Week One: The gothic

For the introduction to this class I read Marry Shelly's classic Frankenstein. I found the psychological aspects of the story to be quite intriguing. It is a story of with strong character development. Dr. Frankenstein's Abomination is the greatest example of this character development. It is a creature created from an experiment to reanimate dead tissue. Once it is given life it begins as any new creature, in its infancy. The creature may be fully formed and large in stature, but its mind is in the young stages of a newborn child. It does not understand what it is and like any child, it does not see itself different from any other person. Once it finds societal members that teach it to speak, read, and write, it believes itself to be a member of society. This creature doesn't understand why people run away from it, and it becomes dejected from society. It becomes frustrated and hurt by this, and begins to act as if it is in its adolescent years. It seeks revenge on its parent, and curses its existence due to this man. He finds ways to get at Frankenstein, in this case by killing off his family. It only reaches adolescence though, once the creature finds its creator after the long trek through the arctic, it begins to realize what it had done. It had not thought of the future until he had finally achieved what he had aimed to do. This psychologically is similar to one in their teens, where they act on emotion and impulse without the forethought of the consequences of their actions. Like any teen, it has an emotional response to this. It begs the question of what he creature was maturing to. The quick development of it could have seen a truly bright and prosperous individual. This ties into the theme of society, it is incredibly vain. We want people whom are pretty or seem to fit in over truly brilliant and less attractive individuals. We seem to value the youthfulness of a face over the intellectual person.