Moxley #3

BIG QUESTION: Are humans inherently good or inherently evil?

If analyzing Frankenstein as a response to this question, I would say that Mary Shelley implies that humans are inherently good, despite their potential to create evil. Frankenstein begins his quest to create life with only the thought of scientific progress in mind, truly realizing what he has done only after his creation murders his brother, and continues to indirectly take the life of Justine before murdering Clerval and Elizabeth. Frankenstein is also morally conflicted when he promises to create a companion for the monster, as he recognizes his own potential for evil if he creates another monster knowing the result, and wonders if he can make the choice to unleash another one of his creations now that he can speculate the repercussions. "Even if they [the monster and his new companion] were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had I a right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations?" (pg. 121) Frankenstein makes a decision that solidifies Shelley's opinion surrounding the Big Question, as he stays good by destroying the monster's companion-in-the-works, sacrificing his own peace in exchange for not condemning the human race to a world full of daemons.

In a spin-off to my initial blog response, Shelley also makes us question the definition of what is human, as Frankenstein's monster and Frankenstein share incredible guilt and anguish over the consequences of their own actions, indicating that Shelley wants us to define 'human' in terms if emotional capacity, making the monster essentially human: "After the murder of Clerval, I returned to Switzerland, heartbroken and overcome. I pitied Frankenstein; my pity amounted to horror: I abhorred myself. But when I discovered that he, the author at once of my existence and my unspeakable torments, dared to hope for happiness; that while he accumulated wretchedness and despair upon me... then impotent envy and bitter indignation filled me with an insatiable thirst for vengeance." (pg. 164) Frankenstein's monster feels a full range of human emotions, essentially meeting the unofficial 'qualifications' of humanity the Shelley presents throughout the book. This idea made me look back at the events of the book in a different way, making me even more sympathetic to the monster's experiences early on in his life, which in turn made me wonder if that was Shelley's intention the entire book. I concluded that the question of humanity and what it means can be interpreted in a variety of ways, and Shelley probably intended for her readers to think about the question throughout the book and continue thinking about it after they put Frankenstein down.