More Fantastic Stuff

So strangely enough, this is the second blog I've written (out of six or so) that is tagged with "gothic literature". I just wanted to share that I'm so excited, because my Christmas gift came today. Well, it's the only thing I spent a bit of Christmas money on (supplemented with a gift card). And it is my two-volume set of American Fantastic Tales. I'm excited to curl up in bed and read one scary story by famous American authors each evening (I have to do something to disturb myself before bed, since we watched the last episode of the latest season of Law and Order: SVU a couple nights ago). I love reading.

Quote from the Introduction: "[Gothic and fantastic literature] emerged as an expression of the universal sense of loss, grief, and terror produced by the gradual replacement of the Enlightenment's orderly, rational, reassuring world-view with the unstable and untrustworthy universe that came into being during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." This is going to be a good read.

Who's the Real Monster?

Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all humankind sinned against me?

--The Creature, in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Just finished reading my Halloween book, Frankenstein. I mean to have it finished in October, but instead my blood-curtled far into Thanksgiving season. I hadn't read it before, but generally love gothic fiction, and this was no exception.

It strikes me as interesting though that most people think Frankenstein is the name of the monster in the book, and as far as movie monsters go, "Frankenstein" has always seemed to me kind of lame (maybe why I hadn't read this book yet), just a bumbling, sappy, Eyore-type figure, with nowhere near the potential to scare that Dracula possessed. Frankenstein is actually the name of the doctor who creates the creature, and he's not a mad scientist, he's really kind of like you or me. Frankenstein, blinded by his desire for "achievement", creates a being with physical and intellectual capacities, but then forgets about him, without ever fostering virtues in him. The creature is left to form his own estimation of virtue, and being without companionship, devoid of community in a world where no one looks like him, he turns on his creator after Frankenstein refuses to make him a companion.

The book is really about (in my estimation) our ability to perversely delude ourselves. I kept thinking about the "monsters" of our society, the modern-day criminal, and how we react to the actions of those who terrorize, murder and often look physically different from us. What if, instead of seeing these people as monsters, we were able to recognize our own part of the responsibility each time a crime was committed? What we felt the pain of having failed this person and our community in our complacency towards the virtue-formation of others? What if, being aware that the communities and societies we live in are fundamentally our "creators", we were convicted by each conviction of a crime to pour our resources into rehabilitation, education and the fostering of virtue in those WE are responsible for?

I'm not against holding people accountable for their actions. In fact, I'm just suggesting that in actuality we fail to do that. While it couldn't be the place of the "justice" system to somehow convict the societies themselves that crimes emerge within, maybe we could pay more attention to the ways in which we create the "monsters" in our midsts. In Missouri the juvenile delinquency system is rehabilitative, and the ACLU recently posted a blog about it in honor of the 20th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Love it.