“인간적이지 않은” 부성: 프랑켄슈타인의 기형 괴물과 테라토포비아

Abstract

Out of all the allegorical meanings attached to the monster in Frankenstein, this paper attends to his being a “child,” a laboratory-assembled one at that, abandoned by his creator and father for his physical deformities. As Frankenstein’s disownment of this allegorical child is prompted by his abhorrence of the child’s perceived visual image, it stands comparison with the manner in which the blind father of the De Lacey household readily opens himself up to this monstrous stranger, though it is short-lived, sabotaged by his children with normal vision. The monster construes the blind patriarch's sympathetic understanding of his need for kindness and protection as a beacon of “humanity.” The contrast between the “humanity” of such blind hospitality and the consequential inhumanity of the other visually judgmental laboratory-father furnishes this paper a key leitmotif underlying its characterization of Frankenstein’s neglectful fatherhood “that can't be human.” While a popular scholarly focus in the discussion of the novel has been the ambiguous humanity of its iconic monster, this paper veers to the inhumanity of his human creator and father, whose normal sight only serves to handicap his rational humanity as it assists in a superficial judgment on the existential worth of his creature and for the worse, his demonization. The paper attempts to gauge the inhumanity of a human father, a rational scientist of Enlightenment whose bioethical failure stems from the irrational superficiality of basing his judgment on the perception of eyes. In its ending note, the paper adds that Frankenstein’s exclusionist bioethics against the “deformed” and “ugly” creature of his making puts Shelley’s novel in resonance with our contemporary concerns about abandoned children, particularly those with physical differences.