Final Project Choice #1

     For my final project, I have chosen to use option 1. I chose option 1 because it gives me the opportunity to use one of my most favorite authors, Edgar Allen Poe. For this essay I will be using my personal copy of “The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe”. When I chose to write this essay, I did not have any particular idea of what I wanted to accomplish in writing it other than trying to get an A on my paper. I was then faced with this (accomplish) question for my blog post. Honestly I could not think of anything. So far my focus has been on my grades and not much more. Then my oldest daughter asked me what I was doing, and I explained to her that I was intently trying to figure out what I wanted to accomplish with my essay. She looked over the outline for option one and asked me what I thought Poe’s hang ups in his poems and stories. My reply was death and heartbreak. My daughter then said, “So you are trying to show a correlation between the death and heartbreak in Poe’s stories to his life”. After she said this I just kind of sat there feeling a bit dumb. I spent most of this week trying to figure out what I wanted to accomplish, and my seventeen year old daughter answered this question for me in less than ten minutes. I might have felt stupid, but the whole “Child is Smarter than the Parent” scenario was quite comical, especially when she danced away singing, “I’m smarter than mommy”. I felt a tiny bit smarter about a half an hour later.  This is when I figured that maybe one of my accomplishments with this essay could be trying to inspire others to read Poe, and see that even in all the death and depression of his writing, there is a real sense of dark beauty in his writings. As far as my research goes, I will be using the college library databases for this. I have used them in the past, and have had a lot of success with them. I might also use other book, but I am not sure yet. Overall I am excited about this project, and have really enjoyed reading something that I like (unlike Frankenstein). 

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 Here is a link for more Edgar Allen Poe

Portfolio Cover letter

Shaunyell Bobbitt

Cline

English 102

23 October 2011

To whom it may concern,

            This semester I have faced many challenges, from time issues, to transportation and even family emergencies. By far my biggest challenge that I have had to face so far has been my health. I have been living with Lupus for almost 10 years, and it causes many problems with my health. This semester, I have had my lupus flare up, which caused me to have issues with walking, and daily function. I also had a bad case of pneumonia that landed me in and out of the hospital emergency room several times. Luckily after several weeks, and two rounds of antibiotics, it cleared up. This was all a hassle, but I pulled through well, and did not fall far behind in my classes. As far as my successes go, I would have to say that trudging through my illnesses, and not having to quit this semester (which was a fear I had to face) and maintaining A’s and B’s in all my classes would be on the top of the list. 

            Another challenge I have had was the readings. Besides this class, I have three other classes that I have do extensive weekly reading in, and it has been tough to find time to read everything I have to. I had one advantage in the Frankenstein reading though, I had read Shelley’s Frankenstein before so it was a bit of a review for me.

            The literary analysis that we have done has been a fun and new experience for me. I have done a lot of research writing as well as narrative and creative writing, but this was the first time that I did any literary analysis. I have enjoyed it a lot; it seems to be a very natural thing to do. I love to read, and it is just natural for me to analyze what I am reading. The main reason I have enjoyed the analysis writing, is because that is a new experience for me, and I like to think that I thrive on new experiences.

            Finally, I come to my goals for myself in this class. I have to say that my highest goal for myself is simply to become a better writer. This is a goal that I have had since English 100. I feel that at this point I am a good writer, but I know that as humans, we all have room for improvement. As a secondary goal, I would like to eventually start to write a novel, and hopefully have it published. This I am afraid, is more of a long term goal, and not simply a goal limited to this semester. In time, I will stick to writing poetry and the occasional short story for fun.

Essay 3

Shaunyell Bobbitt

Cline

English 102

14 October 2011

Frankenstein: a Look at the Strength of Women, and the Weakness of Men

            I personally have never been a big fan of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I think that there were much better classic science fiction/horror books written, but one thing that does stand out in Shelley’s chilling tale is her imagination. When I read Frankenstein for the first time, I was captivated with her ideas about medical science, and the moral repercussions of an issue very close to the cloning issues we face today. As I read Frankenstein again for this essay, I began to ask myself why in the world a woman of the 1800’s would write a tale of such dark and sinister content. It is not like women back then had the same luxury of being able to speak their mind freely like women can now. That is when it hit me, Shelley was not simply writing about medical horrors and the effects of playing God. She was in fact writing about the issues regarding how women were perceived to be the weaker sex back in the 1800’s. In my opinion she even goes a step further in her description of the men in her macabre tale. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a tale of the oppression women felt in her generation, always having to be weaker in comparison to men, and she goes as far as to show that men in general are weaker when compared to the lives women traditionally live.

            “The Women of Frankenstein,” was an article written by William Veeder. In Mr. Veeder’s article he states that Shelley had felt weak as a woman, and due to her weakness, she became defensive, and portrayed the men in her book Frankenstein as weaker than the female characters. Veeder goes on to say that the character Justine had first appeared to be weak in nature, but had showed much more strength when she had been in the courtroom (Veeder 271). One thing that he did not state was how the male characters exuded any weakness.

            In Shelley’s book, I find that the character of Victor shows a lot of weakness, especially when it comes to his monstrous creation. In the fourth chapter of volume one Victor describes how he had intended his creation to be beautiful. What he saw in reality was the complete opposite. Victor describes the monster as such:

His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with the watery eyes, that seemed almost the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips (Shelley 34).

I find that this passage shows how weak Victor is in comparison to the average woman. Here Victor has given life to his creation, and in a way can be compared to the birth of a child. Instead of looking at his child with love and admiration, he is fixated on the deformities of his child. Though it is true that there are women that lament when they see that their child has been born with a deformity, not many women would do what Victor Frankenstein does next:

He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped, and hushed down stairs. I took refuge in the court-yard belonging to the house which I inhabited; where I remained during the rest of the night, catching and fearing each sound as if it were to announce the approach of the demonical corpse to which I had so miserably given life (Shelley 35).

Here his monster reaches out to him much like a newborn would reach out to its mother. But being a man, Victor cannot feel warmth for this demon, and he runs out of the room like a coward, and as he holes up in the courtyard of the building, he jumps and startles at any little sound. The thing that I do not understand is why he suspected a created person made up of corpses was going to be a sight considered beautiful. After all this was his creation, and I am pretty sure he saw what this thing looked like on a regular basis, there is no sense in being scared when life is bestowed upon his child. Another Author that saw the dynamic of female and male strength differences was Anne K. Mellor.

            In Mellor’s article “Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein”, Mellor describes the male/female role division from the eyes of Victor, “Victor Frankenstein’s nineteenth century Genevan society is founded on a rigid division of sex roles: the male inhabits the public sphere, the female is relegated to the private or domestic sphere” (Mellor 274-275). This clearly shows that in the case of Victor’s character, he had the same gender ideals that the majority of people had in the nineteenth century. This is the same ideal that Shelley was trying to disprove in her book “Frankenstein”. Further into her writing Mellor describes the scene where Victor decides to go against his own word, and not make a female for his creation, and she questions why he came to this decision.

First he is afraid of an independent female will, afraid that his female creature will have desires and opinions that cannot be controlled by his male creature. Like Rousseau’s natural man, she might refuse to comply with a social contract made before her birth by another person; she might assert her own integrity and the revolutionary right to determine her own existence (Mellor 279).

When this excerpt is analyzed, it is easy to see that Victor feels threated by the thought of any woman being truly independent. Mellor clearly states that Victor worries that his “male” creation might not be able to control his “female” creation. Only a man that feared losing his own authority over the female sex would even consider an atrocious idea like men controlling women. In knowing Victors fears, one has to ask why he would be fearful of a woman with a mind of her own. The only clear explanation there is, is that Victor fears females in general. If he did not fear them, then why worry if this potential female creature could be uncontrollable. It is as if he thinks that if a female were (God forbid) allowed to think for herself, to make her own opinions, and to think differently than her male peers, then all hell might break loose in society. This may have been the opinion Mellor, but not every critic thought like she did.

            In the article “Female Gothic: The Monsters Mother”, written by Ellen Moers the Idea that Shelly wrote Frankenstein to show the world that women are stronger than men is not there. Moers likens Shelley’s story to the tragedies of motherhood, specifically the tragedies of Shelley’s real life experiences of motherhood. Moers describes the real life experiences of Shelley as a mother as one of pain

According to Moers, “Pregnant at sixteen, and almost constantly pregnant throughout the following five years; yet not a secure mother, for she lost most of her babies soon after they were born; and not a lawful mother, for she was not married-not at least when, at the age of eighteen, Mary Goodwin began to write Frankenstein. So are monsters born (Moers 216-217)

All this shows is that Shelley had a difficult life when it came to child rearing, and by no means does this show that she wrote Frankenstein as a metaphor for her life’s pains. If one was to compare Shelley to Victor, and her children to Victor’s creation, things do not match up. Shelley never abandoned any of her children, unlike Victor with his creation. Shelley also did not show fear of creating and giving birth to more children, because she repeatedly tried to have more. This also goes against what Victor felt as the creator of his monster. It is not like shelly was feeling guilt for the birth of her children, she simply felt grief over the deaths of the ones that passed away.

            Finally, Mary Shelley tells a story of horror, and paints a scene that is both breathtaking, and chilling. Since the publishing of “Frankenstein” many critics have tried to quantify the meaning of Shelley’s tale. As to what she truly intended we can only speculate. But when one takes into account the social and moral boundaries that women had to adhere to in the nineteenth century, and how it was a man’s place to guide and control a woman’s thoughts and actions, it is easy to see that Shelley would be angry about these unwritten female laws. Shelley knew from experience that women are strong both mentally and emotionally, why else would she continue on trying to have children even after so many of her own had tragically died. Can a man go through the same and come out mentally and emotionally stable. That is not to say that a man would not grieve the loss of his child, but could the same man handle it if he had given birth to it? Victor could not even handle the sight of his creation, and if his monster died, than he would no doubt rejoice in its death. Shelley intended to show the world the inner strength of a woman, and to show that men in general are not the stoic rocks they portray themselves to be.

Works Cited

Mellor, Anne. Comp. Frankenstein Norton Critical Edition. 1^st. New York: W.W. Norton &

            Company Inc. 1996. Print.

Moers, Ellen. Comp. Frankenstein Norton Critical Edition. 1^st. New York: W.W. Norton &

            Company Inc. 1996. Print.

Shelley, Mary. Comp. Frankenstein Norton Critical Edition. 1^st. New York: W.W. Norton &

            Company Inc. 1996. Print.

Veeder, William. Comp. Frankenstein Norton Critical Edition. 1^st. New York: W.W. Norton &

            Company Inc. 1996. Print.

           

             

           

Summary of a Critical Response

     For my critical response article I chose to reference from the one written by Mr. Hugh Reginald Haweis. Mr. Haweis wrote his analysis in 1886, a mere 68 years after Mrs. Shelley wrote Frankenstein. I chose this particular article, because Haweis's opinion on Shelley and her book, are very close to my own. In his article Haweis says that he thinks the whole subject of Frankenstein is appalling, but thinks that the scenery Shelly uses is very good. Because of her ideas, and no lack of description, Haweis calls Shelly an Imaginative writer. the issues that he has with Shelley's Frankenstein, is that it lacks in its plot. When Shelly describes the making of (what Haweis calls) the monster, he says that it was hasty. Haweis even goes on to say that Shelly is vague in her writing, but he does say that the images she paints with her words is powerful. the last comment Haweis has for Shell's book, is that even though he sees these errors in her writing, the readers of her book will most likely finish Frankenstein because of the different geographical areas that are used in her book, as well as the picture of human nature she illustrates.
     I have the same opinions about Shelley's Frankenstein. I have always been a fan of books in the Horror genre, and I have read many written by different authors. The one thing that I love in an author is fluidity. Shelly in my opinion did not have much fluidity in Frankenstein. The book, at least when I read it seemed to stumble rather than flow. I also agreed with Haweis about how imaginative Shelley is as a writer. It was always easy for me to visualize the characters, and surroundings that she created. Haweis last analysis was one that I agreed with, and also learned from. This book was one that I had to keep reading. I had to keep turning the pages to see where Shelly would be leading me to next. this was something that I did not realize at first. my realization did not come to me until I read Haweis's article. This is actually why I picked this analysis to use for this assignment. I do not however think that this article will be a good one to use in essay three. I think that this one is too short, and only focuses on Shellye's writing skills. This seems too narrow a view.

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To learn more about Haweis click Here

Revising an Essay

     In the essays that I write, I tend to revise them most of the time. The times that I choose not to do any revision are usually a direct result of how much time I have before my deadline is up. I also have to admit that I do not revise as much as I should when a particular project is not very exciting or fun to do. That said, I do like to write, so therefore I do tend to take revision seriously (usually). The main reasons I do revision is so that I can achieve the highest grade possible, and I know that I am capable of good solid work, and want to feel accomplished in the papers I do write. I have a tendency to write things very fast. This tends to result in minor grammatical and spelling errors which frustrates the heck out of me of I leave them knowing full well that they are there. This said, I don't really ever do any revision in my first drafts. I tend to be a perfectionist, but not obsessive. The benefits of revision are simply a well written paper. As far as the changes I plan on making in my final essay, I plan to use our instructors comments as a key. This helps me to see the little mistakes that I am prone to, but always seem to never see when I am writing. This will also give me a lot of insight. Laura may happen to see a flaw, or have input in an area of my paper that i was not privy to. Finally, I find it interesting to go back and reread my essays in the rough draft stage to see exactly what I was trying to convey in my paper. Sometimes it's like everything I wrote makes complete sense. Other times, I can not make head or tails of what i wrote. In these latter times I simply start over, and try again.

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Here is a link for more help on essay revisions.