In Response to Mrs. Clinch..

In class we discussed how one of Mrs. Clinch's least favorite men of literature was Dimmesdale of The Scarlet Letter. I can see how Dimmesdale would not be held favorable in the eyes of many due to his weakness, cowardice, and overall pathetic-ness, but I cannot get over Victor Frankenstein.

Victor Frankenstein is my least favorite person in all of literature. I simply despise him.

He's my least favorite so far, anyway. Which made it hard to read and discuss with others without ranting incessantly about how bad of a guy he is. (I'm not even sure if succeeded in doing that.)

I read Shelley's Frankenstein previously in 8th grade, and I remember disliking Victor then as well. Before I read it again this year, I credited my dislike for Victor to middle school ignorance and a general misunderstanding of the text, and vowed to read the book again with an open mind.

I got to about the second chapter when it all started to come back to me. If anything, my hate (what a strong word) for Victor intensified after reading the story a second time.

In my opinion, Victor is simply repulsive. He is the monster that the others should have been throwing rocks at. Sure, when compared to Dimmesdale, Victor can be called the braver of the two, but at what cost?

Victor started out his quest thinking he would be able to do better than God or Nature and create life with his own hands....which is forgivable. I mean, we all get a little self-absorbed and haughty sometimes. But Victor took it to another level. With his narrations of his desire to "penetrate the secrets of nature" and "unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation", the reader could clearly see that this guy truly believed that he could surpass the divine. He killed me with his final declaration of his supposed success before the Creation came to life: "A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs." I'm sorry, Victor? "Bless" you? "Owe" you? "Deserve"?

If conceptual conception between man and woman under God is classified as "natural" birth, then Victor is a rapist. He claimed to "pursue nature to her hiding-places" to "penetrate her secrets", for Pete's sake.

Even if we ignore all those evocative statements and only read that he wanted to reanimate the dead, his behavior when his creation finally comes to life is still contemptible. Victor is actually surprised how appalling his creature appears when it takes its first movements, even when he knew it was going to be ugly before he finished creating it. He abandons this creature without teaching it any morals or values at all, but gets upset and vows revenge at it when it does him wrong in return. Seriously, Victor?

And even after all of that, Victor refuses to take any responsibility for his actions. He instead decides to blame Fate, Destiny, and others for the way his life turned out. He reanimated the dead with his own hands, chose to abandon it, rejected taking responsibility for the Creature's actions before all of his friends and family were dead, and he still narrates to Walton about how "Destiny was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter and terrible destruction". Victor only starts to see what he himself might have done wrong in the tenth chapter, when he sees the Creature again and thinks "For the first time, also, I felt what the duties of a creator towards his creature were, and that I ought to render him happy before I complained of his wickedness."

Perhaps Victor Frankenstein is the biggest of all Shelley's warnings in her book about the responsibility of the Creator towards his creation. And I would say she made her warning very clear.



P.S.--This post was harder to write than I originally thought it would be. I reeeaaally do not like that guy. I had to take breaks when reading the book for the second time because I was too agitated with Victor to continue.

Puritanism is still alive?

The other morning my dad and I were talking, when he said something I found particularly interesting:

"[Americans] seem to always want to throw someone in prison."

This immediately reminded me of the first chapter in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, when the narrator says, "The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison" (Hawthorne 41). Meaning--according to Hawthorne, at least--the Puritans believed punishment for crime should be harsh and necessary to rid people of their transgressions. So much so, that they plan to build one in a new colony before houses or even a church are built.

I thought this was very interesting because in today's time if someone even mutters the word "Puritan", everyone around that person curses the name and censors everything related to Puritanism. The Puritans got a bad rep for the Salem Witch Trials, so today, anything that is even remotely labeled as "Puritan" people tend to evade.

Yet, our (meaning Americans') behaviors are still very similar to those of the Puritans. We claim to have moved on and label ourselves as "modern", but are we Americans truly different from our strict predecessors? What do you think?

I agreed with my dad that Americans are quick to throw suspected criminals in prison. I've noticed how in big court cases, a lot of people just want to lock the defendant away at the first sign of them being guilty, often at the first accusation. Perhaps because it's quicker and easier. And there's proof--America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, without even having the highest population. 

Additionally, Americans haven't completely abandoned the belief of predestination. Not to say that they are right or wrong, but a lot of people continue to believe that their fates are left up to God or another celestial being.

Maybe we haven't actually changed from the Puritans at all, or as much as we'd like to think. Perhaps all those movements away from Puritanism were actually just shifts of one big cycle, and we're right back where we started.

Frankenstein concepts in Warm Bodies (**spoilers!**)

After our in-depth talks in class over Frankenstein, the concepts and themes from the story have been stuck in my head--tenaciously so--affecting what I observe and interact with in reality.

Lately everything to me has been related to Frankenstein in some form or fashion, but one item in particular has struck me as being especially similar to the story: the movie Warm Bodies.

Warm Bodies is a romantic comedy movie (with kind of a horror twist?) about a zombie boy who falls in love with a living girl during the apocalypse. What immediately set off alarms in my head when I watched this movie this past weekend is how the protagonist zombie boy (named "R") is undead. R wasn't an inanimate body that was brought back to life; however, you could say that both he and the creature in Frankenstein are two beings composed of dead/dying parts, livened by a spark of peculiar origin.

The story only gets more similar from there.

For example, R says in the beginning of the movie that he doesn't recall how humans began turning into zombies, but the movie makes a brilliant comment when it illustrates and implies how humans were already well underway in their transformation into figurative zombies before the apocalypse began--hundreds of people are seen in an airport, but instead of enjoying each other's company, they are all plugged in to some kind of electronic device, completely detached from their surroundings as they shuffle through the airport, milling around like mindless drones*. If Shelley's Frankenstein is the earlier warning of the dangers of technology, then Levine (the director of Warm Bodies) attempted to make his movie its contemporary descendant.

Adding to that, the fact that R is unsure of how humans became literal zombies argues against how I interpreted the role of the Creator to be significant in Frankenstein. The zombies are not implied to be created from some divine being, but they breathe and walk just as the living humans do, suggesting that perhaps the "nurture" side of the nature-nurture argument wins out after all. Once a human became a zombie in the movie, it wasn't taught how to be a zombie from some parental figure; rather, it observed what it could/should do from the other preexisting zombies around it. Furthermore, how the zombies were said to come from humans--rather than being "born" or "created"--I think says something about human nature as well. I saw in Frankenstein how the creature's monstrosity was reflected back on mankind, resulting in the Unjust Society idea in the book. Warm Bodies goes along with that in the way that because the unsightly zombies were considered to be degradations of humans (and the zombies in this movie have even further degradations they call "Bonies"), the movie could be saying that humans are inherently gruesome and monstrous, or that all mankind eventually degrades into an inferior form. (I'm not quite sure.)

Another similarity between Warm Bodies and Frankenstein that I noticed is in the context of knowledge being a very important and desirable thing. In Frankenstein, both Victor and his creature seek to know more, literally, while in Warm Bodies it is more of a visual representation. The character R claims his favorite part of the human body to eat is the brain, simply because it is the tastiest, and allows him to see parts of the unfortunate soul's memories when he eats them. If human brains were taken to be the visual representation of knowledge in this film, then it can be said that R also seeks "knowledge". Not only does he like to eat the brains out of humans, but after he meets his love interest of the film, he attempts to use the memories he absorbed as well as his own faint memories to discover what it means to be human again.

So, what does it mean? What's the big idea? So what? I'm not entirely sure. Whether Levine was attempting to do a modern take on Shelley's Frankenstein with his movie or just reference the novel, I don't know. But I think Levine does agree with Shelley in that humans are on their way to their demise, and their destruction will be their own faults.

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See the first four minutes of Warm Bodies here, including *this scene: