"Frankenstein's monster, often erroneously referred to as 'Frankenstein', is a fictional character who first appeared in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Shelley's title thus compares the monster's creator, Victor Frankenstein, to the mythological character Prometheus, who fashioned humans out of clay and gave them fire.
In Shelley's Gothic story, Victor Frankenstein builds the creature in his laboratory through an ambiguous method consisting of chemistry and alchemy. Shelley describes the monster as 8-foot-tall (2.4 m), hideously ugly, but sensitive and emotional. The monster attempts to fit into human society but is shunned, which leads him to seek revenge against Frankenstein. According to the scholar Joseph Carroll, the monster occupies 'a border territory between the characteristics that typically define protagonists and antagonists'.
Mary Shelley's original novel never ascribes an actual name to the monster; although when speaking to his creator, Victor Frankenstein, the monster does say 'I ought to be thy Adam' (in reference to the first man created in the Bible). Victor refers to his creation as 'creature', 'fiend', 'spectre', 'the demon', 'wretch', 'devil', 'thing', 'being', and 'ogre'.
It has become common to refer to the creature by the name 'Frankenstein' or 'The Monster' but neither of these names is apparent in the book.
As in Shelley's story, the creature's namelessness became a central part of the stage adaptations in London and Paris during the decades after the novel's first appearance. In 1823, Shelley herself attended a performance of Presumption, the first successful stage adaptation of her novel. 'The play bill amused me extremely, for in the list of dramatis personae came _________, by Mr T. Cooke,' she wrote to her friend Leigh Hunt. 'This nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good.'
Within a decade of publication, the name of the creator—Frankenstein—was used to refer to the creature, but it did not become firmly established until much later. The story was adapted for the stage in 1927 by Peggy Webling, and Webling's Victor Frankenstein does give the creature his name. However, the creature has no name in the Universal film series starring Boris Karloff during the 1930s, which was largely based upon Webling's play. The 1931 Universal film treated the creature's identity in a similar way as Shelley's novel: in the opening credits, the character is referred to merely as 'The Monster' (the actor's name is replaced by a question mark, but Karloff is listed in the closing credits). Nevertheless, the creature soon enough became best known in the popular imagination as 'Frankenstein'. This usage is sometimes considered erroneous, but usage commentators regard the monster sense of 'Frankenstein' as well-established and not an error.
Modern practice varies somewhat. For example, in Dean Koontz's Frankenstein, first published in 2004, the creature is named 'Deucalion', after the character from Greek Mythology, who is the son of the titan Prometheus, a reference to the original novel's title. Another example is the second episode of Showtime's Penny Dreadful, which first aired in 2014; Victor Frankenstein briefly considers naming his creation "Adam", before deciding instead to let the monster 'pick his own name'. Thumbing through a book of the works of William Shakespeare, the monster chooses "Proteus" from The Two Gentlemen of Verona. It is later revealed that Proteus is actually the second monster Frankenstein has created, with the first, abandoned creation having been named 'Caliban', from The Tempest, by the theatre actor who took him in and later, after leaving the theatre, named himself after the English poet John Clare." (wikipedia.org)