1. Ashleigh Mott
December 9, 2013
ENGL 420
Professor Orrin Wang
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Notion of Personhood
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, has at its
center a man, Victor Frankenstein, who creates life in a laboratory. In the novel,
the creation shows himself to have cognitive abilities; he is able to teach himself
to speak and to read, and he develops a sense of self-awareness. With this, the
creature becomes conflicted about his existence; that is, whether he does or does
not have value as a person. The creature’s notion of personhood, and where he
stands as a person, has different conflicting angles; his appearance is radically
different from that of those around him, he has nothing to his name in terms of
money, friends and biological family, or property, and his birth was unnatural
in every sense. What may be the greatest factor in the question of personhood in
Frankenstein is which of these factors is the most essential to being a person.
In Frankenstein, the creature is created from human body parts sewn
together in a lab. This circumstance might be enough to cause him to feel anxiety
about his personhood, but his appearance exacerbates this. The creation scene
at the start of Chapter Five describes the creature’s appearance as sickly and
perhaps even less-than-human; “His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of

2. muscles and arteries beneath…. his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same
[color] as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion,
and straight black lips.” As grotesque as Frankenstein’s narration describes the
creature’s appearance, Frankenstein himself calls those features “beautiful,”
although his narration that follows, “The different accidents of life are not so
changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two
years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body” suggests that
his own labor, not the creature’s appearance itself, makes it beautiful. (Shelley
96)
Later in the story, a large part of the creature’s anxiety is brought on
by his appearance, and how different it is from the appearances of the people he
comes across. He laments in Chapter 13 that he has been “’endued with a figure
hideously deformed and loathsome…” [Shelley 65]. The novel plays with this
question of what constitutes personhood. The creature is proven at previous
points in the novel to be sentient, literate and well-spoken, but this line in
particular shows that he is also aware if his appearance, and that it is more
grotesque than those of the people he has come across. “…his otherness and the
impossibility of his assimilation into human society spring directly from his
obvious materiality. The monster’s constructedness, the veins visible through
his patchwork skin, the thin, straight black lips are at once wonderful and
terrifying to those who look upon him. These features call attention to the very
constructedness of the onlooker.” [Harris 104] His creator and others view the
creature as both a marvel and an oddity, and he is well-aware of how this gaze

3. makes him feel less-than-human; “…ultimately in a post-Enlightenment Europe,
the monster finds that intellectual capacity is not an unconditional signifier of
membership in the human species… the body proves an inescapable reality that
determines social participation.” [Harris 105] Even though he is demonstrably
intelligent, what others see when they look at the creature, as well as what he
sees in himself, becomes the greater decider of how human he really is.
Another great conflict for the creature in his anxiety over his
personhood is his birth/creation. He is aware that his entry into the world is one
of a kind; “The creature does not come to life as a small, helpless infant in need
of the care of others…. The long period of becoming (human) that follows birth
and entails varied and prolonged dependence on others is precluded by the
mature form that the creature has at birth. He himself associates the absence of
a formative history of dependence and relation with his grossly anomalous
physical shape as he describes his developing sense of being ‘similar [to], yet
strangely unlike’ human beings…” (Yousef 197). In chapter 13, the creature
relates what he has learned through his eavesdropping on the group of peasants.
He mentions their talk of family and children, and laments again about having
had none of the experiences that come along with family, childhood, and growing
up; “’…where were my friends and relations? No father watched my infant days,
no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past
life was now a blot…From my earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in
height and proportion. I had never yet seen a being resembling me or who
claimed any intercourse with me. What was I?” [Shelley 66-7]

4. Here, the creature shows another sign of his anxiety about his
personhood; he has no memories of childhood and family members because he
was created in his fully-grown body and has no biological family. Furthermore,
he expresses frustration at having seen no one who looks like him; he knows he
was created at a lab at this point, but it seems that knowing someone who looked
like him existed would give him a sense of not being so alone. A biological tie is
important to the creature’s sense of personhood, but the greater need is to have
a place to belong. The creature’s anxiety in this regard is two-fold; because of his
appearance and lack of familial ties, “…he is alienated from human society
because of an imperfect embodiment. When he looks for other persons in whom
he could identify a familiar form, he sees none like himself….” Furthermore, the
creature invokes a type of socio-economic isolation; “…As imperfect, he has been
‘disowned’ from social and economic exchange. No one wants to take possession
of him. Moreover, he cannot pinpoint his identity because he has no
possessions: no connections, no money, [and] no property. He has no human
origin and no societal origin with which to identify, for he has been artificially
manufactured in a workshop, and thus he asks not ‘who was I?’ but instead
asks, ‘what was I?’” [Harris 108]. The creature has anxiety about his place as a
person because not only does he lack a biological family, but he also lacks any
other way of being recognized within the society, socially or economically.
Regarding the question of which of the creature’s anxieties is the one
that is most relevant to his sense of personhood, the problem is that all three
anxieties have the same common denominator. The creature’s conflicts with his

5. unnatural birth, grotesque appearance, and lack of a place or group to belong
with are all tied to what is required of most people to have a sense of autonomy,
or self-determination. “He has no name, a factor which may be considered a
fundamental marker of one’s identity, and he has no real sense of self, because
of the method of his creation. Constituted from the body parts of many human
beings, he cannot attain an autonomous existence” [Kennedy 122]. The
creature’s conflicts with his personhood seem to all have that root; his grotesque
appearance comes from being made of the body parts of various humans, he was
born out of “…the one act of reproduction that…is accomplished by a male
without female participation” [Goss 437], he has no biological family with whom
to identify, and is never even given a name. As such, the creature is left not
feeling whole, and as such, not like a person. This is the main reason for his
anger with his creator; “…[he] acknowledges his radical difference from
Frankenstein and Frankenstein's ‘fellow creatures,’ while at the same time he
insists on his right to be angry that they have denied him the ‘bliss’ of a
relationship with them” [Weinstone 176].
In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the issue of what it means to be a
person is one that the creature Frankenstein creates struggles with. The common
denominator in all of his struggles seems to be his lack of autonomy and sense
of self, due to the circumstances of his birth/creation, appearance, and lack of
a place to belong. The novel presents the creature as sentient, self-aware, and
intelligent, but those are traits do not make him feel any more human. Even with
sentience and intelligence, the circumstances of the creature’s existence, and the

6. isolation that they bring, leave him devoid of a sense of self. Even though he
desperately desires personhood, it is something he can never truly achieve.

7. Works Cited
Goss, Theodora and John Paul Riquelme. "From Superhuman to
Posthuman: The Gothic Technological Imaginary in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
and Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis." MFS Modern Fiction Studies. 53.3 (2007):
434-59. Print.
Harris, Renee. "Our Material Selves: Imago and Social Exchange in Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein." Humanities Review. 11.1 (2013): 104-13. Print.
Kennedy, Michelle. ""Are We Not Men?" The Effect of Cloning on Traditional
Theories of Humanity and Personhood." Journal of Franco-Irish Studies. 2.1
(2011): 115-31. Print. <http://arrow.dit.ie/jofis/vol2/iss1/7>.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, Random House, LLC. 2003, Kindle File.
Weinstone, Ann. "Resisting Monsters: Notes on "Solaris"." Science Fiction
Studies. 21.2 (1994): 173-90. Print.
Yousef, Nancy. "The Monster in a Dark Room: Frankenstein, Feminism,
and Philosophy." Modern Language Quarterly. (2002): 197-226. Print.