Victor Frankenstein

These two chapters are set at a point where Victor Frankenstein is crafting and making the first descriptions of the monster and is very focused and obsessed with his work. In this chapters the scientist Frankenstein and the monster are regularly described the usage of similar terms, just to show how the monster displays his subconscious mind. We see how he takes the role of women of giving beginning to life by giving life to an inanimate object. Later after giving it the existence he realizes that the creature is ugly and regrets the time he put into planning and crafting it. When the creature woke up and opened its eyes they were yellow and dull, and it was ugly, this makes him view it as evil. The monster realizes that he is ugly and fierce and this angers him because human beings fear him, so he resorts to violent actions and tries to hunt his creator down and destroy his family so as to revenge. The monster frightens the scientist and makes him have many nightmares, and he is unable to communicate his feelings. The relationship between Frankenstein and the monster he created can be analyzed using three essays namely, Andrew J Hoffman wrote in his Monsters anthology essay called "Why we create monsters" an introductory piece that "the promise of monster stories is that if we can control the monster, we can control our lives" (15). On the other hand, Jerome Cohen’s VII thesis from "Monster Culture Seven Theses," he says that monsters are our children and always return and that when they return, they bring not just a fuller knowledge of our place in history and the history of knowing our place, but they bear self-knowledge, human knowledge(20).Timothy Beal concluded in a Chronicles of Higher Education Essay in November ninth,1991 called "Our Monsters, Ourselves" he pointed out that "monsters invite us to discover our monsters in ourselves and ourselves in our monsters."Andrew J Hoffman investigates the central idea of the monstrous. He tries to understand why we create monsters in our lives and the forms the monsters come in, the desires and fears the monsters embody, the historical and cultural instances they remind us of and ways we can cope with those that haunt our dreams and imaginations within our societies. After Victor Frankenstein's mother had died he spent a lot of time trying to figure out why some things are alive while others remain dead. He became obsessed with making the dead living once again, so he pursues anatomy to understand how human bodies transition from having the life to losing it and becoming dead, his intentions are to create a new race of creatures. Hence he spends most of his free time digging up corpses, after assembling all the pieces he needed and bringing the creature to life he realizes that the creature did not turn out to look the way he had planned. This terrifies him as he does not know what to do, the monster was unhappy by how Frankenstein had created him, so he ran away. Frankenstein could no longer control him, and he could not continue with his normal life like it used to be because of the frequent nightmares he experienced the monster he created. This resulted in his illness as he struggled to figure out how he could stop his very own creation before it destroyed him and his family. Frankenstein could no longer control the monster nor his life.Jerome in his theory states that monsters are our children, just as women give birth to children, Frankenstein created a monster. Even when the monsters are hidden away or pushed to the edge of the world, they always return home where they were born. When they do they remind their creators of them and the effort and work it took them to create them, it reminds their creators of the things they hoped to create during that time and how it turned out to be in the present. Based on Frankenstein's life we see that he spend a lot of time in isolation away from his wife Elizabeth, he never wrote to his sister or wife and did not make friends. He was a scientist who enjoyed studying and discovering new things, and he was a nerd. We see his obsession with anatomy growing after his mother passed on, he became very curious about what makes the living alive and what keeps the non-living dead. The desire to create a race of monsters that would become his family came at this time and hence he spent a lot of trying crafting and planning how he would make this become a reality. He viewed is place in history being a great scientist and inventor who created a new race of magnificent creatures in the world by giving life to assembled body parts from dead corpses, but it turned out that he created a monster that not only frightened him but also scared the rest of the world.Timothy Beal concluded by saying that monsters invite us to discover our monsters in ourselves and ourselves in our monsters, he further explains that our monsters are more than seasonal consumer items and more than scapegoats for threats and dangers in our lives. They reveal to us the knowledge that we have gathered over the years and the limits of conscious reach we hold. He further added that people meet monsters when their unlimited knowledge, ever expanding consciousness trembles in fear in its tracks. After Frankenstein had studied all there was to know in this world during his time, he realized even with all his knowledge he was not able to figure out what made the living things live and the non-living dead. In his quest to understand this he meets his monster that he could not control or change because it was greater than him. Frankenstein discovered his monster in his attempt to understand death and life also by creating a new race from dead corpses. The monster he created constantly reminded him of his crafting and planning research work, what he hoped the creature would look like and be and what it was after the creation.ConclusionFrom all the three essays we see that monsters are created to act as scapegoats for our anxieties and fears, once they are created they remain to haunt us forever. They remind of what we hoped they would have been before creating them and what they will be in the future. From Frankenstein's story, we see that his monster did not turn out to be what he had carefully crafted and planned.