In a weekly gathering called, The Friendship Bench, there’s frequent conversation about arriving, belonging, connection, comfort, courage, and vulnerability. On the Bench — and because of it — deep, trusting human connections have been and continue to be forged. Since I’m one of the people who’s forged and benefited from those profound human connections, they caused me to recall a conversation from a literature course I took as the late-blooming college student I was.
In that course, the name of which escapes me, we were required to read Frankenstein. (Everyone should be required to read Frankenstein. If you haven’t read it, it’s not what you think it is.) One day in class, the professor asked, “Why do we consider Victor Frankenstein’s creature to be a monster?”
Since I was the oldest student in the room, I got lost in thought for a little while: “Hmm … I’m likely the only one here who remembers the 1931 film. And I’m almost certainly the only one who has any idea who Boris Karloff was. So, the answer can’t be about bolts in his neck or scars on his head.”
As I was ruminating, other students were offering suggestions:
“He’s ugly.”
“He’s homicidal.”
“He’s built from spare parts.”
“He’s more than eight feet tall.”
“He probably doesn’t use deodorant.” (Okay. I made that one up.)
Finally, the professor said, “We consider Victor Frankenstein’s creature to be monstrous because he has no human connections and no possibility of ever establishing any.”
He was right, of course. Abandoned by his creator, who’d refused to create a mate for him, the creature experienced rejection, isolation, loneliness, and cruelty, causing him to become bitter and murderously vengeful. Because the creature’s capacity for goodness and kindness went unacknowledged and unreciprocated, the creature became a tragic manifestation of evil and a foil for societal inhumanity.
Oddly enough, in the contemplation of my connections from The Friendship Bench and elsewhere, the professor’s comments about the monster came back to me. And the creature’s embodiment of the potential for inhumanity that resides in all of us made me think of Victor.
It’s Alive!
Today, thanks to the DSM 5 and its penchant for creating mental maladies we’re supposed to believe can and should be treated pharmacologically, we’d call Victor’s excessive ambition and hubris — his letting his obsessive compulsion to create life despite the warnings of his teachers and at the expensive of his relationship with Elizabeth — narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). It renders him unable to see the moral and ethical implications of his actions, unwilling to take responsibility for what he’s done, and quite willing to abandon his creature after bringing it to life (to say nothing of wanting to destroy it).
We might argue Victor is monstrous because he has no interest in human interaction. He has no possibility of seeing through his arrogant self-righteousness, of getting beyond his impenetrable ego, of mitigating his incorrigible pomposity, or of toning down his imperious sense of superiority. He has no humility. And he has no sense of wonder, other than to marvel at himself in all his blind self-absorption.
Mirror, Mirror ….
I know a duck-hunting joke that ends with a punchline that contains the phrase, more [I’ll tell you the joke sometime] than you can shake a [bad word here] stick at. I bring that up here because Victor Frankenstein has more traits of NPD than you can shake a stick at. Here’s the shortlist, which is known in the biz as the Egotistical Eight:
- Grandiosity? Check.
- A constant need for admiration? Check.
- Lack of empathy? Check.
- Inflated sense of self-importance? Check.
- An exaggerated belief in his own abilities and achievements? Check.
- A tendency exploit or manipulate others to achieve his own goals? Check.
- A sense of entitlement? Check.
- Envy and arrogance? Check.
Two things come to mind. Both are from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. The first is spoken by the Ghost of Christmas Present as he and Ebenezer Scrooge observe Tiny Tim Cratchett: “It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child.”
The second is spoken by the ghost of Joseph Marley when he visits Scrooge to foretell the coming of the spirits that will visit Scrooge that night:
It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellowmen, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world — oh, woe is me! — and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness … Business! Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!
Required Reading
Victor only traveled far and wide — through Europe, north into Russia, then to the Arctic Ocean, and on towards the North Pole — in pursuit of his creature. And he didn’t pursue the creature in spirits of charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence. Rather, as close as Victor got to what might be argued was the common welfare, was his futile determination to kill the creature he created — perhaps, metaphorically interpreting the story, to kill his own narcissism.
Frankenstein should be required reading because it reminds us we have to live with the monsters we create — even if we’re the monsters — and why our human connections are so singularly, irreplaceably valuable.
Not all monsters are narcissists. But all narcissists are monstrous.
