Frankenstein’s
monster is born with double the original sin. Unlike God creating Adam and Eve, an imperfect being creates
the monster, and so he bears the sins of his creator as well as his own. Mary Shelley does not allude to Genesis
in describing the monster’s evolution, but instead references John Milton’s Paradise Lost, emphasizing that the
monster is born into an already sinful world by a flawed creator, and the
species of this creator teaches him everything he learns. While Adam awakes in a warm paradise,
the monster explains “It was dark when I awoke; I felt cold also, and
half-frightened…” (Shelley 129).
From the very beginning the monster is subject to the miseries of the
world. Whereas Adam is surrounded
by beauty and love, the monster only encounters hate.
In his
cultural education, the monster learns about brutal despots and wars that
destroy armies, the fall of humans from paradise, and the complicated nature of
sin. From this education the
monster concludes that he is imperfect due to the nature of his birth: “[Adam] had come forth from the hands
of God a perfect creature…he was allowed to converse with, and acquire
knowledge from beings of a superior nature: but I was wretched, helpless, and
alone” (154). Because the monster
is born from an imperfect creator, his nature is monstrous, but he is also
nurtured to be monstrous, learning only of pain and evil from the beginning of
his life. Given his education and the
complicated nature of sin presented in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Werter, are the monster’s crimes at the very least
forgivable, if not justifiable?
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ReplyDeleteI think you make a good point when you argue that the monster’s crimes are understandable due to his upbringing. It is true that he was born into a world that showed him no love and one in which he had to create his own definition of good and evil from what he could scrape from a few books and watching the cottagers. In this constructed ethics system, it is easy to see how the monster rationalizes killing William Frankenstein. His ethics are all of his own creation, and when the child informs him that he belongs to his enemy, the monster can make room in his ethics system for the societally unacceptable act of killing a child.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I would not go so far as to say that the monsters actions are “justifiable,” except, of course, to himself. It is easy to understand why the monster did it given his entirely self-guided upbringing and his anger with Frankenstein, but to say that the act is justified is to say that it is acceptable. Although the monster can explain to Frankenstein why he murdered William, it cannot give a societally ethical reason for why he killed William, because there is not one.