The Creature gets a Wife?

By Galilea Sanchez

There they both stood, standing face to face on a chilly mountain, surrounded by the glistening white snow. With the creature’s long awaited question ready to slip confidently from his black lips. 

“I want you to make me a wife.” he said, without a stutter or blink of the eyes. 

Victor stood there, deeply contemplating the story his creature had just shared with him. It had really touched him, and the creature’s modest request truly was the least he could do for all he’d made him suffer. In his head he pictured her, a female creature just as unpleasing to look at, yet standing, with a wide smile on her dead lips next to the creature, with their hands intertwined. With the same dead skin, connecting them for life. Then Victor’s imagination stretched farther, and he saw two kids accompanying the strange couple. The tallest of the two a pretty young girl, with long flowing back hair flowing behind her yellow shoulders, holding the hand of an even younger boy. 

And then his imagination drifted further still. A whole town full of yellow-skinned creatures of all shapes and sizes, living peacefully among themselves all resembling his original creature in one way or another. Then suddenly his head started spinning, a yellow blur of identical creatures consuming him and he landed at the creature’s feet, rubbing his eyes.

He stood up, looking the creature, straight in his dark, watery eyes. “I’ll do it.” he said.

 The creature stood there once again looking at his creator, only now with concealed amazement. It had worked, it had really worked. He had managed to manipulate this insignificant human into fulfilling his demand. Managed to sell him a made up story of suffering. The truth was that the tale he had relayed to Victor, was all a lie. The truth was that he had spent his days in a pub, wearing a large black coat that covered all that needed to stay hidden. There he would sit, intoxicated and thinking constantly of the beautiful women that would occasionally pass by. But he was not dumb, he knew that any normal women would never accept him, and so he set out to find Victor, and ask him for the only thing his lonely life was missing, a wife, made just for him.

But now, the creature saw an even happier future for himself, perhaps…one with two wives? It had been easy enough to ask for one, could Victor be tricked into making two female creatures just for him? There was only was to find out.

“If one wife could cure all my pain,” he said dramatically, “perhaps, two could heal me even faster.” 

Victor’s eyes grew wide. He stood there stunned. How could he have been so ignorant. Here he was finally resentful of his actions and all his creature could think about was women! Had he no idea of all the worry and fear he had caused him? But this request was too much of a disrespect to him. With one last glance at the creature he said the words, “It seems to me that a bit more pain would do you just fine.” And with that he set out, away from the creature, leaving him alone once again. 

Well, no matter, thought the creature unaffected by rejection, I’ll just have to build a wife, myself.

Review:

If you’re looking for an entertaining and unexpected change to the well-known novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, look no further. In this short but promising rewritten scene of the novel, the author manages to create a creature of her own, one, perhaps, even smarter and creative than the one in the novel. The scene selected is the one where the creature has finished sharing his tragic journey to Victor, and has mustered up the courage to ask Victor for a female creature to accompany him in his solitude. After revealing to Victor all the supposed hardships he faced on his journey to confront his creator, Victor is faced with making a crucial decision that could affect not only his life and the creature’s, but possibly the whole world’s. And instead of rejecting the creatures request, as seen in the novel, things take a different turn, and then, even more turns. 

Full of colorful and descriptive language, the author has the reader hooked and anticipating the creature as well as Victor’s next move. Although the  story seems to be predictable at first, as you read further, there are unexpected changes and plot twists that await, overall leaving the reader wanting more. While managing to keep some aspects of the original novel as well as the initial atmosphere in the scene, the author shows a new and fresh way this scene could have occurred. A single picture sets the mood of the scene and serves its purpose in the story, showcasing the possible selection of wives for the creature envisions for himself. Ultimately, this nicely written alteration of the novel, gets the reader thinking of the countless directions Victor and his creature’s story could have taken, based simply on a single decision, to create or not create a female creature. 

Failure to be Perfect

I believe that the top hat response of, “Somehow, by wanting to produce a more perfect human being, Victor and Elizabeth are admitting to disabilities of their own. A creature impervious to pain and is virtually indestructible by medical and other violent means would be a triumph to the Frankensteins- if Adam were more conventionally attractive and had a neuro-typical consciousness.” has the potential for a broader interpretation of the film. The way Victor looked at Adam, was completely different than the way he looks at anyone else throughout the entire film. When Adam first came to life, Victor looked at him with amazement, but once he couldn’t speak and his skin began to change in appearance, then Victor’s look changed to discomfort. Victor was unhappy with Adam becoming so close to his wife, who became a mother figure to him. Perhaps it was due to him being ashamed by the way Adam looked and how he acted, but Victor clearly didn’t want to be a father figure to the “Monster” he has created. Once his disabilities began to present himself, Victor could hardly wait to get rid of Adam. It was too much for him to deal with, the unsuccessfulness of his creation caused a feeling of failure in himself.

– Alina Cantero

What Really Makes Us Different

By Mahealani LaRosa

Although one may not think it, colonialism and racism are rampant in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The most obvious examples of this are through the scenes involving the monster, but also through the story of Safie, the Muslim migrant lover of cottage-dweller Felix. Both of these characters are essentially isolated and discriminated against for being different than what society deems normal. Throughout the novel, the creature is pushed away by society, literally “attacked… bruised by stones and many other kinds of missile weapons” (98) when he tries to enter the world of humans. Undeterred by his horrific treatment, he “longed to join them” (101) and continues to watch the cottage-dwellers to “discover the motives which influenced their actions” (101). Although he is beaten and chased and cast away by people, he still wants to know why. He wants to understand what makes him different, asking himself  “Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?” (115) to better comprehend the reason he is seen as lesser than man.

The chief difference between the creature and Safie is that although she is different than the cottage-dwellers and the other European citizens of the novel, she is somewhat more accepted than the monster. Felix was “ravished with delight…. every trait of sorrow vanished from his face” when he sees Safie for the first time. Although Safie has “a language of her own” she somehow still manages to make all of the cottage-dwellers overcome with “ecstatic joy” (106). She manages to make the humans happy, while the creature makes the humans scared and angry. What is the difference between these marginalized people?

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote a book called Decolonising The Mind in which he explains that language has the power to define individual identity. Those who are oppressed, like the monster and Safie, must learn to use their own language, not the language of their oppressors. This does make sense in Safies case. She spends weeks stumbling to learn the language because she feels the need to be internally colonized in order to truly connect and understand Felix and his family. However, the creature is never born with it’s own language. It is created in the middle of its life, without anything to call its own. It is kind of ironic how fast the creature picks up the language though. The monster says it could “imitate almost every word that was spoken” while Safie “understood very little” and “conversed in broken accents” (108).

I think that the creature uses Safie’s letters to ‘prove the truth of it’s tale’ because it strengthens this idea that they are both internally colonizing theirselves. While the creature does it in a more blatant way, easily picking up on the language and speaking eloquently, while also longing to be a part of society, Safie demonstrates this idea more. She is accepted and loved by this family, technically a part of society, but she will never be understood because of where she comes from. She stifles her own language, therefore stifling her own growth as a human, to be loved by people who tell her that her life will be better with them. She is free to become whomever she chooses, but society has enforced this idea in her brain that in order to be truly accepted she must be like everyone else and internally colonize herself.

The Sensation of Acceptance

Throughout my lifetime, my family has lived in constant fear for as long as I can remember. Being an immigrant is a title that inflicts danger on those who obtain it. We live in a world that has the notion the different is wrong. Different is evil, a threat. Different is NEVER okay. Our society is easily manipulated to have an ideology that isn’t even theirs, that doesn’t feel right, but simply because of the hierarchy of individuals insist that it’s okay to inflict hate to those who are different, we are afraid to oppose otherwise. But to the small group that decides to stand up and implies their minds onto what is right, makes me realize that the world isn’t all that bad. That the bad that we constantly view in the news can be easily overlapped by the saying of many that are ready for a change.

Today in age we still live with the notion of barriers from the countries around us and for as long as I can remember Gloria Anzaldua was an individual that was extremely against such ideology that still thrives today through the words of President Donald Trump. “Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.” [Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 32]. Anzaldua’s ideologies still reside on many Chicanos, and amongst countless others that are outcasted for being different.

Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, is no different. The monster tries to convey to both Victor and Walton that to what he has experienced in the short amount of time living, he too relates what he has read about Safie’s life story. Never should we live in a society where different is evil, erroneous, bad. Negative connotations that we inject on the ideology of being different is what truly impacts the differentiation for what’s wrong and what’s truly wrong in this world.

Immigrants are NOT one of them. If we continue to flourish with such neglect that affects this world with the ability for change, it marks the end of all that is noble and righteous.

– Stephen Muñoz

 

Through the Looking Glass

At the end of his essay, “The ‘Workshop of Filthy Creation’: A Marxist Reading of Frankenstein”, Warren Montag concludes that in Marry Shelley’s novel the creature is “not so much the sign of the proletariat as of its unrepresentability” (480). After reading Shelley’s novel and Montag’s essay I have come to disagree with Montag and believe that the creature, in fact, helps show the representation of the proletariats in Shelley’s novel. In Shelley’s novel, the creature gives a grave description of Felix, Agatha and the old man’s living condition in which he discovers that “the cause of the uneasiness of this amiable family: it was poverty; and they suffered that evil in a very distressing degree” (101). This family is a direct representation as told by the creature of the oppressed working class; they live in a little cottage with their blind father and must fend for themselves every day.

The two children, “often suffer the pangs of hunger very poignantly; for several times they placed food before the old man, when they reserved none for themselves,” due to being lower class status, with a blind father the two young cottagers needed to take care of one another and in having so much to do during the day they would not often have enough food for all to eat so let the old man eat because he couldn’t see if they were eating as well (102).

The creature being created by the working class man, Victor Frankenstein, sympathizes with the lower class family because they are isolated to the little cottage and must fend for themselves like he has had to because he has been doing the same thing since he was created. “For the monster is a product rather than a creation, assembled and joined together not so much by a man as by science, technology, and industry, whose overarching logic subsumes and subjects even the greatest geniuses” (Montag 473). Even Victor himself is a brief representation of the proletariats because he was the creator of the creature but once the creature was finished it wasn’t what he wanted it to be and he didn’t care to see the creature.

The creature who was hiding in their cottage took notice of how “their nourishment consisted entirely of vegetables of their garden, and the milk of one cow, which gave very little during the winter, when its masters could scarcely produce food to support it” and how “the youth spent a great part of each day in collecting wood for the family fire” (101-102). Seeing the family struggle just to stay warm at night, the creature, “took his tools and brought home firing sufficient for the consumption of several days” (102). With the use of the word “home”, the creature is considering himself as part of their family which therefore makes him a representation of the proletariat rather than a non-representation of the proletariat.

-Alina Cantero

The Misunderstood Monster

Christopher Martinez

 

 

Before I start this blog I want whoever is reading this to go to Thesaurus.com and find synonyms for the word monster. One of the synonyms is Frankenstein, however he is clearly not a monster in Mary Shelley’s book Frankenstein. Whenever I think of Frankenstein all I imagine is a monster that kills and has no soul. I fell for the typical classification of Frankenstein being shown as malevolent. Likewise, the video for my blog is to show others the cliché that the monster is an ugly and a destructive monster.

Throughout the book, Mary Shelley describes the monster as a person who is innocent and is wanting to love someone. From the beginning of chapter eleven, the monster tells Victor Frankenstein his story up to that point. We learn from the monsters stories that he is an intellectual person who seeks knowledge about everything. The monster reads the books that Victor had in his jacket. These romantic books gave the monster a view of the world he lived in. He knew a lot what humans desired in life. The monster also looked for attention, but everyone seemed to be anxious and afraid to have his presence. Since no one wanted his companionship he accepted himself as an outcast.

I can conclude that at this point I am starting to feel as if Frankenstein is every student right now. Every student is curious to try learning new things and use them in the real world, while also seeking attention and friendships. I realized at this point that the real monster this whole time was the fantasy I had learned about the misunderstood monster.