I recently read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for the first time. (OK actually I listened to it being read during my commute, but I think that counts as reading it.) Many things about the book surprised, even though I knew the book was very different from the movie depictions and that the monster in particular was nothing like the movie monster. What I did not know was that in the book, the monster is not actually assembled from body parts, is not brought to life by electricity or “galvanism,” and was made eight feet tall in order to make it easier to work with — Victor Frankenstein figured a larger scale would make the little details easier to manipulate. 🙂
The descriptions of the monster are mostly very vague (hideous and misshapen are the main descriptors), but the few details we get — yellow, semi-transparent skin, watery eyes, huge grinning teeth, long black hair, and his mummy-like hands — certainly seem freaky.
The details of the construction of the monster, and his aborted bride (I am not worried about spoiling a nearly 200 year old book!) are vague also, but we do learn that Victor relied on “chemical instruments” to accomplish his work. He describes the work as horrifying and disgusting at various points in the narrative, but it seemed to be more of a moral, rather than visceral, repugnance. I should mention that this was far from being purely a scientific undertaking; Victor alludes to an intense study of alchemy and ceremonial magic that he undertook before going off to university. But the important point is that at no point does he mention needing body parts or digging up graves. In fact his second attempt at creating a being takes place on an isolated island with hardly any inhabitants and no graveyard.
So the monster usually identified as the archetype of flesh golem was not really a flesh golem, in the D&D sense, at all.
This is not Frankenstein’s monster.
Fun fact: in the novel, the monster is also a fruitarian, living on nuts and berries. When he is trying to persuade Victor to build him a wife and let them go live peacefully in the wilds, he says: “My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment.”
(For the curious, my review of Frankenstein is on Goodreads)
I disagree whole-heartedly…the process of creation was different but they are essentially the same as an end result..truthfully the process at which “the monster” is created isn’t very well documented in the book so the best you can do is come to your own conclusions/hypothesis as to how you think he was made..doing so doesn’t make it fact but your best educated guess. Being that “the monster” has a heart beat and was reanimated through one process or another makes him a golem of sorts…being that he’s composed of human flesh makes him fleshy so a flesh golem best describes him.
I’d say it makes the creature more a homonculus than a flesh golem though — the passage in chapter 4 that describes his creation suggests (to me) that Frankenstein was able to scale the creature up :
It’s pretty hard to imagine Frankenstein finding a single corpse that big (and moving it by himself) let alone a series of them for parts. The fact that he could spend months collecting “materials” makes me think flesh was not being collected either — there is no grave robbing going on, and no need to preserve the materials or work faster because the materials are decaying. But D&D golems seem to be defined by the materials used to assemble them. Given that Frankenstein only mentions alchemy and chemistry, the creature seems to be wholly synthetic.
But you’re right it’s ultimately conjecture, and was never made explicit because those details either weren’t important to Shelley or she preferred to keep it mysterious.