Sept 5, Frankenstein

Frankenstein. Ah yes.
I remember this book. I wanted to have my thesis for this paper be "Mary Shelley is extremely" ugly. I eventually chickened out on this thesis because of Talissa's authoritarian view on what "english" papers should "be."

Anyway, the basic idea was that Mary Shelley was basically using the Monster as a projection of herself. She gives the Monster a lot of sympathy through the plotline--it's this charming creature that just so happens to be hideously ugly the the point that it scares off everyone it sees. Even when it is doing heroic deeds like rescuing a child from a river it still is scorned by all of humankind because of it's disgusting face--of course this situation was cleverly crafted by Shelley. She thinks of herself as extremely heroic and simply the butt-end of a cynical and superficial society. Her pitying tone in which the mosnter constantly decries the vices of the evil society that scorns it based on its appearances is what initially tipped me off.

But then i did some research on wikipedia and found that Mary Shelley was constantly being abandoned--her mother died when she was little and then her nanny left because she was having sex with some dude. And then percy shelley, her husband was a total asshole and kept wanting to sleep with other women. So it was an ongoing issue.

Finally, I used google image to find a picture of her, and sure enough, she was ugly. I mean, she wasn't THAT ugly... but it was a PAINTING. Meaning that whoever painted it obviously made her much better looking than she actually was. Plus i was trying to prove that she was ugly, and this fit my thesis.