The Monster In Mary Shelley's The Shining

In the horror novel The Shining, by Stephen King, Jack Torrance and his son Danny stayed at The Overlook Hotel. The hotel was actually a haunted hospice, it drove Torrance insane the longer he stayed there and eventually it led to the creation of a psychopath. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the monster was originally a pure hearted creature who society corrupted. All monsters, not born because all people are born innocent, but created by society. People’s prejudices and expectations for them to develop into monsters create them. Specifically judgements based on the countenance of people damage their development.

In a time where the majority believed that humans were born with all their knowledge since birth, Jean-Jacques Rousseau went against

The weight of responsibility to nurture and teach a human being for the beginning of their lives should be understood from the start since in Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein created a completely new living being but fled shortly afterwards, leaving the creation alone without a guide to teach him. Rousseau believed reprimands were not to be used while raising a child “for he does not know what it is to do wrong” (265). Children can not be held accountable for their actions since they were not shown how to do anything the honorable and correct way, but only told. To teach a child to be a compassionate and wise person, parents and teachers must first demonstrate with

The first time he observed his own reflection he became “fully convinced that [he] was in reality the monster that [he] was, [he] was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification”(Shelley 201). He felt shocked at first but became bitter over how disgusting his creator made him until he had a mirror. The fact that his appearance mattered so much was made worse with his future encounters with humans. The only human that treated him with respect and understanding spoke to him because the man was blind. Today thousands of people of color were stopped in traffic-stops, especially the black population. Even in areas where they were not the majority they are stopped by police, in a “study—which gathered data voluntarily reported to the FBI from 2011–2012, tracked by race (excluding Latinos)— found that 70 departments from Connecticut to California arrest Blacks at a rate 10 times more than people of other races”(FBI Data: Racial Profiling is Real, Catalan). Even in the twenty first century people are discriminated by the color of their skin. The creature also experiences this bias out of superficial reasoning, which became the main catalyst in the creation of the monster. The only solace the monster had with a human was with a blind man since he could never see his hideous face so he could not be frightened by him unlike his family