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Frankenstein: The Purpose of Creation 11354 Views
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Description:
The creation of Frankenstein’s creature is actually a metaphor for potatoes? Whoa. That’s crazy. We never would’ve….oh. Wait. It’s a metaphor for childbirth? Huh. Well. ...That’s not as cool.
Transcript
- 00:01
We speak student!
- 00:03
Frankenstein a la Shmoop
- 00:05
The Purpose of Creation
- 00:07
Why the creation scene?
- 00:11
[ classical music ]
Full Transcript
- 00:22
[ music continues ]
- 00:30
[ music intensifies ]
- 00:33
[ music darkens and slows ]
- 00:40
It's pretty easy to see
- 00:42
that this is a birthing scene, right?
- 00:46
It's a creation scene
- 00:47
on one side.
- 00:49
And we can talk a lot about,
- 00:50
you know, how Victor Frankenstein is playing God.
- 00:53
We'll talk about that a little bit later in the course.
- 00:56
But, if we're thinking about this from Mary Shelley's perspective,
- 00:59
it is an actual childbirth scene.
- 01:02
If you read the passage,
- 01:04
the creation scene,
- 01:06
there are words like
- 01:08
"agony,"
- 01:10
"toil."
- 01:11
These words that we really associate with childbirth.
- 01:15
And childbirth in the early 1800s
- 01:18
was not easy.
- 01:20
You know, it wasn't like you go in,
- 01:22
get your epidural, and everything's done.
- 01:24
It was painful.
- 01:26
Postpartum depression was actually a huge issue.
- 01:29
Back then they didn't call it that.
- 01:31
But the entire scene and what happens during and after it
- 01:35
is really supposed to recall childbirth.
- 01:36
As I mentioned, Mary Shelley,
- 01:38
who we say, "Oh, well, she was only 18.
- 01:40
What does the she know about childbirth?"
- 01:42
She had already given birth twice at that point.
- 01:44
And, kind of, these labor pains
- 01:47
are a metaphor for childbirth, a metaphor for writing the book,
- 01:51
et cetera, et cetera.
- 01:52
And you can read this scene in so many different ways.
- 01:54
Just one reading is to say
- 01:56
she's kind of showing what childbirth is like.
- 01:59
Why would she be so intent on doing that
- 02:01
other than the fact that she'd given birth twice?
- 02:03
She was living and writing
- 02:06
in a society dominated by men.
- 02:08
And men could do everything in this period. And they did.
- 02:13
The one thing men could not do
- 02:15
was create life.
- 02:16
That was the one thing that women could do
- 02:18
that men couldn't.
- 02:19
So she wants to kind of show the scene of
- 02:22
here's a man trying to create life
- 02:24
- and -- - Things go awry.
- 02:25
- Yeah. - So in the whole vein of trying to create life,
- 02:29
there's the notion of trying to control life
- 02:32
and destroy life.
- 02:34
And, you know, you have to think about
- 02:38
a child -- She was probably 15 when she got pregnant
- 02:41
the first time.
- 02:43
and there have been a number of readings of Frankenstein
- 02:45
as an abortion, as a living abortion.
- 02:48
It's a woman taking control of her body
- 02:50
in a way that you couldn't do before,
- 02:54
you wouldn't want to do.
- 02:55
And you can imagine the technology of abortion
- 02:57
back then was a whole different animal.
- 02:59
- Yeah. - How does all that play
- 03:01
in its time frame?
- 03:03
And with her as a person who's like --
- 03:04
I think of her as this very smart, lonely woman
- 03:07
whose time was 200 years early in some way.
- 03:11
What we risk doing is reading
- 03:14
onto Frankenstein something that was not there
- 03:17
because we now have these, you know, huge controversies
- 03:21
and things like that about abortion now.
- 03:23
But that's not to say that we
- 03:24
A - should not do that
- 03:25
or B - that that was not actually the case back then.
- 03:28
But, yeah, there is a lot of this idea of a woman
- 03:30
being able to control the birthing process.
- 03:34
What's interesting about Frankenstein is that
- 03:38
if we're thinking about it in terms of an abortion,
- 03:40
like you said, it's a living abortion.
- 03:41
Frankenstein gets created.
- 03:43
He's not aborted as a fetus or whatever you would say.
- 03:47
He is born
- 03:49
and then his creator abandons him.
- 03:51
We can talk about it as an abortion,
- 03:53
but I think the bigger issue,
- 03:55
or the issue that would have been more important at the time,
- 03:58
was this abandonment issue.
- 04:01
And this child was born and then immediately
- 04:03
his father, the creator, just completely abandoned him.
- 04:07
Which brings into bigger questions of,
- 04:10
you know, nature versus nurture,
- 04:11
which we'll talk about in a bit.
- 04:13
Was the monster born bad
- 04:14
- or was, you know, badness thrust upon him? - The environment bad.
- 04:17
- Yes. - [ laughs ]
- 04:20
What does the creation scene represent in Frankenstein
- 04:22
and why is it included?
- 04:25
What controversies arise?
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