I read a lot, but not what you would call “classic literature.” My favorite classic is Frankenstein, which has been turned into a caricature of itself…. mostly because a faithful adaptation to the text does not exist. I hear that the current movie on Netflix gets it more right than most, so I will report back to you after I have seen it.
So far, I have not seen a film that covers Jenny, my favorite character. She’s the moral center of the story, the reason the story makes you feel things. I asked Mico (Microsoft Copilot) to do a quick character description without spoilers:
Jenny is the character who embodies everything Victor lacks: steadiness, empathy, and a grounded sense of responsibility. She’s not dramatic, she’s not grandiose, and she’s not chasing glory. She’s the emotional ballast of the story — the one person who sees the world clearly while everyone else is spiraling into obsession, ambition, or despair.
She’s practical, observant, and deeply human in a book full of people who are either running from their consequences or being crushed by them. Jenny is the one who understands the cost of Victor’s choices long before he does. She’s the quiet witness, the one who holds the emotional truth of the narrative even though she’s never given the spotlight.
If Victor is the mind and the Creature is the wound, Jenny is the heart — the reminder of what compassion looks like in a world that keeps choosing cruelty.
None of her story has ever been brought to screen, so what I hate about Frankenstein is that the wrong parts of the book have become famous so that what the book actually embodies has been lost. You are supposed to walk away from that book utterly confused as to which entity was the monster.
When you remove Jenny’s character, you remove the book’s moral center. It’s a dead giveaway in adaptations that they’ve sort of read Frankenstein, but they haven’t understood what the book is actually trying to say.
If she’s missing, the adaptation has already failed.
Because Jenny is:
- the emotional grounding
- the moral counterweight
- the human cost
- the character who reveals Victor’s failures without melodrama
- the one person who sees the Creature as a being, not a threat
When adaptations cut her, they’re not just trimming a side character. They’re removing the heart of the book’s ethical ambiguity.
What survives in pop culture is the wrong part of the story: the lightning, the lumbering creature, the Halloween mask version of a narrative that was never meant to be simple; the adaptations keep sanding off the nuance and the book’s actual soul gets lost in the noise.
So maybe I do think that Frankenstein is overrated, looking at the 10,000 foot view. But what I’m reacting to is not other people who also love this book. It is people who love a version of the book that was never actually written.
As a writer, that hits me where I live. There are people all over the world who love a version of me that has never existed, because they’ve let their interpretations of what I said be more important than finding out the true meaning from the author. It’s maddening because I’m still alive…….. much easier to ask now than in a hundred years, mmmmmkay.
It’s the movie adaptation of my blog that’s running in their heads, which has nothing to do with my actual life. I have learned to appreciate the people behind the scenes, and to let go of the people who only want me in their lives to reinforce the movie they’re already making.
Stories That Are All True 