Frankenstein Prison Experiment

What makes a villain? While some claim a villain is born—that something inherently evil rests within his nature—Sociology provides a frightening alternative: nearly every one of us can be nurtured into villainy. Marry Shelley’s fictional depiction of Frankenstein’s creature supports this view of socially nurtured villainy as effortlessly as the Stanford Prison Experiment, which epitomizes the power of social roles—“a typified response to a typified expectation” (Berger)—and social norms—unwritten rules on how to act in a given situation that are generally reinforced through interpersonal rather than legal means—to bring normal people to commit villainous acts. Frankenstein’s creature learns the norms and roles relating to friendship and family, but when humans deny him the roles of “friend” and “companion,” they force him into that of the villain. His role drags the creature through evil acts with its own momentum, just as the roles of the guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment and the scandal at Abu Ghraib did. Anyone becomes a villain when others force him into that role by treating him as one.

Frankenstein’s creature feels the loneliness that drives him throughout Shelley’s novel and into villainy only after learning that he should feel lonely because humans are social creatures, but he has no companions. He tells Victor, his creator, “When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?” (Shelley 140). The creature’s nature, conception, and existence defy the norms that define family relationships—such as a mother’s role in nurturing her child—because he has none. He realizes that breaking those norms makes one different and socially unaccepted, a “monster.” Learning he should have family even though he never has teaches the creature to feel lonely. Since the creature learns by observing the De Laceys and reading books like Paradise Lost, the only way he learns about himself is through comparison. He finds that “Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and detested” (Shelley 154). That even the devil has companions strengthens the creature’s belief that everyone should. It also highlights his loneliness with even greater force. The creature learns to compare himself to humans and realizes he is lonely because they live socially while he remains solitary.

After learning that he departs from social norms, the creature desires a chance to follow them. He learns that companionship, which complies with the norms he learns, brings happiness when Safie arrives at the cottage. Frankenstein’s creature sees Felix’s face express “a degree of ecstatic joy, of which I could hardly have believed it capable. . .” (Shelley 136). The creature applies this concept to himself and decides that all he needs to be happy is a link to someone else. He calls the De Laceys his “protectors” and forms an imaginary link between the family and him. When they leave their cottage to escape him, they “had broken the only link that held me to the world. For the first time the feelings of revenge and hatred filled my bosom. . .” (Shelley 164). The people he loves and trusts deny him happiness in friendship, and the creature realizes he is completely alone. He cannot delude himself into thinking something connects them any more. The creature cannot follow the social norms that define the role of “friend” because even his cottagers will not let him.

Every human the creature meets rejects his friendship, forcing him into a social role he never desires: the villain. After he saves a young girl’s life, the man with her shoots the creature out of fear, so “the feelings of kindness and gentleness, which I the creature had entertained but a few moments before, gave place to hellish rage and gnashing of teeth. Inflamed by pain, I vowed eternal hatred and vengeance to all mankind” (Shelley 168). The man denies Frankenstein’s creature the chance to take on the role of the hero after saving the girl by treating him as a villain instead. Every other role is socially denied him because people only treat him as a monster, so that is what the creature becomes: a monster and a villain. As Peter L. Berger says: “We become that as which we are addressed.”

Once Frankenstein’s creature steps into the role of the villain, it drives him more forcefully than his own feelings because he must follow the norms of the only role anyone will let him fill. After Victor’s death, the creature reflects that “I was the slave, not the master of an impulse, which I detested, yet could not disobey” (Shelley 272). A role and the norms applying to that role are socially created and socially defined, so they are stronger than just one person because they’re created and upheld by many. The creature cannot stop causing Victor misery and being a villain because he had already defined himself as such. He even changes his view of the world to match his villainous role: “Evil thenceforth became my good” (Shelley 272). He becomes a villain and a monster because humans treat him like he is. He becomes evil because by definition, a villain is evil. The creature’s role propels him forward with its own momentum.

In 1971 Philip Zimbardo conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment. He randomly assigned normal college males the role of either prisoner or guard in a simulated prison environment that transformed everyone involved into whatever role they played. A few days into the experiment, Zimbardo invited a chaplain to speak with the prisoners and “half the prisoners introduced themselves by number rather than name” (Stanford Prison Experiment Slide Show). Just like Frankenstein’s creature becomes what people label him as, these students became their numbers and even thought of themselves as those numbers rather than by their actual names. They felt powerless to keep their names because the intense situation defined them as numbers. Zimbardo also asked Christina Maslach to interview the prisoners and guards. Her outrage at the intense abuse forced on the boys who became prisoners shocked Zimbardo out of his role as superintendent and made him realize the experiment must end. The power given to his experiment through the social norms and role it created was so potent that “out of 50 or more outsiders who had seen our prison, she was the only one who ever questioned its morality” (Stanford Prison Experiment Slide Show). Similarly, it takes Victor’s death to shock the creature out of his villainous role. The role assigned to the creature, the students, and even Zimbardo, the experimenter, takes over and only releases them when something shocks them out of their role.

The Stanford Prison Experiment created its villains before Maslach convinced Zimbardo to end it though. Just after the prisoners rebelled against the guards, forcing them to assert their authority for the first time, Zimbardo noticed a change in the guards’ thinking: “it was no longer just an experiment, no longer a simple simulation. Instead, the guards saw the prisoners as troublemakers who were out to get them, who might really cause them some harm.” They stepped into their roles so completely that it changed the way they saw the other participants in the experiment. Frankenstein’s creature changes in the same way when “evil becomes his good.” Frankenstein murders Victor’s loved ones to bring him misery; the guards harassed the prisoners with ever-increasing brutality and sadism. Seeing and thinking through the lens of the social roles the guards or the creature assume makes them commit evil acts.

While a thirty-year-old experiment may seem out of date, the more recent and extremely real events at Abu Ghraib in 2003 prove that it definitely is not. American soldiers abused, sexually humiliated, and tortured Iraqi prisoners. Despite the “bad apple” theory, they were normal people driven into villainy by a situation beyond their control. This scandal from only four years ago bears so many correlations with the experiment from three decades ago that only the most stubborn can deny its relevance. Some are obvious: both involve prisons; both dehumanize the prisoners; both give the guards power over those prisoners. Others are slightly less so: both have unclear norms; both develop into abuse because no one knows their boundaries; both involve social forces that drive individuals to horrible extremes. The lessons of the Stanford Prison Experiment are no less relevant today than in 1971 or in Shelley’s world of Frankenstein and his creature.

We are not innately evil. Frankenstein’s creature is not innately evil. The prison guards, real and fake, are not innately evil. We are not born villains. The invisible forces of social norms and roles influence us with enough strength to make normal, and even good, people act villainous because we are social creatures. We live in society; we depend on it; and we let it shape us so we can fit into it. The creature could not do this because his form separated him from humans, but he still let social forces drive him to become what men saw him as. The guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment never even thought about norms; their roles carried them through it without conscious thought and they only realized it afterwards. The guards at Abu Ghraib endured something similar, but it was real and had even greater and realer consequences. We are not born villains, but we can each become one.

Bibliography

Berger, Peter L. Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective. New York: Anchor Books, 1963.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: Pocket Books, 2004.

Stanford Prison Experiment Slide Show. 10 Nov. 2007.