Examples Of Monstrosity In Frankenstein

Tashea Williams
Dr. Bard
British Literature
17 April 2023
The Monstrosity of Neglect: The True Tragedy of Frankenstein Before the now infamous monster featured in gothic novelist Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus infiltrated popular culture, he was not a groaning, brain-dead zombie. Rather, in the beginning pages of Shelley’s novel, he is an intelligent, articulate, and sensitive character before he succumbs to mental degradation. What brought on this radical deterioration of the self? Being not just an assortment of reanimated body parts, the monster in the novel is also in possession of what one could categorically describe as a human soul, or, in more secular terms, human emotions and desires. However, due to his unseemly

His lack of pondering this possibility suggests that the scientist never foresaw that his experiment would possess “humanity.” It is true that he is woefully unprepared to take on the mantle of caretaker. However, Victor Frankenstein is not an evil megalomaniac, either. Close analysis of the novel, narrated by the scientist himself, clues the reader into a childhood of emotional neglect that likely manifested as an inability to nurture his creation later on in life. Frankenstein himself is convinced that he had a happy rearing, recalling his childhood resembling “the best of all possible worlds” (Claridge 2). However, he soon exposes his flawed and unreliable perspective when his repeated insistence that he loves his family is met by his incongruous ambivalence at best, and cold apathy at worse; Victor has not been home in five years, and despite his family’s concern for his health, he refuses to reach out to them. This inconsistency in description and reality convincingly suggest a “strained emphasis on felicity” (2). As Claridge further argues, Victor’s father is “insensitive to his son,” “disapproves of [Victor’s] grief” after his mother’s passing, and

Frankenstein’s post mortem horror and apathy toward his creation. The scientists literally “labors” to bring the monster into the world, and upon his arrival, Victor’s reaction is akin to the postpartum experience some mother’s report having with their own newborns (one which Shelley herself may have been familiar with), whereby the mother experience bouts of depression, disgust, anger, anxiety, and apathy toward their child due to a complex neurochemical cocktail (Mughal 22). Frankenstein himself admits to his own disgust, stating that he is “unable to endure the aspect of the being [he] had created,” and so he “flees, abandoning his creation, unnamed. ‘I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion,’ the creature says, before, in the book’s final scene, he disappears on a raft of ice” (Lepore 3). In addition to birth and abortion imagery, society’s rejection of the monster being based on his abhorrent appearance is comparable to the prejudice women experience because of their own anatomical makeup. In both cases, the victims are arbitrarily ostracized due to their possession of attributes they have no control over and which do not determine the content of their character. The true horror of Frankenstein is thus not the repulsiveness of the monster, but the tragedy of his treatment. The monster is innately good when he is first brought to life. Initially, he possesses the normal desires of any