When the Monster Speaks

Part III of Monsters

By K.F. Hartford

The first thing Frankenstein's Creature does is open his eye.

Victor runs away.

It is a strange beginning to a relationship that will destroy them both. Victor Frankenstein has spent years pursuing the secret of life. He has studied death until the human body has become material to him: bone, muscle, tissue, mechanisms to be assembled and animated. He has imagined the moment of creation so obsessively that almost everything else has disappeared beneath it.

Then creation happens.

The eye opens.

And Victor discovers that he has thought very carefully about how to create life and almost not at all about what he will owe it once it exists.

For the first portion of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, this matters because Victor controls the story. We know the Creature largely through the man who made him and abandoned him. Victor calls him monster, daemon, wretch, fiend. The language precedes our knowledge. Before we understand what the Creature thinks, wants, remembers, or feels, we have already been told what he is.

Then the monster begins to speak.

And the novel changes.

Before He Was a Monster

One of the strangest things about returning to Shelley's novel after absorbing its enormous cultural afterlife is discovering how gentle the Creature initially is.

He enters consciousness almost like an infant, although an infant trapped inside an enormous and terrifying adult body. Sensation arrives before understanding. Light hurts him. Darkness frightens him. He becomes hungry and cold. He discovers fire and experiences both its warmth and its capacity to burn. He hears birds and attempts to imitate their sounds without understanding why his own voice is different.

Nothing has a name yet.

This is important because Shelley does not give the Creature an innate moral vocabulary. She gives him experience.

He learns the world before he learns what the world thinks of him.

And his earliest impulses are not particularly monstrous. He experiences pleasure in warmth, food, birdsong, and light. When he discovers that taking food from a poor family contributes to their hunger, he stops stealing from them and gathers his own food instead. He secretly collects firewood for them. He watches them care for one another and gradually begins to understand affection by witnessing it.

The Creature's first sustained education in humanity is not philosophical.

It is domestic.

He watches the De Lacey family.

Learning to Be Human

The De Laceys do not know they have a student.

Hidden beside their cottage, the Creature watches Felix, Agatha, and their blind father. Later, through Safie's arrival and Felix's efforts to teach her, he learns language alongside her. Words begin attaching themselves to the world.

With language comes something far more consequential than speech.

Comparison.

Before the Creature understands human society, he knows that he exists. Once he understands it, he learns what kind of existence he has been given.

He sees affection and realizes that he has no family. He sees conversation and realizes that he has no companion. He learns about wealth and poverty, rank and property. He learns that human beings belong to families and nations, that they possess names and histories.

Then he asks the inevitable question.

Where do I belong?

He has no answer.

This may be one of the cruellest consequences of education: knowledge gives him the language necessary to understand his deprivation.

Ignorance had allowed him to experience loneliness.

Education teaches him what he is missing.

The distinction matters.

We tend to speak of knowledge as though its moral value were self-evident. Education liberates. Language empowers. Reading expands the mind. All of these things can be true.

But knowledge also enlarges suffering.

A person cannot mourn an exclusion he does not yet understand.

The Creature learns humanity and, in doing so, learns that he has been excluded from it.

The Monster Who Reads

Then Shelley gives him books.

The Creature finds a small collection containing Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, Plutarch's Lives, and Milton's Paradise Lost. The selection is almost absurdly consequential. From these books he encounters emotion, history, virtue, politics, civilization, creation, rebellion, God, and man.

He does not read them as we do.

We encounter books against the accumulated context of everything we have already learned. The Creature has almost none. Literature does not supplement his understanding of the world. It helps construct it.

Plutarch gives him models of human greatness and public virtue. Goethe gives him interiority, passion, longing, and despair. Milton gives him a cosmology.

And Paradise Lost gives him something he desperately needs.

A story about where he came from.

The problem is that he cannot determine which character he is.

At first, Adam seems the obvious comparison. Both are created beings. Neither chooses to exist. Each encounters the world without childhood or ancestry. Each must understand himself in relation to a creator who existed before him.

But the comparison collapses.

Adam is created deliberately. He is beautiful. His creator remains with him. He is given a place in creation and eventually a companion like himself.

The Creature receives none of these things.

So he turns toward Satan.

This is one of the great psychological movements in the novel. The Creature does not identify with Satan because he begins evil. He identifies with Satan because Satan understands exclusion.

He envies.

He watches happiness from outside it.

He knows himself to be separated from the beings among whom he wishes to belong.

The Creature's reading therefore gives him more than language. It gives him narratives through which to interpret himself.

And narratives are dangerous things.

Once we discover a story that explains our suffering, we can begin living inside it.

The Face in the Water

There is another education occurring alongside the Creature's intellectual one.

He discovers his own appearance.

Until then, he has seen other people recoil from him without fully understanding why. Eventually he sees his reflection in water and understands that he does not look like the people he has been observing.

The discovery devastates him.

This is a peculiar kind of self-knowledge because his ugliness is not something he experiences directly. A face is largely something other people see. We know our own faces through mirrors, photographs, and reactions.

The Creature learns his appearance socially.

He knows he is hideous because human beings teach him that he is.

And here Shelley constructs an almost unbearable experiment. She gives the Creature sufficient sensitivity to perceive beauty and sufficient intelligence to understand that he does not possess it.

He admires the De Laceys. He recognizes their grace, affection, and physical form. He learns the standards by which human beings judge one another and discovers himself at the bottom of them.

His ugliness therefore becomes more than physical difference.

It becomes a social sentence.

The Creature begins to believe that if people could encounter his mind before his body, perhaps the judgment might change.

So he devises an experiment of his own.

The Blind Man

The elder De Lacey cannot see him.

For once, the Creature has found a human being who cannot judge his face before hearing his words.

He waits until the others are gone and approaches the old man. Their conversation is one of the most important scenes in the novel because, briefly, the Creature's theory appears to work. He speaks eloquently. The old man responds with kindness. The Creature describes himself as an unfortunate being seeking protection from people he loves but who do not know him.

For a few moments, he is not a monster.

He is a voice.

Then the family returns.

They can see him.

The experiment ends violently.

Whatever possibility the Creature imagined collapses with it.

This is the point at which a simplified reading of Frankenstein becomes tempting. Society rejects the Creature; therefore society creates the monster. Had Victor loved him, had the De Laceys accepted him, had people responded to his kindness rather than his appearance, perhaps he would have remained benevolent.

There is truth in that interpretation.

But I think Shelley gives us something harder.

When the Victim Becomes the Perpetrator

The Creature burns the De Laceys' cottage.

Later, he kills William Frankenstein, a child.

He frames Justine Moritz for the murder, knowing she is innocent.

Eventually, he kills Clerval and Elizabeth.

These are not accidents committed by a confused being who does not understand morality. By this point, the Creature understands suffering extremely well.

That is precisely why he knows how to inflict it.

His education has worked.

He understands love, so he knows what Victor will feel when the people he loves are taken from him. He understands loneliness, so he can manufacture loneliness for someone else. He understands injustice and nevertheless allows Justine to die for a crime he committed.

The Creature does not merely lash out.

He chooses.

That matters enormously because there is a seductive moral idea hidden inside many stories about monsters: if we can explain why someone became terrible, perhaps we have explained the terribleness away.

We have not.

Understanding is not absolution.

A person's suffering can explain an action without making the action just. Victimhood does not grant moral immunity, and cruelty experienced does not become cruelty permitted.

If anything, the Creature's capacity to understand suffering makes his later violence more morally complicated, not less.

He knows what pain is.

Then he chooses to reproduce it.

Who Made the Monster?

So who is responsible?

Victor?

Certainly.

He creates a sentient being and abandons him at the first moment of need. He refuses responsibility for the consequences of an experiment he pursued entirely for his own ambition. Even when confronted with evidence that the Creature possesses intelligence, emotion, and moral reasoning, Victor struggles to see anything beyond the body that horrifies him.

Society?

Also.

Again and again, the Creature approaches human beings and encounters violence or rejection before his intentions can be known. His appearance functions as evidence against him. The world teaches him that virtue will not necessarily produce acceptance.

But the Creature?

Yes.

And that third answer is what prevents Frankenstein from becoming a simple parable about prejudice.

The Creature has agency.

At some point, the question changes from What happened to you? to What will you do because it happened?

Those questions belong beside one another.

Our culture often treats explanation and responsibility as though they were enemies. If we explain behavior through trauma, deprivation, discrimination, ideology, psychology, or circumstance, some fear that we have excused it. If we insist upon responsibility, others fear that we have ignored the conditions that helped produce it.

But perhaps mature moral judgment requires us to hold both truths simultaneously.

People are shaped by what happens to them.

People remain responsible for what they do to others.

The balance is uncomfortable because it denies us a clean monster.

Victor cannot carry all the guilt.

Society cannot carry all the guilt.

The Creature cannot be reduced either to innocent victim or irredeemable evil.

Everyone has contributed something.

That may be why the novel remains alive.

The Story We Choose About Ourselves

I keep returning to the Creature's reading of Paradise Lost.

Adam or Satan.

Beloved creation or rejected one.

Innocent or monster.

He searches literature for a category large enough to explain himself.

Perhaps we all do some version of this.

We inherit stories about what people like us are supposed to be. We acquire stories about what has happened to us, what we deserve, who harmed us, whom we should fear, what our suffering means. Some of those stories are true. Some are imposed upon us. Some save us.

Some eventually imprison us.

The Creature is repeatedly told what he is, but eventually he begins participating in the definition.

He has been treated as monstrous.

He becomes monstrous.

And then the transformation itself seems to prove that everyone was right about him from the beginning.

This is a vicious moral circle.

See? We knew what you were.

But did they?

Or did they know what he might become?

That distinction does not resurrect William, Justine, Clerval, or Elizabeth. The dead remain dead regardless of how elegantly we explain their murderer's development.

Still, the distinction matters.

Because if monsters are simply born, there is very little for the rest of us to learn.

If they can also be made, then we have obligations before the violence begins.

And if they can participate in making themselves, then compassion cannot require us to abandon judgment after it does.

When the Monster Speaks

This is what changes when Shelley allows the Creature to tell his story.

She does not reveal that the monster was never a monster.

That would be easier.

She reveals a consciousness.

The moment the Creature speaks, the category becomes insufficient. We have to confront his loneliness without forgetting his murders, Victor's abandonment without absolving the Creature's revenge, society's cruelty without pretending that cruelty removes his agency.

The monster speaks, and instead of resolving the moral problem, speech makes it worse.

Perhaps that is the point.

From a distance, monsters are easy.

They frighten us. We condemn them. We destroy them.

Up close, there is biography.

There are causes.

There are choices.

There are wounds that explain without excusing and injustices that matter without erasing the injustices committed in return.

The Creature wanted human beings to look past his face and recognize his mind.

Shelley forces the reader to do exactly that.

What we find there is not innocence.

It is something much more troubling.

We find someone recognizable.

And perhaps that is why Frankenstein remains more disturbing than the simpler monster stories that came before it. Shelley does not ask us to decide whether the Creature is really a monster.

She asks us to understand him after he becomes one.

That is much harder.

Because once the monster speaks, we lose one of monstrosity's greatest comforts:

the belief that evil belongs to something fundamentally different from us.

And that leaves another uncomfortable question.

If evil does not look different from us, why have we spent so much of human history trying to give it a face?