In his Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell introduces numerous characters with disabilities and
deformities of various sorts—two with eye patches (although one is faking it) and one with a glass eye,
one with a harelip, one who contracts smallpox and is badly scarred, one whose hand, impaled by an
accidental speargun shot, must be amputated to save her life, one who is deaf, and several with limbs
missing. On one level, being Durrell characters, they are simply versions of the exotic. Yet collectively
they come to represent something else: everyone, Durrell seems to be saying, is damaged in some way or
other, and no matter how careful or fortunate we might seem to be, we don’t get through life without
being marked by the experience. Interestingly enough, his damaged characters are not particularly
incommoded by their deficiencies. The harelipped Nahfouz becomes a celebrated mystic and preacher,
while Clea, the painter, reports late in the final novel that her prosthetic hand can paint. The gift lies not in
her hand, in other words, but in her heart, her mind, her soul.
What’s Mary Shelley up to then? Her monster doesn’t carry the specific historical baggage of a Jake
Barnes, so what doesp. 199his deformity represent? Let’s look at where he comes from. Victor
Frankenstein builds his spare-parts masterpiece not only out of a graveyard but also out of a specific
historical situation. The industrial revolution was just starting up, and this new world would threaten
everything people had known during the Enlightenment; at the same time, the new science and the new
faith in science—including anatomical research, of course—imperiled many religious and philosophical
tenets of English society in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Thanks to Hollywood, the monster
looks like Boris Karloff or Lon Chaney and intimidates us by its sheer physical menace. But in the novel
it’s the idea of the monster that is frightening, or perhaps it’s really the idea of the man, the
scientist-sorcerer, forging an unholy alliance with dark knowledge that scares us. The monster represents,
among other things, forbidden insights, a modern pact with the devil, the result of science without ethics.
You don’t need me to tell you this, naturally. Every time there’s an advance in the state of knowledge, a
movement into a brave new world (another literary reference, of course), some commentator or other
informs us that we’re closer to meeting a Frankenstein (meaning, of course, the monster).
The monster has several other possible frames of reference. The most obvious literary angle is the
Faustian pact with the devil. We keep getting versions of Faust, from Christopher Marlowe’s Dr.
Faustus to Goethe’s Faust to Stephen Vincent Benét’s The Devil and Daniel Webster to Damned
Yankees to movie versions of Bedazzled (and, of course, Darth Vader’s turn to the Dark Side) to
bluesman Robert Johnson’s stories of how he acquired his musical skill in a meeting with a mysterious
stranger at a crossroads. The enduring appeal of this cautionary tale suggests how deeply embedded it is
in our collective consciousness. Unlike other versions, however, Frankenstein involves no demonic
personage offering the damning bargain, so the cautionary being is the product (thep. 200monster) rather
than the source (the devil) of the unholy act. In his deformity he projects the perils of man seeking to play
God, perils that, as in other (noncomic) versions, consume the power seeker.
Beyond these cautionary elements, though, the real monster is Victor, the monster’s maker. Or at least a
portion of him. Romanticism gave us the notion, rampant throughout the nineteenth century and still with
us in the twenty-first, of the dual nature of humanity, that in each of us, no matter how well made or
socially groomed, a monstrous Other exists. The concept explains the fondness for doubles and
self-contained Others in Victorian fiction: The Prince and the Pauper (1882), The Master of
Ballantrae, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Significantly, these last
two also involve hideous Others, the portrait of Dorian that reveals his corruption and decay while he
himself remains beautiful, and the monstrous Mr. Hyde, into whom the good doctor turns when he drinks
the fateful elixir. What they share with Shelley’s monster is the implication that within each of us, no
matter how civilized, lurk elements that we’d really prefer not to acknowledge—the exact opposite of
The Hunchback of Notre Dame or “Beauty and the Beast,” where a hideous outer form hides the
beauty of the inner person.