Frankenstein: a Monster or Misunderstood?
When was the last time you asked someone to check for a creature living under your bed? To a 5 year old, this is a true monster. Do you remember the infuriating feeling you felt upon hearing about a terrorist’s appalling crimes? Some might call a terrorist, a real monster. Who knows what truly a monster is? In the end we tend to follow the statement “to each, his own”. We all have our own opinions based on our own maturity, values, ideas, and worldly experience. Each connotation of the word “monster” however, traces back to the same basic principles that are acknowledged by the masses. The dictionary, combining the separate meanings of the word into one accepted and referred to, states that a monster is any human or animal so grotesquely deviating from normal shape, behavior or character or a person who excites horror by wickedness or cruelty. In today’s society, the average person and the majority of the population’s way of thinking would find the creature to be the real monster of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. The evidence and support shows that the creature fits the definition of monster on all literal and objective levels. Throughout the book, the creature is portrayed as an unbearably gruesome fiend, and the author never lets us forget its horror, always stressing on its physical defects. The argument that gruesome is a subjective term cannot be put across because every person to pick up the book is revolted by its description. “his yellow skin barely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriance’s only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes that seemed almost the same color as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion, his straight black lips” was the way in which Mary Shelly first introduced us to the creature with imagery. Even its birth story, how it was made, is nauseating in itself. Victor Frankenstein was an