Ben Fancher<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dr. Foss<\/p>\n\n\n\n
ENG 384<\/p>\n\n\n\n
5\/2\/19<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In Mary Shelley\u2019s\u00a0Frankenstein,\u00a0<\/em>a doctor, Victor Frankenstein, figures out how to reanimate the dead in a process that is never really explained to the readers. To test his theories, he creates a Creation who is compiled of the body parts of several different corpses. To Victor\u2019s surprise, the Creation turns out to be not as attractive as he thought, despite being made out of random people\u2019s body parts and Victor, not getting the child he expected, runs away and completely abandons his Creation and the closest thing he ever gets to a child. Victor fears the Creation and completely neglects raising him, just because the life Victor created turned out to be different from him. In Mary Shelley\u2019s\u00a0Frankenstein,<\/em>the Creation\u2019s experience in the world is the same as that of many autistic children; they exist in a world that doesn\u2019t know how to interact with them, and they have parents that don\u2019t know how to raise them and might even feel like they were denied the child they deserved.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In Jim Sinclair\u2019s \u201cDon\u2019t Mourn for Us\u201d, there is a section entitled \u201cAutism is not death\u201d, in which Sinclair talks about the fact that the birth of an autistic child is not the death of a non-autistic child, since the child was never not going to be autistic. Parents grieve because they feel they were somehow denied a \u201cnormal\u201d child. Sinclair says it best when he says \u201cMuch of the grieving parents do is over the non-occurrence of the expected relationship with an expected normal child\u201d (Sinclair). Victor\u2019s interactions with the Creation after he brings him to life show a parent struggling with the birth (I know the Creation was built, not born, but it\u2019s still the creation of a child, so hush) of a child that they were expecting to be born different than the way they were. That is, they were expecting their child to be the same as them. Frankenstein says in chapter five that he \u201chad selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!\u201d (Shelley, 43) Frankenstein had intended for his Creation to be beautiful, tall, and strong. The Creation turned out tall and strong, but Frankenstein was horrified by his appearance. He had worked himself up imagining the perfect creation; and he had made himself believe that his creation would be just like him, perfectly alike in body and mind and soul. What he got was not what he expected to get, but what he got wasn\u2019t any sort of monster or alien, as Sinclair would say. Frankenstein succeeded in making something that is made of more human than any one human being on the planet. The Creation stands on two legs. He has hair, two eyes, two ears, a nose, and a mouth. He\u2019s very, extremely, ridiculously muscular, but so is Captain America, and we all love him. We also know that the Creation has an amazing capacity to learn, as demonstrated in chapters 11-16, where he learns an entire language and several things about what it is to be a human being.\u00a0\u00a0And yet, upon seeing the Creation in its finished form, Frankenstein says that \u201cthe beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart\u201d (Shelley 43). Frankenstein\u2019s dream was that of a perfect creation. He wanted to defy death and create a perfect human being. He expected that perfect human being, but he didn\u2019t get it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At this point, what Sinclair says that Frankenstein should\u2019ve done was said to himself \u201cThis is not the child that I expected and planned for\u201d (Sinclair). After saying this, Frankenstein should\u2019ve taken time to grieve in PRIVATE, meaning NOT directly in the FACE of his creation, and then gone back to his creation and said to himself that, while this \u201cchild\u201d is different from the one that he wanted, it is still deserving of care and attention, and since the \u201cchild\u201d doesn\u2019t have anyone like him to give him that care and attention, it\u2019s Frankenstein\u2019s job to take care of him. This is what Sinclair says that parents of autistic children need to realize. It\u2019s what Frankenstein needed to realize. Yes, the Creation is different from you, obviously. He\u2019s the size of LeBron James, he has yellow skin, and he\u2019s scary looking, but he isn\u2019t a monster. He\u2019s just a challenge. The challenge is the same as raising an autistic child, since Victor would be raising a child that is different from the one he expected, and is different from him, but for a man who figured out how to combine parts of dead humans into one living one, it should\u2019ve been a challenge well worth the effort.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n In DJ Savarese\u2019s \u201cCommunicate with Me\u201d, Savarese writes about the struggles his classmates have with trying to communicate with him. DJ himself isn\u2019t the problem, but his classmates say that they aren\u2019t sure how to talk to him. DJ uses a facilitator to help him communicate, and when people see that, they don\u2019t know whether to talk to the interpreter or to DJ. Or they see that DJ is autistic, and they don\u2019t know how to deal with that either. His classmates don\u2019t know that DJ sometimes needs to be signed at to communicate, since sometimes his hearing shuts down. Or they don\u2019t know that he sometimes loses control of his body, resulting in his reaching out towards whoever he is talking to. People would easily be able to communicate with DJ, but they just don\u2019t know the rules, or they don\u2019t know that the rules even exist.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n People don\u2019t know how to interact with the Creation as well. They see that he\u2019s a yellow skinned, unattractive, seven-foot-tall, muscular person, and they immediately start using words like \u201cmonster\u201d and \u201cugly\u201d and \u201cogre\u201d for some reason. Victor\u2019s brother, William, used all of these words to refer to the Creation all within the same breath which is, for one thing, very rude, but also, doing this means that he broke one of the rules of interaction with the Creation. The Creation is very much aware that the reason Victor abandoned him is that he thought he was horrifyingly hideous, having read as such from the notes he stole from Victor\u2019s lab (Shelley 112). This makes the Creation particularly sensitive to any insult to his appearance, so calling him things like \u201cmonster\u201d and \u201cogre\u201d will result in\u2026strangulation. People see the Creation and all they see is a giant scary monster, but they don\u2019t see that he\u2019s really just a human being. The only person that didn\u2019t react with fear or yell at him or try to cause him harm was the blind man in chapter 15, and they had a very pleasant conversation, which shows that the only reason that the Creation doesn\u2019t have more pleasant conversations is that most people see him and they don\u2019t see someone to have a conversation with. They see someone to run away from or shoot at. They don\u2019t understand that it isn\u2019t difficult to have interact with this person, because they don\u2019t try to learn how to interact with this person. But if they tried, they would discover an individual with a kind heart and a sharp mind, who is ready and desperate to share themselves with the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Creation in Mary Shelley\u2019s\u00a0Frankenstein<\/em>is not the child who Victor Frankenstein wanted, but he is the child who Victor got. He is equally deserving of love and happiness and care as a Creation with a beautiful, perfect face and amazing flawless skin. The challenges of having to raise the Creation are obvious, but they in no way mean that the Creation is some sort of monster who is impossible to raise. There is obviously a challenge in raising the Creation, and there is a challenge in raising autistic children. They might not be the children that their parents wanted, but they\u2019re the children they got. They might seem hard to interact with, but you just need to learn how to do so. It\u2019s a challenge, but it\u2019s one worth undertaking. The happiness and success of a human life is something too valuable to decide to give up on, just because it\u2019s a life too different from your own.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Word Count: 1375<\/p>\n\n\n\n Works Cited<\/p>\n\n\n\n Savarese, DJ. \u201cCommunicate with Me.\u201d\u00a0Disability Studies Quarterly<\/em>, 2010,\u00a0www.dsq-sds.org\/article\/view\/1051\/1237<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shelley, Mary.\u00a0Frankenstein.\u00a0<\/em>Electronic Text Center. University of Virginia Library.\u00a0https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20110206045402\/http:\/\/etext.lib.virginia.edu\/toc\/modeng\/public\/SheFran.html<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Sinclair, Jim. \u201cDon\u2019t Mourn For Us.\u201d\u00a0Our Voice,<\/em>vol. 1, 1993.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ben Fancher Dr. Foss ENG 384 5\/2\/19 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In Mary Shelley\u2019s\u00a0Frankenstein,\u00a0a doctor, Victor Frankenstein, figures out how to reanimate the dead in a process that is never really explained to the readers. To test his theories, he creates a Creation who is compiled of the body parts of several different corpses. To Victor\u2019s surprise, the Creation … Continue reading “BEN FANCHER’S FINAL EXAM ESSAY BECAUSE THIS WEBSITE WON’T LET HIM LOG IN FOR SOME REASON. ASK AMANDA. WE’VE BEEN TRYING FOR THE PAST 41 MINUTES. :(“<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-take-home-final-examinations"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/papJgd-pp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1575"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1576,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1575\/revisions\/1576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}