Learning language incited great thoughts in him but did not satisfy his longing for companionship. His insights and physical existence were kept to himself. Expressing his intuitions and yearnings in the context of acceptance was needed to allow the "godlike" science to dissolve his anguish. Huddled in the cold outside of community, the Creature's newly acquired gift of knowledge served only to deepen his sorrow.

In the ice-cave of Mount Blanc, Victor Frankenstein is compelled to admit that the Monster's "tale and feelings, proved him to be a creature of fine sensation." Relief, however, would only come through relationships. Could the Creature risk rejection? Life at the margin had brought out what was potentially virtuous within him. Would it gain him acceptance?

Neither sensitivity, intelligence nor his pathetic longing for community would overcome human revulsion toward the marred creature.

Had his passionate qualities convinced Victor Frankenstein or the De Lacey family to validate him, Mary Shelley's tale would be a romantic comedy, resembling Mel Brook's modern parody Young Frankenstein (1974). As it stands, the story is a cataclysmic horror tale of compulsion, murder and revenge.

Victor's cruel phrase, "There can be no community between you and me; we are enemies" not only unveils animus toward his progeny but speaks of humanity's collective rejection. The phrase easily translates into "you are outside of human community, we want no part of you." But why? The origins of the Monster, born of the lust of his creator's overreaching schemes, have implied to some interpreters that there is an intrinsic reason for humanity's rejection of him. Physically, he consisted of a tangled mass of dead body parts stitched together to become what nature would never have produced. This quality is labelled by horror philosopher Noel Carrol as "ontological impropriety." The perennial taboo of not blending categories between living and dead, animate and inanimate sets an absolute boundary between the dead and the living. This boundary has been overstepped by Victor Frankenstein; the Monster is the consequence of transgressing nature. From the Monster's perspective this explanation is capricious and unjust: "You are what you are for reasons beyond yourself. You are damned by the human race for it."

Justifying the inhumane treatment of the Monster on physical grounds might have been comprehensible in Mary Shelley's time. Today, when living individuals have the transplanted kidneys, lungs and hearts of the departed sustaining them, this position is nonsensical. Scientifically, we have obscured the boundary between the living and dead; humans have found it to be a boon not a curse. If the Monster is to be found wanting, it can not be on the basis of physiognomy but on a more crucial criterion. A patient combining the parts of other humans or other living beings is no longer considered a monster.

Perhaps it is not Frankenstein's Monster but our species that is incapable of relationship. The problem may be humanity's inability to overcome insularity. Our species is seduced by sameness whether racial, religious, or economic. The Monster is not only dissimilar but is beyond categorization, parent-less, racially indistinct, and vocationless. Without the ability to link him to anything familiar, those who met the Creature relied on their senses. His physical loathsomeness caricatured humanity. Even so, unknown to those with mere surface sight, the Monster possessed potentials for deep-rooted spiritual and intellectual values. They saw a parody of human nature, not latent humanity.

There was one transitory exception to this stubborn rule, the blind Father De Lacey. The Monster realized his chance for friendship relied more on hearing than sight. Over the months, he observed the elderly De Lacey and found him full of charity, character and the ability to listen. The old man's blindness would surely overcome human prejudice against physical ugliness. Initially the Creature was correct. De Lacey commiserated with the Monster and graciously offered him help and friendship. The elderly gentleman concluded that his visitor was an honest person in a dire situation of friendlessness. Trust was short-lived, however, owing to the reaction of the old man's sighted family who upon seeing the Monster desperately clinging to their father deemed him a fiendish threat. The prejudice of sight prevailed. Upon the heels of promised friendship, the Creature found himself driven out of the society of the cottagers. Alienation produced rageful violence.

From now on rage carved a swath of misery through the lives of those in the path of the Monster. Anger blinded the wretch morally, leading him to criminality. He plotted to abduct a child whom he imagined was not perverted by human prejudice. Could he train a child to love him? When the child showed his repulsion and declared himself William Frankenstein, younger brother of Victor, the enraged Creature strangled him. After the murder, he planted death- dealing evidence on a sleeping servant girl whom he ogled in an abandoned barn. She was wrongly accused and hung for the murder of William. He hated her simply because he suspected she might be sexually revolted by him. Next the Creature strangled Henry Clerval who knew nothing of his monstrous existence. Henry's sentiments had little in common with those of Victor Frankenstein; his only crime was friendship with the Creature's creator. Lastly, the fiend exulted in a cardinal scene of malignity where he left Elizabeth Frankenstein limp and dead on her bridal bed.

Yet when she died! - nay, then I was not miserable. I had cast off all feeling, subdued all anguish, to riot in excess of my despair. Evil henceforth became my good.

What is a creature of such purported sensitivity doing gloating over the corpses of his murdered victims? It is a scene not unlike Henry Fuseli's horror painting of a demon straddled obscenely over a ravished woman. Little sensitivity revealed there! What is Victor Frankenstein, the benefactor of society, doing first abandoning and then hating his creature? These questions can not be separated since they both involve the question of the will versus circumstantial fate.

The monster and the man have their own explanations for their actions. "I am malicious because I am miserable" the Creature moaned to his maker in the ice cave. Translated this may read: "I was treated badly, was rejected, and therefore I struck out in revenge."