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Frankenstein: Who is the Monster? 39631 Views


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Description:

What do Satan and Frankenstein's monster have in common? They’re both heroes. ...Wait. What?


Transcript

00:01

We speak student!

00:07

Your father was Frankenstein.

00:09

But your mother was the lightning!

00:12

Frankenstein a la Shmoop

00:14

Who is the Monster?

00:15

Are we supposed to sympathize with the monster?

00:20

The Romantics were obsessed with a lot of things.

00:23

They were obsessed with

00:25

emotion, and nature, and the Sublime.

00:27

And another thing they were obsessed with was Satan.

00:29

[ ominous classical music ]

00:31

They all reached back to Paradise Lost,

00:33

which is this epic poem by John Milton

00:36

which basically just recounts the story

00:40

of Satan as a fallen angel.

00:42

And, you know, kind of retells the Bible in some fashion.

00:46

Shelley actually uses a line from Paradise Lost

00:52

as the epigraph to her book,

00:53

which we'll talk about a little bit later.

00:55

But Romantic thinkers thought of Satan as a kind of hero.

00:59

You know, this Romantic hero

01:01

or Byronic hero, also called a Satanic hero.

01:03

Satan in Paradise Lost

01:05

is a hero of some sort.

01:08

Satan is a figure who is rebelling against his overlord.

01:12

In this case, God.

01:14

We think of the same thing in Frankenstein.

01:15

Is Frankenstein's monster a Satanic hero

01:19

where he's just rebelling against his overlord?

01:22

And if so, then he's Satan, but we also feel bad for him.

01:27

- Right. - Because it's not his fault.

01:28

So we can kind of have a devilish figure who we also

01:32

sympathize with.

01:34

And that ambiguity is definitely something that

01:36

Shelley's trying to bring out.

01:37

Is there an allegory there for the plight of women?

01:39

Who were -- It wasn't their fault.

01:41

They were controlled by men;

01:42

they kind of had to rebel.

01:43

But in, sort of, guilt that you would feel

01:46

and a whole range of...

01:47

Yeah, absolutely.

01:48

I mean, again, reading onto Shelley's life,

01:52

you know, this proto-feminism

01:53

and being a woman among men

01:55

is a huge part of it,

01:56

so we can really read that onto almost every part

01:58

of Frankenstein if we want.

01:59

But this idea of

02:00

you're born into a society that is one way

02:04

and you need to change that.

02:06

Can we really fault Frankenstein's monster

02:09

for wanting to rebel? No.

02:11

Can we fault Satan for wanting to rebel?

02:13

Maybe not.

02:17

Does the monster deserve our sympathy?

02:20

How did the Romantics envision Satan?

02:23

Is the monster similar to Satan?

02:27

[ evil laugh ]

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