Deep in the frozen wilderness of the Swiss Alps, a towering figure emerges from the fog. He is stitched together from the remnants of dissecting rooms and charnel houses, possessed of immense strength, yet his hands reach into the brush only for acorns and berries. When Victor Frankenstein confronts his creation, the Being delivers a striking declaration of peace. He refuses to destroy the lamb or the kid to satisfy his hunger. In a world saturated with violence, Frankenstein’s creature is an ethical vegetarian.
For more than two centuries, readers and filmmakers have examined nearly every angle of Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece. The monster’s dietary choices often slip past modern audiences without a second thought, yet his refusal of flesh was a deliberate statement. It reflected a radical countercultural movement that swept through Shelley’s intellectual circle during the Romantic era.
During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, choosing a plant-based diet was an act of political defiance. British radicals such as Joseph Ritson, John Oswald, and Mary’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, championed vegetarianism as an essential pillar of universal justice. These thinkers viewed the slaughterhouse as an engine of human corruption. They argued that dominating and killing animals paved the way for warfare, tyranny, and social inequality. John Oswald fought and died in the French Revolution after penning passionate appeals for animal mercy. Percy Shelley argued that only the wealthy elite indulged in the consumption of flesh, maintaining that livestock farming monopolized fertile land that could easily feed millions of starving citizens.
Mary Shelley wove these radical debates directly into the architecture of her book. The novel unfolds through concentric rings of narration. On the outermost rim, Robert Walton writes letters home from his Arctic expedition. Victor Frankenstein occupies the middle narrative, recounting his obsessive laboratory experiments. At the very center lies the creature himself, recounting his education, his isolation, and his plea for a mate.
This structure dramatizes the boundaries of human sympathy. Humanity sits at the center of its own universe, drawing a strict line between itself and the rest of the living world. The creature turns this hierarchy upside down. Cast out by his creator and attacked by terrified villagers, he responds by widening his own circle of compassion. He extends basic moral consideration to animals, something mankind refuses to extend to him. When proposing a peaceful exile to South America with a female companion, he envisions a tranquil life where the sun ripens their meals and no living thing suffers for their sustenance.
Shelley also infused her story with the vegetarian reinterpretations of classical and biblical myths that circulated among her peers. Romantic reformers frequently reframed the Garden of Eden as a vegetarian paradise, viewing the Fall described in Genesis as humanity’s tragic descent into the practice of eating meat. In their eyes, the original sin brought forth disease, physical suffering, and moral decay. When the creature wanders the earth gathering wild nuts, he mirrors that uncorrupted world before the arrival of the blade.
The novel’s subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, carries an equally pointed meaning. While standard mythology praises Prometheus for bringing fire to mankind, Romantic vegetarians drew on ancient passages from Pliny suggesting that Prometheus was the first to slaughter an ox. To these writers, culinary fire was an invention designed to mask the horror of a butchered corpse. Mary Shelley’s creature discovers fire left behind by travelers and finds roasted scraps of meat in the ashes. While he recognizes that the cooking process makes food savory, he rejects the meat itself. Instead, he uses the embers to roast roots and nuts. He embraces the warmth of the flame while refusing its bloody legacy.
Literary traditions from Ovid and Jean-Jacques Rousseau echo through the creature’s daily life. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid praised the Golden Age when humanity lived in harmony on strawberries, brambleberries, and fallen acorns. Rousseau argued that the natural human diet consisted of vegetables, grains, milk, and bread. When the creature stumbles across an abandoned shepherd’s breakfast, he happily consumes the bread, milk, and cheese, while setting aside the wine. He seeks the rustic simplicity that the Romantic philosophers celebrated.
Even the creature’s anatomy reflects this herbivorous heritage. When Victor constructs the Being, he gathers material from dissecting rooms and slaughterhouses alike. Because the slaughterhouses of the era processed herbivorous livestock, the creature’s body is built partly from plant-eating animals. His physical composition naturally harmonizes with his refusal to shed blood.
This commitment to nonviolence shares a deep connection with the novel’s feminist undertones. At the absolute center of the creature’s narrative sits the story of Safie, whose mother taught her to seek independence and intellectual freedom. Scholars have long recognized the spirit of Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley’s pioneering mother, within these passages.
Mary Shelley understood what it meant to exist outside the boundaries of power. During the famous summer of 1816 when the novel was born, she spent long evenings listening quietly as Percy Shelley and Lord Byron led intellectual discussions. Her creature reflects that muted existence. Unlike many conventional characters of nineteenth-century fiction, the creature speaks with formidable eloquence, demanding justice with fearless precision. The surrounding world refuses to listen, rejecting his voice just as society rejected the radical proposals of early feminists and vegetarians.
The creature’s dietary pledge stands as the moral heart of the novel. By refusing to participate in violence, the creation highlights the cruelty of the society that abandoned him. The supposed monster, assembled from the discarded pieces of the dead, proves to be the most gentle soul in the entire tale.
Bibliographic Information
- Title: The Sexual Politics of Meat
- Subtitle: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory
- Author: Carol J. Adams
- Publisher: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc. (New York & London)
- Publication Year: 2010 (Twentieth Anniversary Edition; original edition published in 1990)
- Edition: 20th Anniversary Edition
- ISBN: 978-1-4411-7328-7
- Historical Period Covered: Late 18th century (the 1790s) to the early 21st century, with primary emphasis on the Victorian era, the World War I period, and the late-20th-century feminist/environmentalist movements.
- Main Subject Areas: Feminist Theory, Animal Defense/Rights Theory, Critical Theory, Ecofeminism, Food Studies, Cultural and Literary Studies, Sociology of Oppression.
(Chapter: 6; Pages: 148–150)