In this photo, the two living, yellow flowers are meant to represent the Monster and his hypothetical female companion, or anyone else who is considered to be an “outcast.” By depicting them using the more “conventionally beautiful” object (flower) in the image, I wanted to challenge the idea that difference is wrong or a “deformity,” as the Monster’s treatment in the novel suggests. It is possible for us to shift the perspective to see the Monster as alive and beautiful, while we see the ugliness in the close-minded and violent behavior of humanity that bring about his downfall and descent into evil. In the photo, as in the novel, the Monster and his companion are isolated from humanity as a result of their different outward appearance, but there are ways to see this in a more positive light. The photo portrays an alternative scenario in which the Monster finds his companion to settle down with. This shift in perspective now considers “the Monster’s gaze,” as opposed to humanity’s, which enables them to be loveable to one another and admired by a viewer – the roles of humans versus monster in Frankenstein now reversed. The contrasting effect of this new perspective serves to highlight the subjectivity of how we define what makes something beautiful or good.
My first creative project on Frankenstein is an exploration of how we define beauty, and the subjectivity of that definition. The Monster’s journey with self-image is so impactful because, as readers, we are able to watch as he gradually internalizes society’s negative perception of him. He begins as a kind of “blank slate,” with no mention or awareness of his appearance – uncorrupted by such conventions, as we all are before a certain age. The first time it comes up is an encounter with an old man in his hut: “His appearance, different from any I had ever before seen, and his flight, somewhat surprised me” (76-77). He is not only confused by the man’s fear of him, as he has not yet learned that he is “ugly” in the eyes of society, but also his neutral “surprise” at the man’s own unusual appearance proves that our aversion to difference is learned, as yet another product of social convention. Only after repeated occurrences of others’ repulsion towards him, the Monster begins to understand the nature of his “deformity” (83). When he finally sees a reflection of himself, his opinion of it is influenced by what is seen as “normal” and “beautiful,” conventionally. He asks, “Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?” which is the primary question I am responding to with this photograph (87).
In this photo, the two living, yellow flowers are meant to represent the Monster and his hypothetical female companion, or anyone else who is considered to be an “outcast.” By depicting them using the more “conventionally beautiful” object (flower) in the image, I wanted to challenge the idea that difference is wrong or a “deformity,” as the Monster’s treatment in the novel suggests. It is possible for us to shift the perspective to see the Monster as alive and beautiful, while we see the ugliness in the close-minded and violent behavior of humanity that bring about his downfall and descent into evil. In the photo, as in the novel, the Monster and his companion are isolated from humanity as a result of their different outward appearance, but there are ways to see this in a more positive light. The photo portrays an alternative scenario in which the Monster finds his companion to settle down with. This shift in perspective now considers “the Monster’s gaze,” as opposed to humanity’s, which enables them to be loveable to one another and admired by a viewer – the roles of humans versus monster in Frankenstein now reversed. The contrasting effect of this new perspective serves to highlight the subjectivity of how we define what makes something beautiful or good.
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For my second creative project on Frankenstein, I wanted to explore the concept of Victor Frankenstein as ‘mother’ to his creation. We had been discussing this quite a bit in class as well. In the text, Frankenstein first attempts to emulate motherhood and secondly attempts to discard the responsibilities of motherhood by leaving his creation to die. Both of these choices have disastrous consequences for Victor and those around him. Victor describes his process of creating the monster as such: “I had worked hard for nearly two years… For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded moderation” (38). Victor almost emulates a perverted version of the cycle of literal motherhood: giving up body autonomy, rest, and health in the name of your creation. He loves the concept of his child, his creation. He is willing to sacrifice a lot of his life’s pleasures in pursuit of it. However, once his creation is born, he instantly rejects it. He instead notes that “the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (38). Once he achieves his goal of anatomical motherhood, he instantly is disgusted by it. He finds his child to be wretched and ugly. Moreover, he has the intense feeling that the creature should not exist. The creature, on the other hand, searches desperately for a parental figure in a world that gives him none. The only person close enough to a mother, Victor, runs from and shuns him. In my photo, Victor looks rather dejectedly down at his swaddled creation, a literal representation of a mother and newborn baby. Victor feels no joy or love towards the thing he so desperately wanted to be a mother to. My Victor wears a veil, covering his face and twisting the types of acts associated with life and death. Where there is typically joy at a birth and grief at a death, Victor here is in a state of mourning at the birth of his child. He hides behind a veil and does not want to face the child head on. The veil can also be interpreted as a wedding veil, as Victor’s possible wedding to Elizabeth looms near. By portraying Victor as a literal mother, I tried to envision the complexities Victor was facing due to his creation. He is incapable of removing his attachment to it, he will always be the creatures mother whether he likes it or not. At the same time, he does not embody the title of mother in anything other than his role in creation. He does not nurture nor guide his creation at all. I believe my depiction of Victor softened him ever so slightly compared to the original text. My Victor is disgusted, but not hysterical, at the sight of his child. Whereas Shelley portrays Victor as desperately trying to escape motherhood, my Victor at least seems to have come to terms with the link between him and his creation. The setting of my photograph is inside the Victoria and Albert museum in London, England. It is inside a historical recreation of a late 1700s/early 1800s ballroom. As Frankenstein was written and set in different ends of this time period, I chose it as my backdrop. I was initially drawn to this piece by Mendelssohn because of its seemingly contradictory description: “Allegretto tranquillo,” which translates to fast and tranquil. I loved how the piece was able to balance these contradictory facets of it beautifully and embody both of these traits so clearly. I think that this also draws a nice parallel to the contradictory nature of Mont Blanc, being both an awe-inspiring, sublime place and a hideous, empty one, depending on if the observer views “silence and solitude” as “vacancy” (Shelley 144). I had always thought this piece’s arpeggios really accurately represented the feeling of floating on rolling waves that one would feel on a Venetian gondola (the piece’s namesake), and the part from “Mont Blanc” that inspired me to make this parallel was the two introductory lines: “The everlasting universe of things / Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves” (1-2). There was just always something that stuck out to me about these opening lines of “Mont Blanc,” but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. I think there is something haunting about how one can feel so small in the “everlasting universe of things” and how we are all just pawns that could easily succumb to “rapid waves.” I also think there is something very “trance”-like about this piece, a term that the narrator uses to describe the setting of the Ravine of Arve (35).
Just like Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” there are five segmented parts that make up its whole: the introduction, Part I, Part II, Part III, and finally the coda. Like the introduction of the piece, the first part of “Mont Blanc” seems to represent an inquisitorial first glance at the mountaintop. The first two notes that the right hand plays (E# and G#) seem almost to pose a question that is asking for a resolution. Similarly, the narrator seems to question if this setting is the “source of human thought” and if the “waterfalls around it (Mont Blanc) [will] leap for ever” (5, 9). The next part of the poem seems to seek for the resolution to the questions that are raised. The narrator describes “seeking among the shadows that pass by / Ghosts of all things that are” (45-6). This section of the piece seems to represent a nonchalant exploration of the mountaintop, as this section is predominantly played in a piano volume and has a relaxed feel. The next section of the piece is where it reaches its climax, and the same can be said for “Mont Blanc.” The narrator seems quite angry at the mountaintop in this section, saying “how hideously / Its shapes are heap’d around!” and “Is this the scene / Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young / Ruin?” (69-70, 71-3). The narrator seems appalled by the mountaintop in this section, as it seems to be such a deathly, hideous place. In Part III of the Mendelssohn piece, we encounter a resolution, as the theme echoes what has already been played in Parts I and II. This section of the poem also makes callbacks to earlier parts, as the narrator notes once again the “Roll [of] its perpetual stream” and marvels at the “everlasting” nature of “Mont Blanc” (1, 109). The coda of the piece draws similarities to Part V of the poem, as they both represent the narrator’s final tussling with the nature of their respective muses. Both seem to leave the reader/listener with an undecided tone, as the narrator concludes with a summarizing question: “And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, / If to the human mind’s imaginings / Silence and solitude were vacancy?” (142-4). Works Cited Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni,” Wonders and Sublimity 2024, Stanford Online High School, University of Stanford, April 2024, https://spcs.instructure.com/courses/7897/files/1338651?module_item_id=177635. Accessed 9 April 2024. satan as something larger than life
as the monster in the burning lake. you as the monster in the mountains that are eating you whole. the limbs of your companion fall into the sea & catch on fire. your creator as a god with his hands tied behind his back. mind being taken over by the thought of life & then shutting down when that life comes to be. this is what comes from obsession. & finally. you. as a hated adam who wouldn’t have needed an eve if your god had been beside you in this story there is hatred & satan is never there in the beginning only the end. This poem is about the monster in Frankenstein. There are a lot of references to Satan and other characters within Paradise Lost, so I wanted to bring that into this poem and connect Milton’s characters to the main figures within Frankenstein. When the monster first reads Paradise Lost, he realizes that his situation should be very similar to Adam’s, with him being the only one created of his kind, but that unlike Adam, he is deserted by his creator and doesn’t have a happy and blissful life. The monster states, “Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition; for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, a bitter envy rose within me” (Shelley 95). I wanted to connect the monster to both Adam and Satan, arguing that he doesn’t become like Satan from the very beginning of the book, even though he might be regarded as such by Victor and other humans who are fearful of him. The ending lines of my poem best show this, with the line “in this story there is hatred” showing how the monster starts to act with more and more malice towards his creator as the story continues, especially with Victor’s destruction of his possible female mate; the story also partly ends with the murder of Elizabeth before she marries Victor, mirroring Satan’s destruction of Adam and Eve after feeling a lot of hatred and envy towards them for having a happy life. I also wanted to bring in Victor as having the role of God, and even though in Paradise Lost his “children” are Adam and Eve, in this story the monster is his child. My imagery in the second stanza is a way to show how Victor seemed to be trapped or drawn in too far by the process of his creation, and unable to accept that he has responsibility over his creation once the process is done. The lines “your creator as a god / with his hands tied behind his back” juxtapose with the actual process of creation mentioned in Frankenstein, which has very heavy use of the hands in putting the body together; I wanted to do this to further show how trapped within himself he actually is even though he doesn’t realize it. He thinks that his hands are helpful to him and that they are allowing him to create a new and wondrous life form, but again he is not prepared for what he actually creates and therefore becomes imprisoned within the obsessiveness of his “creative” process. Also, when he first creates the monster, Victor recalls, “He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped and rushed down stairs” (Shelley 38-39). In this moment, hands become something threatening to him, which again goes against the positive and powerful way he thinks he uses his hands throughout the creation of the monster that now threatens him. the writer.
releases his mind. untethered & passionate. creativity becomes creation but creativity is lost. make something human and then take away humanity. you are humanity & you are in isolation. and your work is burning alive. you lit the fire but refuse to admit it. some of the words survive crumpled seared pages stuffed in jacket pockets the writer cannot take off the coat. the writer is too cold to burn alive but does it anyway. In this poem, I focus on Victor but portray him as a writer instead of as a creator of new life. I was partly inspired in this poem by our romantic poetry unit and the corresponding idea of the writer or poet as the creator of something outside of the self. I also thought that it would be an interesting way to describe Victor’s situation, since the stakes of creating new life are so much higher than the creation of a piece of writing. Victor doesn’t seem to realize this and the responsibility that must come with his creation, and completely ignores and detests the monster for a long time after the night of the monster’s birth; he treats this living thing as a piece of bad poetry that gets closed inside a notebook and never revised. The living thing must then go off on its own without anyone to turn to and without any initial knowledge of the world around him; he also knows that he is hated by both his creation and anyone who lays eyes on him. I illustrate this through the end of the first stanza. I am talking about Victor throughout the entire poem, and the line “make something human and then take away humanity” reveals how Victor seems to be the monster’s only connection to humans like Victor. The monster seemingly has human emotion and knowledge but cannot put that to good use and associate with humans in any positive way since everyone is fearful of him. I also use the imagery of fire in the following lines to show how the monster’s character slowly becomes worse and worse and how he becomes so envious and hateful of humanity that he resorts to murder. After murdering the child William, the monster says, “I gazed upon my victim, and my heart swelled with exultation and hellish triumph: clapping my hands, I exclaimed, ‘I too, can create desolation…’” (Shelley 105). The imagery of fire also connects to the themes of hell and Satan present within my second poem (project 2/3), along with the monster’s descent into a more Satan-like figure through Victor’s neglect. The rest of this poem goes over Victor’s connection to his creation, even though he does not feel like he should be connected at all. The monster follows him throughout the story, and after Victor destroys his progress on creating a mate for the monster, he promises that he will take revenge. The story ends with the monster standing over Victor’s body, and even though he did not directly murder Victor, he followed him until the end of his life. The imagery of fire was also used for Victor here, to connect them more clearly throughout the poem and show how Victor was dragged downward by both his actions and the monster’s. I go back to the idea of Victor as a writer in the second half, suggesting that what could have originally come out of Victor’s creation of new life did not occur; if Victor had been able to look ahead to what would happen after life occurred or if he had acted differently towards that life, the monster might not have contributed to his downfall. As I write in the second stanza, some parts of the original idea still survive but nothing positive does. Victor is trapped in the burning coat with the remnants of his “writings”, or the monster's character and beginning sense of wonder for the world, and in the end he metaphorically burns himself alive. The contrast of imagery in the last two lines also represent the setting in which his life ended, with the ice surrounding him on all sides. Within this image of the Monster, the reflected surface signifies his own interpretation of his character, like a mirror bouncing back on him, similar to the moment in the novel he had first seen his appearance through a reflection. The reflected image represents the two sides to the Monster’s character - who he longs to be versus who he actually is. Through this portrayal, the Monster wishes to be pure and good, similar to the depiction of Adam within Paradise Lost, but in actuality is simply the horrid creation nobody cares for, not even his own creators. All of society’s judgments and reactions pushed the Monster away from who he could have been and have shaped him into who he actually is, which is what this project portrays by the two different reflections depicted in the Monster’s perspective.
On one side, the Monster has the ability to depict a sense of purity and fairness as his role of a newborn creation within the novel, not yet poised by society. He holds the innocence of a newborn in his interests to explore different aspects of the world, literature, language, and even people. However, in actuality, the Monster’s short-lived pureness is quickly torn down by society’s reactions and influences and abandonment. Now, he sees himself just as society and his creators do - a horrid and ugly mistake - no longer who he wishes he was or could have been. While he “ought to be thy Adam,” complete with the pureness and innocence of a newborn creation, he is instead “the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.” Before being subjected to society’s cruelty and hateful influences, the Monster “was benevolent and good…[but] misery made [him] a fiend.” The Monster holds two sides - two faces - of who he is and who he could have been, speaking to the effect of society’s disgust and hatred on his own personal perspective of his character. As soon as his birth, his identity is quickly altered as his creator faces him with disgust and hatred, abandoning him and with that, tearing down the innocence and pureness the Monster could have held. Now, the Monster remains on the inside how society views him on the outside - a true monster - no longer the pure Adam he could have been, but the monstrous devil, just as this project paints him to be. For my first creative project relating to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, I wanted to work with the relationship between the female monster and the character of Elizabeth. Though they never meet, in fact the female monster never comes into existence at all, they are seemingly pitted against each other in death as Victor and his creation both aim to destroy what the other holds dear. The female monster ‘dies’ first. Shelley describes the following: “I thought with a sensation of madness… and, trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged. The wretch saw me destroy the creature on whose future existence he depended for happiness, and, with a howl of devilish despair and revenge, withdrew” (125). After initially agreeing to the monster’s request for a companion, Victor ‘kills’ her in front of the monster's eyes. Although the female creature is but a heap of body parts at this moment in time, the monster takes this act to be one of murderous violence against his loved one. Upon leaving, the monster promises Victor that he “shall be with [him] on [his] wedding-night” (127), which Victor takes to be a threat on his own life. However, we soon learn that Elizabeth Frankenstein (née Lavenza), and not Victor, will die on her wedding night when the monster strangles her. Shelley writes that “the murderous mark of the fiend’s grasp was on her neck, and the breath had ceased to issue from her lips” (147). By the time Frankenstein begins its denouement, both female companions are dead, killed out of fear or revenge.
In Frankenstein, the two deaths of Elizabeth and the female monster are weighed against each other and deemed equal. Although Victor is distraught at losing Elizabeth, he sees her death as the equivalent and opposite reaction to him failing to reanimate the female monster. The male monster clearly equates the two deaths as well, as his response to witnessing the destruction of his mate is to in turn destroy Victors mate. In my creative project, I wanted to explore just what it means to equate Elizabeth’s death to the female monster’s demise. At the end of the day, Elizabeth was a fully living woman, who had a future violently removed from her. The female monster, while denied her future, was never truly alive and therefore could never truly die. Her existence was purely conceptual for both Victor and his monster. They both see their two female companions as the same, stripping the very living Elizabeth of any personhood she could have held in their eyes before her death. By combining the female monster and Elizabeth into one person, I tried to compare and contrast who they were in death to show how the comparison is not very apt at all. The right-hand side of the face, made to represent the female monster, is stitched and unfinished. I used black sewing thread to stitch through my layers of scar wax to imitate two different body parts being stitched together. The eye socket is bruised and the skin is discolored and battered, as the person is in fact not alive. The lefthand side of the face, made to represent Elizabeth, is alive and whole. The only injury is the handprint bruise on her neck. Both are in a wedding nightdress and both were taken from their future spouses, but to call their fates equal objectifies Elizabeth to the status of a corpse: a literal heap of body parts. The monster's lack of a mate that he believes he is ‘owed’ is not equivalent to Elizabeth’s life. Lecture 2/3: Frankenstein: Ballet & Literature - Ballet’s First Homosexual Pas de Deux & Death3/22/2024 *Trigger Warning: 5:28-5:33 (Gun sound & Suicide)* The Creature says, “No sympathy may I ever find. When I first sought it, it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and affection with which my whole being overflowed, that I wished to be participated. But now, that virtue has become to me a shadow, and that happiness and affection are turned into bitter and loathing despair, in what should I seek for sympathy?” (166), just moments before his death. In the novel, the reader is able to solidify the malice and evil that the Creature has committed himself to, sending the reader to view the Creature as the monster that he literally portrays. In reading the novel, the reader does get an understanding of the Creature’s child-likeness, as well as how he is also a victim in this story. However, in the ballet this interpretation is taken to another level… The ballet’s ideology, which is an exact mirror of Scarlett’s ideology, comes clear in the last 6.5 minutes of the entire ballet. While revenge on the Creature’s part happens, it is also shown in relation to his deep regrets and sadness, whereas the Creature’s character in the novel comes across as more strong and resilient in the end, claiming that sympathy is not needed. In this lecture, I discuss these themes stated here, as well as how the movement literally represents Victor and the Creature’s similarities to one another, despite their reciprocal hatred that the novel illustrates, as well as the significance of the last scenes including ballet’s first ever homosexual pas de deux.
In the ballet, Frankenstein, by Liam Scarlett, the audience is immediately drawn into the process of creating this Creature. The scene that I show in this lecture is the first real glimpse that the audience gets of the Creature as his own character and it truly is the birth of the Creature, as well as the start to a terrible chain of events. There are lots of similarities in the text and the ballet, but what makes this visual representation through dance so powerful is our ability to get a taste of thematic elements and interpretive units of the story handed to us right as the story unfolds, especially from the Creature’s point of view. In the opening scenes, we understand right away that Victor is repulsed by the Creature, saying that, “disgust filled [his] heart” (38). However, what we do not fully grasp until much later is the immediate needs of the Creature following his birth. As are the crucial moments after the birth of a child, the moments following the birth of the Creature are also crucial, however, are easily neglected in Victor’s narration of events in the text. We see the confusion, agony, needs, and longing in the Creature’s reaching out to his creator, which is the first thing he does upon becoming more lucid. In the text, the Creature’s perspective of being born is not as clear as it is in the ballet, as in the ballet, the innocence, naivety, and vulnerability is seen right from the start. In my opinion, the ballet leads the reader to be more sympathetic to the Creature in this beginning scene, leading to less of a focus on Victor’s mental state and panic, and instead, a deeper understanding of the Creature’s youthful characteristics.
I created this colored-pencil art piece to represent the relationship between human consciousness and sublimity in the landscape depicted in Shelley's "Mont Blanc". Starting from the Arve River as an "everlasting universe of things", the force of the rushing river overwhelms the reader's mind and seemingly the rest of the atmosphere in its "own deep eternity" (1). Thus, I decided to incorporate a variety of colors within the waters, symbolizing the unceasing chaos and sensory its power carries and takes from its environment. I took inspiration from Van Gogh's "Starry Night" to draw the style, as I also wanted to capture the emotional and "trance-like" state it induces within the reader. The Arve River's sudden sublimity overpowers the reader, but it is after they become more passive and susceptible to the river that they are able to muse on their "own separate fantasy" and have "wild thoughts", allowing their mind to create its own imaginings and interpretations (2). In this way, the unusual pattern and swirls of the river represent the human mind's ability to break beyond the Arve River's "traditional power structure", in which our power to imagine counters the river's power to subdue. In drawing Mont Blanc, I depicted it according to the lines describing it as "rude, bare, and high, / Ghastly, and scarr’d, and riven” (2). I wanted the contrast of Mont Blanc's sublimity to the Arve River's to be evident, but still blend into the same style of intersecting but slightly more calm strokes. The "viewless gales" and serene but barren environment of Mont Blanc implies a more hidden interexchange of consciousness, one not as obvious and dominating as the Arve River's and needed to be discovered instead (2) . The straighter colored-pencil strokes intersecting in Mont Blanc represent a more direct connection to human consciousness: the subconscious. Unlike the Arve, where the sublimity lied in chaotic processing and rational thought more easily able to access from information pushed out and given, Mont Blanc's sublimity bestows a wisdom that requires the reader to stop, learn, and question "large codes of fraud and woe" within their subconscious (3). Thus, once the reader reaches the top of the mountain (me depicted sitting), and in turn, learns the "higher wisdom", there is a guiding light revealing a constellation of a brain (knowledge). Both the Sun and Moon are present within the art piece instead of just one or the other, because part of the human mind's relationship to nature's sublimity is finding harmony within each other. Within this partnership, we learn the interdependence of human consciousness and nature's wisdom: “And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea / If to the human mind’s imaginings / Silence and solitude were vacancy" (4). As Mont Blanc teaches us to listen, learn, and interpret and as the Arve River unites us and processes chaos, there really is no vacancy or silence for nature when the human mind is able to imagine and fuel its own adventure into sublimity.
Overall, the choice to depict this art piece in a surrealist type of style ties into the overall dream-like and subconscious theme to the relationship of the subliminal landscape in "Mont Blanc" through human consciousness. Breaking free from the “detested trance” of "the race / Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling / Vanish”, humans are able to find purpose beyond the superficial and fruitless cycles of life and death that seem to predict an ominous ending (3). By taking inspiration from nature's eternal silence and solitude as powerful instead of vacant, we, in turn, are also reignited to find passion within our own imaginings. Venturing beyond mere rational thought, when we reach the subconscious we unlock a world between life and death where we find purpose in interpretation and teaching wisdom. By realizing and recognizing power in nature, we discover the ability to use our own power: imagination and enlightenment to discover beyond what is given to us. Though depicting the Arve River in more of a surreal adaptation than Mont Blanc may weaken the metaphor of it being more of "rational thinking" than Mont Blanc, the overall message still seems to come through, especially since it helps me reinforce the idea of Mont Blanc representing the "teacher" of wisdom. |
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