Final Project IDEA!!!!!!!

http://www.squidoo.com/real-history-of-vampires

I plan on doing Option #2 for my final project. The reason why I chose this option was because in the beginning of the semester, I was told that we would be doing things about monsters and that it would be the surrounding theme. So when option 2 gives me the choice of what kind of monster I want to do research on, how could I refuse? Though the monsters that I am generally interested in are vampires, werewolves, fairies, witches, warlocks, and etc. But being the total nerd that I am, I will be doing my research on vampires. Yes, I know that it has been done before but that’s just it. So much research has been done on vampires that the materials for it are limitless. I’ll just make sure that my paper is different than all the rest and won’t put anyone to sleep (hopefully. Lol). The primary texts that I will be using is the novel series Vampire Kisses by Ellen Shreiber. She brings a different spin to the vampire stories that we all know so well and makes it her own. She does include the stereotypical things that most of us are accustom to seeing in vampire novels but includes other things that have not been brought out into the open. The in-text citations from these books will help me give the readers a better understanding of what I mean. What I hope to accomplish with this project, is to give people a better understanding of vampires as a whole. I don’t want the reader to be thinking about the things they have seen in movies or have read in books but I want them to be thinking back in time, we’re talking about centuries of time here. Where a form or breed of vampires may have existed and are unfortunately misportrayed in many ways, movies being the prime suspect. The type of research I will do is through the databases at our school, Yavapai Community College. Already I have found great information to support my paper. Most common terms to search with would be “history of vampires” or “vampires” just by itself and also one more being “vampires and movies” to so how far south the movie industry has taken the history behind vampires and made them stereotypical.

MId-term check in

October 17, 2011


Dear Laura,

It is the halfway mark of this class and it always surprises me how fast the time flies. There are many things that I have improved on and still some in the process of being fixed. My biggest success in your class would probably have to deal with the blog posts. I have always posted my responses right onto blackboard and so having to not only go to another website to post my blog and responses was something new and different to me but I feel as if my critiquing style has grown and my responses are coming out clearer and in a manner where it will be helpful and beneficial to the person I am commenting on. My biggest challenge in this class so far would have to be the essays. It’s not on the essay as a whole but certain parts such as, making it too personal or not having the paragraphs flow into one another without confusing the reader, are some of the things that I have been working on and am hopeful when it comes to my final project, have been fixed and resolved.


The readings in this class have affected me a pretty good amount. Sometimes in English classes, the reading is either very interesting or very boring, but I feel that the articles that you have had us read and the book Frankenstein along with the articles in there, have redeveloped my way of looking at a story and to try and see just what exactly the author wants me to pull out from their story and have a clear understanding of. I feel that this had benefited me not only in this class but in my other writing classes that I am taking at the present moment.


The literary analysis is different because the writing classes that I have taken so far are for either writing fiction or just giving my opinion on something for a discussion board. Though my Creative Writing class did have me go into a bit of literary analysis, to look at a story through the lens of a writer, not a reader. There has been more of it this semester in the classes I am taking but this English class builds more onto it and expands the amount that can be seen and accomplished.


My goals for the second half of the semester are to continue on strong with my blogs and responses, make sure that I read as a writer, bring interesting and creative things into the classroom and to have an amazing final project. I hoping that the fact that diving in head first for my research and topic that the outcome will be something to be proud of. I hope to keep the A that I have in this class to the end and keep improving on my writing skills.


The piece of work that I am the most proud of would be the analysis of a poem. I loved the poem “Lady Lazarus” and just couldn’t pick any other one to do the assignment on. The visuals hit me hard and I knew what I would talk about and try to have others in vision and see what they might see differently from the first time they read the poem. I had to check back at the assignments tab to see what has happened before this week because I’m starting to forget all the assignments that have been in this class already and we are only halfway through. I’m looking forward to the second half of this semester and what other assignments it brings.

Sincerely,


Delaney Abajian

Draft of Essay #3

Delaney Abajian
Cline
ENG 102
12 October 2011

Feminism

The bond between a mother and child depends on the will of the mother and how close she is with the child. If the mother neglects her child, the child will do one of two things. The first and most likely thing is that the child will not understand what is happening and at some point will develop feelings of anger and hatred. The second option would be that the kid copes with what has happened and moves on with their life. Unfortunately in the book Frankenstein, the creation tried to choose the second option but in the end became the first. The parent-child relationship with Victor and the creation was never established, so the creation set out to destroy everything that Victor loved and cared about since the creation had no one to feel that way for him. There are some relationships throughout this book that worked and some that didn’t. The ones that worked are Victor and his mother, Victor and Clerval, and Victor and Elizabeth. The ones that end up becoming either ineffective or nonexistent are Victor and the creation. This also can be related to the difference between Mary Shelley’s bond and Victor Frankenstein’s bond since one cared very deeply for their creation while the other didn’t.


“I need not describe the feelings of those dearest ties are rent by that most irreparable evil, the void that presents itself to the soul, and the despair that is exhibited on the countenance. It is so long before the mind can persuade itself that she, whom we saw every day, and whose very existence appeared a part of our own, can have departed for ever-” ( Shelley, 25). Even though this is Victor talking about his deceased mother, it calls attention to the fact about children who are cared for and treated with kindness by their mother’s, end up showing sympathy and emotions that would not be there if the opposite happened. It shows that Victor’s mother was a nurturer and that she placed her family above all else. This corresponds with Victor and the creation. What could have started off in a loving and nurturing relationship ended in estrangement and dislike of both the parent and the child. Victor speaks of despair at the loss of his mother but the creation tries to speak about the despair of being forever lonely and not having the care of a parent.

Clerval is another example of how Victor has a parent-child relationship whereas the creation does not. Though Clerval has no relation to Victor, other than being his dearest friend, the following quote has Clerval taking on a tone of a brotherly role. “My dear Victor,” cried he, “what for God’s sake, is the matter? Do not laugh in that manner. How ill are you! What is the cause of all this?” (Shelley, 37). Clerval is showing not only his concern for Victor as a friend but in the course of a brother like figure as well, since he has known for a great period of time. This is probably why Mary Shelley had the creature’s next victim be Clerval because he would have seen and noticed how close of a person that Clerval was to Victor and begun to feel emptiness inside of him. The emptiness would keep filling him until he took away from Victor what the creation himself wanted more than anything, a companion.


Ellen Moers brought up amazing points as to how Victor and Mary Shelley were somewhat alike but also different in the way they approached certain situations. Both wanted to create life but each had a different way with dealing with the consequences of what happened after the creation had gained its life. “In February, 1815, Mary gave birth to a daughter, illegitimate, premature, and sickly…The baby died in March. “Find my baby dead,” Mary wrote. “A miserable day.” (Moers, 221). Moers goes on to explain that after the birth of Shelley’s first child, that even though it was born premature and sick, Shelley tried everything she could to nurse it to better health and keep it alive even though the effort would be in vain. This is where she differs from Victor. Victor indeed wanted to create life and that he most certainly did, but when his creation was complete and it was alive and moving, he became scared of what he had done and fled away from the scene immediately. He ran away from the thing that he saw as grotesque and ugly and would not even try to help the creature that he brought life to.


This seems to be where Shelley even got the idea of having something like this become the main storyline for a novel. “Mary Shelley was a unique case, in literature as in life. She brought birth to fiction not as realism but as Gothic fantasy, and thus contributed to Romanticism a myth of genuine originality. She invented the mad scientist who locks himself in his laboratory and secretly, guiltily, works at creating human life, only to find that he has made a monster.” (Moers, 217). Moers could not have better explained it than with this quote. Frankenstein brings to the reader not only birth but originality as well. Birth was not common for female writers but Mary Shelley brought it the forefront of her story and had it carry throughout as it continued on, pointing out the failing parent-child relationship between Victor and the creation, that would in the end result in the deaths of them both.


“As long as domestic relationships govern an individual’s affections, his or her desire will turn outward as love. But when the individual loses or leaves the regulating influence of relationship with others, imaginative energy always threatens to turn back on itself, to “mark” all external objects as its own and to degenerate into “gloomy and narrow reflections upon self” (F, p.32).” (Poovey, 254). Here is another reflection on the difference between the relationships that Victor had and the ones the creation will never learn to know about. Well he did learn about the relationships that the DeLacy family had but that was only through observation and not through real experience of his own. The creation started off with having a happy outlook on life and that he would one day be able to feel love and compassion from humans as he felt for them but as soon as he realized that this was not going to happen, he went into a gloomy and narrow reflection upon himself.


Moers and Poovey talked about how the mother side of Mary Shelley had an impact on the story Frankenstein and that feminism comes out greatly throughout this book in the characters of Caroline and Elizabeth but also somewhat in Victor as well because of wanting to “create something” and “bring life” to it. “Recently, however, a number of writers have noticed the connection between Mary Shelley’s “waking dream” of monster-manufacture and her own experience of awakening sexuality, in particular the “horror story of Maternity” which accompanied her precipitous entrance into what Ellen Moers calls “teen-aged motherhood” (Gilbert & Gubar, 226). Critics of Mary Shelley in the beginning thought of her form of female gothic style as bringing something that shouldn’t be introduced into books but with time, newer critics see why it was brought into the book and why it was the main point. Bringing to life her story of her first child and representing it with the characters Victor and the creation. It brought to the forefront the reality of pregnancies during that time and how much of an effect it had on the mother if she did indeed lose her child.


I thought the story of Frankenstein was only just about a mad scientist creating a creature and it turning out hideous but in reality finding out that there are many themes behind it and within the text itself that my outlook on it as a whole is different now. The one that stuck out to me the most was when I had finished the story and read the article “Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother”. Ellen Moers explained in depth the relation to Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein. That the death of her first child caused her to begin her story of Frankenstein. I believe that Shelley’s purpose for writing this novel was to introduce a form of birth into a story and take it to where no female writer had gone to before. She wanted not just Gothic but she also wanted the Romance side to it to make it seem like everything would be okay only for it to be crumbled to pieces. Mary Shelley definitely goes into great detail when explaining the different stances that she takes in this story dealing with parent-child relationships.







Works Cited

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1996. Print


Moers, Ellen. “Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother.” New York Review of Books. Garden City: Doubleday, 1976. 214-44. Print.

Gilbert M. Sandra and Gubar Susan. “Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve.” The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. 225-40. Print.

Poovey, Mary. “My Hideous Progeny”: The Lady and the Monster.” The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. 251-61. Print.

Female Gothic:The Monster's Mother

Frankenstein Article

Ellen Moers’ “Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother” brings to light how Mary Shelley used the parent-child relationship within the story of Frankenstein and how Mary Shelley was comparing the monstrous creation that Frankenstein had made, to the birth of her first child. I’m not sure when Ellen wrote this article but I’m assuming it was in 1976 for the “New York Review of Books”. Ellen goes in depth with Mary’s relationship to Shelley. That Mary was a “daughter, mistress and a mother” as well as a Gothic writer and that Frankenstein is women’s literature. Even with the horror and grotesque details in the story, Frankenstein is still considered woman’s literature. Also how Gothic writing styles where used more often in women writers and that the most gruesome tales were indeed written by women.

I feel that Ellen Moers focused more on the parent-child relationship in Frankenstein where I spent more time wondering who exactly was going to die next. I wanted to know more about what was going in Victor’s mind whereas Ellen wanted to know more about Mary Shelley herself and how this book related to her own personal life in a way. I saw that there was the abandonment of Victor from the creature and how the creature wanted to be accepted by the family that he watched everyday but I believe that’s the closest that I came to being similar in my reading to Ellen Moers. Yes, I did learn something from the article but it wasn’t about the book and it wasn’t about writing an literary article, I learned more about the author herself Mary Shelley. I learned that she had lost her first born child, a little girl, and that this had influenced her in her writing of Frankenstein. Writers are often known to use personal experiences in their stories but I feel that this was something that is not seen too often, meaning something so personal to the author herself. Yes this would make a good article to use in Essay #3 because of the in-text citations that could be used to explain and relate to the book itself.

http://www.litgothic.com/Authors/mshelley.html