Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) and his Creature (Rory Kinnear) in Showtime’s Penny Dreadful (2014)

“By revealing that difference is arbitrary and potentially free-floating, mutable rather than essential, the monster threatens to destroy not just individual members of a society, but the very cultural apparatus through which individuality is constituted and allowed. Because it is a body across which difference has been repeatedly written, the monster (like Frankenstein’s creature, that combination of odd somatic pieces stitched together from a community of cadavers) seeks out its author to demand its raison d’être – and to bear witness to the fact that it could have been constructed Otherwise” – Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

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