My Terror is Greater than Yours

Perhaps our race and ethnicity readings will influence us to consider that Victor Frankenstein’s creature is not as different as once believed. He contrasts the context of Victor’s world, but – as evidenced by this week’s authors – just because one is unlike their society does not mean their ingrained value is any less relevant or useful.

As the Norton introduction points out, “Anzaldua is arguing that our whole understanding of identity has to be revised. The old notion that we can know who we are by tracing our roots, by referring back to some stable point of origin, has to be abandoned. There is no pure, single source” (Norton 2097). So, as we segue from our discussions about gender into discussions about ethnicity and race, we may ask the question: does it matter how or what the creature was? Does the novel challenge us to “accept the doppelganger in your psyche” in an effort to see – and accept – the values inherent in the “other” (2104)?

In an attempt to logically piggyback on Vanessa’s insightful and astute paper below, Victor begins to feel sympathy and compassion for the creature because of his eloquent oratory, but cannot get past the way the creature looks. The two of them have so much in common, yet one of Victor’s primary reasons for rejecting the monster is not because of his mind, or his speech, but for his appearance. Are these not the basic principles of racism, xenophobia, and lookism (99)?

Within the novel’s reality, however, the creature was not a mestiza with any chance of connecting with his “roots,” Instead, he was a singular mutant tormented by the impossibility of finding his place, one who could never experience “a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders” because he had no borders and wore flesh that would always remain untraceable (2099). Perhaps Victor’s terror of the creature was not as great as the creature’s terror of his rudderless drift; this perception makes Shelley’s novel that much more horrifying.