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Research essay: a ‘monster’ and its humanity.

Professor of English Susan J. Wolfson is the editor of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Longman Cultural Edition and co-editor, with Ronald Levao, of The Annotated Frankenstein.

Published in January 1818, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus has never been out of print or out of cultural reference. “Facebook’s Frankenstein Moment: A Creature That Defies Technology’s Safeguards” was the headline on a New York Times business story Sept. 22 — 200 years on. The trope needed no footnote, although Kevin Roose’s gloss — “the scientist Victor Frankenstein realizes that his cobbled-together creature has gone rogue” — could use some adjustment: The Creature “goes rogue” only after having been abandoned and then abused by almost everyone, first and foremost that undergraduate scientist. Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg and CEO Sheryl Sandberg, attending to profits, did not anticipate the rogue consequences: a Frankenberg making.

The original Frankenstein told a terrific tale, tapping the idealism in the new sciences of its own age, while registering the throb of misgivings and terrors. The 1818 novel appeared anonymously by a down-market press (Princeton owns one of only 500 copies). It was a 19-year-old’s debut in print. The novelist proudly signed herself “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley” when it was reissued in 1823, in sync with a stage concoction at London’s Royal Opera House in August. That debut ran for nearly 40 nights; it was staged by the Princeton University Players in May 2017.

In a seminar that I taught on Frankenstein in various contexts at Princeton in the fall of 2016 — just weeks after the 200th anniversary of its conception in a nightmare visited on (then) Mary Godwin in June 1816 — we had much to consider. One subject was the rogue uses and consequences of genomic science of the 21st century. Another was the election season — in which “Frankenstein” was a touchstone in the media opinions and parodies. Students from sciences, computer technology, literature, arts, and humanities made our seminar seem like a mini-university. Learning from each other, we pondered complexities and perplexities: literary, social, scientific, aesthetic, and ethical. If you haven’t read Frankenstein (many, myself included, found the tale first on film), it’s worth your time.

READ MORE PAW Goes to the Movies: ‘Victor Frankenstein,’ with Professor Susan Wolfson

Scarcely a month goes by without some development earning the prefix Franken-, a near default for anxieties about or satires of new events. The dark brilliance of Frankenstein is both to expose “monstrosity” in the normal and, conversely, to humanize what might seem monstrously “other.” When Shelley conceived Frankenstein, Europe was scarred by a long war, concluding on Waterloo fields in May 1815. “Monster” was a ready label for any enemy. Young Frankenstein begins his university studies in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. In 1790, Edmund Burke’s international best-selling Reflections on the French Revolution recoiled at the new government as a “monster of a state,” with a “monster of a constitution” and “monstrous democratic assemblies.” Within a few months, another international best-seller, Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man, excoriated “the monster Aristocracy” and cheered the American Revolution for overthrowing a “monster” of tyranny.

Following suit, Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, called the ancien régime a “ferocious monster”; her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was on the same page: Any aristocracy was an “artificial monster,” the monarchy a “luxurious monster,” and Europe’s despots a “race of monsters in human shape.” Frankenstein makes no direct reference to the Revolution, but its first readers would have felt the force of its setting in the 1790s, a decade that also saw polemics for (and against) the rights of men, women, and slaves.

England would abolish its slave trade in 1807, but Colonial slavery was legal until 1833. Abolitionists saw the capitalists, investors, and masters as the moral monsters of the global economy. Apologists regarded the Africans as subhuman, improvable perhaps by Christianity and a work ethic, but alarming if released, especially the men. “In dealing with the Negro,” ultra-conservative Foreign Secretary George Canning lectured Parliament in 1824, “we are dealing with a being possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child. To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical strength ... would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance.” He meant Frankenstein.

Mary Shelley heard about this reference, and knew, moreover, that women (though with gilding) were a slave class, too, insofar as they were valued for bodies rather than minds, were denied participatory citizenship and most legal rights, and were systemically subjugated as “other” by the masculine world. This was the argument of her mother’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which she was rereading when she was writing Frankenstein. Unorthodox Wollstonecraft — an advocate of female intellectual education, a critic of the institution of marriage, and the mother of two daughters conceived outside of wedlock — was herself branded an “unnatural” woman, a monstrosity.

Shelley had her own personal ordeal, which surely imprints her novel. Her parents were so ready for a son in 1797 that they had already chosen the name “William.” Even worse: When her mother died from childbirth, an awful effect was to make little Mary seem a catastrophe to her grieving father. No wonder she would write a novel about a “being” rejected from its first breath. The iconic “other” in Frankenstein is of course this horrifying Creature (he’s never a “human being”). But the deepest force of the novel is not this unique situation but its reverberation of routine judgments of beings that seem “other” to any possibility of social sympathy. In the 1823 play, the “others” (though played for comedy) are the tinker-gypsies, clad in goatskins and body paint (one is even named “Tanskin” — a racialized differential).

Victor Frankenstein greets his awakening creature as a “catastrophe,” a “wretch,” and soon a “monster.” The Creature has no name, just these epithets of contempt. The only person to address him with sympathy is blind, spared the shock of the “countenance.” Readers are blind this way, too, finding the Creature only on the page and speaking a common language. This continuity, rather than antithesis, to the human is reflected in the first illustrations:

In the cover for the 1823 play, above, the Creature looks quite human, dishy even — alarming only in size and that gaze of expectation. The 1831 Creature, shown on page 29, is not a patent “monster”: It’s full-grown, remarkably ripped, human-looking, understandably dazed. The real “monster,” we could think, is the reckless student fleeing the results of an unsupervised undergraduate experiment gone rogue.

In Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein pleads sympathy for the “human nature” in his revulsion. “I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health ... but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room.” Repelled by this betrayal of “beauty,” Frankenstein never feels responsible, let alone parental. Shelley’s genius is to understand this ethical monstrosity as a nightmare extreme of common anxiety for expectant parents: What if I can’t love a child whose physical formation is appalling (deformed, deficient, or even, as at her own birth, just female)?

The Creature’s advent in the novel is not in this famous scene of awakening, however. It comes in the narrative that frames Frankenstein’s story: a polar expedition that has become icebound. Far on the ice plain, the ship’s crew beholds “the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature,” driving a dogsled. Three paragraphs on, another man-shape arrives off the side of the ship on a fragment of ice, alone but for one sled dog. “His limbs were nearly frozen, and his body dreadfully emaciated by fatigue and suffering,” the captain records; “I never saw a man in so wretched a condition.” This dreadful man focuses the first scene of “animation” in Frankenstein: “We restored him to animation by rubbing him with brandy, and forcing him to swallow a small quantity. As soon as he shewed signs of life, we wrapped him up in blankets, and placed him near the chimney of the kitchen-stove. By slow degrees he recovered ... .”

The re-animation (well before his name is given in the novel) turns out to be Victor Frankenstein. A crazed wretch of a “creature” (so he’s described) could have seemed a fearful “other,” but is cared for as a fellow human being. His subsequent tale of his despicably “monstrous” Creature is scored with this tremendous irony. The most disturbing aspect of this Creature is his “humanity”: this pathos of his hope for family and social acceptance, his intuitive benevolence, bitterness about abuse, and skill with language (which a Princeton valedictorian might envy) that solicits fellow-human attention — all denied by misfortune of physical formation. The deepest power of Frankenstein, still in force 200 years on, is not its so-called monster, but its exposure of “monster” as a contingency of human sympathy.

Walter Dean Myers

Ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Sixteen-year-old Steve Harmon recounts his and James King ’s trial for the killing of Mr. Nesbitt , a drugstore owner, in a botched robbery in Harlem six months prior. Through personal notes and a screenplay he writes in his notebook, Steve recounts the 11 days between the start of the case and the jury’s verdict. He names the screenplay “ Monster ” after what the state prosecutor Sandra Petrocelli called him in court.

On the first day of the trial, Monday, Steve sits with his attorney Kathy O’Brien and listens to Petrocelli make her opening remarks: according to the state, late last December, James King and Richard “Bobo” Evans entered a drugstore, tried to rob Mr. Nesbitt, and accidentally shot the man with his own handgun. According to the prosecution, Steve Harmon and 14-year-old Osvaldo Cruz both acted as lookouts during the robbery, and are thus legally culpable for the man’s murder, as well. Nobody actually witnessed the murder, but Petrocelli presents her first key witness, a man who claims to have information that connects King and Bobo Evans with the murder. The man himself is a convict who testifies so that his own prison sentence will be reduced. King’s attorney Asa Briggs challenges the witness’s ability to be objective since he is benefiting personally from testifying at the trial. Steve’s mind wanders back to violent scenes from his childhood growing up in Harlem, even though he himself never sought out violence.

On Tuesday, Steve writes about how much he hates jail and how afraid he is—everyone there is violent and only talks about hurting each other. They attack people for no reason, and one of them carries a knife. In court, Petrocelli produces another witness, also a criminal who tells the same story as the first, in exchange for a reduced sentence. Once again, Briggs challenges the witness’s objectivity and moral character, and the judge adjourns the hearing for the day when Briggs starts to get heated. That evening, Steve lies in bed listening to two men beat and rape another inmate. He thinks about his younger brother Jerry and how much he misses him.

On Wednesday, Steve wakes up thinking about how in jail, they take people’s shoelaces and belts so inmates can’t kill themselves. Steve can’t help but think of himself as a monster, just as Petrocelli branded him. O’Brien told him that her job was to make the jury see Steve as a human being instead, and Steve understands why. In court, Petrocelli brings Detective Karyl in to testify, who (supposedly) investigated the murder and made the arrests, even though he never found any actual evidence at the crime scene. Steve recalls the night Karyl and his partner first questioned him. Karyl automatically assumed he was guilty and said he hoped Steve would get the death penalty, even though he’s just a kid. Back in the courtroom, Briggs accuses Karyl of not actually investigating at all, but just finding a few convicts who’d testify for him instead. O’Brien worries that none of this makes Steve look any more innocent, since half the jury will automatically think he’s guilty just because he’s a young black male. Osvaldo Cruz, a 14-year-old kid whom Steve had to be careful not to offend in Harlem, since he is part of a dangerous gang, testifies that he was pressured into participating in the robbery against his will by Bobo, who threatened him.

On Thursday, Steve writes about his relationship with O’Brien. He can tell O’Brien wants to know who he truly is, and Steve wants her to know that he’s a good person, but he doesn’t know how to make her see that. In the courtroom, Osvaldo continues his testimony against King, Bobo, and Steve, which he is giving in exchange for an acquittal, since he is young and claims he was coerced into participating. However, Briggs and O’Brien cross-examine Osvaldo and force him to reveal that not only is he a gang member with a violent history, but he has also at least once committed savage violence against strangers without reason, which ruins the credibility of his claim that he was afraid of Bobo. Later, Steve meets with his father Mr. Harmon , but realizes that their father-son relationship has broken. He thinks that his dad now sees a monster where his son should be. Steve also recalls watching the murder reported on the news and being arrested by the detectives two weeks later.

On Friday, four minor witnesses testify while Steve thinks about Mr. Nesbitt, lying on the floor, knowing he is about to die. Through the medical examiner’s testimony, Steve learns that Mr. Nesbitt was shot through the lung and died after drowning in his own blood. He is horrified.

On Saturday, Steve thinks about how horrible it would be to spend the next two decades of his life in prison, which seems the most likely outcome. He knows O’Brien privately thinks that he’s guilty, even though she’ll still defend him. Mrs. Harmon visits Steve in jail, but he knows it’s too painful for her to see her son as a prisoner. At night, as Steve lies in bed, he questions his own innocence and recalls King telling him that he was going to rob a place and asking Steve if he wanted to be in on it.

On Sunday, Steve attends a church service in the jail until a fight breaks out and everyone is put on lockdown for the morning. He thinks about how nothing feels real anymore outside of jail, not his memories of his old life or the baseball game on TV. Steve’s parents walk Jerry past the window so Steve can see him, though Jerry is not allowed in the jail because he is a child. If he wasn’t an inmate, Steve wouldn’t be allowed in either. His parents visit briefly, and Steve worries about Monday, which will be a critical day for the prosecution.

On Monday, a woman testifies that she was in the drugstore shortly before the murder and saw King and one other man enter, though she admits she had difficulty identifying King. Once she saw the two men fighting with Mr. Nesbitt, she fled the store. Bobo Evans testifies next, also in exchange for a reduced sentence. From what King told him, Bobo understood that Steve was supposed to be their lookout, and he saw Steve enter and exit the drugstore and walk away. After that, he and King entered and fought with Mr. Nesbitt. When Mr. Nesbitt took out a handgun, King wrestled it from him and shot the man, stole cash and cigarettes, and then both of them went to a fast-food restaurant to buy some food and lay low. Briggs and O’Brien cross-examine Bobo, forcing him to admit that Bobo never actually spoke to Steve himself, nor did he ever threaten Osvaldo to help them with the robbery; Osvaldo wanted to be in on the heist. Petrocelli announces that the prosecution has concluded.

On Tuesday, O’Brien admits that it doesn’t look good for Steve. Bobo’s testimony was damning and Briggs is going to try to associate King with Steve, since it will make King look better, as Steve is obviously a decent kid. King’s cousin testifies and gives a weak alibi for King on the day of the murder. O’Brien wants Steve to testify and present himself to the jury as a good kid. She coaches him on what sort of answers to give and Steve realizes that the truth is less important than making the right case.

On the stand, Steve testifies that he was nowhere near the drugstore on the day of the murder (though he’s privately admitted that he was) because he was working on a film project all week. He also testifies that his relationship with King is minimal; he’s just some guy he saw at the playground occasionally when people were playing ball. When Steve is finished, his film teacher Mr. Sawicki provides a character witness and testifies that Steve is an honest, sensitive kid who makes uplifting films about his neighborhood. Briggs makes his closing remarks, claiming that his client King has no connection with Bobo Evans and did not participate in the robbery in any way. O’Brien claims the same for Steve in her own closing remarks, and adds that there is not enough evidence against Steve to lock up a young kid for the rest of his life. The jury leaves to make their decision and Steve and King are taken back to jail.

That Friday, Steve and King are brought back to the courthouse to hear the jury’s verdict. King is found guilty and duly sentenced for a felony murder charge. Steve is found not guilty. He spreads his arms to hug O’Brien, but she turns stiffly away. He remains with his arms outstretched as the image blurs and fades until Steve’s silhouette looks like “some strange beast, a monster.”

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Monster Essay Examples

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