SOURCE: Adams, Carol J. “Frankenstein's Vegetarian Monster.” In The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, pp. 108-119. New York: Continuum, 1993.

In the following essay, Adams examines Mary Shelley's participation in the Romantic vegetarian movement and the irony that her fictional monster, assembled from parts obtained from the graveyard and the slaughterhouse, was himself a vegetarian.

Is it so heinous an offence against society, to respect in other animals that principal of life which they have received, no less than man himself, at the hand of Nature? O, mother of every living thing! O, thou eternal fountain of beneficence; shall I then be persecuted as a monster, for having listened to thy sacred voice?

—John Oswald, The Cry of Nature, 1791

Frankenstein's Monster was a vegetarian. This chapter, in analyzing the meaning of the diet adopted by a Creature composed of dismembered parts, will demonstrate the benefits of...