Frankenstein brings into question what constitutes someone as human. In class, people started to be on team Victor or team Monster on the basis of who the true monster of the book is. But throughout the book, I felt as though the point wasn’t to just pick one side, but to look at the characters as one and the same.
Humanity as a whole isn’t completely filled with positive traits. People slaughter others in war, they cheat, they steal, and they lie. These aspects of humankind all stem from intricate emotions that humans possess. War stems from vengeance and righteousness of self. Cheating and stealing stem from unchecked desires. And lying stems from shame or fear of persecution. As barbaric as some of these actions are they are a result of the complex emotions people contain. These feelings are just a few of the flawed parts of humanity. In this regard, humanity has the potential to be innately monstrous.
Before placing the monster or Victor as a the “true monster”, their deeper emotions must be considered, or lack their of. One complex feeling, revenge, is displayed in Victor and the monster. Spiteful and full of hate for his creator the monster, he threatens that he will “work at [Victor’s] destruction” until he “desolates [his] heart” (Shelley 104). Fueled by rage and anguish, the monster will stop at nothing until his creator shares the same despair. He does this by murder, suffocating his victims to death. While gruesome, this drive for revenge and destructiveness can be found in Victor, the natural human. After the monster takes the lives of those who he holds dear, Victor feels a “maddening rage” and prayed to “wreak a great and signal revenge on [the monster’s] cursed head” (147). The same spite and anger festers into desire for physical harm towards his foe. This parallel between the characters forms as a reminder to the reader that revenge resides in the scary monster and the normal human.
In addition, both characters develop a sense of guilt following their contentious accomplishments. While not specifically monstrous, it shows another connection between the two characters as a consequence of their cruel thoughts/behaviors.For Victor, he reanimated the dead, and created a monster that killed innocents. Throughout the whole book, he experiences intense remorse for his down spiraling experiment. He once saw the “beauty of his dream” but now only had “breathless horror and disgust” for what he has done (35). He feels the countless deaths are his own doing as he states he is “the true murderer” (59). His expression of guilt reflects the intertwining of self reflection shows that he cared about his repercussions. Not until the end of the book is this idea shown within the monster. For a majority of the book, the monster exhibits little or no guilt. Not until after Victor’s death, does this inner turmoil become apparent to the reader. He states that he has “murdered the lovely and the helpless . . . strangled the innocent and grasped to death his throat who never injured”, but regards himself with the utmost “abhorrence” for himself. This one line solidifies an partial glimpse of true humanity, or at least a dark side of it. If he were to lack regret, he could slip into the monstrous category. But he expressed this complex human emotion, one that requires ethics and self reflection.
To ignore these aspects of the characters inhibits a full understanding of the book, and the meaning it is trying to convey. From this standpoint, Victor and the monster are equally human, and in turn, equally monstrous.
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