Topic: People want what they cannot have. In Rousseau’s text “Emile”, he talks about how students have no interest in subjects that are forced upon them, and have a natural inclination towards subjects that they find interesting or useful.
Subject: Frankenstein and his desire to meddle with life, death, and creation, despite the age old principle that those things are not for the realm of man, leave him ardently pursuing his goal.
Similes:
1) Frankenstein wanting what he can’t have is like someone seeing an ex popping up on social media and missing them. Frankenstein’s passion constantly penetrates his thinking, the more forbidden and taboo, the more he wants it.
2) Frankenstein wanting what he can’t have is like playing video games instead of doing homework. His need to create life, although he wants it badly, is detrimental in the long run. He lacks self discipline.
3) Frankenstein wanting what he can’t have is cheese-lust for a vegan. Even though it is unfamiliar to him, he has a newly found curiosity and interest in it.
4) Frankenstein wanting what he can’t have is like wanting to take Russian because it filled up faster than Spanish, which was your first choice.
5) Frankenstein wanting what he can’t have is like reading celebrity tabloids. This demonstrates humans as a whole, and their carnal obsession with external power, the highest level of which can be found among the rich and famous. We live extraneously through different forms of media, fascinating ourselves, reading about and indulging in other people’s lives, lives that we can’t have or experience for ourselves. We can’t have it, therefore we want it. To be able to create life is to gain power.
6) Frankenstein wanting what he can’t have is like taking a gym membership for granted until you can’t afford it anymore.
After devising this series of similes, I notice a few patterns. The first and sixth similes tap into the natural desire people have towards things that are no longer available to them. It seems that people will learn to want something, even if it was once in their possession. The second simile illuminates the fact that often the things we want are harmful to us, and that self restraint is more beneficial in the long run than obtaining immediate gratification. The third and fourth similes note that we go down different paths in life, and end up wanting things unfamiliar and distant to us, as well as things that we did not originally intend on moving towards. All of these details can be applied to Frankenstein and his aspirations in the novel.
I am interested by the kind of associations your similies make. I have two main comments though. 1) while I encourage you to make your similes as creative and wild as they come to you, make sure that you state the simile in a manner that’s grammatically sound. So if you’re comparing Frankenstein’s wanting, you might need to compare it to some other action or some other wanting. If you do compare that action of wanting to a noun (i.e. Frankenstein’s wanting is like a red handle), you need to explain how it Frankenstein’s wanting is like a red handle (i.e. It is like a red handle because it is vibrant, teasing, but at the end of the day hard and dangerous to pull). It’s a good practice to explain the like even when it is more grammatically obvious how you’re comparing.
Second comment: You end with “All of these details can be applied to Frankenstein and his aspirations in the novel.” This statement is a syllogism. You started with Frankenstein, so of course all the statements deduced from that starting point can be connected to the novel. The point of the brainstorming activity is for you to make a claim (even a tentative one) about how these claims or the ones that interest you the most apply to the novel.
One more quick note: The similes don’t really tell us about the world or prove anything. What they do is show us how you’re thinking about these things, and in as much as your similes are part of how a culture thinks of these objects, then maybe one could argue the similes tells us about a popular imagination, but even then… not necessarily.