The Monstrous

• •We tend to use the term ‘monster’ to mean something horrifyingly unnatural or excessively large.
• However, the word ‘monster’ means ‘something to be shown’.
• It demonstrates (it has the same root word – Latin: monstrare as ‘demonstrate’) and it warns (Latin: monere – to warn).
• From classical times to the Renaissance, monsters were interpreted either as signs of divine anger or portents of impending disasters.
• From classical times to the Renaissance, monsters were interpreted either as signs of divine anger or portents of impending disasters.
• The horrific appearance of the monster gradually began to serve an increasingly moral function.
• By providing a visible warning of the results of vice and folly, monsters came to promote virtuous behaviour.
• Note that Victor in Chapter 7 describes the monster as ‘the living monument of presumption and rash ignorance which I had let loose upon the world.’
• In classical myth, monsters are frequently constructed out of ill-assorted parts, like the griffin, with the head and wings of an eagle combined with the body and paws of a lion. Victor’s monster continues this tradition in being constructed out of parts taken from graves, dissecting rooms and slaughter houses.
• Christopher Craft suggests that Gothic fictions of the 19th century have a three-part structure.

  The text ‘first invites or admits a monster, then entertains and is entertained by monstrosity for some duration, until in its closing pages it expels or repudiates the monster and all the disruptions that he/she/it brings.’
• Most Gothic fiction of the 18th and 19th centuries seem to meet this criterion of monsters being admitted to the text only to be ultimately expelled or repudiated.
• Limits and boundaries are reinstated as the monster is dispatched, good is distinguished from evil and self from ‘other’.
• In more recent Gothic fiction, however, monstrous figures are increasingly those with which we identify, and it is the systems that persecute these figures that come to be seen as monstrous.
• Frankenstein – in contrast to works like Bram Stoker’s Dracula – may be seen as providing an early example of this tendency, by inviting some sympathy for the monster, allowing him to speak and explaining the origins of his behaviour.
• Elizabeth after the execution of Justine: ‘men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other’s blood.’
• Through difference, whether in appearance or behaviour, monsters function to define and construct the ‘normal’. Located at the margins of culture, they police the boundaries of the human, pointing to those lines that must not be crossed.
• When, for example, we refer to murderers as ‘monsters’, we seek to distance ‘us’ (the human) from ‘them’ (the monstrous).
• Shelley’s novel, however, deliberately problematises these distinctions.
• If the monster’s appearance is a visible warning, it is primarily a warning against the folly demonstrated by Victor.
• although the monster’s exterior may be horrific, he is, at least initially, certainly not frighteningly unnatural: rather, he could be seen as far more natural and humane than the creator-father who rejects him, the villagers who stone him or the ungrateful peasant who shoots him.
• It is only when he is exposed to, and suffers from, the viciousness of human society that he himself begins to demonstrate violent behaviour, to act as the monster his appearance suggests him to be.
• Shelley’s main concern in terms of monstrosity, then, is to show the process by which human beings create and become monsters.
• She does this by resisting the placement of the creature as truly human or truly monstrous: rather, he inhabits a liminal space between the two, and also destabilises humanity’s place as civilised, placing humanity itself in that liminal position.
• What, Shelley forces us to ask, is a monster? How do we define the monstrous, and how the human? Can we even make a clear distinction between the two, or is the monstrous rather a part of the human