In my opinion, a monster is a tall, large being who is also rather ugly. A monster is evil and enjoys creating pain and suffering and even acting out murders. A monster is horrible both on the inside and on the outside.
In this essay, I will examine the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, to discover how far the “monster” deserves this label.
We learn a lot about the monster in his first narrative chapter. We discover how he observes the actions of humans, and then copies them to achieve things for himself. He views people lighting a fire and uses this to warm and feed himself.
He clothes his body because he was cold and wanted to fit in with society, unlike Adam from the Garden of Eden who clothed himself because of sin. This implies that the monster is not created evil.
The villagers do not react well to the beast. They find him evil and want to get rid of the brute because they are afraid of him. The monster acts like a typical monster here because of the horrendous way he is being treated but I don’t think he is a monster yet, I believe he is just acting. This is my opinion because if the creature really was monstrous it would be unlikely for him to experience the emotions that a human can but he says that when he was rejected by the villagers he “sat down and wept.”
The monster watches the cottagers and cannot understand why they are sometimes unhappy. He sees no reason for them to experience this sad emotion because they have everything the monster hasn’t. He speaks of their luxuries like a fire, food and clothes. While he picks up on their unhappiness, he also notices their manners and kindness. He wants to be polite like the family. In this chapter, the beast gains a deeper understanding of human emotions. He says, “This trait of kindness moved me”. This shows how he accepts these feelings. The brute learns by watching the cottagers activities in their daily lives and by listening to them speak. This shows him as good because he wants to learn so as to be accepted in society.
In chapter 13, the beast learns about respect and decent family backgrounds. He begins to question his existence. The monster learns of his lack of wealth, property and friends and how it brings him the title of vagabond. He agonises over this and wonders what he is. The beast is curious of the being that created him. He wants to know about his past.
The monster desires to comprehend about the fact that he remembers none of his childhood. He learns about family from the Arabian girl, Safie, who is taught English by Felix. This also helps the beast to discover the language alongside Safie.
The monster wishes to know the reason of his unique presence. He wants to understand why he never had a mother or father. He needs to know why he can only remember being his current size and shape. The beast needs answers to all of these questions, and I think recognising that these answers may never be discovered is beating him up inside. In this chapter, the beast feels that he is a monster inside and this may lead us to believe that he is a monster on the outside too.
The monster believes that crime is a “distant evil”. This demonstrates the monster being good and shows he is learning what is right and wrong. He doesn’t see evil as relevant in terms of his own life. He learns of murder and can’t imagine someone having the motive and being evil enough to kill.
Even with this new knowledge, the monster still proceeds to take the leather case containing clothes and books. On account of the fact that these were unattended, I don’t think there was a large problem in the monster taking them but I do think the beast should have contemplated his actions before taking the items. This begins to portray him as a monster because usually you would think about what you are doing before you do it however, in this instance; the monster appears not to.
The monster’s reading materials broaden his mind and cause him to acknowledge his emotions. He says it “moved every feeling of wonder and awe”. This shows how appreciative he is of finding out new things.
The monster compares himself to Adam as he too was “united to no other being in existence”. The beast also speaks of his consideration of being like Satan, talking of his bitterness and envy.
This shows the monster believing that he, himself is becoming more evil. This is due to his circumstances, in my opinion, and his character is changing.
The monster had been alive a year when he decided to introduce himself to the Delacey family, who he has been learning from. The brute chooses to talk to the old man, who is blind, in hope that he may accept the beast for the person he is inside. He does this because he needs friendship; he is lonely and needs association with human beings. This relates to Rousseau’s beliefs about fraternity and everyone needing human interaction to live peacefully.
The old blind man listens to the beast and decides to accept him. Unfortunately, the old mans family return and they see the beast as his “outside” self and force him out of the house. When leaving, the monster feels anguished and doesn’t like the family because he had almost been accepted as an equal and a friend to the old man. I think that he isn’t a monster here but the pain of being rejected is opening up a world of hatred and destruction for the beast.
At the beginning of this chapter, the brute is portrayed as a monster because of his rage. He says,” I could, with pleasure, have destroyed the cottage and its inhabitants”, this shows the beast warming to the idea of death and misery. He feels obliged to take revenge on the cottager’s because they didn’t accept him. He does a monstrous act and sets fire to their empty cottage. I think he is reacting to this knowledge monster-like although I suspect that most people might react like this if they feel unaccepted and inadequate to society.
At this point, the beast despises of Victor because he created the brute without making a partner for him to interact with.
The monster leaves the cottage area and heads for the woods. Here, he rescues a young girl from drowning. The beast speaks of the difficulty he encountered when forcing against the current, though when he saves the child he feels very pleased with himself. However, a man sees the creature with this girl and believes he is harming her so the man shoots him. The monster is angered by this and wants revenge.
This made the beast very miserable and he felt that humans could never understand him. I think that the monster is beginning to believe that the only way for him to make friends is through terror and I also think that the beast is starting to like this idea.
The monster decides he wants to befriend William, the young boy, because children are generally unprejudiced at such a young age, unfortunately, when the monster talks to William, William shouts “Monster! Ugly wretch.” The creature then accidentally kills William while trying to silence him. This indicates him becoming more evil as he tried to prevent William making horrible comments about him.
When he finds the woman’s picture on William, he stops and softens towards William, but after a few moments his vicious thoughts return and he remembers his deprivation and is back to his evil self.
He finds the old barn in which Justine is sleeping. He frames her for the murder of William which I believe is a cruel, monstrous act. I think that the creature has been rejected so many times that he is becoming a monster.
The monster asks Victor to create a companion for him because he is lonely. This is his last resort. The beast believes that if he had a friend he would be happy. This was something which Rousseau also thought was necessary for existence. The monster negotiates with Victor and gives reasonable pleas which suggest that through the Delacey family, he became well educated and logical. He says they will be “cut off from the world”. He will go to any length to gain a being like himself. This relates to the way God created Eve for Adam because he believed Adam was not meant to be alone on Earth. The monster connects with this and feels he is entitled to as female companion just as much as Adam was. God had anticipated this need in Adam but here it is the monster who has to act.
The monster proposes to leave Europe. I think that this persuades Victor to construct a female version of the monster. I think the monster is good here because he talks to Victor and doesn’t use violence to make Victor listen to him. He puts his opinions across in a non-vicious way.
In the novel, the monster is beginning to become very assertive with Victor. The beast is tired of Victor deciding whether he should be happy or not. He reacts badly when he discovers that Victor had destroyed his female counterpart. He decides that he had tried to compromise but that failed, and so he is becoming more violent. He is hurt that Victor is pursuing his own happiness whilst destroying the monsters only chance of happiness. This could be seen as Victor acting like a monster for destroying the creatures hopes of being normal. He threatens Victor by saying “I shall be with you on your wedding night”. Victor takes this threat to mean that the monster will soon murder him. This shows that Victor is completely self-obsessed. He doesn’t even entertain the idea that this threat could apply to anyone but himself. This worries Victor immensely and I think this part of the novel is portraying the monster as a horrible being.
In this part of the novel the monster has murdered Henry Clerval. Victor is blamed for the death. Although he didn’t perform the murders directly, he still calls himself the murderer of Clerval, William and Justine. He says this because he created the beast so it is his fault that the murders took place. This again suggests that it is Victor who is to blame for everything as without the creature, William, Justine, Clerval and soon, Elizabeth.
The monster murders Elizabeth for revenge. Earlier in the novel, the monster told Victor that he would be with him on his wedding night. Victor thought that he was in danger, and didn’t realise that Elizabeth was going to be the monster’s victim. She is a victim because she was killed but she knew that it could happen because Victor had explained the situation with the monster to her.
In his letter to Margaret, Walton says of how he has seen the monster. Walton seems very surprised and says; “such a monster…really existed”. This brings us to think that he didn’t believe Victor and thought he was maybe incapable of creating such a thing. Walton calls Frankenstein “mad” and can’t understand why he would want to create a “monster”.
When Walton sees the monster over Victor’s dead body, he says the monster was muttering words of “grief and horror”. The monster cries out, and speaks of Victor as a “generous and self-devoted being”. Here he is either sorry Victor has died because now he can’t create the beast’s counterpart, or he began to like Victor and had forgiven him for destroying the second monster. The beast appears to blame himself for the death of Victor. He describes his life as full of misery, suffering, rejection and death. The monster calls Victor his “last victim”, this is important because the monster didn’t kill Victor but he still feels responsible for his death. Victor never showed any remorse for the creature and yet the beast developed human feelings. I don’t think that anything justifies the monster’s murders although I do believe that the monster is acting more like a human than Victor is in this part of the novel.
I think that the monster had good reasons for all of his actions, although this doesn’t make them acceptable. In the beginning of the novel, after the monster was created, he didn’t understand human beings and their emotions, so it took him a while to learn what was right and wrong. I think that when the old man’s family at the cottage rejected the monster, he was deeply affected.
His actions can be partly blamed for the way he was treated. Humans didn’t accept the monster so this made him act out murders. I think that the monster needed a friend and when the cottagers don’t like him, and when William tries to run away from him, he feels absent of human emotions and reacts in an inhuman way. He killed William and the cottagers so here he acted like a monster and I don’t think that his ill treatment can be an excuse for murder.
The murders of Justine and Elizabeth were uncalled for, as they hadn’t met the monster. He killed them because of their association with Victor Frankenstein.
The monster’s threat to Victor on his wedding night also signifies that he’s a monster because he doesn’t kill Victor, he kills one of the most important things to Victor, his wife.
Victor ignores his responsibility to the monster, as he has done since his creation. When he denies the monster a female companion, the monster hates Victor; his one last chance at happiness is squashed by Victor’s quest for his own happiness.
In conclusion, I do not think that the creature deserves the label of monster in the novel, because the majority of his actions while evil do have decent reasons behind them. The murder of Elizabeth would never have happened if Victor had made the monster happy and created a companion for him. I believe that Walton’s reaction to seeing the creature upset about Victors death was a true reaction which showed what the creature really was like. Walton said that “his voice seemed suffocated and my first impulses were suspended by a mixture of curiosity and compassion.” Walton realised that the creature was truly saddened by the death of his creator who in human terms would be thought of as his father. The creature is upset that he was unable to say goodbye to his father and so takes Victors body with him on an iceberg to wait to die so that he can be with Victor again. This shows that he has developed a human understanding on life and human emotions which suggest while to look at he may be a monster, but on the inside he is a human, maybe even a better one than Victor.
