In Mary Shelley's original novel, Victor Frankenstein isn't really a mad scientist, as much as he's a bad scientist. He's a cocky student with an unseemly obsession about creating life, and he sets about proving his theories without any thought to what the results might be.
When the creature, cobbled together from corpses, is brought to life, Frankenstein's theories are proven, but the man himself is horrified by what he has made.
Repulsed by his handiwork, Frankenstein rejects the creature and sets off one of literature's greatest examples of a child acting out to get attention from a parent.
