Monsters and Society
Choose one of the three prompts below to answer. Answers should take the form of a short essay, at least 750 words (roughly 3 pages, though longer is fine!)
You should use at least one primary source text from after the midterm (so: Frankenstein, “Bisclavret,” “Familiar,” “Robin Hood & Guy of Gisborne,” the War Poets (Owen, Sassoon, Tolkien), and X-Men).
Prompt #1: Monsters and Society. Elizabeth Young suggests that the Frankenstein story can function as a metaphor: symbolically representing any creation of a monster that then grows out of control, and becomes potentially dangerous, because the creator did not take proper care of it. Monsters, according to this argument, help draw attention to larger social and cultural concerns—that is, monsters aren’t simply single individual beings, but represent larger social problems, like Young’s three examples of the culturally created monsters of slavery, or the United States helping to put political dictators into power, or genetically modified foods. (Frankenstein, for instance, is in part about the monstrosity of a parent abandoning a child, and also about the monstrous potential of new scientific discoveries. Another example might involve how the War Poets of World War One use gruesome and vivid language to depict war itself, and/or a failure of leadership, as a type of monster.)
Using at least two primary source texts for support, discuss the ways in which monsters can represent larger cultural fears and concerns. What kinds of monsters do we see in the texts you’ve chosen, how are they described, and what larger social problems and fears do they represent?
