Frankenstein and Philosophy

by Michaud, Nicolas

  Shelley allows us to observe Victor rationalizing a contradictory view of the Creature, as a demon (with a free but malignant will) and an unfree animal (whose malignancy is instinctual or otherwise inevitable). Just before he dies, he admits that he had obligations to the Creature, but that those obligations were trumped by the need to protect humanity in general. He cites the “malignancy” of the Creature as justification for his own refusal to create a companion and his attempts to kill him.

  Shelley suggests throughout the novel that failures of empathy—the ability to recognize in another being someone like yourself—are moral failures, and they create the tragedy of the novel. The bonds of family and community are humanizing bonds, for the most part. Victor speaks lovingly of his early life with his family, a kind of paradise before the fall. It is by observing (not even directly interacting with) the De Lacey family that the Creature first takes on recognizably human traits, learns language, and indeed comes to love and care for this family.

  But the Creature is denied love and empathy, even from the De Lacey family, and so when he first speaks with Victor, he demands a companion creature, so that he doesn’t have to be alone and unloved. When Victor destroys the unfinished companion, the Creature goes about making Victor into a creature in his own image—alone—by killing Clerval and then Elizabeth. Victor’s family is almost entirely dead, he is without friends, and, by pursuing the Creature into the Artic wasteland, he leaves normal human community.

  Yet the Creature’s relationship to Victor is much more complex than pure hatred. When he speaks to Walton at the end, he seems to feel real sorrow for all the suffering he has inflicted on Victor, and weirdly mourns his passing. Throughout the novel, which in her 1831 introduction she calls her “hideous progeny” (p. 197), Shelley presents the Creature as a sympathetic character, in stark contrast to how Victor treats him. This is not to imply that the Creature is an innocent victim. We can interpret him as morally responsible for the violence that he commits, but also trace how that violence arises out of his circumstances. He’s neither simply a monster nor simply a victim; and in this way we see how unclear our comfortable moral distinctions really are. If a monster can also be a victim, precisely because he was treated as a monster, and his victim far from innocent, our simple categories of good and evil cannot be maintained.

  How Frankenstein Addresses Us

  In his preface to Frankenstein, Percy Bysshe Shelley explains that he (writing as the author) has chosen a supernatural narrative in which to display “the truth of the elementary principles of human nature” (p. 3). Given Victor’s errors we should not repeat his attempt to treat the Creature as a monster; nor should we pretend that Victor himself is only an inhuman monster. Victor demonstrates the possibilities within human nature, at least in Mary Shelley’s eyes. He may be, in Harold Bloom’s phrase, a “moral idiot,” but this is a form of self-protective idiocy that is familiar to all of us.

  Frankenstein is commonly read as a warning about mad scientists, or about technology outrunning our capacity to understand its consequences, and it can function in that way. But there is a deeper concern: that of “moral madness”—our self-deceptive tendency to project evil onto others, and the evil and brutality that we engage in as supposedly excused by that projection. We have to be suspicious of, for instance, political narratives of victimization, often used to justify revenge or harsh control of various kinds. Casting immigrants as criminals, or critics of Westernization or globalization as barbaric, sets up a story in which there can be no complex responsibility, or tenuous boundaries between insiders and outsiders, those who are part of the community or threats to it. And then we have to ask what exactly is being protected, and at what cost.

  In writing Frankenstein, Mary Shelley warns us about our own monstrosities, which we may refuse to recognize but which stubbornly and uncannily declare themselves.5

  _________________

  1The Onion Book of Known Knowledge: A Definitive Encyclopaedia of Existing Information in 27 Excruciating Volumes (Little, Brown, 2012), p. 79.

  2Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus (Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 68, my emphasis.

  3Vincent P. Pecora, “Habermas, Enlightenment, and Antisemitism,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” edited by Saul Friedländer (Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 167.

  4Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Hogarth, 1955), p. 241.

  5My philosophical interest in Frankenstein originated in an interdisciplinary first-year seminar called “Technology and the Human Condition” at Monmouth College, and was furthered by my preparing for lectures on Mary Shelley’s novel in the William O. Douglas Honors College at Central Washington University. I owe thanks to a great many students and colleagues for wonderful discussions about this uncanny book.

  23

  The Monster that Therefore I Am

  JESSIE DERN

  On a dark and stormy night in November, after years of stressful, toilsome, and obsessive work, the moment that Victor Frankenstein has been waiting for is finally within reach: he is about to unlock the secret to life itself. However, he unleashes more than just the spark of life—on this night Frankenstein’s actions give his name infamy.

  When the dull-yellow eyes of his creature open, Frankenstein remarks that “the beauty of the dream vanished, as breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”1 In a blinding flash of both electricity and creativity—Frankenstein’s creation instantly transforms from blessed masterpiece to damned monstrosity.

  Frankenstein condemns his creature as a monster before it even moves, acts, or speaks. What does he see in his creation to bring on this reproach? What really makes a monster? It is perhaps more than just ironic that the name Frankenstein gets associated with the monster more than it does with the man. Could Frankenstein the man be just as much a monster as his creation?

  In her novel, Mary Shelley is inviting us to think about who has the power to create names and labels that judge and denounce others. Who gets to decide who’s a monster? This question puts the center of our focus squarely upon Frankenstein himself, who projects his fear and anxiety about his own powers and their untold consequences onto his creation. From the moment the monster makes its first gestures, facial expressions, and inarticulate sounds, Frankenstein is never able to really see or understand the monster except through the lenses of his own guilt-ridden glasses.

  We will see that he who calls someone a monster may be a monster himself. Who better to help us see this than someone who is a monstrous philosopher and a philosopher of monstrosities? Twentieth-century French philosopher Jacques Derrida writes artistic and argumentative “Franken-texts” that challenge the way in which traditional philosophy has depended on banishing the strange, the foreign, the mutant, and the abnormal from the altar of truth and knowledge. Derrida says that labels are riddled with the motivations and judgments that the labeler has about him or herself in relationship to the “monster,” and the labeler fails to realize that the power he has to judge begins to resemble the negative traits that he accuses of the other. And what is a monster to do about all this? Derrida suggests that challenging a label really becomes a journey of self-exploration, something which Frankenstein’s monster never gets the chance to take.

  A Monster Is Made

  The labeling of “monsters” abounds in Shelley’s novel. Justine, the housemaid and friend wrongly convicted of the murder of Frankenstein’s younger brother says that “ever since I was condemned, my confessor has besieged me; he threatened and menaced, until I almost began to think that I was the monster that he said I was” (p. 58). Elizabeth, Frankenstein’s future wife, distraught that the innocent Justine could be seen as guilty says that “men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other’s blood” (p. 63). Even the monster himself, after being rejected by all of society, accepts the status that has been given to him by the others: “I became fully convi
nced that I was in reality the monster that I am” (p. 80).

  If Justine isn’t really a monster, even though she almost let someone convince her of that, then Shelley wants us to think that Frankenstein’s creature—the monster—is perhaps other than as Victor Frankenstein represents him. We have only his account to go on, the word of a man who is the epitome of the “mad scientist.” For years, Frankenstein had been in restless pursuit of what he called the hidden laws of nature—the very essence of life—a power so god-like that he said he wanted to use it to “banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to anything but a violent death” (p. 22). In order to do this, he lost sight of everything else: his family, his schooling, his friends, his health, his sanity. He began to feel invincible, where even the lines of life and death could be redrawn by him alone.

  It turns out that what he devoted his life and energy to, and what he put care in creating, was really an ugly, animated mess of discolored dead flesh from corpses that from now on will be the stuff of nightmares. Can the monster be a monster simply because it is hideous? Frankenstein seems to think so. Does he have any real reason to fear the monster at this point, since so far it is only guilty of being alive and hasn’t actually done anything yet? If not, then what’s really going through Frankenstein’s head at this moment?

  Frankenstein can never see his creature as anything other than an ugly mistake, though he has mistaken the creature’s ugliness for the self-hatred he is feeling about his own actions. Once alive, this thing, this not-even-human being, has become the manifestation of Frankenstein’s pride, his foolishness, his immoderation, and own fears of failing in what was supposed to be his moment of glory. Frankenstein rejects his creation as a wretch—a despicable and contemptuous enemy—and unleashes it onto the world because Frankenstein never felt as if he should be responsible for it and is repelled by the sight of it.

  Here’s how Frankenstein describes their first encounter:

  By the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters, I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped, and rushed downstairs. (pp. 35–36)

  Has the creature really done anything to deserve this reception? Frankenstein’s response is to avoid, rather than to confront. These don’t seem like the actions of a man who just moments before was confident enough to admit he was forming a new species, the scientific results of which would help to create eternal life for all of humanity. Perhaps later on when the monster comes back to destroy Frankenstein’s life then it deserves his disdain and hatred, but the creature doesn’t go from beautiful to ugly to enemy to the source of life’s destruction just by coming to life, even if its life represents those possibilities.

  Victor Frankenstein, the Monster

  Nearly every film adaptation of Frankenstein portrays the monster as a larger than life destructive force—everything Frankenstein imagines him to be!—while Frankenstein is a joyful, self-congratulatory, eccentric scientist who revels in his god-like ability and newfound responsibility as a creator, boasting to the curious on-lookers who have come to witness such a momentous event. These movie depictions are an idealized version of good and evil, and don’t help us see Victor Frankenstein for who he really is: a monster in his own right.

  How does it really play out in Shelley’s novel? Victor has kept himself in isolation to hide his secrets, and on the night of the monster’s creation he has a nervous breakdown, vowing never to tell anyone of what transpired. His creature becomes the source of his own personal obsession and torment as well as the outlet for his hatred and rage. Once we hear from the creature himself about what he has gone through over the years and what he needs from Frankenstein—the only one who is able to bestow such a request—we can see Frankenstein’s true, monstrous colors: he can’t see how his actions have led to the monster’s actions, and he thinks more of killing his creation rather than helping him.

  Frankenstein is more worried about how he appears to others than the consequences of rejecting the monster. When his closest friend Henry Clerval suddenly arrives and comes to his aid on the night of monster’s creation, Frankenstein could not even tell him about what happened for fear that he would be perceived as insane. Later when he heard that Justine was being sentenced to death for his brother’s murder, which he knew was done by the hands of the monster, he would rather let her die than step forward. As time goes on, and as his situation with the monster becomes more and more unbelievable, Frankenstein even thinks it would better to let others think of him as the murderer of his friend Clerval rather than the monster, who had killed Clerval in a fit of rage over Frankenstein failing to keep the promise he made with the monster to make him a companion.

  Now you might think that nothing Frankenstein has done is nearly as bad as what the monster does in retaliation, but think of it this way: no one was harmed on the night of his creation, and the monster did not hurt anyone until he sought out Frankenstein’s family specifically to hurt Frankenstein. This should lead us to think about what Frankenstein has done to deserve such a reaction. If violence breeds violence, Frankenstein’s actions toward the monster must be truly wretched.

  Now ask yourself this question: would you be inclined to like someone that you already considered to be a monster? Frankenstein’s condemnation of his creature from the minute he was alive puts a shadow over all of their interactions. When the first word that Frankenstein says to his creature is “Devil!”, you know it is not going to be an impartial conversation. Once he realizes that his suspicion that the monster killed his brother is correct, Frankenstein further assumes that his creation is an inherently violent being “who delights in carnage and misery” (p. 50) because he cannot understand how his rejection and the rejections of other humans have driven the monster to react, to vent his anger and frustration at humanity, and even get revenge for what he has considered unfair.

  Yet, wouldn’t you be amazed if you ran into your creation years later and he could make fires and shelter, and speak and reason with you in your own common language? When the monster first speaks to Frankenstein, he says:

  I expected this reception. . . . All men hate the wretched; how then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou are bound by the ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You propose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends. (p. 68)

  The monster is smart enough to point out Frankenstein’s own hypocrisy: how is it that the person so set on creating life, is now set out to destroy it? Frankenstein is the only one who can fulfill the monster’s desire for a companion and for friendship by creating a female like him so that they can live out their days alone and in peace away from humans. The monster says: “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed” (p. 69). While this may not be true at the time he said it (for he already had killed Frankenstein’s brother), it was true the night of his creation. Frankenstein lets his emotions trump the monster’s pleadings because he sees what the monster says as a demand and as a threat. Frankenstein feels the victim of the whole situation because he cannot see how his repeated rejections of the monster have caused him to be this way. It is here that Frankenstein becomes himself a monster, since he decides that regardless if he is the only one who can help the monster, the monster is not entitled to friendship, companionship and sympathy from anyone.

  Derrida’s Encounter
s with The Other

  How do you become a monster? Even those humans we have called “monsters” across history didn’t start out that way. Much like monsters, Jacques Derrida writes about rogues and animals, which he says are labels that are infused with the labeler’s perspective about him or herself in relationship to these “monsters.” He says that those who label the Other as a monster which is foreign, strange and misunderstood are trying to point out that that which is other to them represents a threat. The Other may be perceived as a threat to my reality and way of life, even to the general order of things in the world like a sense of right and wrong. However, those who label something or someone as Other may cause that thing to remain foreign, stranger, and misunderstood often because of this label. Derrida says that this label is always created in a negative or pejorative sense, and the one creating it is using a twisted logic that says more about him or her than it does about the Other.

  In Rogues, Derrida says that a rogue—an outlier to a group and someone who goes against traditional norms, thus someone who is seen by the group as hostile to it, and perhaps even seen as a scoundrel and delinquent—is always being called a rogue by those who deem themselves to be respectable and representative of the moral order. Those who think they are in the right because they are in the majority have a power and strength in numbers and in traditions and habits, giving themselves a sense of authority to judge someone outside of their group.

  When Frankenstein feels that the monster is making a threat in order to get what he wants, he says: “no torture shall ever extort a consent from me. You may render me the most miserable of men, but you shall never make me base in my own eyes” (p. 104). This means that Frankenstein wants to be seen, even in the eyes of the monster, as an authority that has the power to judge but is immune from judgments from the outside, judgments that he would think are off-base precisely because they come from the outside.