“All men hate the wretched; how then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, they creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us”
– Chapter 10
At this point in the book, Dr. Frankenstein meets his monster on the summit of Montanvert, where he traveled in the hopes of helping to inspire him and bring him out of his depression. The monster persuades Victor to accompany him to a cave to talk.
Victor genuinely hates the monster, and views him as a demon – something he sees as less than or inhuman. To be fair, I’m not quite sure if we can categorize the monster as something human because he is, by design, unnatural. And Victor hates him because he symbolizes what he views as failure: the face of the monster he tried for so long to create, terrible to behold rather than the perfect beauty that he imagined.
And yet, the monster doesn’t understand Victor’s hatred of him. He knows it’s there, he acknowledges it in this quote, but he also expresses his confusion. Why is Victor so adamant in his hatred toward the monster when he did naught but exist? How can this man have such hatred toward something he spent so much time and energy to create, who he abandoned and left to despair and misery? The monster doesn’t understand that he – his existence as a whole – reminds Victor of everything that he hates about himself.
This brings to question something about human nature. Is it innate to humanity that we attribute our failings to an innocent and hate them? Personally, I feel more shame and embarrassment toward my failures than hatred, so if I were confronted with a monster that I have created – in a similar vein to how Victor was confronted by his – would I be ashamed of them? Embarrassed? Angered? Frightened? Would I attribute my failure to their existence and hate them for it, as Victor did for his own?
If Victor – or people in general when confronted with their monsters – was in a better mindset, one not teetering on the edge of a psychotic break, would he hate the monster as he did? Would he be able to recognize that, though he wasn’t quite successful in what wanted, the monster is innocent and alive, and be able to treat him as such? Or would the mere fact that the monster is inhuman take away that understanding and empathy?
