Because I have lost confidence in your commitment to writing thoughtful, thorough blog posts, I am going to change the due by time to Sunday at 10 am. Your blog must be posted by 10 am and your comments must be posted by 6pm. Also, all blog posts must be AT LEAST 350 words. Your comments must be at least 20 words.
Choose one of the following:
How is Frankenstein a Man vs. Nature story?
How is Frankenstein a Man vs. Self Story?
How is Frankenstein a Man vs. Society story?
Make your best argument. Use textual evidence.
Is it bad to manipulate nature, the answer is very. One of the most influential themes in the book Frankenstein is that of Man vs Nature. The man, Dr. Frankenstein, tampers with the natural creation of the human body as he creates a monster that has been pieced together with body parts of dead humans. Frankenstein becomes obsessed with manipulating the human body, so obsessed to the point where he begins to lose his sanity. Upon the completion of his monster he finally feels the weight pushing down on his heart, he had done something terrible and he knew it. This caused him to become seriously ill. Throughout his entire experiment he had neglected his own body and focused solely on the one he was attempting to create. I believe he feels a sense of relief within himself knowing he has the ability to create a creature that belittles the current human expectations. The natural world could not satisfy him so in order to fulfill his satisfaction he tampers with nature in his own way for his own reasons. He tries to say he wants to creat this creature to eradicate illness and disease but I feel it was solely for the purpose to see if he had the ability to create life. Of course after he succeeds he realizes what he had just done and completely abandons his creation. This causes the monster to go on a rage to find his master. In a way the monster is mad at his creator for abandoning him but also feels a connection with him since he is after all his creator. Frankenstein and his monster are basically in a battle, the doctor running from his monster and the monster running after him. This soon leads to disaster, Frankenstein’s brother is killed by his monster and Victor Frankenstein has no one else to blame but himself. Nature such as life itself should not be tampered with or else there will be consequence, God alone has the power to create and no one in anyway should try to play the role of God.
ReplyDeleteStating that he had neglected his own body during this fit very well with the argument. In order to be moral, you must at least have a self love and self worth first, but in Frankenstein, Victor was the exact opposite, not worrying about the consequences on himself and others around him after his creation.
DeleteSaying that the natural world did not satisfy Frankenstein is very true. I also agree with your statement that he made this creature for his own satisfaction rather than good reasoning.
DeleteYou did a good job of explaining why you thought his actions were against nature. However, I felt as though you were just telling the story rather than explaining the main points of why his actions were agi nature.
Delete“Man talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side.” (E.F. Schumacher) In Frankenstein, Victor becomes so caught up in gaining the power of creating life. He believes that he will almost become god-like in a sense once he achieves his goal of this. This goal of his does not end well, once he “won the battle”, (creating life) things only go downhill for him. Victor ends up on “the losing side” and encounters many different problems with the monster that he had created. He realizes that his desire of gaining an almost god-like power of creating life has gone wrong, so he abandons his creation. In reality, if a person had a child and the parents abandoned them, the child would never be the same. The child would always wonder “Why?” and maybe even have a hatred for the parents. The monster that Victor had created basically believes that Victor was it’s parent, and for him to abandon his monster, or in this sense his child, is unethical. Victor should have realized that altering and creating life in a lab to create something that would be better (in his mind) than a normal human being was not well thought out. There comes consequences with immoral actions no matter the case. In this case, the consequences end up with the monster killing Victor’s brother William in order to get revenge on Victor for abandoning him. Victor also knew that his monster was the killer of his brother even though his sister was framed for the crime, but he didn’t say anything about it because he now understood that his plan of creating life was crazy and that he would be looked at differently by his family and others. He would also be blamed for the murder of his brother. In one immoral decision that Victor made, these two huge negative impacts were left, along with many smaller impacts. Many can be tempted by power, but almost always will they find themselves on the losing side.
ReplyDeleteI like your opinion about how an abandoned child can feel a lot of different things including hatred which happened with Victor's creation.
DeleteI thought the basis of your argument was there and you had very good ideas. However, I feel you could have expanded on some of your ideas.
DeleteThe fateful string of events that transpire in Mary Shelley's novel: Frankenstein, shed light on the injustices innocents sometimes face. This can be drawn from the life of Victor Frankenstein’s creation. An exposure to goodness and moral virtue, coupled with an unwavering desire for revenge, casts the creature into a great struggle, a struggle within itself. Arguably, this conflict is at the core of the story; although nature and society aid in the development of the story, they have comparatively insignificant roles.
ReplyDeleteVictor - a man lacking of moral-code and principle - has, on numerous occasions, committed and allowed for injustice, but perhaps his greatest injustice of all was creating the “elixir of life” (17). In the course of events thereafter, his creation has - despite a benign upbringing - been subjected to further injustices by society and nature. Injustice coupled with love and moral; the creature is bound to have a deeply-hewed perplexity in its nature. This manifests itself when it furiously asks Victor for a mate, the creature plainly demands: “make me a mate or I will destroy you” (54). This unveils the creture’s cotempt for its own creator, but also unveils its feelings, feelings of love and desire. Clearly, a conflict of interest is apparent. Will the creature succumb to fury and revenge, or will it abide by its inherent moral-code of forgiveness, love and sacrifice.
Thus, although society-related are nature-related conflicts are prevalent and are, in fact, essential components of the story, such conflicts only reinforce the notion of “man versus self.” In this aspect, it is clear that Frankenstein not only consists of a “man versus self” conflict but; instead, revolves around that conflict.
I like the points that you gave. While we had the same argument subject, it gave me a different view on it.
DeleteYou made me think about the monster in a new way when you made the point about him wanting a mate. He could be like you said have vengeful feelings or he could feel love.
DeleteThe pervasive stench of electric apprehension suffocates the dark, dank room. Fear of failure and giddiness at the prospect of success override the weakening ache that plagues his limbs. Adrenaline makes his own heartbeat, skipping and stuttering in his ears and throat, the only sound to reverberate off the walls. And then it happens. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the story of a man who seeks his own ultimate destruction. Evidently, the pursuit of knowledge becomes that which undoes the protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, in this cautionary tale of man versus nature. Victor seeks truth, as made evident by his relentless pursuit of the sciences. His pride, however, infects his work and causes him to do the unthinkable. Allusions to other works emphasize a singular, recurrent point within the context of the novel: if nature is God’s creation, then transgressions against nature can be equated with transgressions against God, and as such, divine retribution will be sure to follow. One such work referenced is in direct correlation to the full title of Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus. Prometheus, within the Romantic Era, was associated with tragedy and its relationship to the quest for knowledge. Within the Greek mythos, Prometheus is best known for being the Titan who formed man from clay and stole fire from the gods for his survival. The subtitle “The Modern Prometheus” speaks volumes about Victor, his God complex, and his relationship to his monster. Much like Prometheus, he also formed his creation out of that which comes from the earth. Prometheus made man from clay, and Frankenstein made his monster from the dead. Prometheus stole fire from the gods to give man life. Victor reanimates his abomination through currently undisclosed means, however due to his fixation on the tree struck down by lighting and media interpretation of the scene, it may be, in this case, safe to assume that his life-giving act had to do with electrifying the makeshift corpse. Both spend the rest of their lives paying for their decision to light the fire behind the eyes of their creations. Prometheus is ultimately chained to a mountain and cursed to perpetually have his liver plucked out by vultures. Victor has something greater taken from him—his heart. If the past is any indication of the future, then it may be sufficient to assume that Victor will ultimately lose all those he has ever loved to his monster. Chapter eight speaks to this in the last line that reads, “Thus spoke my prophetic soul, as, torn by remorse, horror, and despair, I beheld those I loved spend vain sorrow upon...the first hapless victims to my unhallowed arts.” Prometheus’s punishment at the hands of the gods matches Victor’s brought down by the wrath of God. The myth of Prometheus is not the only story alluded to in Frankenstein. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner shares many thematic beats with the two aforementioned stories. In this case, one can draw parallels between Victor’s life-giving and the Mariner’s life-taking acts. Both seek greatness and glory only to make a grave and fallacious error. Victor’s monster is the allegorical albatross hanging around his neck keeping him from peace and ensuring his suffering. Even when the imminent threat is gone, both men are haunted by their decisions as is made evident in Robert Walton’s letters. Both the Mariner and Frankenstein feel they must tell their stories, as seen in the novel when Frankenstein says, “I had determined at one time that the memory of these evils should die with me, but you have won me to alter my determination.” Frankenstein is a story of the perversion of nature and the consequences of such. It details the dangers of glory-seeking and pride, and even hints at the concept of divine retribution through parallelism and allusion. They say knowledge is power, but perhaps, in Frankenstein’s case, it would be better if he had never conceived the idea. For Frankenstein, the pursuit of knowledge and power can only result in suffering.
ReplyDeleteI like your comparisons between Prometheus and Frankenstein. I did not know that Prometheus made man from clay, but that is very similar to what Victor Frankenstein has done in this story. Prometheus stole from the gods while Victor Frankenstein was trying to become like a god.
DeleteI liked your outside comparisons to the story. Although, I have no idea what prompt you were writing. I may just be skimming to fast or I might just not understand your vocabulary.
DeleteAleksandr Solzhenitsyn once said, “the battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.” While I don’t believe that God placed evil in every one of us, I do believe this quote describes what I believe to be the underlying theme of the book, Frankenstein versus man. While some may argue that Doctor Victor Frankenstein became a “monster” because of the outside society or nature, I believe it was his own self, the man, that truly drove him to become the person he was. As Catholics, we believe that everyone is innately good, and that temptation is what drives us to evil. But as humans, we are the ones that fall to the temptation set before us. The book shows us this good nature in each person, specifically in Frankenstein. Throughout the first few chapters of the book, we are told about how much his family loved him, how well he was raised, and the good values held among his family. Here, it also describes the love and care that Victor had for people, such as his cousin Elizabeth. As he goes off to school, however, we see that Frankenstein starts to become obsessed with education. This is not a pure and good love for learning though. The education he seeks is for a different purpose, he himself seeks the type of learning that will one day give him power and glory. His own brain starts to envelop him, making him obsessed with what his knowledge can do for him. He shuts himself off from everyone else, friends, family, professors, everyone who might be able to bring him back to reality. This outside world, nature, and the people who love him, society, could have snapped him out of what he thought was right and brought him back to what was really right. ** In these ways we see that Frankenstein wasn’t looking at giving worship to the Creator, but rather worshiping himself as a creator. These themes in the book show us that man is born innately good. However, it is himself falling to temptation that turns him “evil” or into a “monster.” While a battle line between good and evil isn’t placed in each of us at birth, it can be created when man himself puts decides to see himself as more powerful than he’s meant to be.
ReplyDeleteThe quote you used was a very good one for this story line. We are not born with evil living inside us but in this story the doctor makes himself seem this way.
DeleteAs a society our values change from time to time. During the time of Frankenstein, however, we can see traditional family values that we often see today. For example, we can see a loving family, a praise of education, and friends that never give up of their loved ones. These values that are very apparent in the beginning of this story seem to slip as the story moves along. Just as people are not bad when they are born, we can see this is Victor. He shows signs of love, for his family and for himself. However as the story moves along, he turns more self absorbed, perusing a gross science that society has abandoned. Because society has developed a new science, they no longer bother with the science that Frankenstein is so intrigued with. We can see societies values shown through the conversation with Frankenstein and his professor when he gets to College. His professor tells him that that science is dumb and pointless and flawed. Although working towards a goal is a good value shown in almost all societies now, and probably then. His goal is very unethical. Although unethical, it was also selfish. Victor created this monster for himself, he states that this study drive him to want power, he has no interest at all for the betterment of mankind. Society nowadays has been continually telling us to please ourselves, however in this time, based off of the the family and loving values shown in the first couple of chapters, we know that victors selfishness is deeply frowned upon by his society. His selfishness is also shown when Frankenstein abandons his creation. For example when scientists create a child through in vitro fertilization, or without two parents, and the child lives, just because the parents might be afraid to take care of their child does not mean that they can abandon it. Although societies valves change, doctor Frankenstein is going against almost every value society has in the later part of part one of this book.
ReplyDeleteFrankenstein’s man vs. nature theme is due to the simple fact that Victor’s creation goes against nature and was created in a lab. Victor is not satisfied by the natural world, so he decides to tinker with it. He creates a well-developed, intelligent being. Constructed out of human parts, this creation does not share the same abilities as a human should however. Victor really struggles with the fact that it is not the job of man to create life. This causes Victor to perform something that he has not really thought out and he suffers the consequences. Nature stands as a peaceful place for Victor, he feels it can help him after he loses a loved one, so he decides for the creation of his friend. Frankenstein’s creation suffers due to the unnatural appearance it has from being created against nature in a lab, so people stand clear of it. Although it is compassionate, the creature develops a hatred at Victor for doing this. As a result, it wants to get revenge with its creator and is willing to do anything to do so. By killing a loved one of Victor it is finally able to do so. Although his creation kills Victor’s brother, it is mostly Victors fault for creating this beast and not mothering it as a being would be nurtured in nature. The same thing would happen to an abandoned child in the natural world if it was belittled like Frankenstein’s creation was. Victor could not realize that it is the job of God and not him to create life and he could not recognize that this being needed love and to be raised correctly. This then creates the ongoing struggle of hatred and pain to others, it was the job of Victor to recognize the possible outcomes with creating this creature. Due to selfishness and being unable to think about what could happen to him and others around him he goes against mother nature. He develops a beast created out of the limbs and body parts of humans. This soon becomes the destruction of his life.
ReplyDelete