The dictionary definition of a monster is (one who deviates from normal or acceptable behavior or character( or (a person of unnatural or extreme ugliness, deformity, wickedness or cruelty( (754). In Frankenstein, the title character of medical student Victor Frankenstein fits the first definition and the deformity and cruelty parts of the second. His zeal for medical knowledge leads him to an obsession (with the science of anatomy: but this was not sufficient; I must also observe the natural decay and decomposition of the human body( (30). So Victor starts spending his nights at a graveyard, exhuming and examining corpses in detail. Instead of being repulsed by worms chewing their way through cadavers, he becomes exhilarated to the point of sexual arousal on watching a hideous form of nature at work. He is a necrophiliac minus the mechanics of intercourse.
Victor deludes himself into believing that he is not only sane but on the threshhold of a scientific breakthrough resulting from his deviant behavior. And yet he writes like a lunatic: (Remember, I am not recording the vision of a madman( (30). Further, that (what had been the study and desire of the wisest men since the creation of the world was now within my grasp . . . I was like the Arabian who had been buried with the dead, and found a passage to life aided only by one glimmering and seemingly ineffectual light( (31). It is only when Victor(s madness yields the idea of reanimating a corpse from stitched together body parts that he becomes wholly monstrous because the idea itself is monstrous, a wild deviation from normal or acceptable behavior. He is going to play God by creating human life, and in our time as well as Mary Shelley(s, such a man would be seen as a monster.
Yet, Victor is in conflict over his own perverse idea. Even as collecting body parts excites him, he fears he is losing his humanity, without which of course he would be a monster: (Who shall conceive th...