Frankenstein - Social Responsibility
Uploaded by luke30000 on Apr 29, 2001
Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein in a time of wonder. A main wonder was whether you could put life back into the dead. Close to the topic of bringing life back into the dead was whether you could create your own being, like selective breeding but a bit more powerful.
Close to where Mary lived there was a man named Vultair was experimenting putting electricity through Frogs to see if they could come back to life. With that going on close to her as well as the fear of a revolution and the pressure on her to think of a ghost story it is not surprising she thought of a horror story that would still be popular in the 21st Century.
Now I have explained where the story came from and why it is as it is I will explain the social responsibility it brings up and how it is still important today.
Looking after something you create is one point it brings up. Frankenstein created his creature so he should have looked after it but instead just because he didn’t like the way it looked he ran away. He never taught his creature anything so for all the creature knew it could have been okay to kill people and suchlike. That relates to today as some children who were not taught right from wrong by their parents watch films like Scream and I know what you did last summer where murdering seems cool as it involves Jennifer Love Hewit, Sarah Michelle Geller and Neve Cambell getting killed. The children watch these and think “I want to be like that scary guy with the mask” and they go and try to kill someone. If they do they get charged for the offence but many people think that the children’s parents should be blamed as they never taught the child right from wrong and they didn’t stop the child (sometimes as young as eight or nine) from watching the video which is rated eighteen or fifteen. When the filmmakers hear about how their film was responsible for a death they never (except for once) take the film away from the public and what they usually do is make a less violent sequel, which isn’t really helping anyone and less violence still is some violence.
Teaching a child right from wrong is another point it brings up but I feel I have covered this point in the...