Moral Dyslexia

“Mary Shelley, at this point in our narrative, did not understand all this, but by the time she had finished writing Frankenstein she did not see things Shelley’s way, either. She had by that time experienced the sadistic consequences of her sexual profligacy. Frankenstein was her attempt to make sense out of the conflict between the Enlightenment and the classical, Christian moral order. The calamities described in horror fiction are really repressed moral truths. Horror is morality written backwards; it is the moral order viewed through the wrong end of the telescope ” (E. Michael Jones, Monsters from the Id, p. 59).