“I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.”(Frankenstein page 68)
“Yet mine shall not be the submission of abject slavery. I will revenge my injuries: if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear; and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy…I swear inextinguishable hatred. Have care: I will work at your destruction, nor will I finish until I desolate your heart, so that you curse the hour of your birth.”(Frankenstein page 102)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu6NKHtLzks
This is a video of Elliot Rodger. Last Spring 2014, Rodger went on a shooting rampage in Isla Vista and Santa Barbra California. He killed six people and injured seven. Why you may ask? He did this all because he could not get a girlfriend. I am not simplifying his complaint at all. Through this video, Rodger repeats many times over that life is “unfair” and that its not right that “slobs” can get girls when he is so wonderful and he “doesn’t even have a girl’s number in his phone”. Towards the end of the videos, Rodger talks about slaughtering as many people as he can in his college/town that have over looked him. This mirrors what the creature says to Frankenstein when he talks about revenging injuries and inspiring fear instead of love. The creature and Rodger both felt that they were mistreated; the creature by Frankenstein and Rodger by girls (specifically blonde girls). Both Rodgers and the creature also felt that they had a right to kill in order to execute revenge. The only way that these two are different is the fact that one is a novel and the other rally happened. Each monster here felt that killing innocent lives was the way to receive justice. Each overlooked the fact that companionship is not a right in life.
What I like is that your comparison has really allowed us to think about the way that companionship and pretty girls mark a certain kind of marker of personhood for men. The women as Elliot Rodgers mentions them are always beautiful blondes who you get to have with you. They aren’t people, and they have no variety even in their physical appearance, but they something about his manhood and personhood. What concerns me is that you do more of a straight comparison where you show how the two examples are similar. The assignment though wanted you to find a theory in the Frankenstein about monstrosity and apply it to how you can understand a contemporary text. I think you picked a great comparison because as I watch the video I keep thinking that the Frankenstein may in fact be able to help us make some sense of the Rodgers. Because Elliot Rodgers is not monstrous looking and he appears to be financially well taken care of, so he’s not totally cut off from society the way the monster is. So they are not totally the same, but there differences might help us to narrow in on the importance of their similarity, the intensity of their alienation and the sense of desperation that it’ll never come to an end. When we think about Rodgers as just mad that he doesn’t have a girlfriend, he doesn’t make much sense, but if we can try to see if there’s a part of the monster’s desperation that applies to Rodgers it might help us to understand some of what’s at stake in Rodger’s narrative.