019Mary Shelly’s ‘Frankenstein’
posted by [TALLéNT] on June 18th, 2007
As I knew beforehand, this is a greatly important novel in world literature. It is perhaps the most widely known story (or maybe only icon) in the world. It was a good experience therefore to study it as a part of my schooling.
To be honest, it really was not what I expected. I originally assumed that the monster was called Frankenstein. Silly me! But I think this is a widely held misconception. In this sense, I find a lot of similar aspects of the story that I had not known before our class started studying it. As I read on, I found more and events that grew further and further from my initial presumption of the plot as well as the characters. This is one of the main reasons I am thankful for reading analysing this text rather thananother lame Shakespeare play.
The flavour of the Mary Shelley’s 1816 novel was, although distinct, not what I was lead to believe. I was all set to get stuck into a thoroughly exciting and horrific tale. Instead I lazily trudged through the mud of a highly intellectual and slow-moving process. Ultimately, I didn’t like it. It was not exciting (the closest it came to this was when Victor had that nightmare first night after he breathed life into his unnamed monster), and I found it hard to get stuck into. In the end I set myself a 5 page per day quota to get through it. Also, someone please tell me why the monster, after listening for a couple of months to a family of three who really didn’t spend that much time talking to each toher, suddenly spoke like a Harvard graduate with 200 IQ! He spoke with emotion, feeling, intellectual diction and purpose, none of which I learned after a couple of months. I’m still not at the monster’s level and I’ve been studying the English language by ear for 17 years! And I’m suppose to be in the Extension English class! This really puzzled me. All those film versions of the monster I saw beforehand (like in James Whale’s 1931 adaptation) were slow and dumb, making me feel superior to it, like any other human being. This was a strange discovery for me.
Despite my disapproval of much of the story, I reamin pleased that we sudied it. Indeed it suits the Gothic criteria and will always be an important text in the study of English and literature. In the exams in particular, the questions I had to answer made me realise what an iconic novel Mary Shelley has written and how extensively it has been used and reused and morphed and altered in so many aspects of even the most modern cultures. It was truly a worthwhile study.
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