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One of the most curious aspects of our “troubled” view of technology is the multiplicity of ways in which we choose to deal with our concerns. Most obviously in cinema, we see films such as Terminator in which a cyborg that looks exactly like a human tyrannizes Sarah Connor and murders people left and right. The Terminator, of course, represents the future of technology where humans are on the run from their own creations. Our feelings toward technology are ones of regret. We crossed a line somewhere along the way and inadvertently heralded in our own destruction. On the other side of the coin, we see films such as Blade Runner where replicants that look, feel, and bleed just like other humans are enslaved by humans and hunted down when they go rogue. Rick Deckard ultimately comes to the conclusion that some replicants, (ex. Rachael) are worth saving. We are also left wondering whether or not Deckard himself is a replicant. Why this great disparity between points of view? In one instance, we see ourselves making technology the Other. It is something that must be contained and conquered in order for us to stay on top. It threatens to take us over. On the other hand, we see technology become abjected—the replicants are both human and not human—making us wonder: what does it mean to be human? The replicants are a threat to society, but we are meant to see this perspective as unjust. We feel pity for Roy Batty when he communicates the fate of his existence as a living, breathing entity that can think, feel, and experience life, but who was enslaved and asked to do terrible things. Was it merely the fact of his creation that made him inhuman? Ultimately these stories become reflexive, causing us to look back at ourselves and how we define ourselves as humans and how we define technology.
Frankenstein contains aspects of both of these types of films. This book is not simply a horror story warning people about the dangers of technological advancements, it is a reflection on the way we define monstrosity. Although Victor believes his creation to be a daemon from the instance he sees its eye move, he is making a definitive claim based on the process by which he brought the monster into being and his physical appearance. It is not the wretch that is implicitly monstrous, it is the actions of Victor who irresponsibly pieced him together, brought him to life, and abandoned him, failing to take responsibility for his actions, that are monstrous. In this way, the monster represents Frankenstein’s abject fears. The daemon embodies what he sees to be himself and the work of his own hands and what he clearly wants to see as something that is definitively Other, not him that he can conquer. The wretch necessarily becomes a monster because, for Frankenstein; the creature embodies his own ties to monstrosity and must be conquered. Thus, he labels the creature based on his own need to make the wretch his Other.
When Justine describes the murderer of William, she labels him a “monster” and “the devil himself” (66). In this, she is not referring to a man with a horrible deformity; rather she is basing these judgments on the action committed. The wretch himself only becomes truly monstrous once he has committed deeds that go against the grain of humanity. When the wretch realizes that Frankenstein will not make him a companion, he gives himself over to revenge much like any human would when faced with such circumstances. At the end of the tale, he describes his monstrous actions as a choice: “Evil thenceforth became my good. Urged thus far, I had no choice but to adapt my nature to an element which I had willingly chosen” (188). We see from his narrative that the wretch is initially gentle. He does not even kill animals for food until provoked by Frankenstein’s insensitivity and refusal to understand. Victor constantly runs away from the thing he has created because it is a reminder of his own monstrous deeds in creating an ugly being unfit for society. The wretch has high aspirations, longing to abide by the laws of virtue, but he is denied the ability to overcome his label as a monster due to his unconformity. Appearance prevents his becoming like Rachael and condemns him to act like the Terminator.
As a result, Frankenstein exposes two aspects of how we term monstrosity: 1) a perversion, physical nonconformity and 2) a decision to engage in actions that go against the grain of appropriate societal behavior, active nonconformity. Haunted by the first, the wretch is forced to engage in the latter. This, in turn, causes us to reflect back on the man who made the monster and recognize his own participation in monstrous behavior in abandoning his creation and running away from his responsibility until no one is left but Ernest. We feel sympathy for Frankenstein’s monster because he was abandoned and left to his own devices. He tried to be good, but was met with repulsion by society. The deeds he commits are clearly terrible, but they can be seen also as a cry for help from one who has been denied the ability to demonstrate his ability to function appropriately within society, and thereby save himself from being deemed a monster.
You might be interested in this essay by Jon Saklofske that evaluates the Blake Archive and imagines new ways of visualizing its content.
Also: how do doppelgangers fit into our definition of the monstrous?
1. Poor Ernest Frankenstein. Type his name into Wikipedia and you’ll receive an amusing but reasonable redirect:
Ernest gets little page time. He isn’t mentioned in a letter to Victor in which Elisabeth does spend time discussing his other brother (William), and he oddly drops out of Victor’s remembrance instead of becoming more dear as his last remaining family member. (Stuart Curran’s Romantic Circles edition of Frankenstein collects the few references to Ernest here) What is Ernest even doing in the novel? I’d love to compare his place in the different versions of the work–I think it was Curran who suggested that Ernest is written slightly differently in the 1831 edition, and the fact that he remains in the book by that point (with Victor’s forgetting uncorrected) suggests Ernest’s vanishing role is worth exploring.
2. What do you make of the strange painting of Victor’s mother posed by her father’s coffin (a particularly creepy subject for Victor’s father to specifically commission)? Does this fit in with Steven Jone’s Freudian reading of Victor’s dream? Or were such subjects par for the course at the time? (Photographs of recently deceased children made to look like they were sleeping weren’t abnormal for the Victorians–though why paint a remembered person as dead/encased in a coffin when you could imagine him as alive within the painting? Did showing his true state conform to some sort of belief about naturalness/reality as reflected by painting?)
I gazed on the picture of my mother, which stood over the mantel-piece. It was an historical subject, painted at my father’s desire, and represented Caroline Beaufort in an agony of despair, kneeling by the coffin of her dead father. Her garb was rustic, and her cheek pale; but there was an air of dignity and beauty, that hardly permitted the sentiment of pity. (Shelley, Frankenstein, unknown page located in Project Gutenberg e-text)
3. In Jones’ Against Technology, he refers to “the story of Frankenstein’s creature who turns into a monster” (my emphasis, 1), an assertion that writes the character as first simply a creature, later monstrous. Is the monster’s monstrosity a result of his manner of birth, his grisly components and visage, or his evil actions? Does he become more or less monstrous during the novel as he gains knowledge, civilization, and other attributes of “humanity”–or does he perhaps simultaneously approach and recede from humanity?
If a Neo-Luddite would term Frankenstein a cautionary tale, a warning to those whose “hubris” (as Dan termed it) in developing artificial intelligence blinds them to its in inherent dangers, then what would they think of such problematic fiction as Asimov’s I, Robot or Disney’s WALL-E?
Both stories share a similar plot line: man invents machines, machines pose threat to man, a dissident machine rises up, saves man, and restores ‘natural order.’ Another parallel emerges in that both the machines of I, Robot and WALL-E receive programming from their human operators stating their primary function as human preservation and service (Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and the directives given to various robots in WALL-E).
In I, Robot the super-computer V.I.K.I. ultimately identifies the most dangerous threat to humanity as people themselves. Logically, then, human beings must be severely limited and monitored for their own protection, resulting in robots ruling with iron fists. Though a rather frightening realization of Brautigan’s machines of loving grace, the androids of I, Robot really do have humanity’s best interest at heart. Likewise in WALL-E, the navigational component AUTO is following an outdated directive to avoid returning to earth, as it is supposedly unable to support human life. Hence he attempts to bar the ship’s captain from steering humanity home.
Though human beings do revolt in both stories, in true Neo-Luddite fashion, their feeble attempts are almost comical. The baseball-bat-swinging Chicagoan mob of I, Robot puts up a much better fight than the corpulent hover-chair-dwellers of WALL-E, but in both cases a cybernetic savior is needed. However, these cybernetic saviors’ ability to triumph rests in their distinctly human-like qualities. An unlikely hero, the plucky WALL-E saves the day by exhibiting one of the most laudable traits of self-sacrifice, a characteristic developed in earlier moments in the film when WALL-E expresses one of the basest of human desires in his longing for companionship, more specifically, the love of Eve. In his ability to love, WALL-E recognizes the worth of the greater good and willingly sacrifices himself for it. I, Robot’s much more complex hero, the android Sonny, also displays a broad spectrum of emotions throughout the film – anger, sadness, even conspiratorial trust. He is differentiated from homogeneous swarms of his hostile brethren by the fact that he is not only programmed with the Three Laws, but he has been endowed with the ability to choose to ignore them. Sonny’s creator, Dr. Lanning, endowed Sonny with reason and free will (two emphatically human rights), coupled with his ability to dream (which begs the question: Can a robot not only achieve the semblance of cognizance, but also delve into the subconscious?). Sonny is also given a predestined purpose, which manifests itself in his ability to defeat the rampaging V.I.K.I. through yet another show of willing self-sacrifice. When V.I.K.I. attempts to dissuade Sonny from his intent, questioning, “Do you not see the logic of my plan?” he thoughtfully replies, “Yes, but it just seems too heartless.”
Both stories are problematic in their depictions of human-robot amalgamations. The stories’ villains are humanized (they are given names and voices), while the heroes go even further and present as manifestations of humans themselves. But really, can threatening technology be neutralized by technology that is more empathetic, more human? Taking into account that both cases, like the Morris worm, contain human error at their cores (V.I.K.I.’s logical conclusion was an inevitable result of her programming, and AUTO’s directive was straight from the mouths of humans), is it really a technological battle at all? I mean, what kind of battle is it where a human-created robot, operating on human-generated parameters, infringes on human rights and is subsequently destroyed by an altered, yet still human-created, robot, also operating on human-generated parameters? It almost seems to be a gigantic battle game – will love triumph over logic, does self-sacrifice trump self-destruction? – with the all-too-human warfare of vices and virtues played out on a grander technological stage.