I am not mad
Mary Shelley's concentration on
this issue brings the reader to
an awareness that, where an entire culture refuses to believe in
the truth of the aberrant, it may appear mad even when it is not
technically so. Or, as the British psychoanalyst of the 1970s,
R. D. Laing, tried to argue, it is possible to believe that those
we call mad are merely reacting sanely to the inherently mad
stresses forced upon them by modern civilization. It is those
who have no awareness of them who truly constitute the mad. In
this case the public position of those who seem to value Victor's
intellectual integrity but dismiss his self-accusations, first
Mr. Kirwin and then his own father, allows us to read them as
representatives of a reigning cultural establishment that,
however well-meaning it may be, may at the same time appear willfully
blind.
