where an entire culture refuses to believe in the truth of the aberrant, it may appear
mad even when it is not technically so. Or, as the British psychoanalyst of the 1970s,
R. D. Laing, tried to argue, it is possible to believe that those we call mad are
merely reacting sanely to the inherently mad stresses forced upon them by modern civilization.
It is those who have no awareness of them who truly constitute the mad. In this case
the public position of those who seem to value Victor's intellectual integrity but
dismiss his self-accusations, first Mr. Kirwin and then his own father, allows us
to read them as representatives of a reigning cultural establishment that, however
well-meaning it may be, may at the same time appear willfully blind.