배려의 윤리와 정의의 윤리: 메리 셸리의 『프랑켄슈타인』

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to interpret Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in terms of two binarily opposed ethics, ethics of justice and ethics of care, which Carol Gilligan formulated in her In a Different Voice. Characters like Victor and Walton, representing ethics of justice, place primary value of life on heroic and lonely achievement while Alphonso and Elizabeth embody ethics of care, striving to build the feeling of solidarity on the basis of community. What is striking about Frankenstein is the way Mary Shelley presents the ethics of justice as the cause of monstrosity. Victor's creature, who would have been noble and virtuous if properly taken care of, was abandonded and transformed into a monster. Of course, it should be taken into consideration that he did not intend to create a monster. But the monster is the unintended consequence of the absence of care in his ethical terrain. The ethics of justice, if pushed into the extreme, begins to untie all the knots of family union and communal solidarity, eventually turning human subjects like Victor into a lonely and isolated individual. Mary Shelly untiringly emphasizes over and over again that such a lonely and isolated individual is a monster: Victor at the degree zero of communal care was a monster himself even before he created his unwonted child "monster": his ugly creature is the manifestation of his ugly ethics. Then Mary Shelley's Frankenstein should be read as an ethical work of literature seeking to answer the question "What is a moral monster?"