Isolation
Part II: Isolation
The creature's rejection from society and the neglect of his father causes him to experience isolation. The creature feels separated from society because he is an anomaly for his countenance and stature. The creature tells Victor, "I was dependent on no one, and related to none [...] my person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them" (91). The creature feels separated from the people around him because the people have family, friends, and home while the creature only has himself.
The creature feels that he has no sense of identity, thus causing feelings of loneliness. When the creature is alone in the woods, he watches the De Lacey family and learns to speak by listening to the family and begins to read. The creature tells Victor, "Increase of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was" (93). The creature is intelligent, and his inquisitiveness and longing for love lead him to language. After observing the De Lacey family and the family's kind words to one another, the creature realizes that he has no one to protect him like the De Lacey's protect one another.
Victor is the stereotypical toxic parent that blames all of his flaws on his child. Because of Victor's childish viewpoints on his creature, the creature's lack of basic needs causes him to feel isolated. Cassidy explains the ethics of parenting: "We ought to decide for ourselves if we should have children, but this cannot be a complete moral account, for we need some reckoning with procreative responsibilities to future children" (8). Cassidy's argument explains the creature's isolation from society because Victor did not decide if he wanted a child; he created a being out of pure curiosity.
After Victor decides that the creature is a mistake, he flees from parental responsibility, refusing to take on his moral account of creating a human. Cassidy mentions, "Being an excellent parent goes beyond the negative duty not to harm; we have a positive duty to 'do right' by our children" (48). Rather than be a positive influence, Victor endangers his child for his mistakes, which forces the creature in dangerous situations: hiding in the woods, traveling through the mountains, e.g.. The creature's dangerous situations lead him to be isolated because he has no safety and is away from society.
Matters are worse for the creature as he has no mother. The creature's only source of protection is supposed to be from Victor, who ignores the creature. Cassidy explains the role of a good mother: "Good mothers first preserve their children by meeting their basic needs, then nurture them by meeting their psychological and emotional needs, and finally prepare them for inclusion in the social world in which they live" (47). Since the creature has never had a mom, he does not obtain the necessary psychological and emotional needs that are required for a child. The creature has no parents; therefore, he experiences intense trauma as he has no emotional and psychological preservation because those around him have emotional incompetence toward someone who is different. The creature feels isolated because no one will give him the basic needs of survival.
The creature's lack of emotional and psychological development leads to low self-esteem. The creature tells Victor, "Hateful day when I received life! [...] accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?" (93). The creature has no name for himself, and he considers himself a monster. Victor's constant name-calling causes the creature to view himself as a monster. Cassidy's article claims, "[I]ncompetent parents are the ones who are physically or emotionally abusive to their children, and hence fail to preserve their lives" (Cassidy 47). Victor's incompetence has emotionally and psychologically destroyed his child. The creature refers to his first day as a "hateful day" (Shelley 93), which concludes that the creator may hate his life because of the way Victor treats him. The creature's isolation goes into his "hateful day" because, from birth, Victor hated him. The creature feels withdrawn because Victor forces the creature to be alone by ignoring him.
Stacey Lynn Granelli's dissertation contributes to Cassidy's argument. Granelli's dissertation argues, "Creating the Monster in this fashion is Victor's first act of irresponsibility toward his child — giving the Monster life but making it impossible for him to belong to and identify with any natural part of the life cycle or the society around him" (6). The creature's deformed face is Victor's fault, but he abandons and isolates his child, knowing that the creature will never fit in because of his face. Victor wants to forget the creature, but it is not very easy for Victor to forget when the creature keeps coming around. The creature feels disconnected because he wants to belong and identify with this creator, who hates him. Granelli argues the juxtaposition of Victor's parenting versus his parents. Her essay points out,
It is especially interesting to consider that Victor is an abusive, irresponsible parent despite his...knowledge of, exposure to, and appreciation of loving, nurturing parenting [...] When it is his turn to parent the Monster, he shirks his duties, leaving the Monster forsaken. The Monster does not receive any character-building lessons; his first lessons are of abandonment, self-preservation, and pain. (7-8).
Granelli makes an excellent point because she proves that Victor is a hypocrite. Victor had a great childhood and retrieved love from his parents, but he isolates the creature because he considers the creature evil because of his different looks. The creature cannot help the way he looks; however, should not be abandoned and feel isolated because of is different look.
The creature is a product of his isolation. Granelli's dissertation adds, "there is no mother to provide guidance and positive formative experiences for the child in Victor's place, and Victor's failure to parent the Monster, who is, in essence, an orphan, will ultimately help cause the Monster's inability to form a socially acceptable identity and his fall to evil" (9). Cassidy and Granelli debate similar facts, as the creature's defiance is because of how ostracized he feels from society.
The creature considers himself an outcast. The creature says to old man De Lacey, "I am an unfortunate and deserted creature; I look around, and I have no relation or friend upon earth. These amiable people to whom I go have never seen me, and know little of me. I am full of fears, for if I fail there, I am an outcast in the world forever" (95). The creature has a negative outlook of himself, thanks to the way that the people around him treat him. The creature is an anomaly in a world that he should fit in.
The creature's loneliness leads to fear of interacting with people. When the creature tells his life story to Victor, he explains: "I found that these people possessed a method of communicating their experience and feelings to one another by articulate sounds. I perceived that the words they spoke sometimes produced pleasure or pain, smiles or sadness, in the minds and countenances of the hearers ....after having remained…I discovered the names that were given to some of the most familiar objects of discourse" (79). The creature learned to speak by listening to the De Lacey family, which does show how human-like he is. He can articulate at the same excellency as people. The consequence of that is that even though he speaks like a person, he does not look like one and understands how different he is.
Diana Reese's article explains the political liberation and social ethics of Frankenstein. Reese mentions Kant's ethics and how the principle behind a decision is a duty to the moral law. Reese explains the philosophical reasoning behind Victor's rash decisions and how the ethics affect the creature. Reese states, "In Kant's ethics, the problem of an unexplored species difference is preferred to the problem of cultural or historical difference" (56). Kant's study revolves around rationalism, and proves that Victor's duty to moral code is flawed; the creature is isolated and becomes the first of his species. Culturally and historically, Victor failed to make the creature fit the ethnocentric beauty standard of the time, thus abandoning a creature that is secluded from the main species with none like him.
The effect is that the creature pondered whether or not to speak to the De Lacey family. The creature says,
I had admired the perfect form of my cottagers --- their grace, beauty, and delicate complexions: but how was I terrified! [...] I eagerly longed to discover myself to the cottagers, I ought not to make the attempt until I had first become master of their language; which [...] might enable [...] them overlook the deformity of my figure. (80).
The creature feels that no one will love and accept him because he looks different from everyone else. The creature has a fear of rejection, so he isolates himself from society because he is safe from the rejection and judgment that he faced from Victor. The creature then decides to learn the language of the De Lacey family, so when he presents himself to them, he is similar to them in some way.
Even though Victor abandoned the creature and forced the creature into isolation, the creature still wants a family. The creature feels that if he were to have a family, the family should look like him. The creature tells Victor: "I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself; the gratification is small, but it is all monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another [...]" (105). The creature feels and is isolated from humanity, so he begs Victor to create a female "as hideous as [himself]" (105) to be with him. The creature is intelligent and sees that people like those that resemble them, so he feels that having a lover that not only resembles him but is of "monsters" (105) will deplete the creature's misery and make him happy.
Anne Mellor elaborates on Victor and his refusal toward the creature. Mellor digs deep into Shelley's backstory of the novel, Frankenstein, because all authors and writers have a backstory framed around their work. Mellor says, "Mary Shelley's reverie unleashed her deepest subconscious anxieties, the natural fears of a very young woman embarking on the processes of pregnancy, giving birth, and mothering [....]" (2). Mellor's point is significant because Shelley wanted to display her anxieties of motherhood through Victor Frankenstein, an obsessed scientist who creates life and then abandons it. Mellor makes a good point because it makes Frankenstein more personal. The book highlights Victor Frankenstein as an atrocious father to signify how children can feel withdrawn from irresponsible parents. Parents should be grateful that they have a child or children, but the creature was created from selfishness.
Mellor mentions the role of destiny and how it plays a role in Shelley's novel: "After Shelley's loved ones died, she had become convinced that human events are decided not by personal choice or free will but by material forces beyond the control of human agency [....] Into the 1831 Frankenstein, Mary Shelley introduced [...] 'Destiny,'" (5-6). Victor decides to abandon his "child" and force him into isolation, and in the end, Victor loses his loved ones, as Shelley did. The argument revolves around everything happening for a reason: Victor plays the immoral parent as the creature reenacts the karma of Victor's failure as a parent. Mellor's argument is partially agreeable because parents should not fear their children looking different or being deformed. A child that stands out from the others is not a bad thing. No child should never feel withdrawn from their family.