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| Mont Blanc at Night |
Answer TWO of the following...
Q1: Discuss the dream that Victor has just before he beholds the Creature for the first time. What is significant about this dream, considering that it contains the two women in his life--his mother and Elizabeth? Also, why did he originally find the Creature "beautiful," but after the dream he exclaims that it is a "miserable monster"?
Q2: Percy Shelley wrote a poem about Mont Blanc (the highest peak in the Alps) which obviously Mary Shelley knew intimately. At the end of this poem, he writes, "Mont Blanc gleams on high:--the power is there,/The still and solemn power of many sights/And many sounds, and much of life and death." (you can read the entire poem on page 295). How do these lines connect with Victor's experience on Mont Blanc in Chapter IV? What sublime experience does he have there, and how might Wordsworth or Coleridge translate this experience in Romantic terms?
Q3: After Justine's death (which Victor inadvertently causes), Victor notes that Elizabeth "was no longer the happy creature, who in earlier youth wandered with me on the banks of the lake, and talked with ecstasy of our future prospects." Why is it significant that Victor's first victims are all women (and a child, which is in the care of women)? Does Victor have a hostility or ambivalence toward women which his Creation seems to act upon? Is the Creature, in a sense, Victor himself?
Q4: When the Creature confronts Victor on the mountain, he exclaims, "I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous." Whether or not you believe this, why is this an extremely Romantic sentiment? What poem or poems from the Romantic period would support the Creature's words?
Q3. Victor's "compassion" towards the women seem selfish. While he doesn't enjoy the fact that they are dead/miserable, it is because it makes him feel worse. This is, hopefully, to teach him a bit more compassion towards those around him and actually understand that they feel emotions outside of the realm of his own. He doesn't like the fact that Justine died because he feels that it was his own fault, not due to genuine care. He also doesn't like Elizabeth's suffering because he wants her joy to be their to ease his own disdain. Victor is entirely his own creation. He played the part of god, and, since he was an unjust god, his Creature is acting in the same manner that brought it to life. Victor's actions are all reflective of the outcomes he is receiving - right down to the demeanor of the Creature.
ReplyDeleteQ4. Nearly all of the Romantic poets would recognize the fact that Victor's creation would take after him. The life we hold around us is an extension of our demeanors and thoughts about the way the world should be around us. We, in effect, make our nature, our life, and our acquaintances out to what we think they are. Thus, the Creature is expressing a Romantic idea because it realizes itself to be an extension of Victor and to be carrying with it the same ideals on life and nature that Victor does.
Yes, great reading here...he has no real use for Elizabeth or Justine. They are there to make him feel better, and to remain kind and innocent. When they get broken and lost heart, he loses interest in them. Note that later in the book, when marriage is proposed, he decides to leave Geneva for 2 years! Ostensibly, this is to work on the Creature, but he could have taken her with him or married her first. If he did as the Creature wanted, he didn't have to worry about retribution. It shows his distaste of women and perhaps of Elizabeth in particular. You know she's going to die--he seems almost convinced of it. Everything is 'fated' for him, and that could mean that he wants it to happen on some level.
DeleteQ1: Victor created life in an unnatural fashion rather than create life the natural way with Elizabeth. Victor's mother raised him with love, while Victor cannot do the same for his creature. Obsessed with creating life from inanimate objects, he did not take into account the child-rearing aspect of bringing a new life into the world. Victor has animated a perverse bringer of death.
ReplyDeleteQ3: My initial thought was that the death of women and children is especially perverse, and added to the horror element of the story. However, it is true that Victor is neglectful of his family. He is so wrapped up in his obsession, he seldom writes them despite their frequent entreaties for communication. When Victor is ill, his family experiences a time of good fortune. William is no longer sickly, and the whole family is happy. As soon as Victor recovers, his family falls on misfortune. Victor himself is a kind of vampire who is only well at the expense of others. The creature may symbolize his more primitive nature, and the displacement of the resentment and anger he feels towards those close to him.
Q1: In the dream, Elizabeth, upon embracing her cousin "became livid with the hue of death" (36). In an instant, he was holding the dead corpse of his mother in his arms. Victor's obsession with unveiling nature's deepest secret has led to a lot of neglect in his life, especially in the case of the women who care for him. He doesn't know how to care for anyone, not even the creature he creates, which leads to death.
ReplyDeleteQ4: Romantics would have loved this idea. It's renewal and rebirth made possible through our connections with the environment around us. I think a few poem's we read earlier in the semester echo this idea in a way. For example, in "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" the mariner loses touch with nature because of his own misery and selfishness. He is not redeemed until he learns to appreciate the value of nature. The creature will also suffer from a deep sadness until he finds purpose and inspiration in the sublime.
Ashley Bean
ReplyDelete3. I think it’s significant considering Mary Shelley’s background. This is her speaking through these victims, she has felt that way for a long time with her husband being more interested in his bromance and the death filling her life more than anything. Victor treats Elizabeth in such indifference, strikingly similar to how Mary Shelley must have been treated. The creature is definitely an extension of Victor, and through is abandonment he brought forth his worst traits in a live being.
4. Even today, a second chance is an extremely romantic idea. The idea that the creature is only “bad” because Victor abandoned him and left him to wander alone and face the horror of reality is one we want to believe. This is my first time ever reading Frankenstein, so in my fresh perspective I know I want to believe that, and I do so far. The creature was innocent, the only one who was impure, so to say, was Victor, who forgot about and ignored his family for his work for months.
Elyse Marquardt
ReplyDeleteQ2: Mont Blanc is incredibly important in this story because it is where Victor encounters the monster face-to-face for the first extended amount of time. Mont Blanc symbolizes the sublime, and so it is fitting that the monster (who is anything but ordinary) is first seen and scrutinized here. Percy Shelley's poem about Mont Blanc discusses how powerful and dangerous Mont Blanc can be. This ties in with Coleridge's poem "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" when he talks about the danger and might of the Arctic that he is exploring. These Romantic poets really emphasize the perilous beauty of snow and ice and mountains: these things are indeed gorgeous, but they are also deadly.
Q3: As we discussed in class today, Mary Shelley did not have any positive female figures in her life. The only women who were around were all crazy and selfish and most of them ended up killing themselves. Mary seems to put this into her story by killing off all the weak/female characters, which reflects the powerlessness and early deaths of all the women and children in her life. If Victor is meant to personify Mary Shelley, it makes sense that all the women and weaker people, such as children, are disappearing from his life. Mary may blame herself for the deaths of her friends, sister, and child, and this comes out in her story.
Elyse Marquardt
Good point--the women ARE powerless in this book, which reflects Austen's women as well. Only here, the stakes are higher than getting married or being an old maid. Here the men literally kill you. It could be that Mary blames herself for losing touch with Nature, or she could be accusing the great men who chase big Romantic dreams--and leave everyone else in the dust.
DeleteQ3: Whether he meant it to be or not, Victor’s making of his Creation is an act against women. While it takes both a man and a woman to make a child – to make Life – Victor wanted to create Life without a woman. His mother was a source of love when he was a child, and when she died he lost that love. He may have viewed this as his mother – being a woman – having been weak, this weakness being what caused her to die and remove the much-desired love from his life. Victor may have sought to remove what he considered the “weak link” from the equation, and may have even resolved to provide his Creation with motherly love instead.
ReplyDeleteI don’t think that the Creature was killing for Victor, I think he was killing for himself. Due to the nature of the Creature’s “birth”, he doesn’t have a mother but he also doesn’t have a father, or at least not in the traditional sense. In traditional reproduction, “father” and “mother” are titles assigned to each parent that over time have come to define the specific duties that each parent must fulfill that are fundamental to the child’s development. Victor removed the female component, but not the role of mother. Because of this both roles fall to him, making him both the father and the mother of his Creation. Victor fulfilled a portion of his motherly role by giving his Creation life, but then refused him of motherly affection. By doing so, Victor rejected his Creation not as a father figure but as a motherly one. As the motherly role is traditionally assigned to women, the Creature attacked women as substitutes for the mother that rejected him. The role these women played in Victor’s life also made them appealing targets, and with the added “bonus” being that without a woman Victor wouldn’t be able to have a traditional child, making his Creation his only child and ensuring that his Creation could not be replaced.
When Victor’s mother died, he was essentially denied her love. When Victor rejected his Creation, he denied his Creation his love. Victor acted out against this denial by making his Creation, while his Creation acted out against this denial with violence. In a way, the Creature is the past repeating itself, and also a possibility of what Victor may have been had he turned to violence rather than creation.
Q4: It is a Romantic sentiment in that it basically states that we are what others make of his. Others treated him like a monster, so a monster he became. Ideas like this appear in other works such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where once the Mariner treated Nature like it was beautiful it became beautiful. The concept is widespread among Romantics, and comes in various forms.
Great, detailed response--so much to address here! I think it's ironic that Victor loses his mother so he makes the Creature lose his mother/father. It's another aspect that makes them mirror images of each other. And as the dream suggests, I think he blames his mother for dying...and fears that everyone will utlimately leave him. So he leaves them first. Sorry. Creature!
Delete1. I feel like the dream has the two women in his life because it is the two women that he loves. They become one and without them, he does not know what love is. Also, I believe he thinks the monster is beautiful, until he figures out he has no idea what love is. This is something that he created and no longer possesses the ability to care for it. I believe he fell in love with the idea, kind of like how Prophyero falls in love with the idea of Madeline. He never truly wanted to create the monster, but he wanted to chase a dream. He wanted to set out to prove what nobody else could prove. After he did it he no longer has anything to dream about.
ReplyDelete4. I think this sentiment is extremely romantic because it is the idea of love. Romantics idolized love and wanted any and everything to do with it. This is very much like the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. At the beginning of the frame narrative he is trying to relay his knowledge on the wedding guests. If he does this he may fulfill his life. Maybe relaying this knowledge will allow him to have a second chance and he can be happy. This is Victors second chance to be happy.
Yes, great responses--it's all about the ideal for him: ideal women, ideal creations, ideal power. But it never is. Not surprisingly, he creates the most "unideal" image of a child...though in some ways, it worked perfectly. The child is good, but he's too blind to see it. that's the trouble with an ideal: how do you know what to look for? Something might be ideal in a different way than you expect.
Deleteq3. I don't think that necessarily Victor resents women--I'm not even sure that I'd say his Creation does either, but I certainly believe that Mary Shelly was reflecting on her own feelings in this text. We discussed in class today how she never had a positive relationship with a woman so it's not surprising that she found it easy to kill them off quickly in the book. I can't force myself to think that it's anything more than that. I think in the story, the Creature is literally just trying to kill the weakest to hurt Victor because there's always the argument, if he had killed the men first, that they could've defended themselves. If Victor hadn't been so wound up in his sciences, he could've been available to defend those women. This can be applied literally and figuratively with Victor's infatuation with science.
ReplyDeleteq4. First off, the location is already invoking the sublime. *Cue the romantics.* I think themes of redemption, love, misery, and happiness are frequently possessed by the average romantic poem. Maybe the lesson learned could be compared to the Mariner's lesson/curse. There's a revelation in both texts.
Good responses; I wouldn't say she found it easy to kill women off, but she might argue that "men" certainly do. I think Victor doesn't know how to love, so his attempt to creature and nurture a 'child' fails miserably. I think there's a certain repulsion he has for women, as hinted at in the dream. Behind every Elizabeth is a rotting mother! Eww...
DeleteQ1- I think Victor was expecting to make something beautiful and wonderful. Something that reminded him of his mother and Elizabeth. But once the creature was made he realized the horrible truth behind what he had created. The creature was not beautiful and wonderful like he was dreaming it would be. It was a hideous monster. His dream was just him processing the reality of what he had done.
ReplyDeleteQ3- I feel like his first victims were all women and children because he had no need for them. He was content with his science and he wanted to make a "child" that would never leave him or die. Women could leave him, hurt him, and die. I don't think he was completely hostile towards women. He just saw them as something he didn't need like the way I feel towards my fiance's video games. If I could get rid of them without him noticing I would. I feel that is what the creature did in a sense. I feel like this story is kind of like Victor becoming so consumed with bringing his creature to life he goes insane and the creature is all in his head. Like in the movie Shrooms, the main character takes some deadly shrooms and starts seeing evil spirits that kill her friends and at the end you discover she was the killer all along. She was just tripping and the spirits were all in her head. I think Victor has honestly lost his mind and is projecting the creature to cover up his evil deeds because he can't cope with the truth.
Yes, great points--I think he wanted something beautiful but didn't realize that he had lost his conception of beauty. In a way, he wanted to kill the beautiful things in his life--they disgusted him because no matter how beautiful, they ultimately shrivel up and die. It's like Keats's poetry--it talks about the danger of ideals. Victor can only see ideals and nothing else.
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