Frankenstein Character Map

Frankenstein has forty people in it, and most readers could name five. The trouble is not the size of the cast. It is that the novel is three stories folded inside each other — Walton’s letters hold Victor’s account, which holds the creature’s — and a cast list cannot show which of the forty each narrator ever meets. This map charts the full 1831 text: 40 figures and 76 relationships, each carrying a short quote from the novel, so you can check the line rather than take our word for it.

Start with the figure everyone gets wrong. “Frankenstein” is Victor; the novel uses the surname fewer than thirty times and never once for the creature. The map lists Victor under fourteen names, “Frankenstein” among them. The creature it lists under eighteen — the dæmon, the wretch, the fiend, the monster, the devil, the being, my adversary, my persecutor — and not one of them is a name, because the book never gives him one. He comes closest himself: “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel.” He is not alone in this. Twelve of the forty figures have no name anywhere in the text: Safie’s father is only “the Turk,” Elizabeth’s father only “a Milanese nobleman,” Walton’s lieutenant and ship’s master are their ranks, and the man who shoots the creature for saving a drowning girl is “the rustic.” Then look at the creature’s sixteen lines. Eight are hostile. Four run to the De Lacey family, who do not know they are being watched. The only line that comes back from the cottage is Felix’s beating.

Search a name to jump to it. Solid lines are kinship, dashed lines are unions and allegiances, dotted lines are social ties, and selecting a figure dims everyone they are not connected to. Select Victor and twenty-four lines light up, more than anyone else’s. Select Elizabeth and seventeen do, one more than the creature: the woman he strangles is better connected than he is. Thirty-two of the seventy-six lines are family, and the creature holds exactly one of them — the map files his making as a child’s line to Victor, with the “thy Adam” sentence on it. Felix’s aliases on the map are “Brother” and “Son,” Agatha’s is “Sister,” because those are the words the creature heard through the wall of the cottage before he learned their names.

Two honest notes. The counts surprise: Henry Clerval is the fourth most-mentioned figure on the map, ahead of Victor’s father and of Walton, and he has only four lines; Margaret Saville, who never appears, has one line and twenty-three mentions, because every letter that frames the novel is addressed to her. And the map was made by software reading the novel, so it can be wrong. Its worst slip is Mr. Kirwin: the map calls him an Irish magistrate and files him among the Geneva acquaintances, because it has folded into him the unnamed Genevan judge Victor appeals to after Elizabeth’s death — two men in two countries, one node. It draws several ties more than once (Victor and Elizabeth are joined by four lines: sibling, relative, lover, spouse), so 76 lines join 59 pairs. And one figure, the hoarse-voiced Irishman who tells Victor “it is the custom of the Irish to hate villains,” stands on the map with no line at all. Every connection carries its quote so you can catch that kind of thing.

Who’s who in Frankenstein

The short version, for the reader who just needs the thread back. Every name here is on the map, with the passage that puts them there.

Victor Frankenstein

Fourteen names on the map, from “the stranger” Walton pulls off the ice to “Frankenstein,” which is his and not the monster’s. Twenty-four lines, the most of anyone, and three of them run to the creature: enemy, maker, and the one the map files as a parent.

The creature

Eighteen names and none of them a name: the dæmon, the wretch, the fiend, the monster, the devil. 320 mentions, second only to Victor. He describes himself best: “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel.” His four hostile lines outward go to William, Justine, Clerval and Elizabeth — the four deaths he causes.

Elizabeth Lavenza

Seventeen lines, one more than the creature. In this 1831 text she is an orphan adopted from a peasant cottage in Italy, “the daughter of a Milanese nobleman,” not a blood relation; the household goes on calling her “my cousin” anyway, and the map keeps the word among her twelve aliases. Four lines join her to Victor.

Henry Clerval

Victor’s friend from childhood and the fourth most-mentioned figure, with only four lines: Victor, Elizabeth twice, and the creature, who strangles him in Ireland. He is the one who calls Victor by his surname: “My dear Frankenstein.”

Alphonse Frankenstein

Victor’s father, “respected by all who knew him for his integrity,” with eight lines. He dismisses Cornelius Agrippa as “sad trash,” and Victor blames that careless sentence for everything that follows. He dies in Victor’s arms within days of Elizabeth.

Robert Walton

The letter-writer whose six lines frame everything: his sister, his lieutenant, his ship’s master, Victor twice, and the creature, whom he meets once and greets with “Wretch!” He is the only one of the three narrators the map does not also file under “the narrator.”

Justine Moritz

The family’s servant and ward, eight lines, executed for William’s murder on evidence the creature planted while she slept: “I bent over her and placed the portrait securely in one of the folds of her dress.” At her trial: “God knows,” she said, “how entirely I am innocent.”

William Frankenstein

Victor’s youngest brother and the creature’s first victim, with ten lines — more than Walton or Clerval — because everyone in Geneva is tied to his death. Eight names on the map, down to “The child” and “The boy,” which is all the creature knows him as before he learns whose son he is.

Felix

The De Lacey son, seven lines. He frees Safie’s father from a Paris prison, loses his family’s fortune and country for it, and is the one person in the cottage who ever lays a hand on the creature: “Felix darted forward, and with supernatural force tore me from his father.”

De Lacey

The blind father, with eight names for one man (“the old man,” “the aged cottager,” “The blind old man”) and three lines. He is the only person who ever speaks kindly to the creature, because he cannot see him. “The name of the old man was De Lacey.”

Safie

Daughter of “the Turk” and of a Christian Arab mother, neither of whom has a name on the map. Five lines. The creature learns to speak by listening to Felix teach her: “she and I improved rapidly in the knowledge of language.”

Agatha

The De Lacey daughter, one alias — “Sister” — and three lines: her father, her brother, and the creature, who adores her from his hovel without her knowing. Her thirty-one mentions make her the last of the twelve most-mentioned figures, just ahead of Victor’s mother.

Questions people ask about Frankenstein