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Dark Reflections Series Presents: Shelley & Graven
A Classic Compare & Contrast Analysis Of Two Authors' Works
Reflection 6 ~ Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus
This material is part of a larger non-profit literary collection: Dark Reflections Series, and features work comparison and contrast between between two authors, Mary W. Shelley (Frankenstein) and G.E. Graven (Grotesque: A Gothic Epic).
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G.E. Graven’s Grotesque: A Gothic Epic and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus both center on a physically unusual, socially rejected being whose appearance causes others to fear and condemn him. In both works, the “monster” becomes more emotionally and morally complex than the people who judge him. However, the novels place this figure in very different worlds: Shelley explores scientific ambition, individual responsibility, and psychological isolation, whereas Graven develops a medieval, theological, and apocalyptic epic centered on faith, persecution, and redemption.
Major similarities
1. Both humanize the Gothic “monster”
Shelley’s Creature is not presented as inherently evil. He begins with the capacity for sympathy, learning, and affection, but rejection and abandonment contribute to his eventual violence. His tragedy comes partly from the contrast between his inward humanity and society’s response to his outward appearance.
Lazarus Gogu serves a comparable role in Graven’s novel. He is a winged, grotesque human-angelic hybrid who is treated as an abomination by many ordinary people. Like Shelley’s Creature, he is intelligent, emotionally capable, and eager for acceptance, companionship, and love. Both characters therefore challenge the assumption that physical deformity signifies moral corruption.
2. Isolation and persecution are central themes
Both protagonists exist on the margins of human society:
Shelley’s Creature is rejected because of his unnatural appearance and is forced into solitude.
Lazarus is persecuted because of his hybrid, gargoyle-like body and his perceived connection to forbidden or supernatural forces.
Their isolation creates an important Gothic tension: the frightening outsider may be more morally sensitive than the supposedly “normal” society that persecutes him. In both novels, fear of the unfamiliar exposes human prejudice and cruelty.
3. Both explore the relationship between appearance and morality
The two works ask a similar question: What makes someone monstrous—the body, the actions, or the judgments of other people?
In Frankenstein, the Creature’s physical appearance immediately produces horror in those who see him, even before they know his character. In Grotesque, Lazarus’s wings and grotesque form likewise cause others to interpret him as evil or unnatural, although he functions as a morally serious and potentially redemptive figure.
This reversal is an important Gothic technique. The visually frightening character may possess compassion, while attractive, respectable, or religiously authoritative human beings may behave with cruelty or hypocrisy.
4. Both use the grotesque body to blur boundaries
Shelley’s Creature is assembled from human remains, making him a disturbing combination of life and death, human and nonhuman. His body symbolizes the consequences of crossing natural boundaries through scientific ambition.
Lazarus represents a different kind of hybridity. His body combines human and angelic or Nephilim-related characteristics, while his wings connect him to gargoyles, chimeras, and medieval architectural grotesques. Thus, both characters occupy an uncertain space between categories rather than belonging comfortably to a single order of existence.
5. Both connect horror with ethical and philosophical questions
Neither novel uses horror merely for shock. Each asks broader questions about:
the responsibilities of creators;
the treatment of outsiders;
the meaning of humanity;
the danger of violating an established natural or sacred order;
whether redemption remains possible after suffering and rejection.
Shelley frames these questions through scientific ambition and personal responsibility. Graven frames them through faith, divine order, demonic forces, and apocalyptic conflict.
The Gothic sublime combines terror with awe, beauty, and vastness. Shelley often achieves this through mountains, glaciers, storms, and remote landscapes that reflect the characters’ emotional states. Graven expands the sublime into a mythic and cosmic register, using medieval landscapes, plague-stricken regions, monasteries, castles, supernatural beings, and apocalyptic events.
In both works, the characters’ private suffering is placed against forces larger than themselves—nature and scientific ambition in Shelley; theology, history, and cosmic conflict in Graven.
6. Both employ the Gothic sublime
Major differences
1. Scientific creation versus theological hybridity
The most fundamental difference concerns the origin of each protagonist.
In Frankenstein, Victor creates the Creature through an experimental attempt to generate life. The novel therefore focuses on:
scientific ambition;
the desire to overcome death;
the responsibilities of invention;
the consequences of abandoning what one has created.
In Grotesque, Lazarus is not the product of a modern scientist or laboratory experiment. His identity is rooted in biblical, apocryphal, and medieval mythological frameworks, including traditions associated with fallen angels and the Nephilim. The central conflict is consequently less about laboratory science and more about divine order, spiritual identity, persecution, and apocalyptic destiny.
2. Victor Frankenstein has no direct equivalent in Graven’s novel
Victor is indispensable to Shelley’s plot. He is both creator and failed parent: he brings the Creature into existence, immediately rejects him, and then spends much of the novel attempting to escape the consequences of his actions.
Grotesque does not organize its story around an equivalent “mad scientist” figure. Lazarus’s conflict is not primarily with one individual creator who refuses responsibility. Instead, he confronts a broader network of human prejudice, religious persecution, supernatural evil, and cosmic conflict.
This shifts the moral emphasis:
Shelley concentrates responsibility in Victor’s personal choices.
Graven distributes conflict across society, religious institutions, historical forces, and supernatural powers.
3. The Creature’s moral trajectory differs from Lazarus’s
Shelley’s Creature begins with the potential for goodness but gradually turns toward revenge. His violence is presented as psychologically understandable without being morally excused. Rejection, loneliness, and Victor’s refusal to create a companion contribute to his transformation.
Lazarus, by contrast, is presented as a persecuted figure who resists becoming evil. Despite cruelty directed toward him, he maintains his faith and moral purpose. The contrast can be summarized as follows:
This is one of Graven’s most significant reversals of Shelley’s pattern: the rejected creature remains a protector rather than becoming primarily an avenger.
4. Individual tragedy versus epic and apocalyptic scale
Frankenstein is ultimately a personal tragedy. Although the novel travels across Europe and the Arctic, its central conflict remains the destructive relationship between Victor and his Creature. Its major consequences are emotional, familial, and psychological.
Grotesque operates on a much broader scale. It is presented as a historical-apocalyptic saga set against the late Middle Ages, with warfare, monasteries, plague, religious institutions, fallen angels, and Armageddon-like dangers. The narrative therefore expands the Gothic conflict from one creator and one creation to a struggle involving history, theology, society, and cosmic forces.
5. Secular-scientific anxiety versus faith-centered Gothicism
Although Frankenstein engages with religious and philosophical ideas, its central anxiety is associated with human knowledge and scientific ambition. Victor attempts to penetrate the mystery of life and death, and the novel questions whether human beings should pursue knowledge without considering its ethical consequences.
Grotesque is more explicitly faith-driven. Its questions concern:
divine and demonic powers;
scriptural and apocryphal history;
the meaning of spiritual corruption;
the possibility of redemption;
the endurance of faith amid persecution and apocalypse.
Thus, Shelley’s novel asks whether humanity should attempt to master nature, while Graven’s asks how humanity should respond to a world in which sacred, supernatural, and historical forces are already in conflict.
6. Intimate frame narrative versus chronological epic structure
Shelley uses a complex frame structure:
Robert Walton’s letters introduce the story.
Victor recounts his history to Walton.
The Creature tells his own story within Victor’s narrative.
Victor’s account then returns to Walton’s letters.
This structure gives the novel multiple voices and perspectives. It also emphasizes uncertainty, subjectivity, and the difficulty of determining whose interpretation is most reliable.
Graven’s work is a chronological and braided epic involving several parallel storylines. Its prose maintains a more consistent, authoritative, and rhythmic narrative voice rather than shifting between nested personal testimonies.
7. Psychological introspection versus external action and world-building
Frankenstein spends considerable time inside the minds of Victor and the Creature. Their guilt, despair, resentment, hope, and philosophical arguments are central to the novel’s effect.
Grotesque gives greater prominence to external action and expansive world-building: historical events, battles, religious conflict, supernatural threats, and the protagonist’s physical survival. Its emotional concerns remain important, but they are placed within a more public and epic narrative rather than being confined primarily to an individual psychological struggle.
8. Prose novel versus illustrated, poetic Gothic epic
Shelley’s novel is a prose narrative whose Gothic effects are produced through description, setting, narrative framing, and psychological reflection.
Graven’s work combines prose with rhythmic and poetic qualities, including meter, internal rhyme, alliteration, and musical cadence. It is also fully illustrated, so its treatment of the grotesque body is not only verbal but visual. This gives Grotesque a multimedia dimension that Frankenstein, as originally published, does not possess.
Comparative overview:
Overall interpretation
The strongest connection between the two works is their shared use of the sympathetic supernatural outcast. Shelley helped establish the Gothic monster as an intelligent and emotionally vulnerable being whose suffering compels readers to question the morality of the people who reject him. Graven develops a related figure in Lazarus Gogu, but transforms the pattern into a medieval theological epic.
In this sense, Grotesque can be read as both an echo of and a departure from Frankenstein. It echoes Shelley by presenting a physically grotesque figure who longs for acceptance and is judged by appearance. It departs from her by replacing scientific creation with biblical hybridity, personal tragedy with apocalyptic history, and moral collapse with sustained faith and redemption.
In brief: Shelley asks what happens when human beings create life without accepting responsibility for it. Graven asks whether a being marked as monstrous by appearance can remain morally faithful in a world corrupted by fear, persecution, and supernatural conflict. Both novels ultimately suggest that the deepest monstrosity may lie not in the abnormal body, but in the cruelty with which society responds to it.
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