ABSTRACT
Instead of threatening, I am content to reason with you. I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me? . . . Shall I respect man when he condemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness, and instead of injury I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance . . . Yet mine shall not be the submission of abject slavery. I will revenge my injuries; if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear . . . I intended to reason. This passion is detrimental to me, for you do not reflect that YOU are the cause of its excess. If any being felt emotions of benevolence towards me, I should return them a hundred and a hundredfold; for that one creature’s sake I would make peace with the whole kind! . . . I must not be trifled with, and I demand an answer. If I have no ties and no affections, hatred and vice must be my portion; the love of another will destroy the cause of my crimes, and I shall become a thing of whose existence everyone will be ignorant. My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor, and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being and become linked to the chain of existence and events from which I am now excluded. (Shelley, 1994 [1818], pp. 182-183)
Since I couldn’t get out of my own skin . . . I just, I wanted to get away from me, like. So, since I couldn’t get out of my own skin, I’d drown myself in it, you know? Like, just get wasted. Get away from it. Get away from the pain, all the aggravation, and away from myself, basically. I just wanted to be alone, but, I don’t know, like. You know how
you just want to be by yourself sometimes, but even though you’re there, you’re still not by yourself, you’re just like . . . I don’t know, I just, how I felt back then, I think . . . I don’t want to have that, that name, that I’m a criminal. Cause I’m not a bad person. I’ve done bad things. I made bad choices. I’m not a bad person. I was like, I’m a person that’s standing on her two feet, that made it through so I’m, I’m stronger. (“Meg,” 2006, in an interview with the author)
Frankenstein’s creation, the first and fictional voice above, and Meg, 19 years old, the second and very real voice, each with a vivid awareness and tragic history of fear and violence, reveal the anguish of the exiled Other, expressions by the punished Other of yearnings for connection. Each struggles with profound conflicts between those yearnings and sorrowful awareness of rejection and detachment. Each has committed acts of violence and has lived a tormented life of approach and avoidance of human relationships. Both have incisive awareness of their own realities. Both have told their stories; each provides a clear, comprehensible narrative with names, facts, confessions, and orientation to time and place, as well as descriptions of feelings, insights, and self-observations and interpretations. Each is, objectively, a criminal. Each tells a story that, analyzed and interpreted within theoretical frameworks of feminism and psychoanalysis, provides refined understanding of their intolerable behaviors, and points toward reconsideration of conceptions of crime and justice, individual and collective.
