- "A Kind of Insanity in My Spirits":Frankenstein, Childhood, and Criminal Intent
"That is also my victim!" the creature exclaims upon viewing Victor Frankenstein's dead body at the end of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). "[I]n his murder my crimes are consummated; the miserable series of my being is wound to its close! Oh, Frankenstein! generous and self-devoted being!" the creature cries, "what does it avail that I now ask thee to pardon me?"1 In his anguished confession, the creature assumes full responsibility for Victor's death, magnifying his parent's virtues and villifying his own character. The creature likewise accepts responsibility for killing Victor's brother, friend, and wife. "[I]t is true that I am a wretch," he declares. "I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept, and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing" (190). Overcome with guilt, the impulsive and remorseful creature vows to "seek the most northern extremity of the globe" and to "consume to ashes" his "miserable frame" (190). In the creature's tortured words, as in his determination to end his life, Shelley depicts the despair of a young, repentant offender.
The question of criminal responsibility, however, is more complicated than the creature suggests. Although he blames himself for the murders, the novel asks readers to reach a different verdict. The treatment of children's criminal capacity underwent an important shift over the course of the eighteenth century. In the sixteenth [End Page 53] and early seventeenth centuries, responsibility for crimes depended primarily on causation. Jurists focused less on whether a person meant to commit an act and more on whether an individual actually committed it. English law thus made little distinction between children and adults; children ages eight years and older were routinely punished for felonies including murder.2 In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, criminal responsibility became linked to new ideas about human understanding. In their treatises, Sir Matthew Hale and Sir William Blackstone maintained that individuals could not be guilty of crimes unless they fully understood and intended the consequences of their actions. By the middle of the nineteenth century, jurists embraced this idea, effectively raising the age of capacity in capital cases to fourteen.3 The shift in the treatment of young offenders and the meaning of criminal intent was part of a broader movement to reform the penal system. Rejecting the view that humans were inherently and immutably evil, reformers sought to replace retributive punishments with those grounded in rehabilitation.4 Published in the midst of these changes, Frankenstein takes up questions about criminal responsibility that preoccupied thinkers in the Romantic era and that remain of concern to this day.
Critics have read Frankenstein as a meditation on the vexed relationship between parents and children as well as the failures of the penal system, but they have largely overlooked the implications of childhood for criminal justice.5 Most critics thus conclude that the creature is guilty of murder.6 Jonathan H. Grossman helpfully highlights Shelley's interest in the legal status of children, bringing Percy Bysshe Shelley's custody dispute to bear on the text. Grossman's emphasis on matters of bastardy and guardianship, though, leads him to downplay the criminal justice system's role in the novel. In Grossman's view, "[t]he essential problem with Frankenstein and the human creature's relationship is not actually that the human creature is monstrous—or that Frankenstein's treatment of him is monstrous"; rather, Grossman contends, the problem is the law's failure to recognize Victor and the creature's relationship as legitimate.7 Sandra Macpherson, by contrast, argues that "the question of relationship is one and the same as the question of blame."8 In her reading, the novel "confirms and helps to articulate the importance of eighteenth-century innovations in strict liability to products liability."9 According to Macpherson, in holding Victor strictly liable for all the injuries stemming from the unwieldy machine he creates, Shelley affirms a model of justice in which intentions are irrelevant to responsibility...