Representation of the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

The word monster derives from the Latin ‘monere’, to warn, and ‘demonstrare’,
and that is precisely the function of the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
He is there to warn the readers about the political, ideological, psychological,
indeed the cultural motivation behind his creation and to demonstrate what
happens when such a monster happens. Frankenstein’s monster thus has little
significance whatsoever by himself outside his relation to his creator (including
the motive behind its creation) and to society at large. Therefore, any discussion
on the representation of the Monster in the novel necessarily involves a close
look into different aspects of those relationships.

Transgression of nature

In the first place, the laboratory creation of an artificial sentient being outside
natural process of reproduction is a transgression of nature. Without a suitable
moral framework, encompassing respect for human liberty, equality and
fraternity, scientific tool of enormous power over nature is like a monster with
the mind of a child, easily turned delinquent if the socialization process fails or
is aborted, as in the case of Frankenstein’s monster. Through her representation
of the monster as a metaphor for a monstrous technology Mary Shelley seems to
have warned us with uncanny insight, across centuries, not only about
holocausts made possible by scientific invention, but of the threat of total
destruction by nuclear technology. And as if in fulfilment of Shelley’s prophetic
tale, we have come to the threshold of duplicating human beings. In a latest
interview the recently deceased, great scientist Stephen Hawking warned that
AI (Artificial Intelligence) would be the undoing of mankind and human
civilization.

Monster’s appearance: Problems of perception

The monster is a monster because of his size and ugliness, that is, his mere
material being. Victor abandons him in horror of its "hideous" ugliness. Oddly
enough, this is the only stated reason for his rejection.

When the creature sets forth alone into the world, everyone he encounters
assumes that his outer appearance – his gigantic, yellow-skinned body - is a
valid index to his inner evil nature and therefore he is a threat.

The only character who listens to his tale of suffering and then feels sympathy
for him, is the blind, old father of the De Laceys. The significance of this is
reinforced when the monster, in response to Victor’s commands, “relieves” his
creator from the sight of his “detested form” by placing his “hated hands”
before Victor’s eyes. By momentarily blinding Victor, the creature cautions us
lest our own acts of perception prove faulty.

What is humanness?

The monster is the "problematic body" that is neither natural nor civilized, yet at
the same time both. He is created in human shape but is not born. He learns
human language, yet he is not admitted into human society, initiation into which
requires belonging to a family and a nation, or race. Acquiring a European
language and even considerable linguistic and rhetorical skill shown as a result
of literary acquirement does not suffice for the monster to achieve human status.
The monster thus unsettles the notion of humanness and casts the very category
under critique.

The monster’s actions in his so-called pre-civilized state—before he encounters

human violence - not only aim at survival, but are also prompted by sympathy
for others. He stops eating from the de Laceys' food supply when he discovers
that they are very poor; he even actively contributes to their well-being by
cutting wood from the forest nightly and bringing it to their yard for them. Later
he saves a little girl from drowning.

Yet he is treated with "inhuman" cruelty. The gentle Felix attacks him in horror
on finding him with his father. All these cause him to turn his back on human
society in despair. While trying to animate the girl on the shore of the river, a
peasant sees him and shoots him on the spot. Wounded he realizes that his own
goodness is bound always to meet with malevolence.

Expelled from Eden for no fault of his own except his physical deformity, for
which only his creator could be held responsible, the Monster is driven to
become Satan and "vowed eternal hatred and vengeance to all mankind" —a
metaphor he himself employs in allusion to Paradise Lost. After having killed
Victor's brother, William, and caused the death of the innocent Justine, the
"daemon" tries touchingly to appeal to Victor's sense of justice and compassion
with the hope of persuading him to create a female for him, who would give
him the love and sympathy he argues that he deserves like all human beings:
“My vices are the children of a forced solitude …. my virtues will necessarily
arise when I live in communion with an equal”.
Thus Shelley offers a subversion of the definition and the valorization of
civilization in the monster's relation to it. Significantly, the only nurture and
guidance he receives is what he derives from the books he finds near the home
of the de Lacey family. The books he reads are significantly representative of
Western civilization and its patriarchal traditions—historical, political,
religious, epic and sentimental, among others —within which he has no place:
Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives, and the Sorrows of Werter. In Paradise Lost the
monster finds the epic-religious equivalent of his own situation in Satan rather
that in Adam, which he expresses to Victor on their first encounter in terms that
render the full extent of the latter's injustice.

He tells Victor that he was appalled by the inhumanity/monstrosity of humanity

when he read about the violence and injustice human beings and nations inflict
on each other in Volney's Ruins. Discursively, then, the monster holds a mirror
to mankind to show its own barbarity as an alien newly acquainted with the
horrors of civilization. His outcry against the injustice inflicted on him is a
passionate voicing of the discontents of civilization. His violence, on the other
hand, is only an answer to the violence done to him by humanity, and his
physical deformity a specular image of the moral deformity of civilization itself.

Self and other

The monster may be interpreted as a reflection of the inexplicable other in

Victor himself, which cannot be separated from his inner motivation to make
the monster. The monster encountering his own image in a pool for the first
time enacts this radical gap between image and self-identity, which in fact never
totally disappears from the human psyche. The otherness of the monster's body
in relation to his discursively constructed subjectivity figures also the other of
human subjectivity particularized in Victor's relationship to him: it is the
unnameable and dangerous other of his own self that Victor flees from the
moment of the monster's inception.

Feminist view

Recent feminist approaches to the representation of the monster have opened up

many critical issues about the novel. Victor's creation of a child without
Elizabeth's reproductive aid amounts to making motherhood itself unnecessary.
Such a being, invented to satisfy the Romantic masculine ego by eliminating
any other creative power than the self would be an image of the self: "a being
like myself...A new species would bless me as its creator and source... ". Victor
imitates thus God creating Adam in his own image. The monster aptly expresses
the analogy: "I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel". And he
plays out his Satanic part in that the sole energy that drives him is hellish
revenge.

It is also possible to identify the monster with Eve created from Adam's flesh.
But unlike Eve the monster is composed of bodily parts unearthed from nature
defined in the Western culture in terms associated with the female.

When the monster listens to Felix’s readings of cultural texts to Safie, he

assumes Shelley’s role of mute but avid listener of conversations, say between
Lord Byron and Shelley, on ideas or ideologies and on contemporary scientific
discoveries like electricity and its uses in re-animating a dead body. Hence the
monster also shares the marginality of his female author in relation to masculine
accumulation and self-confident exchange of knowledge. Thus in his kinship
with Eve, paralleled by his kinship with the woman writer, the monster offers an
archetypal trope for woman's exclusion from the symbolic: he symbolizes Eve's
moral deformity in his malformed figure and in so far as he is excluded from
masculinity because he is denied human subject hood (defined in terms of
masculinity), his deformity functions as a token of his "fall into gender" —the
feminine one—implicitly problematized in the novel (Gilbert and Gubar).

The monster is associated with femininity in the sense that it figures the
"monstrous otherness" of woman. It is not only created, but also defined as a
sub-human creature by a man whose powerful subject position is representative
of the dominant forces in society. Further, the monster shares the textual
marginality of the female characters in the novel

According to Poovey, by killing Victor's family the monster literally realizes the
murder figuratively perpetrated by Victor in turning his back on it. Moreover,
Victor repeatedly acknowledges his own crime as one that has done violence to
domestic ties.

The violence of the monster "marks the return of a repressed 'female principle'"
necessary for the humanization of civilization. Within a frame of reference that
locates the monstrous ego of the self-absorbed Romantic creator at the center of
the novel, the monster pleading for love and sympathy can be seen as inviting
his creator to negative capability, to a sympathy whose first condition is an
acceptance of the otherness of another being.
Gilbert and Gubar see the monster's desire for a mate as a "search for a
maternal, female principle" that might compensate to some degree his rejection
by a world of fathers. The most striking evidence for the monster's metaphorical
function as repressed femininity is the dream Victor has on the night of the
monster's animation. Elizabeth, an embodiment of perfect femininity, becomes
ghost-like in Victor's arms and turns into his dead mother, the principal giver of
love and protection in Victor's and his family's life. The monster's coming into
being without being born of woman marks thus the return of femininity in
Victor's subconscious, representing the collective subconscious of his male-
dominated culture. That the feminine principle returns in the shape of death,
reveals the "deadly" extent of this repression.

Conclusion

By creating an artificial human who was animated by science and then rejected
by his creator, Mary Shelley was able to create a complex symbolic crux
where questions of politics, parenthood, scientific morality, reproduction,
progress and power could be played out.

Shelley’s significant characterization of the novel as “my hedious progeny” in

her introduction equates text and monster with reference to the act of authoring
which is a rewriting, not only of many texts, but also of many discourses into a
new combination, just as Victor creates a being from fragments of bones and
tissues. And just as Victor cannot control his creation, which significantly turns
into a monster the moment it comes to life, Shelley does not have authority over
hers once she has authored it, and it comes to acquire the monstrosity involved
in the unmanageability of literary meaning due to its plurality and
indeterminacy.