'In 'Frankenstein' the Monster is not a villain, but a victim.' Discuss.

Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' (1818) deals with the transgression of bodily and scientific limitations, and portrays the disastrous consequences of doing so. The Monster is, both within the world of the novel, and the reader, a contentious character in terms of his status as either villain or victim. While Victor's Monster may at first appear to be an archetypal villain, it can be argued that the character's apparently monstrous nature is merely the consequence of his own transgressive creation. The Monster, by nature, is liminal, he is made up of human parts, but his conception is man-made and artificial, and as such he is never accepted by society. The character's own understanding of this grows as he is repeatedly rejected and victimised even by those he seeks to help, such as the DeLaceys. He himself describes his isolation, crying: 'God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage him, but I am solitary and abhorred.' Here, Shelley addresses the Monster's plight, evoking both sympathy and disgust in the reader through his acceptance that he is 'filthy' and 'abhorred', and through this interplay between sympathy and disdain, Shelley emphasises the Monster's mutant status. Bennett and Royle comment that the term ''Mutant', from the Latin for 'change', is essentially bound up with inessentiality, with mutability, and with otherness'. It is the Monster's status as inherently 'other' which causes even his most selfless actions to be interpreted as violent, and it is in turn this victimisation which causes him to ultimately become just as monstrous as society perceives him to be.