t provide direct answers, they offer methods for asking questions, working through uncertainty, or thinking frameworks. They may not yield tangible and immediate solutions like engineering does, but they act as mirrors and guides. Whatever the case, classics—or texts that exemplify enduring human themes—still have relevance. Because how can we move forward without understanding what has shaped our choices and growth as people? What does it mean to make decisions without knowledge from the past? This is what classics provide: a written record of our attempts to understand ourselves and, ultimately, the human condition.