THE SON SPEAKS

Which brings us to an unprecedented scene, one which has not been matched since. The one-year-old infant has gotten Daddy's attention and has further persuaded him to sit down and listen to his story of what it's like to be cast out of Eden. Normally, when father meets son or mother meets daughter, it is not human meeting human but role meeting role. And because the parent, being so much bigger and older and more experienced, has all the marbles at the start, the child can never win, can never really play because the parent--together with the parent's culture--also dictates the rules. One of those rules is that creative play is out of the question. By the time the child gets some marbles of her own, she can play only by her parents' filicidal rules. Here Shelley has created for us a son who, though well on his way to becoming a committed and trapped player like the rest of us, is miraculously able to speak of his infant experience of filicide.

It is an intensely masculine scene, this meeting between Frankenstein and his monster. To get it into the larger human perspective, consider this: how would this scene and the novel be different if Victor had created a female instead of a male? Would we not have had a very similar confrontation, but with the female monster speaking charges which would sound very familiar to us? Would not her charges be essentially those which the feminist movement has brought against all us patriarchs together with our accessorial matriarchs-in-waiting? Having created a male, in other words having re-created himself, what Victor hears instead is a catalog of the crimes of himself against himself coming from this miracle monster-child who has the articulateness of an adult.

The monster's story of his first year of life--from the night of his birth when Victor fled to this meeting on the glacier--comprises the central section of the novel (Chapters 11-16). It is not often that we masculine masters of the earth get such a chance to see ourselves as the Other sees us. Shelley gives us an impossible report from an impossible creature, a one-year-old who feels, thinks, and talks.

* * *

The nameless son's earliest memories are vague. When he first opens his eyes on the night of his birth he sees only dim outlines, and his first attempts at movement are painful and clumsy. He is aware that he is alone, but he does not know that Victor has fled in terror. He takes some of Victor's clothes and stumbles into the darkness, winding up in a forest, where he sleeps. The following day he comes across a fire in the forest. He burns himself, then figures out how to use dry wood to keep the fire going and discovers how to cook nuts. Several days pass during which he manages his survival quite well. It begins to snow and he seeks shelter in a village--his first encounter with people. The villagers are terrified. Some run from him, some attack him. He escapes easily.

After a period of aimless wandering he finds a shed attached to the back of an isolated cottage. This shed becomes his home for a year, the year of his infancy. The people in the cottage never use the shed. The monster hides there by day and goes out by night to find food. Through a chink in the wall of the cottage he has visual and audial access to the world of adult humanity as reflected in the family living there.

The situation Shelley has contrived here is that of the infant lying in its crib, observing adult human beings going about their business, slowly figuring out what that business is and how you do it. But this infant is deprived of the warmth of physical contact and affection. He watches and listens. Months pass as he learns the basic words. He is content. He is warm and secure and finds plenty to eat and drink.

In the gradually unfolded story of the inhabitants of the cottage--we learn their story at the same rate as the monster does--Shelley has created a small novel-within-a-novel. Again, as in her picture of Victor Frankenstein's idyllic childhood family, she here gives us--and the monster--a highly idealized view of a family. Three persons inhabit the cottage: an old man, who the monster eventually realizes is blind, a young man who works hard in the fields, and a young woman who cares for the house. Though they exist in poverty, the monster is struck by their openly displayed love for one another. They are never angry, they never complain, and they devote much time to entertaining and cheering each other up with songs and stories read aloud. Beneath this surface the monster perceives a deep sadness which he is at a loss to figure out. He wants to join them but is afraid to reveal himself. At night he has dreams of becoming a member of the family. During the day he has fantasies of being able to solve their problems for them and make them happy. His hopes of revealing himself to them suffer a severe setback one day when he accidentally sees his own image in a pond. The truth about himself begins to dawn: his appearance is a horrible parody of the human beauty of the cottagers.

Spring transforms the desolate landscape--it is the child's first spring--and the monster is overwhelmed by the experience. He becomes more and more hopeful, more and more eager to reveal himself.

Under mysterious circumstances a fourth person, a young woman, arrives one day and stays to live in the cottage. She does not speak the same language as the other three, though they obviously know her and are fond of her. They spend much time teaching her their language and reading aloud to her, which enables the monster to acquire something of an education. He hears three books read aloud: Plutarch's Lives, along with The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Paradise Lost. At night he steals into the cottage and borrows the books in order to teach himself to read. Obviously it is a rather patriarchal education that he is receiving (but then don't we all). As it progresses he becomes more and more aware of his predicament. There is no indication that there has ever existed a creature such as himself. He ponders his loneliness and begins to wonder about his origin. The plot creaks badly and he finds, in Victor's clothes which he had taken that first night, Victor's lab notes concerning his own creation. There he reads all the details concerning the origin of "my odious and loathsome person."

The monster stops his narrative and says to Victor:

Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage him, but I am solitary and abhorred.

Hideous and filthy. Is the monster's ugliness only an externalization of the way Victor perceives himself internally (of, in other words, the way Mary Shelley perceived that men really see themselves)? Earlier in the novel Victor characterized his son as "my own spirit let loose from the grave and forced to destroy all that was dear to me." It seems this omnipotent creator has created his son in his own image: hideous and filthy. One is reminded of the complications arising from our own anatomy, with its fecal and urinary outlets so near the places of our greatest physical pleasure, the places of our own creation.

It is part of the acculturation package to learn that feces and urine are bad. We must then feel some sense of betrayal on the part of whatever larger force it is that as children we believe creates us. To think that this divine and divinely shaped form, that both I and you, beloved Celia, shit. . .? Ah, such metaphysical treachery. Thus another part of our filicidal dissimulation is the pretense that we are clean and beautiful while we go around knowing that we are in places hideous and filthy and that we are in fact born from those places. We can hide the ugliness between our legs with clothes, but the ugliness of Frankenstein's monster extends over his whole body. Not only is he ugly, he is also alone:

... no Eve soothed my sorrows nor shared my thoughts,- I was alone. I remembered Adam's supplication to his Creator. But where was mine? He had abandoned me, and in the bitterness of my heart I cursed him.

The monster continues his story. Although he is despondent when he discovers the facts of his origin, he perseveres in his life adjacent to the cottagers. They seem much happier now that the fourth person has arrived. The monster sits for hours eavesdropping on their familial bliss.

The new arrival, Safie, is the only female character in the novel with some depth to her. As the monster pieces together her story from fragments of overheard conversations, one begins to suspect that we are hearing a fictionalized, romanticized version of Mary Shelley's own life. Reared in an "enlightened" household, Safie is very much on her way to being a liberated woman. Her mother was a "Christian Arab," originally a slave [!] , who escaped her bondage and taught Safie "to aspire to higher powers of intellect and an independence of spirit." She describes her father as a man who, though brilliant and successful, was not above bartering his daughter's happiness in order to secure his own freedom in a situation which drove Safie to seek out the people in the cottage. We do not need to go further into the subplot which Shelley invents to bring these four people together. What is significant is the similarity between Safie's background and that of Shelley herself. Also significant is the fact that the character who most resembles Shelley appears inside the fourth frame of the novel.

Frame One is Walton writing Victor's story to his sister in England. Frame Two is Victor telling the story of his life to Walton. Frame Three is the monster telling his story to Victor. Frame Four is the monster overhearing Safie telling her story to the cottagers. There, tucked away in the innermost of these frames, Shelley gives us herself, or a part of herself.

For all her extraordinary ability, apparently Shelley was having some difficulty facing herself--a fact which is hardly surprising when one considers the intensely patriarchal figures surrounding her. Her father, William Godwin, was your classic liberal, in all senses of the word. For a husband, she had one of the great poetic talents of the age. And then there was her husband's close friend, Byron, he of the--dare I mention it--club foot.

As if those three men were not enough, she also had to contend with the accomplishments of her mother, Mary Wollstonescraft Godwin, the first modern woman to speak out clearly against man's inhumanity to woman and for woman's basic humanity. Her mother had died when Mary was born. Perhaps such diverse and powerful pressures were necessary for the creation of the patriarchal portrait she produced in Frankenstein. The fact that she inserts a picture of herself in the novel in such a guarded way gives some indication of the extent to which she had been unable to reconcile herself and her circumstances. Further evidence will be forthcoming shortly concerning the strength of the inner conflict which caused her to write such a work at the age of nineteen.

The monster finally decides to reveal himself to the family in the cottage. His plan is to make friends with the blind man when the other three are absent. He will win the old man's affection and then be able to describe to him his own ugliness. The old man will tell the others about his new friend and the monster can show himself to them with less fear of rejection.

One afternoon the three younger people leave the house and the monster makes his first contact with humanity as a thinking and speaking person. His conversation with the old man has hardly begun when the other three return unexpectedly. The monster suffers another instant rejection as the two women faint and the young man attacks him physically. Again he does not fight back but runs away into the forest; He says he became a "wild beast," howling his pain and anger to the unhearing trees and the singing birds:

"All, save I, were at rest, or in enjoyment, I, like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within me, and finding myself unsympathized with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin.... There was none among the myriads of men that existed who would pity or assist me, and should I feel kindness towards my enemies? No, from that moment I declared everlasting war against the species, and more than all, against him who had formed me and sent me forth to this insupportable misery."

His filicide is nearly complete. His only pleasure is pain. Life has meaning only to the extent that he can fight against the species of man, and especially against his father. Since his filicide is not yet quite complete, he still has some hope. He tells Victor that he realized that "from you only could I hope for succor." All that is left in other words to make the monster a man is for him to suffer his father's ultimate rejection and betrayal.

Using a stolen map and traveling by night, he makes his way to Geneva. En route he has another humanizing experience. He saves a woman from drowning only to be shot at and wounded by the woman's husband. At that point, he says,

"All joy was but a mockery which insulted my desolate state and made me feel more painfully that I was not made for pleasure."

Arriving in Geneva he conceals himself in a park, where he sleeps. He is awakened by the sound of a child at play. The idea occurs to him that the child, naive and innocent, might not react to him as adults do. But the child--it is of course William, Victor's young brother--reacts with terror and screams for help. Among the names he screams is his brother's. The monster makes the connection instantly and attacks and strangles the child.

As he runs away he encounters Justine who is napping nearby. Looking at her he comes as close to sex as nineteenth century convention would allow. From Shelley's veiled allusions it is clear the monster's sex is being stirred by the sight of the sleeping woman. He knows he can never know such a person:

I was forever deprived of the delights that such beautiful creatures could bestow... She....would, in regarding me, have changed that air of divine benignity to one expressive of disgust and affright.

Faced with the choice now familiar to him--he can attempt love with a high probability of rejection or he can attempt destruction with a high probability of success--he chooses destruction and plants a locket on Justine which he had torn from William's neck.

The sleeper stirred, a thrill of terror ran through me. Should she indeed awake, and see me, and curse me, and denounce the murderer? Thus would she assuredly act if her darkened eyes opened and she beheld me. The thought was madness; it stirred the fiend within--not I, but she, shall suffer; the murder I have committed because I am forever robbed of all that she could give me, she shall atone. The crime had its source in her; be hers the punishment.

In the middle of a nineteenth century horror story we find one of the clearest imaginable statements of the ancient patriarchal rationale for misogyny. If this monster is more new Adam than new Prometheus, then in this scene Justine plays the new Eve and receives the full burden of Adam's filicidal anger resulting from his father's rejection of him. Notice that Eve's role here is totally passive. She doesn't have to do anything, not even pick an apple, to become the repository of male guilt. Her very existence is reason enough, for she represents all that Adam can no longer be because of his consuming fear, hatred, and anger--namely, tender, loving, gentle, and beautiful. He will not let her control--and hurt--him by giving her the chance to reject him. Rather, he will control her in the only way he knows how to control, by destroying her, by making her appear guilty for William's death--just as we attempted to control woman by making Eve appear to be the guilty party for the alleged fall of man.

Since the murder, the monster says, he has been spying on the Frankenstein family and living on the glacier. As he finishes the story of the first year of his life he makes his request:

I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me, but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species and have the same defects. This being you must create.

This son without a name is indeed the miraculously speaking human infant. He, like the infant, is totally dependent on his parent for his happiness and must beg the parent for help. By the time we human children are old enough to talk, our filicidal acculturation has already progressed to the point where we cannot ask so directly as the monster does here for that which we really want, namely, love. But this monster-child knows and states his need directly, without resorting to the endless subterfuges of aging human children.

Boris Karloff preparing for the role of his life

in the 1931 movie, directed by James Whale.

Victor's first response to the story and the request is anger, and he delivers himself of a few more patriarchal "begone's" before he begins to soften. The monster summarizes his case, promising that he will be a different person when he has a mate and that he will live in some remote area with her and no longer be a threat to humanity. He says:

My vices are the children of forced solitude that I abhor, and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being and become linked to the chain of existence and events from which I am now excluded.

The primary somatic effect of cultural filicide on males is that condition to which the monster refers here. One is cut off from the "chain of existence," one no longer feels organic or organismic ties to the world one inhabits. To use the twentieth century term: one becomes alienated. Implicit in the monster's inference of his alienation from the larger world is his alienation from himself, both from his "hideous and filthy" body and from the better side of his psyche. He knows he is not yet a creature of destruction, and he is desperately looking for a way to develop the better side of himself. Since California was not yet available, he has no choice but to ask his father for a mate. "My virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal," he says. He also knows there is a limit to the amount of rejection he can experience and still retain a belief in his own goodness.

Presented with this reasoned argument, Victor yields and agrees to construct a mate for him. He still has serious doubts about the wisdom of the undertaking and resorts to the classic filicidal justification for doing something of a highly dubious nature. He will do it not for himself but for his family:

. . to save them, I resolved to dedicate myself to my most abhorred task. The prospect of such an occupation made every other circumstance of existence pass before me like a dream, and that thought only had to me the reality of life.

Once again he is in the grip of a compulsion, and once again all aspects of life become unreal to him except his work--and the thought that he is doing this to save his family. The monster is not the only alienated person in the story. Victor comments on the "insurmountable barrier between me and my fellow men" which the project erects.

Following a brief, happy interlude in Geneva, during which he and Elizabeth decide to marry as soon as his work is finished (he of course does not tell her the nature of his new project), he goes to a remote part of Scotland, sets up a laboratory, and begins the creation of a woman, a daughter. His self-hatred knows almost no bounds as he assembles this second creature:

I was formed for peaceful happiness. During my youthful days discontent never visited my mind, and if I was ever overcome by ennui, the sight of what is beautiful in nature or the study of what is excellent and sublime in the productions of man could always interest my heart and communicate elasticity to my spirits. But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul,- and I felt then that I should survive to exhibit what I shall soon cease to be--a miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity, pitiable to others and intolerable to myself... I felt as if I had committed some great crime, the consciousness of which haunted me. I was guiltless, but I had indeed drawn down a horrible curse upon my head, as mortal as that of crime.

How like his son he sounds. If the monster is an aging child, then Victor is an aging monster. But his only crime is that of filicide. In fact, he is in a sense guilty of double filicide, because he has created a sort of double monster. First, he created his son in the shape of a physical monster--our own sons and daughters have to experience years of acculturation before becoming convinced of the ugliness of their bodies. Second, he has committed traditional cultural filicide by failing from the start to deal with his son as an independent entity. By failing to love his son, he has created a psychological monster. As in all his dealings with his son, so too with this attempt to help him: he goes about it not out of a sense of joy, a sense of being able to help another being get on with the business of living, but out of a sense of burdensome duty:

... now I went to it in cold blood, and my heart sickened at the work of my hands.

He senses that the monster has followed him to Scotland and is secretly watching to make sure he keeps his side of the bargain. After several months of work the moment is at hand to animate the woman. Victor suddenly has second thoughts. Can he trust the monster to keep his word? What if the woman is as repulsed by the sight of her proposed mate as the rest of humanity is? What will the woman think of herself? She will be an independent creature and in no way bound to keep a promise made on her behalf before she was born. Victor's train of thought carries him rapidly to another of the classic patriarchal justifications for the really big decisions which one must occasionally make: what will the judgment of history be?

I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price, perhaps, of the existence of the whole human race.

Nowadays our filicidal rationalizations are a bit more refined, so that we can convince ourselves that history will judge peace through carpet bombing as laudable and exemplary behavior. For nineteenth century Victor, this thought about the judgment of history is what brings the project to a halt. He looks up from his work table and sees the monster looking in the window. Victor hurls himself at the lifeless woman and tears the body apart. He hears the monster scream and run away.

The fiIicide is complete. By destroying the daughter, Victor has destroyed the son. It is a deed and a scene almost too rich in OedipaI as well as fiIicidaI overtones and echoes upon echoes of frustrated love and broken trust from our long familial tradition. How are we to read this remarkable scene? Do we see here Shelley's hatred of her own female self coming to the surface? Or is it a reflection of her awareness of the rampant, pathological hatred of women in this civilization? Is it the hatred of her mother whom she perhaps felt she could not equal? Or is it a reflection of her awareness of the Oedipal confusions and violence hidden in the hearts of men?

Or is it the final and most awful of the insights into the nature of filicidal reality? Namely, the realization that the only way the father can succeed in his patriarchal filicide is if he has already in effect killed the mother, and the realization that even the mother's attempts at love, however tainted, are themselves subject ultimately to the father's absolute and lethal control. If so, then in this patriarchy, the filicidal cry is not--as we had it before:

Father and Mother, how can you both do this to me?

The filicidal cry is:

Mother, how can you let him do this to me?

To which there is no answer. And somewhere, somehow we hide away the realization that woman is as much a victim of filicide as man.

It is the way Shelley relishes this scene, dwelling on naturalistic, almost gory detail--as she does in no other scene in the novel--which causes me to perceive dark and ancient resonances here from the universal screams of pain as the filicidal deed has been done and done again:

The next morning, at daybreak, I summoned sufficient courage and unlocked the door of my laboratory. The remains of the half-finished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the flesh of a human being.. With trembling hand I conveyed the instruments out of the room, but I reflected that I ought not to leave the relics of my work to excite the horror and suspicion of the peasants; and I accordingly put them into a basket, with a great quantity of stones, and laying them up, determined to throw them into the sea that very night; and in the meantime I sat upon the beach, employed in cleaning and arranging my chemical apparatus...

Between two and three in the morning the moon rose; and I then, putting my basket aboard a little skiff, sailed out about four miles from the shore. The scene was perfectly solitary; a few boats were returning towards land, but I sailed away from them. I felt as if I was about the commission of a dreadful crime and avoided with shuddering anxiety any encounter with my fellow creatures. At one time the moon, which before had been clear, was suddenly overspread by a thick cloud, and I took advantage of the moment of darkness and cast my basket into the sea. I listened to the gurgling sound as it sank, then sailed away from the spot.

With excitement and enthusiasm Frankenstein created his man. With fear and loathing he created his woman. If cultural filicide is the hidden atrocity in all our pasts, whether we are male or female, perhaps matricide is the hidden desire behind the lives of all men in this patriarchy. We create male lives and a male civilization in which the opposite is manifested as an ideal: the sanctification of Mother. Perhaps our patriarchal myths are intended not only to protect fathers against the knowledge of their own filicide but also to protect them (us) from the knowledge of matricidal desires. Surely our anger with and disappointment toward our mothers, who physically bore us and bore us into this world, must be very great. Perhaps it is great enough when combined with our knowledge of their passive complicity in the fathers' filicide, to cause us in total unconsciousness of what we are doing to carry out matricidal vengeance on the women called our wives who are also our mothers and our daughters. We never scream the filicidal scream:

Mother, how could you let him do this to me?

but the pain is always there and our vengeance is, in the planet-wide system of feminine servitude, effectively matricide. Analogously, women, in addition to their universal experience of filicide which they share with us, must live with the secret feminine desire for patricide, for that vengeance which they could not carry out on their fathers, on their husbands--who are also their fathers who are also their sons.

This confusion of powerful motivations makes somewhat clearer how it is that each generation of fathers and mothers so easily and readily ships off each generation of sons to martial slavery and daughters to marital slavery. Bringing together all this tangle of hate-filled behavior, both masculine and feminine, is the abundant and manifest self-hatred of Mary Shelley which finally comes gurgling to the surface in this scene, like so many fetid air bubbles rising from the pieces of decaying and very ancient female, human flesh at the bottom of the ocean of history.

Oedipal, Electral, filicidal, whatever label we put on the analysis of the politics of the family, it comes down to the same thing: necrophilia. Corpses fighting corpses for the control of other corpses. Why? Now, because it is habit. And tradition. And because we like it--we have come to prefer pain to pleasure, suffering to joy. Death to life. The compulsive pursuit of control at first brings security, which soon becomes stasis, which soon becomes paralysis, which then becomes that ongoing way of death we call history.

With this climactic scene, father and son have exhausted their options. All that is left for them now is mutual physical destruction. As Victor is cleaning the lab, the monster returns and they have their last conversation. It is brief. The son swears to strike back at Victor as Victor has struck at him. He says he will have his revenge on Victor's wedding night. Victor interprets this as a threat on his own life. His adoration of Elizabeth is so great that he cannot conceive that anyone might want to harm her.

Victor returns to Switzerland and suffers another extended breakdown. When he recovers he and Elizabeth are married in Geneva and go to Lake Como for their honeymoon. Victor leaves Elizabeth in the bridal suite. He is certain the monster is nearby. He takes his pistol to search out and slay the demon. His search is interrupted by Elizabeth's dying screams as the monster kills her.

The father destroys the son-brother-father's life. The son destroys the father-brother-son's life. In this endless canon of patriarchal filicide, women function again and again as surrogate victims. As men have spread their stifling cloak of masculine violence over the planet, they may have physically killed more men than women in the bloody ritual of control known as war. Along the way men may also have killed themselves psychologically by entrapping each new generation of sons in the vicious circle which teaches that control is the only way to live and violence is the only way to control. Beyond those physical and psychological deaths are the raped and murdered women who have fallen victim to their own passive complicity as each generation of sons took their vengeance on the daughters for what their mothers allowed their fathers to do to them. It is truly a behavioral knot whose tangles within tangles are worthy of five thousand years of history and five billion human lives.

Muybridge: Boxer

In Frankenstein Shelley created a precise summary of the course of history, reduced to the four basic characters: father, son, mother, daughter. Just as Victor is really no father at all, Elizabeth is no mother. Neither of their bodies is needed for the creation of their son or their daughter. The son is such a monster that he lives only with great difficulty. The daughter does not live at all. Must we not read in this the most damning judgment of all against men as masters of this civilization? However tragic and bloody the lives of men may be, they at least have a slim chance to explore their human potential. Women, Shelley is telling us here, are still-born in this culture, so deadly and swift and total is their filicidal acculturation.

We are back to Frame One. Victor, on the ship in the Arctic Ocean, brings his story to Walton to a quick conclusion. He has been pursuing the monster all over the world. The monster toys with him, leaving clues here and there, letting Victor catch an occasional glimpse of him, sometimes backtracking and pretending that it is he who is pursuing Victor. Now the monster has led him to this world of ice. Old and weakened by exposure to the harsh climate, Victor is near death. He tells Walton that in the last months of the chase he feels he has been freed from the hatred which had driven him so long. At night, he says, he finds solace in a continuing series of beautiful dreams which he believes are harbingers of a life after death. Victor's last words are:

Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this? I myself have been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed.

A few hours later Walton hears sounds coming from the cabin where Victor's body lies. He approaches and sees the monster standing over the corpse making "exclamations of grief and terror." Walton is suitably horrified by the monster’s appearance but he had promised Victor that if the monster came he would in some way deal with him. Frankenstein's son has one last meeting with humanity in which he describes to Walton his version of the years since Victor destroyed his mate. He says that following his murder of Elizabeth he felt nothing:

I had cast off all feeling, subdued all anguish, to riot in the excess of my despair. Evil henceforth became my good... I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation. I am alone.

The complete filicide. A mythic creature whose filicidal perfection has perhaps been approached only by the most extreme tyrants and murderers. He cannot feel. He is alone in a world without warmth. Living, he is dead. He is us and he is not us. He is us to the extent that we all behave, though less intensely and consistently, in the ways we have seen so intensely and consistently displayed by this mythic father and son. He is not us in the sense that this living death is only the way we think we have to be and not, in fact, the way we have to be. Our cultural filicidal view of ourselves is in its way as much a fiction as is Shelley's depiction of us--the difference being that we have made art life, while Shelley made life art.

Frankenstein ends in death, in a world of ice. The monster leaves Walton, telling him he is going to commit suicide. He plans to build a fire using wood from his sled and throw himself onto it. The creature who never knew the warmth of a human embrace, not even the warmth of the womb, the creature who never existed but who exists in us all, dies still seeking warmth. Our last glimpse of the nameless son comes as we see him wandering off alone across an endless sea of ice toward his self-contrived death.