Category: Commonplace Book (Page 2 of 2)

The artifact I choose is about AIDS which many thought at the time was a disease in which you could get from touching someone. For this reason, many people feared and stayed away from those with AIDS. I picked this artifact over others primarily because I have always had a fascination with the history of AIDS and it fits well with what we are talking about in class very well. It fits well because people with AIDS were considered monsters because of the deadly disease that they had. When we talked about Frankenstein, he was treated like a monster for something he had no control over. Many people who contracted AIDS were unaware that the person they were with had it. But AIDS also had a stigma for being a disease that only homosexuals contracted and during this period in time, homosexuals were considered monsters as well. No one who contracted AIDS asked for it nor would have done what they did to contract AIDS if they knew they would get it. Frankenstein didn’t ask to be made but was hated by anyone who saw him as well as his creator. This made me think about how people with AIDS were treated. 

What interested me most about this artifact was part of the title which says “a killer called AIDS” but also the picture which depicts the killer being a physical person. This made the connection in my head about the thing people feared the most having a physical form that people can see. One thing that I always questioned is to what point is someone considered a monster? Someone with AIDS is the same person that they were before they contracted AIDS. Is it the fear that makes people lash out and consider people monsters?

“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself” (408)

Jane finally let go of Rochester, even though she forgave him. She found leaving him was better for her. Now she has her own place in which she can decorate or do as she pleases and she is in control of these students at the school. She finally has the freedom to do as she pleases.

“And was Mr.Rochester now ugly in my eyes? No, reader: Gratitude, and many associations, all pleasurable and genial, made his face the object I best liked to see” “Yet I had not forgotten his faults: indeed, I could not; for he brought them frequently before me.” (220)

“my secret soul I knew that his great kindness to me was balanced by unjust severity to many others.” (220)

Trans-lating the Monster: Transgender Affect and Frankenstein

“Synthetic products” of a “medical empire”

“my lifelong belief that, as a transsexual, I was a monster”

Frankenstein in the automatic factory

“Frankenstein explores a profound tension that was begging to emerge in industrial society between biology and technology, physiology and mechanics”

Born This Way: Reading Frankenstein with Disability

“The scenes of his birth, recounted by Victor, dramatize an unsatisfactory parental response to the birth of a disabled child”

“The figure passed me quickly, and I lost it in the gloom. Nothing in human shape could have destroyed that fair child. He was the murderer! I could not doubt it. The mere presence of the idea was an irresistible proof of the fact.” (Shelley, page 75)

Having Victor spend so much time creating Frankenstein, so much time in fact that he was sleep-deprived and lost contact with his family makes it seem strange that he was so quick to accuse Frankenstein of killing his brother. Could it have been that Victor felt so guilty about what he had created that he felt it necessary to do anything to be rid of it? Not only guilty but fearful of the creature. Victor maybe blames himself for some of this but wants to lay most of the fault on his creation. It would make sense that he did not want to be blamed because if he was ok with the thought of being blamed then he would have not allowed Justine to die for something that he was so sure that she did not do.