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THE INFLUENCE OF CULTURE ON THE MONSTER

Culture has an immense effect on the monster. The monster senses cultural anxieties about socialdisorder, criminal potential, and the relation between reading and experience. His mind was at firsttabula rasa as J.Locke calls it. Through observing the De Lacey family, the monster becomes educatedand self-aware, realizing that he is very different in physical appearance from the humans he watches.He can not correlate his education (reading) with his awful experience. Through the education hereceived from Safie s assigned reading he got extremely confused because the books Safie readshaped his conception of reality which was too idealistic. Monster s desires and his consequentactions are influenced by Goethe s Sorrows of Werther which gives him the sense of feeling, Plutrachgives him republican values, and finally from Milton s Paradise Lost he learns good from evil. Heidentifies himself with the literally works he was acquainted with. He identifies with two Milton scharacters, both Adam and Satan. Adam because he was also created as perfect , and Satanbecause he is angry and miserable due to his inequality. The gap between his reading which provideshim with the idealistic picture and between his harsh experience is too big, and it rips him apart. AsI read, however, I applied much personally to my own feelings and condition. I found myself similar,

yet at the same time strangely unlike to the beings concerning whom I read Who was I? What was I?Whence did I come? What was my destination? he experiences a crisis of identity. . In loneliness,the monster seeks to befriend the De Lacey s. When the monster tries to befriend the family, theyare horrified by his appearance and reacted viciously out of fear, with violence against him. Thisrejection makes the monster seek further vengeance against his creator. Injustice the monsterexperienced drives him mad and he wants the object of his desire, he wants a family, theFrankenstein family. He travels to Geneva to seek his vengeance. In the woods he meets Victor syounger brother William and tries connect with him because the child was pure and maybe wouldaccept him for who he is, but the child began to insult him so in anger and in his will to shut him uphe suffocated him accidentally. The monster concludes his story with a demand that Frankensteincreate for him a female companion, on the basis that he is lonely since no human will accept him.The monster argues that as a living thing, he has a right to happiness and that Frankenstein, as hiscreator, has a duty to oblige him. He promises that he and his mate will vanish into wildernessuninhabited by man, never to reappear, if Frankenstein creates a companion for him. InitiallyFrankenstein agrees to give him his mate but then after the horrible pictures of them together whenhe almost finished his project he decides not go through with it. The monster is furious and swears toseek his vengeance, kills Elizabeth, Victor s wife, and kills his creator, Frankenstein. After killing hiscreator, his father, the monster finds his own emotional destruction in the destruction of his creator.In the end the monster takes his own life so that no others will ever know of his existence.

THE PERSISTENCE OF FRANKENSTEIN IN CULTURE

Since it was created in the 19 th century the novel has experienced many various adaptations andinterpretations. The work has inspired numerous films, television programs, video games andderivative works. The character of the monster remains one of the most recognized icons in horrorfiction. Depictions of The Monster have varied widely, from mindless killing machines to thedepiction of The Monster as a kind of tragic hero.

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In the original version, in 19 th century, the monster is seen as a noble savage, he is educated, but thiseducation mixed with his horrific experience resulted in unwanted violence and deaths. Inthe 20 th century, in the Whale s film, the monster is seen as ignorant, brute and primitive creature. And in 21 st century it is seen as a hero who is enlighten by knowledge and wants to repair the damage hiscreator has done, and stop him from exterminating the human kind.

Still the most famous one is James Whale s film from 1931. In his film Whale gives us somewhatdifferent story from the one M. Shelly provides us with. He makes the most drastic changes in themain characters: the monster was simplified to a creature of brute primitive force and emotionswhile Frankenstein was assimilated to the myth of the godless an presumptive scientist, tamperingwith nature s secrets . In 2004 the author Dean Koontz launched the first trilogy: Prodigal Son, City of Night and Dead and Alive . The second trilogy began publication in May 2010 with Lost Souls ,continuing with as-yet-untitled novels in May 2011 and May 2012.

In the first trilogy Koontz gives as the other side of the story. Set in present day New Orleans, theseries follows the activities of Victor Frankenstein, now known as Victor Helios, as he continues to

create new life forms for his own purposes. Opposed to his activities are a pair of homicidedetectives and Frankenstein's original monster, now known as Deucalion

Deucalion, Dr. Frankenstein s creation who was once a monster. 200 years later, he has becomehuman and is the hero of our story. The character shares his name with Deucalion, a figure fromGreek mythology, who was the son of Prometheus (Shelley's subtitle for her novel was "The ModernPrometheus"). Deucalion chose the name for precisely this reason. Deucalion is also the Greekmythological equivalent of Noah, and re-started the human race after the flood.

Deucalion it seems, like his other fictional counter-parts, has a dark and murderous past. An exampleof this is the fact that he murdered Helios's first wife, Elizabeth, when Helios was still Frankenstein.

He desires redemption and believes it is his destiny/duty to kill his creator. The irony of this is that he,like the others of his "race", cannot kill Helios personally.

Victor H elios Frankenstein - Once known as Dr. Frankenstein, he has not only created monsters, hehas become a monster himself. Determined to create the superior race, he plans to rid the world of human beings.

While the original Monster was made with parts from dead humans, Victor Frankenstein is now usingmodern technology to create more creatures, particularly synthetic biology. The new race he ismaking is constructed and designed from the bottom-up, and can be seen as bio androids, artificialhumans made of flesh. Their knowledge and behavior is even based on programs downloadeddirectly into their brain, which appears to be an advanced wetware computer.

'In our time, scientism gins up one fear after anoth er in the masses, based on bad science, for the purpose of

making them easier for utopian theorists to control. This is why it seemed to me appropriate to update the

Frankenstein legend to our time. We live in hubristic age, when politicians imagine themselves to me

messiahs and when many in the sciences frankly discuss their dreams of creating a post-human civilization

of genetically engineered supermen, ignorant of the fact that like minds have often come before them and

have left no legacy bu t death, destruction, and despair.' Dean Koontz