Log #3

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein creation was very different from the evil monster portrayed in many Frankenstein movies.  As Stephen Jay Gould put it, “Mary Shelley wrote a moral tale, not about hubris or technology, but about responsibility to all creatures of feeling and to the products of one’s own hand.  The monster’s misery arose from the moral failure of other humans, not from his own inherent and unchangeable constitution.”  After watching parts of three different Frankenstein movies in class, I definitely think that the producers of Frankenstein films portrayed the monster as Mary Shelley intended in her novel.  For example, in the movie “Young Frankenstein,” Frederick Frankenstein uses an abnormal brain when creating the monster without knowing it.  After the monster comes to life and acts strangely, Frankenstein questions Igor, his servant, whose brain he had used and Igor replies “Abby Normal.”  In this case, the monster did not become bad because of his experiences with people, he was bad from the start because he had an abnormal brain.  This, I think, completely misses one of Mary Shelley’s key points, the fact that the monster was not a bad creature until it was mistreated by humans.  I would be very interested to read Mary Shelley’s novel to be able to compare it to the movies more completely, but on the whole I enjoyed the movies as well as Stephen Jay Gould’s response to them.