Loss of Innocence

Bonjour! It is Tuesday again. It’s also spring break and while I could be napping and lazing about, the only thing on my mind was Frankenstein. I know, I know, a teenage girl such as myself should have more things on my mind other than literary classics, but well, whatever. In class on Thursday, in the fishbowl, there were a lot of great commentary about loss of innocence in the novel as well as other things. However, I wanted to elaborate on something that was brought up that I found interesting that was said in class.

There was a lot of talk about how nature has a prominent role in the novel. Whether nature was replacing a mother figure for the monster, or showing characteristics of the primary characters in the novel, it got me think about psychology. More specifically the topic of the nature versus nurture theme, and yes, I know that the “nature” referred to in this debate is alluding to genetics rather than “the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations” (cough, thanks google, cough). But still, it got me thinking. In a different discussion this debate was also brought up, but in the fishbowl on Thursday, it seemed funny to me that one of the main topics of discussion was nature when Frankenstein’s monster seems to leans more toward the nurture side of the debate. The monster has no genetics or anything of the sort to gain any knowledge from, so of course he had to learn purely through his environment rather than relying on his non-existent biological ties. The monster was very much a tabula rasa; he had absolutely nothing with which he could pull any information from. So he had to survive by learning how to behave and act through a random family that he stalked for a year.

This wasn’t really an in depth analysis of anything it was just something interesting that was on my mind. Anyways I’ll see y’all next Tuesday!

-Smitty Werbenjagermanjensen