Jeanne C. I wanted to look more into Frankenstein's monsters' talks of an idealized relationship he could have with his monstrous bride, akin to Adam and Eve. I drew a scene of a young couple with elements taken from Romeo and Juliet, an iconic pair of young lovers who seemed to be soulmates who fell completely in love at first sight and who thus wouldn't deny themselves to each other, in a rather similar way to the monster's want for a bride who "would not deny herself" to him (Shelley 101). I used a simply blue/red color scheme and kept out any dialogue or strong expressions because the monster's ideas of love are incredibly abstract and vague, relying more on imagery and traditional and extremely grounded gender roles rather than actual compassion and empathy. Instead, he maintains an idealized almost storybook like vision as to what love could look like, and by extension, what love could look like for him with a female monster. I kept the colors flat and cold, even when using traditionally warm and romantic colors, such as pink and red. I didn't add any dimension or shading to their clothes and kept the background completely blank with shades of grey. The couple seems almost to be in a cold void of sorts, with dull colors and a dull background. The monster has not thought of how his theoretical partner might feel, or of the possibilities for rejection, with his want to “live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for his being” sounding like a twisted version of a 'love at first sight' or a 'soulmate' type of connection akin to Adam and Eve or Romeo and Juliet- something he would venerate and want but never be able to attain (101). I added a black border that resembles a looking glass or window of sorts, with this image of a young and eternal love going from a delusional but hope-filled possibility to something completely shattered in front of him as the monster watches Victor “trembl[e] with passion" as he tears his bride to pieces through a window (119).
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In the final part of my series, I have sketched Victor Franstein lying dead alongside his monster. The cycle of trauma began with Mary Shelley and her child (as depicted in the first sketch). Shelley’s suffering and traumatic experiences were passed down to the feelings of guilt and depression experienced by Victor and thus his creation - however, in this drawing, the cycle of “intergenerational trauma” comes to an end for both creator and creation.
Upon my first reading of “Frankenstein,” I was shocked to find that Shelley decided to conclude the novel by killing both of her main characters. Through my lens of “Frankenstein” as a tale of empathy, I believed that the death of one character or the other would allow readers to understand where our empathies should ultimately be directed toward. For instance, if Victor alone had died, readers might see a reflection of Shelley’s own survivor’s guilt as a parent, and her internal desire for her child to have lived instead of her. On the other hand, if the monster had died, we may have seen a reconstruction of Shelley’s experience in having lost her child and view Victor’s reaction to the death as an indication of her own coping mechanisms to trauma through him. Alas, the conclusion of “Frankenstein” reminds us that the novel was never meant to be a direct reflection of Shelley’s life or experience. The twisted relationship between Victor and his monster is the manifestation of the unspoken and intrusive thoughts and feelings shared by both a mother and her child, which ultimately ends with the death of both characters. Shelley’s depressing conclusion could have been for many reasons - perhaps Victor and his monster’s death is a warning for mothers of the shame of their negative feelings toward their children, such that these feelings will only lead to horrible consequences. Alternately, it is possible that the death of Victor and his monster is the most peaceful conclusion to their relationship with one another. Their synchronized deaths could be a representation of what Shelley wished for herself, in which case readers might feel empathy for Shelley in this interpretation of the ending. Irrespective, it is clear that Shelley’s own trauma impacted her construction of Victor and his monster’s gruesome end, and I hoped to capture the peaceful auras that both characters find as they conclude the cycle of suffering and trauma sourced from their author, Mary Shelley. This video compares Frankenstein’s relationship with his monster with Dr. Jekyll’s relationship with Mr. Hyde to conclude that our ultimate and strongest goal is to have a good image of ourselves in the questioning of who we are, and explores how this is revealed in both relationships. The video starts with Frankenstein getting ready for the day (in the blue blazer; I gave him a name tag, but it isn’t visible), when he is suddenly confronted with the image of his daemon, speaking to him from the mirror. This would correspond to the scene at the top of the glacier on Montanvert where Frankenstein speaks with his monster who recounts his life, begging Frankenstein for love and help. We can see Frankenstein’s initial horror at seeing his monster and how he turns away from him, refusing to help him. The mirror effect explains Frankenstein’s reaction in the real story, where he fully rejects his monster because he sees that it is a reflection of himself, and he is not capable of being confronted to that. The second scene portrays Dr. Jekyll in the brown blazer taking his potion to give existence to Mr. Hyde. Mr. Hyde erupts from Dr. Jekyll and appears in the mirror, showing that he is fully part of Dr. Jekyll but with this potion he becomes external. We can see Dr. Jekyll’s satisfaction with his work, which contrasts with Frankenstein’s horror with regards to the monster he created. Mr. Hyde is all the bad of Dr. Jekyll, or at least that’s what Dr. Jekyll wants in order to avoid needing to feel guilty for his actions. If someone else does those bad actions, if his bad part is separate from his original self, it’s not his responsibility anymore. He doesn’t understand that Mr. Hyde is still a reflection of him and not an entirely separate being, especially because he chooses to release this evil into the world every time he takes the potion to turn into him. This is what the mirror attempts to show. The next scene consists of flashes between Mr. Hyde and the daemon, superposing them in a way, saying that like Mr. Hyde, the daemon is all the bad of Frankenstein. Frankenstein’s monster was born good, it is only after that he becomes evil, out of Frankenstein’s treatment of him. The monster specifically explains this in his recounting of his life, saying that he desperately wanted to be good but Frankenstein’s hate as well as the hate he was constantly faced with from other people due to his horrific nature, which Frankenstein created, made him turn into an evil creature. Thus, his evil comes from Frankenstein, and because Frankenstein created him in this way, he is responsible for it. Neither Frankenstein nor Dr. Jekyll take responsibility for their actions as the preservation of their image is more important than being good. We can see this clearly in the event of Justine’s death as Frankenstein chooses to let her be executed instead of coming clean about the monster he created. He says it’s because he was scared of being labeled crazy, but after years of work, he could’ve easily gathered evidence of his accomplishment. Dr. Jekyll exhibits this character when he denies any guilt for the actions he commits as Mr. Hyde. When Dr. Jekyll and Frankenstein are ultimately confronted with their alter egos in the mirror, they have very different reactions. Frankenstein immediately begins to question himself and realizes that the monster he sees in front of him, he is actually seeing him and the monster is him. He is horrified of his monster, but because of the mirror, he brings this horror back to himself. He tries to justify himself, to explain that he is not that reflection, but even he does not believe what he is saying. Eventually, the daemon jumps out of the mirror to fully impersonate Frankenstein. At that moment, the reality is too unbearable for Frankenstein as his image of himself is destroyed, so in the last attempt for salvation by killing his monster, he ends up dying. In the real story he doesn’t kill his daemon, but he does kill the evil. When Frankenstein dies, all his cruelty dies with him, and the monster is free to be good again. On his side, Dr. Jekyll’s initial reaction is to laugh as he does not believe that Mr. Hyde is a reflection of him and he rejects all responsibility. Dr. Jekyll is in contempt until Mr. Hyde gets reabsorbed into him, corresponding to the moment in the real story when even the potion is not enough to remain good. He then alternates between being shocked and afraid that his bad side has caught up with him as Dr. Jekyll, and being happy that he can finally be evil as Mr. Hyde. When he finally realizes that he is stuck in this body and he is not able to escape the guilt anymore, he decides in the video and in the real story, to end his life. When they understand the mirror, both Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll search for redemption, to try to correct their mistakes, which ultimately leads to their death. Frankenstein chases his monster to the ends of the earth until he dies, and Dr. Jekyll decides to commit suicide. They die for their monsters because as humans, we can escape our guilt. We can’t run from our responsibility; it will catch up with us. To further illustrate this, the video shows Frankenstein strangling himself at the end of the video, which echoes the daemon’s strangling of William, showing that he understands his guilt and he cannot bear to have this vision of himself so he drives himself to death. Ultimately, the need to see ourselves as good drives them to death. Frankenstein’s storytelling of his miseries to Watson shows a last attempt to preserve his image, as does Dr. Jekyll’s letter to Mr. Utterson. Dr. Jekyll even lets Dr. Lanyon die just to preserve his image when he knew Mr. Hyde would overtake him but he didn’t want the world to know and he wanted to be able to control the narrative of how the story would be told. The video ends with a picture of an artwork saying “who?” as is reflected by the many clothes on the floor in the background, showing that no matter how much we change externally, our core is still the same, and we cannot escape ourselves. As the second sketch in my 3-part series, I have drawn the image of Frankenstein’s monster, capturing his “wretched” and unnatural form in full light. As discussed in the previous piece, Shelley’s own trauma from the loss of her child heavily influences her depiction of Victor’s fear of having violated the natural laws of requiring a woman to give birth to a child. While Victor may remind Shelley of her own guilt or pain at having given birth to a child fated to die within only a few days, Frankenstein’s monster is the manifestation of that child. The monster never had a place in this world, and he is a manifestation of all the negative feelings that are harbored toward him by society and by his own parent. He alone bears the responsibility for his creation of which he bore no will upon. Thus, he seeks to shield himself from the world in darkness and in the crevices of nature where no human will go; it is only in light (which I have deliberately shone onto the sketch) that we can observe the trauma and suffering that the monster experiences because of his creator’s wishes to remove him from this world. I have drawn him to be exhausted, teary, and unlike any living human. He is negative energy and “unfit to exist.”
As mentioned in the previous piece, Shelley’s Frankenstein is a tale of empathy - but not purely of empathy toward the creator. Rather, her story is as much an exploration of the suffering of a parent who brings an “unnatural” child into this world as it is of the trauma experienced by the child who has been cast aside as a result. In losing her own child, Shelley fictionalizes the impact it had upon herself and the soul of her daughter. In many ways, Mary Shelley’s tale of Frankenstein is one of empathy. Shelley’s own experience of the pains of failed birth and of eventual motherhood are translated through Victor’s failed upbringing of the monster he creates as well as the guilt and responsibility he develops. Mary Shelley’s firstborn daughter survived only for a few days, and in the following summer, Shelley began to imagine her story, Frankenstein. As the first drawing in my 3-part series, this sketch of Shelley holding her newborn child closely amidst a backdrop of lightning (that which is capable of giving and taking life), represents the beginning of the trauma that Shelley will eventually work through in her novel.
Novels such as “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” have demonstrated to me the power of literature as a means of confronting and recognizing one's own trauma through a fictionalized version of one’s own experience. Thus, I chose to begin my series with an image of Shelley’s painful experience of losing her first child, as this is the likely origin of her construction of her protagonist, Victor. Despite the clear flaws that Victor embodies as a parent to his monster, as an audience, we cannot help but feel a sense of understanding toward him as well. This is due to the fact that Shelley herself likely harbors feelings of guilt and or depression toward the notion of birth, thus she is able to impart these feelings to Victor. In the following piece of my series, I will explore the depths and details of Victor's failures, as well as the intergenerational impact of a parent’s traumas. The Coffee Shop
His demeanor was completely normal. The normal brown-black tinged eyes, a faded leather jacket, and a slight smile was a perfect picture of a stranger you would bump into at the coffee shop off Woodbury St. As soon as you walked in the calming wafts of fresh coffee beans would enthrall the olfactory system, sending it on a 24/7 buzz. The locals have always wondered how the shop has always kept its temperature the same – spring, summer, fall, and winter – at 75 degrees. There had to be something magical about the place. A chorus of lively conversations coupled with a freshly baked cinnamon roll could only amount to heaven on earth (although the frequenting priest would beg to differ). On holidays, the whole community would gather there; from ancient grandmas who had lost their teeth to married couples who weren’t really married to the seemingly endless stream of sugar-crazed kids, this was the soul and heart of the town. Every house has an unmistakable scent. Some would always wear the obnoxious perfumes you only get when you want to piss someone off. Others smelled like fluffy clouds of smiles and laughter – the tingly feeling that tip-toes up your spine when you know you’re in love. But a few smelled like fat, refreshing drops of rain; the musky yet clear air that cautiously emerges after a heavy storm. Oops, I think we’ve lost our stranger. Now, where is he… Ah, there she blows. Through the wide, enveloping arms of a building, you could see him being scanned for his smell. The officer seems puzzled that the scanner didn’t pick up anything but a passerby assured the officer this was normal; he was simply different. Up and up and up the stairs he went, eyebrows furrowed, smile plastered. Eventually he came to his destination as the ancient doorway hissed and sputtered. A gust of wind slammed into him as he held his tussled hair and took in the view. The birthing-place hadn’t changed – if you could call it a birthing-place. It was more of a narrow, rat-infested alley where the lowest scum of earth scrounged about. He had felt pain first there. In a flash, his life had mutated from an uproarious joy to one of abandonment. Clenching his fists, he averted his eyes to the bar on 56th street. He could faintly hear the twinkles from the bartenders mingling with the slow trickle of beer. It was a raw stream of music encapsulating the eerie emptiness within him. An empty cup waiting to be filled as drops of life slowly tip-tap in. Swaying to one side, he lifted his leg, hidden behind the many tears of his jeans, over the edge. He felt free. It was as if a part of him was in freefall – with no worries, no sadness. A small voice whispered into his conscious let go… As he lazily traced his hand across his chest, he grimaced when the sensation of a multitude of scars overpowered him. One from the girl who stole his heart. The man who stole his dignity. The boy who stole his humanity. The list went on and on. Am I a beast or man? One hop was all it took. Yet, something prevented him from taking that final step forward. He was lost – then he wasn’t. Analysis Throughout the book, I kept finding myself being drawn to this seemingly dichotomous but similar relationship between Frankenstein and the monster. I wanted to explore this relationship in the realm of what happens after the book ends. First, I sought to highlight how absurd it was to dehumanize a creature based on its looks. Using the requirement of a certain “smell,” I drew a picture of a society that accepted people based on their scents. The character (representing the monster) had no smell and therefore could be subject to dehumanization and expressed the “blank slate” theme. I really wanted to dive into the inner conscious of the monster, so I discovered that the first encounter with his “parent” was life-defining. Although the story opens to a warm note, a cloud of suicidal depression hangs around until the very end when the character decides not to take his own life. The ending is meant to be ambiguous regarding the definitions of “lost” and what path the character chooses to take. However, I think the monster in the book, though adamant about burning himself, will refrain from taking his life and follow the steps of his maker. There is something innate in humans (this implies that the monster was human) that fights to stay alive, even in the face of death. No matter the extent of the character’s scars, there is always time to turn back. Jeanne C. I wanted to explore the theme of nature in the novel Frankenstein, especially in the idea of a perversion of nature through Victor's creation. The relationship Victor holds with nature changes throughout the novel as the effects of his monster begin to weigh on him. In the end, nature goes from something soothing to something haunting. I drew most heavily from Victor's obsessive pursuit of the monster towards the end of the novel, where nature goes from something that lifts his spirits and provides a sense of calm and renewal (for example, when he goes to the mountains after feeling weighed down and guilty because of the two deaths he was responsible for) to just the setting that seems to observe his much more basic and primal hunt for the monster. Nature in Frankenstein remains sublime and seems to take on a life of its own, but Victor's perspective of it changes and as he becomes consumed by his hatred and rage for his monster, he no longer recognizes the sublime and sentience of nature in the same ways he did before. I wanted the mountains and the clouds to look passive but still observant in the rain, very roughly sketched in shades of grey because it is no longer something Victor notices or pays attention to.
Creative Component:
Arrival “I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept, and grasped to death his throat who never…” —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. There are many ways to be born, though I have forgotten most. This is a story about hands: how I have only this blue body, this terrible body, this murdered self. A face blue like overripe stars, like pigeons. I want the ending to be bright. Inside a forest, a place so green & so lovely it could burn you. This is a story about burning & being burned. I will give you bellflower root, mugwort, the skin of my waiting mouth, my tongue still helpless, noiseless against the rain. Here is my body & here is what I can give you. I am only what I sing, a stretched shirt, the stale half of a bread roll. Just a little music as the birds unfurl, strangled into song. What can I give you that will make you stay? The song looped over, the other half of the bread roll. Something innocent, soft. Something that has known warmth & swallowed it. The body as a measure of everything but itself. The birds as they continue to sing. A beat of quiet for the flickering rain, for ruin slipped under pillowcases. This is a story about hands & everything they cannot touch. The only ending I know: grasped mouths & blue palms & the sound of a forest burning into silence. Here is what’s left. Here is my body, death -less & waiting & so cold. Look, all I have is this— a face nothing like yours, your voice still scratching at my throat. Here is my body & the way it has forgotten who -leness. Here is my body. This is a story about how it never starts. Analytic Component: “Arrival” is a Golden Shovel poem that reanimates the relationship between Victor Frankenstein and his monster, between creator and the created. In it, the poetic speaker echoes the monster’s feelings of self-doubt in a world that rejects him for his body, his nature, his “murdered / self.” I was largely inspired by the ending of the novel—specifically, the monster’s final speech before disappearing, in which he admits his misery, his wretched self: “I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept, and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing” (Shelley 211). I decided to use poetic form to guide my understanding of the character of the monster himself, ultimately writing “Arrival” as a Golden Shovel poem. The Golden Shovel is a form of contemporary poetry that builds bodies of work from the bones up. Originated by Terrance Hayes in response to a work by Gwendolyn Brooks, the last word of every line of a Golden Shovel poem is a poem itself, taken from an excerpt or the whole of a separate poem. In this process of literary alchemy, words and phrases from the original poem are reanimated in new contexts and made alive, much like the monster created by Frankenstein. As a result, the poem’s subject matter is reflected in its form. “Arrival” takes an excerpt from the monster’s final speech—beginning, “I have murdered the lovely and the helpless”—and reanimates it, with the monster’s humanity reconsidered in the context of his actions. While the monster towards the novel’s ending has renounced his humanity in committing to the act of murder, the monster in my poem is a more sympathetic character who wants only to know warmth, to know what it feels like to resemble another person, to have a body be acknowledged for what it is. Instead, all he has is this: “a face nothing like yours, your voice still scratching at my throat.” His rapt attention to nature—”a forest, a place so green & so lovely…[t]he birds as they continue to sing”—reflects his desire to assimilate into the world of the living. My adaptation of the monster thus focuses more on his humanity than his inherent monstrosity: “What can I give that will make you stay?” Despite this new characterization, he falls victim to the same societal rejection that his novel counterpart does. Through no action of his own, his story is sealed with a fixed ending: “Here is my body. This is a story about how it never / starts.” Ultimately, the monster presented in my poem is stripped of the chance to be born, his story instead ending before it ever began. This work was greatly inspired by Jane Goodall’s essay, “Electric Romanticism,” as well as Anne Mellor’s essay, “Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein”. The overarching idea behind my art is encapsulated by the following lines:
Did you not call this a glorious expedition? and wherefore was it glorious? Not because the way was smooth and placid as the southern sea but because it was full of dangers and terror; because, at every new incident, your fortitude was to be called forth and your courage exhibited; because danger and death surrounded, and these dangers you were to brave and overcome. For this was it glorious, for this was it an honourable undertaking. You were hereafter to be hailed as the benefactors of your species; your name adored, as belonging to brave men who encountered death for honour and the benefit of mankind. (Shelley 154-155) Although in these lines Frankenstein is addressing sailors in a discussion of setting sail on a new expedition, they reflect the mindset that Frankenstein had while creating the monster; one in which he was willing to risk danger and death in order to create something greater than mankind - which would only potentially benefit mankind. Along the lines of Mellor’s Essay, this piece of art reflects how Frankenstein may be read as a cautionary tale of what happens when nature and the sublime are transcended by man. In my art, I was most interested in how women bear the brunt of this transcendence, despite being innocent in the tampering with nature. Drawing on prominent notions of Romanticism and the sublime in Frankenstein, I chose to create a landscape from scraps and cutouts of Romantic era art. In my work, I represented Victor with a figure who looks much like the man in Wander Above the Sea of Fog. Like the man in this famous Romantic painting, Victor stands on a rock overlooking a vast, ethereal landscape. It is in this way that I aimed to represent Victor’s attempt to rise above humanity in creating the monster, and simultaneously allude to Victor’s connection with nature and the sublime throughout Frankenstein. In the upper left hand corner is the monster from The Nightmare, which I included to conjure the ceaseless presence of the monster in the sublime landscapes that Victor often overlooks. Sprinkled throughout the rest of the landscape are figures - soldiers and dead bodies - from Liberty Leading the People, who are meant to resemble the death and danger that inevitably come with ambitious endeavors to rise above humanity. Most importantly, lying at the bottom of the rock at Victor’s feet, is a female figure from The Nightmare who is meant to resemble Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s position below Victor signifies his ignorance to his wife’s fate, up until the monster murders her when she is left alone. Also, though, Elizabeth and Victor’s relative positions depict Victor's inferior interest in Elizabeth, among other women, which is overtaken by his interest in the monster, and his interest in chasing the sublime through emotional highs and lows. While this theme applies directly to Elizabeth in Frankenstein, I included several other Romantic era female figures below Victor, to show how this theme may also be applied more generally. I also must note the lack of sublimity, represented by a lack of Romantic era art, on the level of the female figures. I made this artistic choice because in Frankenstein, the women are quite grounded by the reality for women in the 1800s; they are often pushed to the sidelines, and unlike Victor, do not experience sublimity. Moreover, Elizabeth in particular, is left in the dark about the existence of Victor’s creation because of Victor’s effort to control the female figures around him. I think the key difference between my artwork and Frankenstein, is that in my art, Victor remains invested in the sublime and his monster, even after Elizabeth’s death. The significance of this artistic choice may be better understood when one views death figuratively. Elizabeth’s death in this instance ought to be seen as the way in which she is trapped in the dark, mostly ignored, and in danger despite being innocent throughout the book - all because of Victor’s attempt to surpass nature. Thus, Elizabeth is really in such a position - below Victor and insignificant to him - throughout Frankenstein. |
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