Frankenstein, Loneliness, Being Human

Just finished: Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

Now reading: Journey of Awakening, Ram Dass

On deck: ??

I get to teach Frankenstein for the first time in more than a couple of years this fall, which necessitated a rereading so that I could start planning what it is, precisely, that I want to do with this book in my classroom. The last time I taught it was in January 2021 over Zoom, and the world looks a little differently now than it did then. A couple of years before that, I had given a paper presentation about Frankenstein, the DC character Superboy, created people, and posthumanism at Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association’s national conference, and while I think that the technological angle of these questions is still—perhaps increasingly—relevant, my bigger reflection this time around has been on the loneliness of both Frankenstein and his creature.

How do I put it? I don’t think it’s enough to say that Frankenstein creates the monster out of grief for his mother and the isolation between himself and his family that going to university created, but this time around reading, that possibility colors my understanding of Frankenstein’s motivations. It’s loneliness, too, which drives the monster in its actions against Frankenstein: rejected by his creator, rejected by the cottagers who he had come to love from afar, and then denied a companion like himself from his creator, he sets out to fully destroy him.

“My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor, and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being and become linked to the chain of existence and events from which I am now excluded.” (186)

That the monster puts so much blame on the rejection he faces for his maliciousness, and that he says that he wouldn’t be so terrible if he just had someone who would treat him like a person seems like a reach, which is the conclusion that Frankenstein seems to come to when he decides, ultimately, not to make the monster a bride. Frankenstein puts so much stock into the revulsion he feels when he sees the monster, the initial fright at seeing the assembly of body parts in motion, that he probably wouldn’t be able to imagine the monster as anything but abominable. And maybe Frankenstein’s right, here: does being around others necessarily make us any better? Who’s to say that having a companion wouldn’t make the monster worse?

I tend to think that when people are cruel or unkind, they often did not receive kindness when they most needed it in their lives. My thinking may be flawed here, but if we assume that behaviors are largely learned and influenced by the experiences we have in our lifetime, what makes it so much more unlikely that someone who has faced rejection since childhood should then reflect that back when they go into the world? Sustaining a belief in the importance of community, I want to argue that we do need to be around others, and we need to be around others who find value in us, rather than shun us. On the other hand, where’s the work on the self to be able to be complete in and of ourselves? I suppose the monster is complicated, in that he isn’t one single body, but rather, assembled, so perhaps his need for companionship is a little more complicated. What about Frankenstein, though? His creation is right when he implies that Victor’s refusal to make another creature—a companion—is hypocritical, especially as the refusal to create a bride for the monster and his disposal of those body parts (which he remarks makes him feel like a murderer himself) is followed almost immediately in the narrative with Frankenstein’s marriage to Elizabeth, the consummation of their marriage, and her strangulation by the monster. Both Frankenstein and his creature share the attitude towards companionship of man and woman as a default state, which by not having makes them more monstrous. The removal of companionship—Frankenstein first to university, where he creates the monster, the continued rejection of the monster by man, and then Frankenstein’s hunt of the creature following Elizabeth’s murder—leads to the creation of abominations.

Another thing that I paid a little more attention to this time around was the monster’s acquisition of language and how he learns to read through the same modeling and teaching provided to Safie, the wife of one of “his” cottagers, and the permission that this narrative move makes for the creature to have the ability to make references to English literature. Language both enables the monster to express himself and the severity of his emotions at the same time that it provides yet another barrier in that the language is borrowed and ultimately makes him even more alien and demonic. Critical lenses have been placed on this text from a variety of different angles, all looking at the ways in which difference is treated by Shelley through the violence enacted against the monster. But even without those critical lenses, I’m considering the paradox of language here: we have as our connective tissue to others our ability to communicate with them, and yet language becomes a weapon against Frankenstein and it becomes another mode of inaccessibility to the monster. He’s able to speak with the blind cottager, who doesn’t see the monstrous visage, language acting like a cloak—but by the same token, when combined with his appearance, he seems even more malicious. The words coming out of his mouth are akin to Satan’s in Milton’s Paradise Lost, a point that even he acknowledges: that is the character in the literature he’s now able to read that he identifies with most strongly, the character who claims that, “It is better to reign in hell than to serve in heav’n.” What would heaven look like to the monster, who has known virtually no joy except the voyeurism in observing the cottagers prior to revealing himself to them? He assumes that it would include a woman just like him, with whom he could hide from the rest of the world.

Frankenstein has been a long time favorite of mine in terms of horror—there’s always been something fascinating to me about the questions about ethical uses of technology, particularly when it comes to how people are made. So many of the questions that could be raised against Frankenstein in his decision to make a person could easily be leveraged against (and have been) contemporary scientists in their own quests to make humans more, for instance, disease-resistant through gene editing, or even the much more accepted (and certainly life-saving) use of organ donation. These same questions about playing God when it comes to the creation (or loss) of life play out constantly in our current techno and medical spheres: they can go the way of artificial intelligence and to what extent it would take for the AI to be considered human, in the fully non-fleshy world of robots and cyborgs, at the same time that they have much more immediate implications in the medical world when it comes to actual human bodies and what we do or don’t do to them. My inclination has always been to look at Frankenstein through a post-human lens, where Frankenstein’s biggest crime (aside from grave robbery in the charnel houses) is his rejection of the creature he created, and I always want to ask at what point do we stop considering something a person? Where do we stop our human empathy? Why does the creature receive the same reaction we hold for non-mammals, and why is it acceptable that we treat those things which—having not already done harm to us—as potential threats because of their appearance (this extends beyond the animal world and into our treatment of other humans, obviously)? At the same time, at what point does science go too far? What is the limit of what we consider acceptable when it comes to restoring or saving bodies? It’s much easier to say, We shouldn’t try cloning wooly mammoths or dinosaurs—why does it become more complicated for humans besides our assumption that humans are on a different level than every other creature on this planet? Why do we have a sense of human exceptionalism when we’re hardly the only animal with complex social structures or even the capacity to build our own dwellings? Books like Frankenstein provide an avenue to talk about the complexities of man, but they also offer a place to begin questioning our rejection of the apparent non-human and the consequences that may come from our inability to deal with our dread of the other.