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capri0mniAnd this dialectic popped into my head (originally posted on Tumblr, today):
Pop Culture's Monster: Argh! Argh!
Mary Shelley's Monster:
Well-Actually intellectual: "Frankenstein" is name of the scientist, not the monster.
Tumblr-Woke intellectual: The scientist Frankenstein is the monster, for creating a sentient being, and then abandoning it.
Mary Shelley: Actually, it is Society that made the monster evil, because of its systematic, repeated, and violent rejections of any being that does not conform to standards of beauty.
Me: Mary Shelley was the creator of both the monster and the scientist. And it was her artistic decision to write the monster's story arc such that society's abuse beat all reason, virtue and gentleness from him, and she wrote the ending that the monster's only happiness would come after he committed suicide on his own funeral pyre.
She, too, was a product of the Society she criticized, and, even if she never realized it, consciously, was thus an instrument of it.
And the popular misconception of Frankenstein's Monster is just a manifestation of Society's refusal to see goodness and virtue when it is encased in forms we are taught to despise, which Mary Shelley spent the entire novel writing about, in the first place.
Peak literary irony.
An extra note, not included in the post I recreated, above: The term "monster," at least, in this case, is value-neutral. It simply means a living thing made up of multiple other creatures (like horses with wings, or genetic chimeras). And as the creature Victor Frankenstein created was sewn together from several different corpses, he would have been a monster even if he remained the sweetest cinnamon roll in the pastry shop till the very end.
Pop Culture's Monster: Argh! Argh!
Mary Shelley's Monster:
Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion.
Well-Actually intellectual: "Frankenstein" is name of the scientist, not the monster.
Tumblr-Woke intellectual: The scientist Frankenstein is the monster, for creating a sentient being, and then abandoning it.
Mary Shelley: Actually, it is Society that made the monster evil, because of its systematic, repeated, and violent rejections of any being that does not conform to standards of beauty.
Me: Mary Shelley was the creator of both the monster and the scientist. And it was her artistic decision to write the monster's story arc such that society's abuse beat all reason, virtue and gentleness from him, and she wrote the ending that the monster's only happiness would come after he committed suicide on his own funeral pyre.
She, too, was a product of the Society she criticized, and, even if she never realized it, consciously, was thus an instrument of it.
And the popular misconception of Frankenstein's Monster is just a manifestation of Society's refusal to see goodness and virtue when it is encased in forms we are taught to despise, which Mary Shelley spent the entire novel writing about, in the first place.
Peak literary irony.
An extra note, not included in the post I recreated, above: The term "monster," at least, in this case, is value-neutral. It simply means a living thing made up of multiple other creatures (like horses with wings, or genetic chimeras). And as the creature Victor Frankenstein created was sewn together from several different corpses, he would have been a monster even if he remained the sweetest cinnamon roll in the pastry shop till the very end.
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Date: 2020-04-14 11:00 pm (UTC)(I kind of want to make a Galaxy Brain meme of this, except... there's no way it would be as good as actually reading what you wrote. So.)
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Date: 2020-04-14 11:57 pm (UTC)...And then, I realized I had too many words in my head, for that (and my thoughts are going in more than one direction at once, so... yeah).
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Date: 2020-04-15 12:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-15 11:39 am (UTC)I mean, I stan Mary Shelley, as the mother of science fiction, but if I had a TARDIS, I'd also like to sit her down and have a chat about the Bitter Cripple trope that (I suspect) her most famous novel had a large part in popularizing.
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Date: 2020-04-16 09:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-16 11:39 pm (UTC)