At the Limits of Inclusion: Rethinking Monstrosity in Shelley, Lessing, and Saadawi
At the Limits of Inclusion: Rethinking Monstrosity in Shelley, Lessing, and Saadawi

Summary/Abstract: This article examines monstrosity as a social product shaped by conformity rather than as an inherent or natural condition. Focusing on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), Doris Lessing’s Ben, in the World (2000), and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013), it investigates how social norms regulate recognition and determine who is accepted as human. The analysis shows that physical and behavioural difference, together with moral expectation, functions as a mechanism of exclusion. Through close reading, the article argues that these figures seek recognition by adopting human social and ethical codes, a process whose limits are exposed through a posthumanist lens. Their repeated rejection reveals how rigid regulatory systems interpret deviation as danger and produce ethical abandonment. By examining scientific ambition, alienation, and distorted justice, the article challenges classificatory frameworks that separate the human from the nonhuman and moral legitimacy from deviance, presenting monstrosity as a critical site where the limits of social inclusion become visible.

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