“Monster’s are not born, but made.” with Jean-Baptiste Grenouille from Perfume.
Updated: Jan 3
I am a lover of literature, especially when it involves ambiguous morals and characters who have them. Of course, like anyone else I love a good redemption arc but sometimes it is nice to have a character that honestly doesn’t regret or feel bad about what they are doing or have done. We all have a dark side inside of us and from time to time it needs to be satisfied with a nice evil character. However, because of this, I end up in the “Are monster born or made” and “Is evil born or made” discussion all the time. It’s a question that society still can’t agree fully on, because yes, a baby is innocent, but would you save a baby that was going to become a mass murderer in the future? Say I don’t know, Stalin? Or maybe Jean-Baptiste Grenouille? Would you? I would and let me explain why in this essay.
No one and I do mean no one is born a monster or evil. You can put anyone in front of me and I will tell you that at the moment of their birth they were not in any way evil or bad or insane or monsters. Why? Because we are the product of our DNA, choices, contexts, and history. All of those come into effect to create the people we become and keep changing throughout our entire lives. I mean who could have predicted that an artist that was rejected from his dream school would go on to become the organizer of one of the greatest mass genocides in modern history? No one, that’s because Adolf Hitler didn’t become the monster he would become until years after that event, but the seed was planted that day and then he helps grow that seed, but the seed wouldn’t have grown if the soil wasn’t made for it, which means he already had prejudice or hate or frustration that borderline into xenophobia. But what if Hitler had been accepted into the art school he wanted? What if he hadn’t already had prejudice or hate or frustration? What if, What If… Then maybe Adolf Hitler wouldn’t have become the organizer of one of the greatest mass genocides in modern history.
Let’s take another example in the form of Jean Baptiste Grenouille. Grenouille not only sees himself apart from humans because of his lack of odour but also superior because of his great nose, that however isn’t everything. From the moment of his birth people have rejected him, his mother wanted him to die the moment he was born like the rest of his siblings. The many wet-nurses accused him of being greedy and the devil-spawn. Father Terrier found the fact he can smell almost anything so strange and different he couldn’t stand being near him for long, afraid of being seen for who he was inside. Madame Gaillard did not in any way care for him and sold him when he became a possible danger to her money. His final caretaker in childhood, Grimal only used him for labour and sold him as well. Not once in his entire childhood, the most important developing years of a child did anyone show a single shred of affection, caring, love, appreciation, or even a smile in Grenouille’s direction. This taught him to do the same, he never in his life showed care for another human being, because it was never shown to him, so he simply never learned to care. He survived all on his own through everything so assumed everyone had to do the same. That the world was a cruel place populated by horrible people.
You can’t show something that is never taught to you. You can’t love when you have never felt it or seen it, you can’t care when no one has ever cared about you. Children learn to do what they see. Madame Gaillard never cared about anyone or anything other than having enough money for a private death, she showed Grenouille that he needed to have the drive, determination, and focused to go for what you want and never stop, but she never taught him morals or to care. Grimal educated Grenouille in hard work and perseverance, that if you work on something hard enough you will eventually gain something of it, to never care how disgusting the work was.
Grenouille, therefore, inherited drive, focus, callousness, determination, and a resolve to go for what he wanted, but not love, compaction, ethics, moral, wrong from right… He simply did not care, like his primary caretakers hadn’t. And he used this to become a perfumer and later to recreate the perfect scent he had found in some girls.
The second thing that created a monster in Grenouille in his context was the fact he was set apart from everybody else. Everyone he met found him to be somehow strange, eerie, and therefore not good. He explains later that this was because of his lack of scent but it doesn’t change the fact that he was a pariah. No one wanted to be his friend or even touch him. This causes him to think of himself as somehow apart from the rest of humanity, he wasn’t really one of them because of his lack of odour. At first, this only made him cold towards everyone else, callous with their lives, but afterward, he starts being disgusted by them and to think himself superior, better.
Now, some might say: “But he was a psychopath, not everyone has a nice life and they don’t all grown up to be a murderer.” Very true. But Grenouille wasn’t just his history and context. In his mind, he was his gift and the most precious thing in the world was the scent.
It was after all the only thing he had ever truly had or enjoyed, it was his hobby and addiction, his obsession. To him nothing in the world was more important than a scent, a smell was all that mattered. Humans were just a means to an end for a smell. When he decided he needed to capture all smells he decided to become a perfumer, but that didn’t satisfy him, he needed to record more scents, which eventually lead him to murder for someone’s scent. Because to him, those girls were nothing more than carriers of something precious and good, their scent.
Now that covers history and context but what about DNA and choices.
For his DNA, who knows who his father was, and his mother was a woman who has let several of her infant children die and would have let Grenouille die if he hadn’t cried. He probably didn’t inherit anything good from that.
Furthermore, his choices truly do make him into a murderer. Grenouille doesn’t reflect on it, but you know he makes the choice to murder and keep murdering because he needs to possess all the smells he can. He chooses and kept choosing murder. For him, there was simply no other way to get what he wanted and needed, and it doesn’t bother him to murder so he did it. Simple as that.
Grenouille wasn’t born a murderer any more than anyone, he was simply the final portrait of his DNA, choices, context, and history.
If Grenouille had been satisfied with being a perfumer maybe he would never have killed any more girls, if he hadn’t gotten distracted with the idea of not having to smell any more humans and spend seven years in isolation thinking only of smell and of himself as grandiose then maybe he wouldn’t murder any more girls, maybe he would have just been a perfumer. Perhaps if his mother had cared or loved him if one of his many wet-nurses had taken a shine to him, showed him any kind of affection or Madame Gaillard had cared for him in any way, if, if, if, if. Grenouille could have been anyone or anything, but he became a murderer.
We are the final products only at the moment of our deaths, we keep changing and growing all of our lives. Grenouille was exactly the same. When he was born, he wasn’t a murderer, he was just a baby that needed to be cared for just like everyone. Like every other baby ever.
Don’t think I am in any way excusing his behaviour or the behaviour of other monstrous people over the years, including Hitler, I am simply giving my point of view on the debate of: “Are monsters born or made?”. My personal opinion is that they are made, that everyone is capable of doing monstrous things, and that everyone is capable of doing good. A baby is neither good nor evil, they are innocent.
We are victims of our circumstance and we are at the same time the makers of our own destiny because we decide how to act within the choices we are given, and everyone has a choice.
Originally published at https://thebookomens.wixsite.com on October 3, 2020.
