Ode on a Grecian URL

Congratulations on surving the midterm! It is my sincere hope that you all did fabulously.

Three quick notes for you tonight:

First, remember to bring your anthologies of VICTORIAN literature to section tomorrow--we're going to kick off next week's reading by beginning John Stuart Mill in class.

Second, I wanted to highlight Melanie's especially entertaining and insightful discussion of monstrosity in Frankenstein. So many of your hebdomadals for last week were just marvelous--if I get time after grading your essays I'll try to put together a list of the best sentences and ideas from them all--but for now delectate on Melanie's masterful meditations on monstrosity:

When people use the word “monster”, the definition seems to me to be “someone or something that forgoes social convention and gives in to their basest and animalistic instincts without remorse.” To be “civilized”, humans must live by a certain standard of behavior that dictates what one can and cannot do. If one does swerve from this path, one must immediately repent of their crime and scurry back to the enfolding arms of social convention. This is what separates a man from a monster. A monster doesn’t care about social conventions, it doesn’t care about being invited to the hot parties or sipping tea with their pinky up, a monster is free from the constraints of society. A monster doesn’t do what is right, it doesn’t feel remorse for its actions, it doesn’t kill with a reason, it just thrives on its whims. This scares the living daylights out of society. Society doesn’t know how to deal with someone who seems to be above their rules, so they fear and loathe monsters.

The line between monster and man is often times relatively thin. What makes a man a monster? If a man murdered in cold blood the criminal that shot his wife and child, people may not condone his actions but they would understand, even a little. This man would not be a monster. The criminal that shot the wife and child would be considered a monster though. Both men murdered, but only one would be a monster, why? When a human is called a monster it seems to imply a loss of humanity, a loss of some touch of divinity that each person has inside. People generally want to believe in the best of others (no matter how bitter and callous life has made us). People want to believe that we all may be sinners at the core but some higher purpose or higher good keeps us from giving in to these basic instincts. When a person loses this sense of a higher purpose, be it for his or her own personal gain or just for the hell of it, they lose this spark of divinity and all that remains is the sinning shell of a once righteous, respectable individual. This is what we mean when we call a man a monster. He’s a fallen angel, a sub-human.

When Frankenstein is contemplating making a mate for his monster, he thinks “They might hate each other; the creature who already lived loathed his own deformity, and might he not conceive a greater abhorrence for it when it came before his eyes in the female form?” Mary Shelley chose to use creature in this case, as a creature can evoke pity while a monster should not. People can feel sorrow for the creation that was made so ugly that no one can look at him in peace. Creature and creation seem to denote the idea that the being in question should be valued for its very existence (“Honor all of God’s creatures”). Calling the creation a creature compares it to humans. I believe people chose to use monster instead of creature because of fear. We fear what Frankenstein’s creation was, someone longing to belong, to be loved. That is far too human for our taste. A monster is someone who was weak, chose to give in to their darkest desires. Humans fear that there is monster in all of us so we hate the term, we fear the term and we apply it to what we are scared to become. We can hate a monster in peace, but a creature reminds of what we may be so we hide behind the term monster.

Third, I wanted to invite the more obsessive among you to begin composing your sixth hebdomadal. It's not due until NEXT week, of course, but if you want to write it now you certainly may.

Hebdomadal 6: Style transplant

Now that we are moving into a study of the Victorians, we need to begin thinking about the different decisions prose writers make as regards style. Middlemarch and Frankenstein are so different not just because of their plots (or because Frankenstein at least has a plot, as some of you have suggested) but because George Eliot and Mary Shelley just write in entirely different ways.

But what are these different ways of writing? In this hebdomadal, I would like you to explore ways of defining a single author's style, and of writing in that style yourself.

Choose Mary Shelley or George Eliot or John Stuart Mill. Write a paragraph describing the style of the author you've chosen. Think about the sense the writing style gives you: is it clear and open or think and chaotic or tight and claustrophobic? How long are the sentences s/he writes? how long the paragraphs? How present is the author or speaker in the text--does the word "I" appear a lot or are the sentences mostly passive? ("I disagree with John" or "Commonly, John was disagreed with"?) What words, or types of words, come up the most frequently?

In a second paragraph, pick a paragraph from another author's work and rewrite that paragraph in the style of the author you've chosen. Thus, if you've chosen to study Mary Shelley's prose, write a paragraph from Middlemarch the way Mary Shelley would have written it. Or you can write a paragraph from the newspaper or, really, anywhere else in the style of the author you've chosen: it might be particularly fun to ape how Mill would write a Letter to the Editor if he were alive today and complaining about the police presence on State Street this weekend.