Saturday, August 18, 2018

Addendum to my post on 14 July My Monster

Although Dr Frankenstein did say that 'the dissecting room and slaughter-house furnished many of my materials' (53) nothing in Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus prior to his statement suggested that he intended to make anything other than a human being. In fact there is no direct evidence to suggest that animal body parts were used in the construction of the creature. 
Possessing the 'capacity of bestowing  animation' (50) Victor did not 'doubt his ability to give life to an animal as complex and wonderful as man' (51). Indeed, he declared 'I began the creation of a human being'. (51) Even if parts from a slaughter-house  formed part of the materials in the solitary chamber at the top of his house, it does not mean that they were used in the construction of the monster; they may simply have been part of his experiments with reanimation. Given Dr Frankenstein had access to 'dissecting rooms' and  'the unhallowed damps of the grave (page 52) and any number of human body parts why would he need the bodily parts of animals?
The word 'corpse' refers specifically to human remains not that of an animal and Shelly herself in the introduction to the novel declares 'Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated' (9) and as such I maintain that the 'monster' was constructed as human and as much as we might like to imagine that he is an amalgam of human and animal biomaterials he is not visually a hybrid.
I argue that since Victor Frankenstein selected 'with infinite care' to create the new creature, describing it's limbs in proportion, his features beautiful...his hair a lustrous black and flowing, his teeth pearly white (55), not for a moment did I imagine that this scientist would select animal bodily parts to represent a beautiful human. So, I maintain the creature animated by Dr Frankenstein was not a hybrid, he was not the mutant offspring of two separate and distinct species nor does he look part animal of any other species other than human. He may (at a stretch) be an amalgam of human and animal biomaterials, but visually he was, in the text and in filmic representations a human being.
Within art historical accounts hybrids are visually distinct as sporting the characteristics and features of humans and animals and he does not exhibit animal features in any way. When Victor first sees the creature years after it escaped, he sees 'the figure of a man' (97). Indeed, the monster aligns itself with a human subject, one formed out of clay when he says to Victor 'I ought to be thy Adam'. (99) Also, if there was any hint at all that the Frankenstein monster was part human/part animal why was he represented in the first Frankenstein film as human? We do not refer to contemporary individuals who have had a pig's aorta inside their body as hybrids, because they are not!

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