snagyp1

Although Kenneth Branagh’s film is titled “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” it is hardly the same tale that she wrote. There are so many scenes and so much information added into the movie for the obvious purpose of creating even more tense and dramatic situations and shocking the audience that it is laughable, literally; I found myself holding back giggles at several points during the film.

I do not wish to discredit the film, however. I think it has plenty of merit for attempting to create a work that follows the original story, written so long ago, which was meant to be chilling, while also trying to be a valid horror film. Many events of the book were included unchanged in the movie, but there were also quite a few changes, made solely for the purpose of directing the film towards a more horrific feel, and therefore I feel that it lost much of what was so touching about the book.

First of all, in the movie, Victor’s mother dies during childbirth, in a violent and bloody mess instead of silently and peacefully from scarlet fever. Secondly, instead of Justine standing trial for and being convicted of the murder of little Willy as the book states, a mob of frenzied villagers hang her in a public square. Thirdly, the creature murders Victor’s father in this film adaptation, but in the book, Mr. Frankenstein dies of natural causes in his own bed, allowing time for Victor to say his goodbyes. These three examples are all relatively unimportant differences that one would expect to be present in movie adaptations of novels, however, there are also two major differences that really jump out at me.

One of which is the fact that, in the movie, after Victor creates the being and realizes that he has escaped, he immediately assumes that the monster will die from the cholera epidemic in the area. Not only does he assume this fact, which turns out to be false, he also seems to completely forget about his experimentation altogether and spends time with Elizabeth being happy and not having a care in the world. In the book, Victor is sick for at least a couple of months after witnessing the sight of the thing he created, and is thus incapable of immediate pursuit, but as soon as he recovers, Victor is plagued by the thoughts of his wretch roaming the Earth. It is my opinion that this vast difference is maybe stretching the director’s creative license a bit too far because it totally changes how the audience feels at that point in the story.

Another huge and heinous disparity between the two is the fact that in this film, Victor has the audacity and is disturbingly insane enough to bring Elizabeth back to life after the monster literally ripped her heart out of her chest, of all things. This whole sequence is unnecessarily perverse and twisted, and should not have been included. Not only did Victor bring her back to life, but he also used random other people’s parts to make her up even though all she was missing was a heart, and the result is a being that is as hideous as the original male monster. Then, to top off his madness, Victor proceeds to dance and be affectionate with this half-lifeless Elizabeth until Steve comes to claim Elizabeth for himself. While the men fight it out, poor Elizabeth realizes what a perverse thing Victor has done to her and is so overwhelmed by this, and the fact that she may have to play companion to the monster, that she sets herself on fire. This scene was one of the ones where I was on the brink of laughter. What a ridiculous addition to such a great book. Branagh should be ashamed.

Frankenstein is a true horror story, but not in the sense that modern society has chosen to portray in today’s movies and television shows. Rather, this novel is chilling because it depicts the repercussions of revolutionary science gone wrong. Unlike some films about the Frankenstein monster, the life created by Victor Frankenstein is not green with bolts in his neck, roaming around town in search of carnage, but is merely a misunderstood, neglected creature, who has been given more height and strength than should be allowed for a human being.

Mary Shelley’s message in writing this book is clearly a warning to scientific minds of her time about dabbling in immorality and trying to play God. I do not think that Shelly detests scientists, however, I think she disagrees with scientific study and experimentation for personal gain and losing sight of its application for the good of humanity. Victor is motivated by the traumatic death of his mother to delve further into the quest for reviving dead matter to life again, but he fails to see the danger in this pursuit.

Victor becomes too ambitious with his illegal and immoral sciences, and does eventually come to discover the secret to life. However, his decision to take the action of creating a new human life from dead body parts definitely backfires on him. The “monster” is eight feet tall and fall more powerful than any naturally born human being. It is for these reasons that the creature is feared and abhorred. With this narrative, Shelley conveys to her readers that scientific breakthrough should be proceed with caution towards being able to understand the universe so completely that humans can control the natural occurrences of Earth.

In response to the question, I originally write that "poetry is merely pure insanity" and that it is also "raw emotion." What made me think of this was the quote from Thomas Babington Macaulay: “Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.” I agree with this statement, and I was surprised to find that, out of the three classmates who commented on my paper, not a single one agreed with me about the presence of insanity in poetry. Maybe these students rejected my idea because they immediately associate being insane with someone’s mind being unable to function properly in a negative way, but I did not mean the word in that sense.

In my opinion, there is a very fine line between insanity and genius. I don’t see insanity as a bad thing necessarily. If you take being insane or deranged to simply mean a mental state in which thoughts arrange themselves differently than what is “normal” you can use the exact same terminology to describe the mind of a genius. The minds of both insane and highly intelligent people work in ways completely unique and different from what is thought of as being ordinary or “normal.” Thus, genius and insanity could be considered to be nearly the same thing, especially in an artistic sense, and, because the most touching poetry is pure genius, it is also therefore pure insanity. I hope that clears up what I meant by my original statements.

I find it very interesting that Lord Byron’s portrayal of the character Don Juan is very different from the legendary man and other author’s works on the man of the same name. According to the Spanish legend, Don Juan was a rapist and a murderer as well as a lustful womanizer and cruel seducer. Other renditions are generally pretty similar, agreeing that Don Juan was villainous, but they may vary on the degree of his hellishness.

Byron’s version, however, is quite the opposite. He shows this man as promiscuous and indecent perhaps, but definitely not in a criminal manner. He is presented as more of an innocently curious man, who just happens to also be obsessed with and fascinated by women and their bodies. In fact, it can be interpreted that he truly loves these women and is simply a victim of desire and passion.

We know that Byron’s purpose in writing Don Juan was to make its readers “giggle,” but I wonder if he really just wrote it in good fun, or if he was somehow making fun of the legend. Is this tale really just a silly piece, intended to lighten people up and get them to laugh? Is there any possibility that Byron may have also intended to satirize the original legend of Don Juan and other renditions?

It seems that some people in this class are equating the use of opium to the use of psychedelic drugs when they are not the same at all, and you can call me weird, but this really bothers me. To set the record straight, opiates are narcotic analgesics, which are classified strictly as depressants. They create a sense of euphoria, or a state of intense happiness (hence why they are used as painkillers), but narcotic analgesics do not cause hallucinations! Thus, opium may cause someone to space out and perhaps become very imaginative in their euphoria, but it is chemically impossible for them to physically see things that aren’t there. It is not like an acid trip or rolling on ecstasy because these drugs are both stimulants and hallucinogens, which would cause a user to be active and/or social while experiencing delusions (more so in the case of LSD). Opium, on the other hand, would make one lethargic and perhaps contemplative, but definitely very content in sitting still, being alone, and just letting their mind wander.

Therefore, while I can still give Samuel Taylor Coleridge credit for the literary genius in his poem “Kubla Khan,” his creativity can be mostly accredited to the opium, in my personal opinion. So maybe it is really just the drug talking when the “sunny pleasure dome” and “Paradise” are mentioned.

It is my opinion that Coleridge's purpose of writing this very long poem was to convey to people that it is a bad idea to mess with the natural order of things (ie: killing an albatross for no real reason). At a time when popular writers were delving into the beauty of nature and so forth, Coleridge wanted it to be known that not only should you appreciate the sublime, etc. that is present all around you on Earth, but you should preserve these numerous beauties as well. The message of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is something like: "If you disturb mother nature with no distinct purpose, you will be cursed for eternity."

Romantic authors’ differentiation between the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque is fascinating to me, and I have especially enjoyed the works by William Wordsworth that we have read for class this week. His poem “I wandered lonely as a Cloud” embodies the sublime, and is an example of how appreciating the beauty in nature inspires you to think philosophically. When Wordsworth comes across a large field of daffodils that seem to go on forever, he compares them to stars in the sky. Both images can spark thoughts about the fact that one human is nothing compared to the size and complexity of the Earth, and even the Earth is nothing when compared to the vastness of the entire universe. Being able to put your existence into perspective allows you to appreciate all forms of life, no matter how large or small, and especially your own. I believe that this appreciation of life coincides with the self-described “heart-filling pleasure” Wordsworth gets from experiencing nature. On the other hand, it could be a purely scientific feeling of happiness.

Scientific analysis shows that the amount of sunlight experienced by a person is positively correlated to the amount of serotonin levels in the brain, which is a factor of mood regulation. Lack of serotonin causes depression, therefore, the more serotonin present, the happier one is. Now, in order to observe the beautiful, sublime, and picturesque found in nature, one would have to spend an awful lot of time outdoors, being exposed to large amounts of direct sunlight, which in turn would increase serotonin and also the sensation of pleasure in said person. So either way, Wordsworth and other literary intellectuals of the time were producing profound thoughts from observing nature, and I appreciate their ideas, poetry, and other writings that express this.

Although the movie Bride and Prejudice is loosely based on the book Pride and Prejudice, and there are obvious character and event parallels, the movie stands on its own, and does not try to copy the book exactly. It is a modernized version of the story set in India; a Bollywood film that was no doubt created with the main goal of entertaining its viewers, not representing Jane Austen and her work (as evident by the random Ashanti cameo). Some people may feel that this means the movie is doing the book an injustice, but I disagree. Since the story was changed and taken out of its orginal context, one cannot expect it to have the same impact as the book, and therefore I am plenty satisfied with its similarity, yet uniqueness.

Some main differences of the movie from the book, other than the obvious ones dealing with setting, include the fact that there are only four Bakshi daughters, instead of the five Bennet sisters. Also, Johnny Wickham is definitely more of a known scumbag than Mr. Wickham in the novel. Johnny impregnated Georgina when she was sixteen, he lives in a floating shack, and he runs off with a young teenager, Lakhi, which is a lot more inappropriate for someone his age in modern times. Also, Lakhi and Johnny’s flight to London ends in a fistfight and slap-fest rather than a marriage like Lydia and Wickham’s situation does.

In the end, the Bakshi family gets themselves out of trouble by rescuing their daughter from Wickham, unlike the Bennet family, who are forced to marry off their daughter in order to save their own reputation. This mainly reflects the differences in the two time periods, which I find very interesting. Back then, if your daughter ran off with a scumbag, you made her spend the rest of her life with him in order to conceal her misjudgement which disgraces the family, but nowadays, one would simply get their daughter away from him as soon as possible, and fault the man as being manipulative and perverse. This seems a little ironic to me because females have gained so much since the 18th century, such as education, yet if a 15 year old is seduced by a creepy older man, it is credited to the man’s cleverness and the girl’s naivety. In the 18th century, an uneducated young woman in the same situation would have to take responsibility for getting into such a situation. This backwardness puzzles me.

As I’ve been reading Pride and Prejudice, I cannot help but be reminded of another of Jane Austen’s novels: Sense and Sensibility. First of all, both works are set around the turn of the 19th century, in the English countryside. Secondly, both books have the same general premise that a few poor sisters are falling in love and trying to find husbands, then these men disappear from the picture for a bit, meet other women, and disappoint the first group of girls. Both books also have somewhat complicated inter-character relationships, although this is more evident in Pride and Prejudice, since there are, simply, a lot more characters in it than there are in Sense and Sensibility.

To a certain extent, there are also character and event parallels between the two novels. For example, in Pride and Prejudice, Wickham is a very handsome young man who initially grabs Elizabeth’s attention, but then attempts to attract a wealthy Miss King instead. This is very similar to Sense and Sensibility: a handsome man named Willoughby leads on the second oldest daughter named Marianne, but then runs off to London and becomes engaged to a Miss Grey, who has a large fortune. In Pride and Prejudice, Bingley goes away to London, leaving Jane heartbroken. Then, both Marianne and Jane travel to London in hopes of rekindling the flames with their respective men, but both women just end up being treated rudely.

In my opinion, Austen should have just stuck to Pride and Prejudice and not even bothered writing Sense and Sensibility because it is merely a simpler, more boring version of Pride and Prejudice. Although I get déjà vu while reading certain parts of Pride and Prejudice, overall, I do enjoy the book, and I certainly enjoy it a lot more than Sense and Sensibility.

Of the writers we read this week, Mary Robinson was definitely one of my favorites, if not the top one. Not only was she both intelligent and beautiful, Robinson was also talented. She was an actress and an intimate companion to several men of power and wealth, and Mary definitely knew how to get what she wanted. I am befuddled as to why I had not heard of her before this week. It seems like such a gifted woman should be more-well known, especially given the time period she lived in.
I particularly enjoyed Robinson’s poem called “January, 1795.” It flows very well, and this stood out to me even more so when it was read aloud in class. Both the equal amount of syllables in every line and the end rhyme contribute to the fact that it flows well. I also like the contrast throughout the entire poem. Half of each stanza (two lines) describes and depicts the lower class and poverty stricken citizens, while other two lines of every stanza are about the wealthy upper class individuals. The contrast between the two throughout the piece is very interesting because it shows the “backwardness” of the two groups. One would expect the upper class to be fine and upstanding, and the lower class to tend to be immoral and wretched, however, the exact opposite is true. Wealthy people are portrayed as insensitive gluttons who don’t deserve what they have, and the poor are shown as good-hearted but ultimately just unlucky and therefore in various states of despair.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” contains several quotes that really stand out to me. My favorite of which is, “The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on, and the current will run with destructive fury when there are no barriers to break its force.” Specifically, Wollstonecraft was referring to the prejudices against women of the time. They were seen as beautiful things to look at, and not much else. For the most part, their purpose was merely to entertain men. Most women did not think beyond this “duty” of theirs because they were not encouraged to. This is the prejudice of which Wollstonecraft speaks.
Women could not develop their minds because men imposed these prejudices upon them, and there was very little resistance or revolt to this way of life, which is why it continued for so long. With this quote, Wollstonecraft is attempting to become a barrier, or at least set the foundation for one, to break the force of the prejudice against women, which is also the main point of her writings in general.
Another quote from this selection that I found intriguing is, “Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience; but as blind obedience is ever sought for by power, tyrants and sensualists are in the right when they endeavor to keep a woman in the dark, because the former only want slaves and the latter a play-thing.” I like this quote because it is basically saying that it doesn’t matter what “type” of man you are dealing with, they ALL want the same thing from women, just for different reasons. A cold-hearted tyrant wants a woman to do whatever he says without questioning him because it gives him power to accomplish what he wants. On the other hand, even a loving man really just wants a woman to be blindly obedient for sex.

In the introduction of our textbook, under the section “Consumers and Commodities,” it is mentioned that opium was widely used during the Romantic era. Although very little was known about the drug at the time, it appeared to fix most problems, and therefore became used to treat a variety of symptoms, mostly pain-related. Because opium was known as a sort of “cure-all,” combined with the fact that it was incredibly affordable, the drug was very easy to obtain for the vast majority of people. The textbook also lists Coleridge’s Kubla Khan as a poem that was written under the influence of opiates. Since the 1800s, we have learned that opiates stimulate certain receptors in the brain to relieve pain, elevate mood, and sometimes cause a drowsy, “dream-like” state, which is evident in this poem. http://etext.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Kubla_Khan.html
The first stanza appears to describe the ancient Mongolian military leader Kublai Khan’s summer capital, Xanadu. Coleridge’s use of such vivid terms to describe something he could not have possibly seen himself seems to support his claim that the poem is based on an opium-induced vision. This is further supported by the strange imagery of “caves of ice,” “dancing rocks,” and “incense-bearing trees,” as well as the fact that there is no real plot or metaphoric meaning in the entire poem, at least, none that I can see. It is merely a creative description of various beauties in nature, with random references to Kublai Khan, and some maid playing a dulcimer. So, although I enjoy the dreamy feel of the poem and appreciate its interesting descriptive qualities, I do not think that it holds much literary merit.