#monsterism

Meet Mrs. Natalie Nice...

The fact of monsterism suggests that nature in Frankenstein has something of the radical amorality described by Sade. For Sade, nature permits everything and authorizes nothing. Since all tastes and pleasures are in nature, no perversion can outrage and no crime alter nature; if one searches for an underlying pattern or principle in nature, what one finds is destruction itself. Therefore man's destruction -- torture, murder -- merely does nature's work. The impassibility of nature, the regulatory principle of life which yet refuses to offer any ethical principle, is a source of anguish for Sade; and his compilation of pleasures and crimes contra naturam can be read as an ever-frustrated effort to make a human mark on nature, to break nature's bonds, to reach through to some transcendent principle. There are perhaps parallels to be found in Victor Frankenstein's manic quest to push nature to a frontier where it becomes meta-nature, where it releases its own principle of being. Certainly Frankenstein's assault on and in the citadel of nature produces a monsterism that both reveals and mocks the arcane principle. The overriding fact of nature in the book -- dominating Mont Blanc, the Lake of Geneva, the Hebrides, and all the other sublime natural settings -- is the fact and possibility of monsterism itself. It is to this, I believe, that the Monster returns in his peroration, as he says farewell to Walton and to the dead Frankenstein: "Blasted as thou wert, my agony was still superior to thine". He attributes his superior torture to remorse; yet surely it first of all derives from the condition of monstrosity itself. This is the supreme agony, and the properly monstrous blot upon nature: that nature should be capable of producing the monstrous. It is a nature that eludes any optimistic Romanticism, and finally most resembles Freud's "uncanny": the Monster perfectly illustrates the Unheimliche, a monstrous potentiality so close to us -- so close to home -- that we have repressed its possibility, and assigned an un as the mark of censorship on what is indeed too heimisch for comfort.