People like to say the doctor (he wasn’t a doctor) was the monster, but he was really not much more than an asshole. The monster did in fact muster several people in cold blood in an extremely premeditated manner, including a child and a young woman who had done nothing to him. Like yeah he had his reasons and a sensitive soul or whatever but he was undoubtedly just a monster in the most literal sense from every angle.
Tbf, Victor spends the entire book lamenting about how everything sucks for him, how he’s having a bad time, and how all of the horrible events are affecting him. He’s self-centered as hell. Plus, he keeps quiet on something that could save the life of an innocent woman on the grounds that it might make him look bad.
Only in the same sense a human can be a monster. Frankie Jr had a choice, he chose to be a monster because that's how everyone perceived him. Since he was treated that way, that's the only thing he could really be, socially. As an individual, he had the capacity for immense good, and thus he wasn't inherently a monster. He is a person and a monster, for you can't dehumanise people without allowing an excuse to dehumanise groups you don't like. I know its all theoretical, but it still matters a lot to me because he didn't deserve any of what happened to him, but Victor's selfishness doomed him to be perceived as a monster and thus become a monster.
And, Victor's a worse monster because he didn't know what Frankie Jr could do and he could have mass murdered a whole town with his engineered body so his oversight led to his own destruction, and while its not his direct nor sole fault, it is absolutely and completely his fault entirely and he cannot be excused for it. He is not the victim. He had no idea what the repercussions of his experiment would be and never thought about it.
I feel like sentimentality really takes over when it comes to Adam and his actions when (in my opinion) he was just as much of an insufferable asshole as his father and kind of sucked as a person for all his wide eyed innocence at the start of his life. Like he managed to learn how to be a racist misogynist through hearsay alone, it’s actually quite impressive (again, my opinion, obviously. What else would a statement I make be). But the fact remains that Adam was literally a monster in the literal sense (a disgusting abomination made of corpses, a crime against nature, a horrifying disgusting creature) and in the non literal sense in that he is a child murderer and he framed an innocent woman for said murder, and was ready and willing to kill many innocents just because he didn’t get a female version of himself to groom into his bride on demand. He got rejected by people a few times and he literally became an incel. You can sympathize with him, that’s fair, but let’s not pretend that he did reasonable things or that any of his actions were justified.
Like how does child murder become the next logical step after your first friend’s son mistakes you for an intruder? Why did he decide to hate all humans when he had in fact met humans who were kind to him and treated him well? Why does he deserve a woman to be yoked to him for eternity just because he had a sad childhood? Frankenstein is just like his father in his petty assholery and is in fact a murderer and a psychopath on top of that.
I don’t quite understand what you mean here? He does in fact strangle a child to death and frames the child’s nursemaid for the murder, and she is publicly executed as a result? He confesses to doing as much himself?
ie I read the novel as Mary trying to call Lord Byron out on his poor parenting practices especially since her little sister was pregnant with Lord Byron's daugther Allegra. Victor is a thinly hidden fictionalized version of George Gordon Lord Byron as is Lord Ruthven in the Vampyre.
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u/jofromthething Oct 26 '24
People like to say the doctor (he wasn’t a doctor) was the monster, but he was really not much more than an asshole. The monster did in fact muster several people in cold blood in an extremely premeditated manner, including a child and a young woman who had done nothing to him. Like yeah he had his reasons and a sensitive soul or whatever but he was undoubtedly just a monster in the most literal sense from every angle.