Monster of the Week: The Rejection (Frankenstein’s Monster and Reckoning with Death)
By Rene Madrigal
Back at the cemetery.
While unintentional, The Spirit and The Corpse represent an interesting dichotomy.
The ethereal and the physical, having once been one now cleaved in twine.
Spoilers for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein up ahead, if you needed a spoiler warning for a 200-year-old story.
Frankenstein’s Monster, from the 1818 Horror/Science Fiction classic, represents a perversion of the duality of body and spirit.
An amalgam of scattered human parts fused together to form a soulless husk yet, in the novel at least, is undeniably human.
It speaks, it thinks, it feels, it loves, it hates.
It is a rejection not just of the dichotomy between soul and body, but a rejection of death itself.
Early on in the novel, Victor Frankenstein loses his mother. Nonetheless by scarlet fever, a very traditionally gothic horror means to death.
While reading, it was odd to see Victor not reckon with this reality at all.
He never cries or mourns or speaks of his mother again. He simply heads off to boarding school and creates his monster.
It was evident to me that the creation of this creature is Victor Frankenstein’s mourning or lack of it, it is a young man simply not accepting death.
I immediately recall my uncle’s ex-wife howling at my uncle's funeral, begging God to raise him from his casket.
This theme is seemingly universally resonant.
Death as uncertainty is the worst part of it for me, to have no hard evidence for any sort of next step.
Humans have been reckoning with and flat out rejecting the concept of death for as long as we have existed, whether it be any form of religion that promises an eternal life (heaven), or even the concept of the ghost, life after death.
Obviously everyone is entitled to their beliefs, but it seems to me the answer is clear; there is no answer.
Death is unknowable. To confront it fully is to acknowledge one’s ignorance in the matter.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein constantly points back to the monster being a reflection of Victor’s unresolved trauma of losing his mother and his unresolved relationship with death.
Victor’s monster also loses the only family it has ever known.
Within the first moments of its creation the creature can see just how horrified its own creator is looking at it. It runs away.
Many see Frankenstein as a Jurassic Park-style cautionary tale of the danger’s of playing God, but I see something much different.
The creature is not a rampaging tyrannosaurus, a flesh and blood monument to the destructive capacity of nature and the hubris of man. Instead he is distinctly human.
After running away from the lab it was created in, the creature eventually settles down in a small farmhouse, feeding off the scraps of a small family’s leftovers.
Here the creature learns to speak and read via the eldest sibling teaching her youngers phonics and vocabulary.
It learns tenderness by observing the family, seeing how the children play, how hard the two eldest siblings work to care for their blind father, how much they love and care for one another.
The creature yearns to be part of this, part of a family, to be known, loved and accepted.
He is rejected, only accepted by the father who cannot see his wretched form, before being chased off by the family.
The very same family who defacto raised him, strikes him with a fire stoker and calls him a monster.
This total rejection from humanity leads the creature down a dark path of malice and murder, with the targets being everyone Victor has ever loved.
Both of these people, Victor and his creation cannot find any peace regarding death for Victor or life for his creation until they learn to let go.
There is never a moment where Victor tenderly visits his mother’s grave and comes to terms with her loss.
He dies of exposure after a mad chase to kill his creation, right his perceived wrong.
The creature however does find some sort of peace as it reckons with death.
He does visit Victor on his deathbed, though he is too late for any conversation.
This does not stop the creature from finding closure. He accepts both his father (Victor) flawed as he may be, and death.
The creature climbs to the tallest hill to die.
It is difficult to not view death as an uneventful and sad ending.
A being who only wanted to be loved finding solace in death on the surface seems a miserable end, but the same death awaits him as did his master as has every human that ever has or will live.
Coming to terms with and accepting death is difficult, the uncertainty can fill you with crippling fear
My only solace is that I don’t have to do it alone; in death I join my uncle, every member of humankind, and every biological being to ever live in this terrifying ordeal.
It’s not as comforting as a loving God with an eternal afterlife waiting for you, but it’s something we all must come to terms with.
Ultimately, we all die together.