Critical Context

In Peter Brooks’ critical essay, What Is a Monster? (According to Frankenstein,) Brooks focuses on answering that very question – what is a monster? He uses a number of textual references to support his main ideas which heavily focus upon the verbal and the visual and the contradiction between the two. He points out that Shelley has made the creature - though disgusting, horrifying, and hideously deformed - the most eloquent creature in the novel. He does not express himself in grunts and gestures but instead is able to speak and reason with a high degree of logic and persuasiveness. His verbal skills and poise completely contradict his visual appearance which is horrid and feared by everyone he encounters. Using language, the creature hopes to find companionship and relation with another being. Brooks brings forth the idea of the “chain of existence and events” which the creature feels excluded from because he is not a part of anything or anyone’s life. “Language is what he must use to experience human love” (page 374). The creature will not be able to experience such emotions through any visual context and it is thus only left with the verbal.

Brooks also ties the creature’s solitude and uniqueness to the story of Adam and Eve. He is linked to no other being in existence and is left alone and helpless. The creature reflects Adam in the sense that he is the creation of a “mighty” creator. In his quest for language, he gained knowledge and the more knowledge he gained the more he understood how much of a wretch he was and how hopeless his situation seemed. This led him to the request of a female creature – his Eve. In the story of Adam, Adam is created in God’s image and then Eve is created in the image of Adam. Controversially, the creature is not made in the divinity and beauty of his creator like Adam was but instead as a horrifying and wretched version. Similarly to the story however, the creature’s Eve would still be created in his like-image. When Victor suddenly decides to destroy the female creature, it takes away any and all hope that the male creature had to access the “chain of existence and events” that would have given him relation in the world and the possibility to provide satisfaction for his desires of belonging. In turn the creature goes to disrupt Victor’s “chain of existence and events” by murdering William which leads to the death of Justine and then down the road the murders of Clerval and Elizabeth and the death of his father.

Basically, Brooks is trying to give light to the idea that throughout this frame within a frame within a frame, there is constantly an unanswered question and unfulfilled sense of completeness. What is a monster? How can a creature with such eloquence and understanding be so controversially hideous and repelling? What makes a monster? As we read we keep seeking and hoping for the answer. We at first think it will appear as we go deeper into the frame work, but then once the answer is not resolved, we hope we will stumble upon it on our way back up the frames. We struggle with ideas as we go; the creature “is a product of nature – his ingredients are 100 percent natural – yet by the process and the very fact of his creation, he is unnatural, the product of philosophical overreaching. Since he is a unique creation, without precedence or replication, he lacks cultural as well as natural context” (page 386). We toss ideas back and forth within ourselves as to what a monster is and what that means for Frankenstein’s creation. He’s created in nature and is thus a part of nature, but yet he falls short of what we accept. In the end of his essay, Brooks gives light as to what he believes is a monster. “A monster is that outcome or product of curiosity or epistempophilia pushed to an extreme that results in confusion, blindness, and exile. A monster is that which cannot be placed in any of the taxonomic schemes devised by the human mind to understand and to order nature. It exceeds the very basis of classification, language itself: it is an excess of signification, a strange byproduct or leftover of the process of making meaning. It is an imaginary being who comes to life in language and, once having done so, cannot be eliminated from language” (pages 387-388). This is what a monster is; it is something we create due to curiosity and once it is created and introduced into language it is an idea that we cannot get rid of. So how does this tie into the novel and Brooks ideas of the verbal vs. the visual? “The novel insistently thematizes issues of language and rhetoric because the symbolic order of language appears to offer the Monster his only escape from the order of visual, specular, and imaginary relations, in which he is demonstrably the monster. The symbolic order compensates for a deficient nature: it promises escape from a condition of “to-be-looked-at-ness”” (page 388). The monster is caught in a controversial situation which will not allow him to achieve relation and happiness. He is horrifying and repelling and his only escape from the judgments and fear is the use of verbal language which he has become very knowledgeable and gifted in. Unfortunately his language skills cannot help him much because the world runs on visual cues. The language does, however, offer the creature a permanent place in our minds as readers. He cannot be eliminated from language, and nowhere in the text does it confirm his own destruction. Shelley’s monster is still out there and will live on in language in our imaginations.

When I first saw the title of this essay I thought it would be talking more about what we classify as a monster and what we perceive as one in the sense of society and what we see as the norms, abnormalities, and stereotypical monsters. After reading it however I found that it approached the topic of “what is a monster?” from a different but still very intriguing perspective. I found it interesting how Brooks looked at the creature as a “toss-up”, in a way, in whether or not it classified as a monster. I think he made many great points on both sides of the argument but that he ultimately classified Victor’s creation as a monster. While we typically think of a monster as something scary and unusual, which the creature is, we do not think of a monster as something that can be talked to and reasoned with. This idea was not something I thought much about while reading the story and I liked that Brooks brought it to my attention. He provided a new way of thinking about the creature and its situation and gave great controversy to the concept of monstrosity. As readers most of us would not question that Victor’s creature is a monster because of its horrifying appearance and terrible acts. Looking deeper however, and looking into Brooks ideas, we can see the other side of the story. The creature was brought into the world seeking what any human being would seek: relation and companionship. In this sense the creature is not a monster; he cannot help how he looks because it was the work of his creator and he only commits his terrible acts out of frustration in his quest for acceptance. He does not want to commit the murders but he feels he has no choice and that he needs to take charge to get what he seeks. He is actually very intelligent and extremely eloquent in his language and reasoning skills. If he were given the chance to prove himself as a peaceful creature in the world he would have no problem doing so. But because he is not given the opportunity to prove himself and use his verbal attributes he is only left with what people see – his visual appearance. His appearance is assumed monster because he is not something anyone has seen before and so this is the image he is forced to live with. His visual attributes and body cannot be touched by another being, it is like he is indestructible, and his verbal attributes come through in bodily form. This is where Brooks’ concept of the creature being impossible to eliminate from language comes in and I liked how he tied that together. The creature cannot be destroyed except by his own doing which is never actually recorded in the book which means the creature lives on as a monster in the mind of every reader.

I found that I agree strongly with Brooks’ critical essay What Is a Monster?. While it was at first strange to me in the angle that he went from to present the issue, I found that it was a powerful way of explaining what a monster is and how Frankenstein’s creation embodied these concepts. While the creature has many attributes that would save him from the classification of monster, his lack of ability to prove himself and use these attributes causes him to do terrible things and fit in more with the qualities of being a monster. This is the label he fits and is thus what he is and will be known as for his entire existence, which, as stated above, is infinite. 

Sources:
Shelly, Mary. Frankenstein. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2012. Print.

"What Is a Monster? (According to Frankenstein)." Rev. of Frankenstein, by Peter Brooks. n.d.: 368-90. Print.