Love

This hit me during today's class discussion...

Victor grew up in a family full of love and happiness except for the death of his mother. But throughout his childhood, his parents were loving and he had beautiful people all around him.
It seems to me that Victor's family and friends love Victor more than Victor loves them. After all, he does just kind of disappear after Justine's execution and never really wrote when he was in Ingolstad. I think Victor has taken it for granted.

On the other hand...
The Monster "grew up," as in lived the early stages of his life, without a family and without anyone to love and support. As a result, he spends his life trying to find love and affection. Not to mention that he's a creature "glowing with love and humanity." Yet he is denied love especially from the one who has received an abundance of it (Victor).

In short, I find it interesting how Victor grew up in love and doesn't seem to care much for it while the monster grew up without it and seeks it with his life yet Victor has the power to give the monster some lovin'.

-Samuel Kim

Hideous?

Shelley begins with Elizabeth’s beauty being the predominant reason behind her adoption and thus sets the emphasis on physical beauty that Victor later preoccupies himself with. The manner in which his mother “presented Elizabeth as her promised gift” (37) and how Victor comes to perceive Elizabeth as a “possession of [his] own” (37) not only objectifies her, but seems to parallel his future expectations of his creation. However, rather than become the owner and creator of man, Victor seeks more. From that obsession of perfect beauty to the mentioning of his only friend's obsession with the glorified heroes of the past and his desire to “render man invulnerable” (42), it’s almost as if Victor, as a modern Prometheus, seeks to go further and give life to what should have been a god.

Victor continues on p. 48 that he “was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth." This only further expands on his desires to go beyond what is human. If "at last my work be imperfect" (54), victor deems it a failure. Or, in other words, his only success would require that he create "a human being in perfection" (56). Though what he’s failed to neglect is that humans are imperfect and thus to create a hybrid god in the image of man is synonomous as creating imperfection. Since this is essentially idealism, the creation of this perfect, godly being is impossible. His expectations are that by giving life to the hybrid corpse, he would be able to renew the beautiful, yet dead, features to full health. Yet all he manages to create is an animated corpse, and thus the source of his horror. He discovers that though he has created life, that livelihood alone is insufficient to physically reverse the decay. His creation is imperfect and ungodly and thus a failure and deemed hideous.

-Kathy Cheng

Neglecting baby

To be frank, Frankenstein has been a bit of a letdown so far. Just as the good doctor fails to rear his monstrous offspring, so does Mary Shelley fail to nurture her narrative. There's never any tension, no sense of the horrific. Much like the creature, the text as a whole fails to exceed the sum of its parts. The book is divided into volumes, each with an ostensibly different "author": Mark Walton, Victor Frankenstein, and the creature. Of course, Shelley is the meta-author, but she doesn't do the best possible job of differentiating her narrators. Since I haven't yet read the creature's narration, I can't speak to it, but I found the voices of Walton and Frankenstein nearly interchangeable. Both struck me as glaringly one-dimensional. The only real difference was the degree of sentimentality. Where Walton's narrative is pretty forward-looking and only occasionally stoops to brooding on loneliness, Frankenstein's "story" seems more like the diary of an angsty adolescent. The young Victor only seems capable of feeling one emotion at a time; he's either rhapsodizing about the joys of his perfect family or bemoaning the horrors he has wrought. But things don't take too long to sour for Victor, and I found the constant lament pretty wearing after a few dozen pages.

While I can't defensibly say that the narrative fails, it certainly doesn't succeed as well as it could have. As a ghost story, it certainly leaves a lot to be desired—had I read the book in the dark, I would've have felt little more than disappointment at the moments of maximum terror. I get the sense that cinematic descriptions just aren't Mary's strong suit. Daunted by the task of describing the creature's genesis, she hurried Frankenstein's account of his creation from concept to completion. How else to explain the bafflingly thin treatment of Frankenstein's assembly and animation? I almost put the book down in disappointment after reading the anemic three-sentence account of Frankenstein's birth. I really hope things pick up in the second volume.

Goodnight!

is frankie a guy or a gal?

I keep wondering why, in the text, Frankenstein's monster is referred to as a male. If something was sewn together from different body parts, how could it be considered a male, or even a female? It's a "thing," right? Victor first described his creation as an "it," then in the next paragraph, "it" has a gender. Did Victor always want a son? Or does it have something to do with the stereotype that males are more evil than women? Now Frankenstein is a story about sexism! Kidding.

I was discussing Frankenstein with a friend from high school, and he mentioned that the "monster" is actually a "golem." According to Hebrew lore, a golem is a being of clay given life, like how Prometheus molded humans out of clay. So Frankenstein's "monster" is a mockery of life in a sense. As we were discussing in class, the monster can never be a human.

Btw, did anyone ever watch that one movie with Rob Shneider? He was sewn back together using animal parts. So he was able to run as fast as a horse, jump as high as a rabbit, and he was horny for a goat. We should watch that movie in class.

How long do these blogs have to be anyway? Peace be with you =]

The Stuff that Makes Feeny(...Feeny....Fee-hee-hee-heeny....) Cry

reading is sexy.

A Good Read...

addicted to reading and writing

Any of these names sound familiar? They should. Chances are you're affiliated with one of them. Actually, probably not since these are the Facebook (as if you didn’t know--the myspace for college and regrettably high school students) groups for literature, as in books not found in the grocery store. In reality, you're more likely to be part of the "Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Can't Read Good... And Want to Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too" group. In fact, not one of the aforementioned groups boasts more than 5,000 members, let alone a couple hundred. Looking at the first five pages of search results for "reading," the literary group in the lead is "Admit it, you cried at least once while reading Harry Potter 7." Total membership: 1763. Many would say Harry Potter doesn't count when it comes to true literature, but most everyone would say reading it is better than not reading at all. Statistics show that those who do read only read four books a year, on average. Why do most of us chuck reading the classics onto the backburner? Has television made us that lazy? At Berkeley, of all places, there’s even an “I Hate Reading” group.

What sparked my mini research project was the group “No, I haven't read that great literary classic--But I've seen the Wishbone!” Sadly, I have seen every Wishbone episode ever made, and I’m pretty sure there won’t be more since the original Jack Russell Terrier passed away some years ago (RIP, oh scruffy one). (Did anyone else collect the Cracker Jack holograms?) Additionally, the Facebook picture for the Wishbone group is Frankenstein, eh hem, I mean “Frankenbone.” Imagine that. "Frankenbone" has been viewed by tens of thousands of college-aged, WiFi-enabled individuals. However, it's doubtful many have attempted to absent-mindedly skim through Mary Shelley's original text. Evidently, it's cool to dress up a small canine in tri-cornered hats and buckled shoes, but God forbid you check the book out yourself. In any case, I still think reading is sexy. Marilyn must have believed it was so, as well. She did, of course, marry Arthur Miller.

And what would Mr. Feeny say to literature being slapped in the face? ...you bunch of poseurs.

FYI, the Wishbone group membership is up to 86,898 as of Wednesday, September 5, 2007, 9:45 PDT.

... 86,900 even by 10:04pm.

stuff

I’m only a little more than half-way through volume 2, but I noticed that while I was reading the “fiend’s” narration, it just didn’t sound believable to me. While I went through a couple more chapters, and learned that he was learning how to speak the language, it made a little more sense, but I still wasn’t that gullible. Does he have superhuman hearing, being able to listen in on conversations that far? It’s one thing to learn the names of objects, but how is he so grammatically smart?

It seems improbable that he could learn how to speak so abstractly in only a couple of years. What surprised me even more is that he also learned how to read and write! Is that even possible by just going off someone’s speech? Maybe I’m being too picky that this “fiend’s” narration is just not convincing. Granted, horror stories in general call for an open mind, but this fiend sounds way too intellectual to be possible. He even grasps concepts like “poverty”!

And if we look at it through the Theory Toolbox perspective, where Victor is the author and the creature is the text, does it mean that there are different ways to read the creature? For example, I assume Victor wanted his creature to have a different meaning than how he turned out. The villagers that he scared off would think that the fiend meant (danger to the village) something entirely different to them than what he means to Victor (something to be persecuted, a murderer, a living symbol of his mistakes, etc), or what he means to himself (perhaps someone trying to learn about the world?). Victor’s intended meaning of his text/creature came out completely different from how he wanted it to, so does fiend create his own meaning if he’s separated from his author?

- Amy Yu

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Victor started off living a very happy life. Having an abundance of resources and love within the union of his family. Just when he thought everything is going well, the unthinkable happens, some one perishes leaving him and his family to mourn and pieces of their heart to be torn out. Some people become distant from ones they love and internally suppress their true feelings. When you seclude yourself and have the mindset of an obssessive mad scientist, people will determine that the result of this kind of behavior is derived from a particular incident that occured during childhood. Experiencing a lost can make someone do drastic things. Maybe experiencing death can make a person want to save somebody's life or in Victors case create life. It is unsual that that Victor decided to use dead body parts to construct a human being. Then again it would be even more unsual if he killed live people, stole their body parts and then constructed a human or thing.

-Lashika Lott

The Beast and Victors Family

There was a topic that I mentioned at the end of last class which i think is really interesting. Does the monster that Victor created in some way resemble his family. Victors family is made up of so many random parts: his mother is a dead friends daughter and his sister a pretty girl that they picked out of a random family. Victor's monster is kind of the same way. The monster is made up of so many different parts comingfrom disection rooms or slaughter houses or even the graveyard. Im curious to whether vitir did this on purpose expecting it to work out just as well as his mixed part family. Or is this another way of foreshadowing that victors family isnt as perfect as what it seems to be.

In this weeks reading it really caught me off guard when we ran into the monster again yet this time he could speak and had learned key mearsures for surviving and seemed some what educated. After seeing the horror movies you have a very unintelligent monster whos main goal seems to be destruction yet this monster in my opinion is merely looking for companionship. Its odd to think something that looks this terrible might indeed have a kind heart

Ramblings inspired by Frankenstein

While reading, there was one thing that bothered me, which was when Frankenstein passed up the opportunity to absolve Justine of her crime. Though he does attempt to do so after she has been sentenced to death, I felt that his reasoning for not doing so prior to the trial was weak. Even if his story may come off as ridiculous, there is always that saying, “You never know until try.” Frankenstein just rationalized off the entire matter and presumed it would be futile, which I believe might also be contributing to his constant misery since his only defense of Justine was saying he believed in her innocence. In class, when we brought up the idea of Frankenstein being a negligent father figure or creator, it implied that he was obviously not mature or strong enough in some ways to face up to his mistakes. This again is shown in his poor decision to let Justine die a shameful death without even attempting to tell his story. In both cases, Frankenstein shied away from his problems instead of dealing with them head on, going so far as to physically run away from his native town to Chamounix.

Up to this point, Frankenstein has been portrayed as an individual who has lead a wonderful life, complete with a loving, if somewhat disturbingly perfect and unrealistic family. He has had ambition, and a thirst of knowledge that drove him to the top of his university, with his name being praised by all the professors. However, the creature seems to mark the turning point, where Frankenstein’s life begins to slowly unravel, and the utopia that was his life is revealed to be less than perfect. The creature highlights flaws of Frankenstein (such as his lack of responsibility) and has also plunged the quintessential happy family into realms of negative emotions they had seldom encountered before.

One thing I must say though, is that I was just a tad disappointed this novel did not turn out to be the outlandish science fiction novel I had always imagined it to be. Where’s the electricity, bolts, and green skin?!

Weds. writing stuff

It is interesting in chapters three, four, and five to see how Victor was so affected by his studies. At first, when the natural philosopher convinces Victor that his studies in alchemy were a sham, he was quite wary and unconvinced with the idea of a scientific education. But, soon after arriving at the University, a chemistry professor is able to convince Victor to resume work. He then buries himself in work, which separates and isolates him from everyone he once knew. This closely parallels the expectations of this university. As a chemist, I find it very easy to lose myself in my work. There is a certain addictive quality to scientific studies. The answer is always around the next corner and the hunt for knowledge is seemingly endless (that’s a good thing). But by burying myself in the work, I, much like Victor, begin to feel alienated from the world. Friends talk about what books they have recently read or movies they have seen, yet all I’ve read in the past months is the Journal of the American Chemical Society and all the events I’ve attended are chemical seminars. But this of course is a spiraling effect and I become more and more separated from the reality most people know. Instead of people and trees, I see carbons, electrons, metals, bonds. It’s not easy, being Victor and me. Sometimes you have to swim to the top for air, otherwise you’ll soon be sewing together body parts from the butcher just to get the next hit of knowledge.

Hellos

hmm... I don't see other postings yet this week (it could just be me, I'm blog challenged), but I guess I'll go ahead a post some of my ramblings. Here goes....

We discussed in class how popular culture has mistakenly taken the name Frankenstein from the mad-scientist character and given it to the monster from Mary Shelley’s horror story instead; although this was not the naming scheme Shelley intended, modern culture isn’t so wrong in associating Victor Frankenstein with his creation. In the book, Victor avoids naming the creature, because he believes his creation doesn’t deserve to be shown the affection of having a name assigned to it. Shelley, however, may have kept the monster an ambiguous character as a statement that Frankenstein and the monster were not so different and could sometimes be seen as the same individual.
For the entire first volume, Victor is the only person that encounters the monster after its escape a few months back. You would think that someone would have seen a hideous eight-foot, not-to-mention barely sewn together, fellow, but apparently chance would have it that only Victor is fortunate enough to be graced by the monster’s presence. As the only person that possesses knowledge of the monster, it is as if the monster only exists in Victor’s head, indicated by the degree of psychological turmoil Victor undergoes. Victor’s thoughts and the monsters actions are so intertwined such that Victor has a dream the night of the monster’s birth foreshadowing the death of his beloved Elizabeth in his arms, and in effect, at his own hands. Victor is also a monster, as mentioned in class, for his cruel rejection of the monster and his lack of responsibility for his creation.
As a side note, the question of the origin of the name Frankenstein was brought up in class. In German, the literal translation of Frankenstein is “stone of the franks”, where franks means free or not being subject to control. Some questionable sources believe that Mary Shelley may have found her inspiration for the book from a visit to Castle Frankenstein where an alchemist had experimented on human bodies.

That's all. Byes!

hello :-)

but it's the weekend.

hi everyone!
here we are.