Seriously, I’m both saddened and genuinely perturbed by people who feel capable and justified in casting out monsters, most especially Adam AKA Frankenstein’s Creature. While the Creature’s actions may be contemptible, his plea to be recognized as worthy of human compassion is so convincingly stated.

We must register, here, the contradiction at the heart of all debate on this issue: if we believe literature to be meaningful, we must recognize the power of language and both emotive and rational argumentation. Simultaneously, there are those who would deny the right of any intelligent entity to justify its own existence or advocate for its recognition as human. After all, it could all be a ploy. Each person must decide which of the two arguments they believe and then, one hopes, follow that logic through to its conclusion. Either words are powerful vectors of meaning and can convey an otherwise imperceptible truth regarding the inner qualities of a given entity’s experience of itself, OR any thing which advocates for itself must be treated with suspicion as a result of the possibility that it could be lying (people included).

I can tell you which option I prefer, but ultimately, nothing I say is likely to convince you, so I’ll leave it at that.

In the case of Adam, I am inclined to point to his reprehensible behavior as evidence of his humanity. He ultimately chooses to express himself in the manner with which he has been made most familiar by those around him; a destructive rage which seeks to balance the scales of justice which he sees as having been so cruelly stacked against him.

This particular rhetorical turn leads us to another point of insoluble contention.

Those who register a fundamental difference between Victor and his Creature are prone to the following logical proofs^[1]:

Simultaneously, they believe that these are static, immutable categories. Victor is not God, so he cannot create life absent of the usual process of human conception and gestation. The fact that he brought the Creature to life (loosely speaking) does not transform him into a god. Ergo, regardless of any action he takes, he remains a man.

Meanwhile, the Creature is burdened with its own immutable, non-human nature. There is nothing the Creature can do or say to alter its status as “monstrous”.

Given my personal thesis of the Creature’s fundamental right to compassion, I can choose to approach these arguments in a few different ways. First of all, this presupposes two very important ideas. It assumes that “Human” and “Monstrous” are mutually exclusive categories, yet it fails to follow one potential outcome of that very supposition. Namely:

This particular line of reasoning can result in the possibility of being both Monstrous and Man without requiring that the terms being interchangeable.

We hit the end of the road when we realize that the question has become ‘What is the definition of “Man”?’

As we can see, it also requires us to deny the possibility that action has any transformative or generative capacity. By relying on the assumption that Victor is a priori excluded from the creation of life without a partner, then anything Victor creates which walks and talks and may show all the usual symptoms of “life” must not actually be alive. Hence the Adam’s designation as “unnatural” and his classification as “monstrous”.

The possible counter-arguments bifurcate once more.

On the one hand, I could produce historical evidence which shows that, prior to the Renaissance/Enlightenment and the development of modern human anatomy, the monstrous was inherently both natural and human. Forces beyond the traditional scope of man were clearly involved, resulting in “monstrous” births being viewed as auguries, portending good or ill. Nevertheless, they were born of human mothers, were seen as relating to human affairs and therefore their position as part of the human world is undeniable.

But an argument from authority, relying on history, is nevertheless an attempt to revise the fundamental assumptions of this argument, in a somewhat underhanded manner.

The other line of argument cuts right to the chase:

By this logic, our behavior is a direct result of our fundamental nature. Because our natures cannot change, our actions are confined to the limits of what our nature allows. If this is the case, then our nature and therefore our actions are the result of having been born one way or another, as this or as that.

If so, Adam is blameless in his monstrosity. His position outside humanity is beyond his control; yet he is supposed to submit to violence and denigration for an accident of birth.

We return to the question of original sin, innate evil, inherent and intrinsic qualities. This is the question which haunts moral philosophy, psychology, religion, and the judicial process:

Are we responsible for our own actions?
How must we live pursuant to or in the absence of that answer?

---

[1] Who wants to yell at me for using symbology cribbed from the two things I remember from high school freshman geometry? This is the rhetorical equivalent of an economist inserting a so-called “illustrative” graph which merely visually represents their argument without any meaningful relationship to actual observed phenomena. DON’T LET PEOPLE LIE TO YOU. (Especially not me.)

(For another take on this issue, read my previous post which takes a more metaphorical approach.)