Cruelty Seeds Hate

Cruelty seeds hate

“The hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of hate. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.” ― Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories.

In Frankenstein, Mary Shelly shows human cruelty and violence in the treatment that the Creature receives from the society and its own creator. This cruelty has its origins in fear and the appearance of the Creature that the same Victor describes as “so horrible that I cannot even look at it without disgust”(Mary Shelly, 1818). With this, Mary Shelly shows a hard critic to society’s false emphasis on appearance and outside beauty.

The beauty conceptuality of the time in which Mary Shelly portraits her novel has a great influence in the Greek perfectionism. Beauty was, at the time, all about proportions, soft and delicate features. This beauty stereotype also included a strong racism against any physical characteristic that was foreign from European culture. The resemblance to angelic figures and Roman and Greek statues were commonly the most attractive beauty standards that were present. (Andreoni, James & Petrie, Ragan. 2006)

In the novel of Frankenstein, it is showed that it is this beauty stereotypes and fear the ones that make society treat with cruelty to the Creature. This statement is perfectly shown in the narration of the Creature and his encounter with the De Lacey family. After many months of learning from them and developing a special affection to the family, the Creature decides to meet them in person. At first, he is received very kindly by the old man De Lacey, who is blind. After this warm welcome and treatment the Creature feels accepted, it is the first and only time that someone treated him as an equal and not as a monster. But this situation is changed when the rest of the family arrives and sees him, disgusted and frightened by his appearance, they hit him and scream to him showing no mercy.

Having as a trigger this last event and as his intelligence grows, he becomes self-conscious and realizes that he will never fit in with humanity. In comparing himself to them, the Creature feels himself to be a monster. He is shocked by his own reflection, and is nearly unable to accept it as his own.

It is also seen in the narration of the Creature the innocence and tender of a new living thing, he wasn’t “created” bad at all. Fear and loneliness where his companions in the early stage of his life and without any knowledge that his appearance disgusted others. It was not until his first encounter with society that he receives the worst kind of treatment, cruelty and

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