Yes, Dahner is probably a good example of what I’m talking about: the conjunction of mistreatment and organic brain disorders. His parents denied scientists at Fresno permission to examine his brain before cremation, so we can’t be sure exactly what was wrong with him, but we know he was an alcoholic and the son of a mentally ill mother.

Charles Whitman is another: beaten by his father, lost his brother to murder, plus a tumour on his amygdala.

The point the English professors are making is that the new generation of students see monsters entirely as victims of circumstances. It’s an ideological belief.

It’s a weird internet-meme that the monster is innocent. Internet-dwellers have been posting that 2018 tweet as confirmation, as though that supercedes the text.

But it is true that I am a wretch. 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. I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. There he lies, white and cold in death. You hate me, but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself.

Right, and that fits with what the profs are saying here: that modern sensibilities view monsters (even serial killers) as victims.

In this case, the sources were a professor of English at Exeter who wrote an intro to the book, and Mary Shelley expert Professor David Punter, of Bristol University.

http://archive.is/BEz2F

The worst people in real life have both an abused background and an organic brain/genetic problem.

The monster’s abnormal reaction to rejection (becoming a serial killer), I read that as he’s probably got a bad brain/nature too. And why wouldn’t he, given how he was made?

You could…

Frankenstein! you belong then to my enemy—to him towards whom I have sworn eternal revenge; you shall be my first victim.’

The child still struggled and loaded me with epithets which carried despair to my heart; I grasped his throat to silence him, and in a moment he lay dead at my feet.

I gazed on my victim, and my heart swelled with exultation and hellish triumph; clapping my hands, I exclaimed, ‘I too can create desolation; my enemy is not invulnerable; this death will carry despair to him, and a thousand other miseries shall torment and destroy him

…but I didn’t read it that as an accident. Imagine using that defense in a courtroom: “I wasn’t trying to kill the child, I was trying to kidnap him for revenge. I killed him by accident when choking him to silence him.” Especially given the physical mismatch of a huge heavyweight versus a tiny child.

As I said earlier, “I think the problem is the students are giving too much credence to the monster’s monologues”

How do they work as journalists if they’re illiterate?

What’s the worst thing done to the monster, in your opinion?

The murders make him a monster.

I think the problem is the students are giving too much credence to the monster’s monologues, but “He is eloquent and persuasive, and once his words had even power over my [Frankenstein’s] heart; but trust him not.”

All that aside, you can’t look past strangling a 4-year-old boy. It’s reasonable to call anything that strangles a 4-year-old boy a monster, even if it felt lonely/abandoned.

And even the monster has the self-insight to know that he’s fundamentally evil: “I had cast off all feeling, subdued all anguish, to riot in the excess of my despair. Evil thenceforth became my good.”

Then why did you post a meme affirming that the book says one thing? If you haven’t read the book?

Nick Groom, external, a professor of English literature at the University of Exeter, who has written a new introduction to mark the novel’s 200th anniversary since publication.

“It’s interesting when I teach the book now, students are very sentimental towards the being,” Professor Groom wrote.

“There’s been a gradual shift… for years Victor Frankenstein’s creation was known as the Monster, then critics seemed to identify him as a victim and called him the Creature. That fits more with students’ sensibilities today.”

A gun in an inanimate object. The monster is a self-described murderer.

“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. I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin.”

No. There’s no mention of who the brain (or any other part) came from. Frankenstein gathered them from various charnel houses.

Who?

the creature itself was innocent.

It’s very much not innocent, it’s a serial strangler.

“I murdered her. William, Justine, and Henry—they all died by my hands.”

Why does the internet think the monster is innocent? It’s there in black and white and we’ve all read the book.

All mythology is public domain

🙄

Not really

Can’t RSS bots do this?