Monsters, By Andrew J. Hoffman Essay

How would you feel to be put on trial for a crime you did not commit? In the book, Monster by Walter Dean Myers, this is the case for a sixteen-year-old Harlem boy named Steve Harmon. Steve is on trial for felony murder because he has been accused of being involved in being the lookout for a robbery that took place on December 22nd in an uptown convenience store that resulted in the shooting of Alguinaldo Nesbitt, the convenience store clerk. Steve Harmon is innocent for the reasoning’s of he does not know who Richard Evans is, the convenience store was not empty, and there was no signal.

In the book Monster, written by Walter Dean Myers, a young boy named Steve Harmon was accused of taking part of a crime. In a real life trial called Murder on a Sunday Morning, a young boy named Brenton Butler was also accused of being a part of a crime. The main reason of those false accusations is because of their skin color, the witnesses notice color instead of physical appearance.

They are made to be more masculine and seem stronger than the average “woman” and how society tells us we, as women, should be. Even in real life, women are always seen with their best female friend. They never go anywhere alone, and the characters in horror movies are no different. They go through the whole plot of the story with their best friend, and their best friend most of the time is more of the fragile and girly character. They are more like society tells us women should be. There seems to be an imbalance with the presentation of women, because they show the lead woman as strong with masculine qualities, while the others are weak and fragile. “Double standards occur when the expectations meted out for members of various groups differ, and they often privilege one group at the expense of another.” (Lauzen, M. M., & Dozier, D. M. (2005)). These women can be sexualized or the complete opposite, depending on the

Secondly, whatever the difference monsters have from a human, whether it be animal characteristics, made-up attributes, or a combination of human limbs and other traits, any discrepancy points out their difference from humanity. The monsters with human attributes backhandedly comment on human behaviors, such as Manticore, Medusa and Minotaur. Blake and Cooper note that Medusa is in a group of “over-sexual women… were combined with snakes in order to emphasize the supposed sinful nature of women and temptations of their bodies” (Blake and Cooper 4). In recent monster stories, humanoid monsters have become increasingly normal. Thirdly, despite their distortions, monsters reflect who we are as humankind. Their many differences in meaning and image reflect humanity’s diversity. “Gothic” fiction is a literary tradition that started a recent wave of monsters that consisted of novels from Dracula to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. People began to write tales that tamed the supernatural

Think about a time, where wild accusations occurred due to a power outage. This is exactly what happened during “Rod Serlings” teleplay. In the 1960s version, “The Monsters on maple street” (2003 Movie). During the unexpected power outages, neighbors accuse neighbors of aliens from a different planet. On the other hand, in the 2003 movie, terrorists were suspected of attacking a neighborhood. Even though both sections are difficult, scared people with fear can cause them to turn against each other.

Monstrous feminine is the female monster that is dangerous in her role as a wife, mother, or lover. She is powerful as a member of the ’other’ that she can attack the establishment both in the wilderness and civilization. She can often use tools or symbols of the establishment against the establishment. In Muschietti’s Mama, Mama attacks Lucas through the wall putting him in a coma. Moreover Mama possesses Jean and drives the children back to the woods where she eventually kills Jean. Also in The Women in Black by Susan Hill, Jennet is powerful enough to make the three girls jump out the window to their deaths from the bedroom. Author Kipps sees The Women In black goading Jerome’s daughter into setting herself on fire with a lantern as she burns to death and destroying the house. Female monsters successfully attack the establishment mainly playing the role of a grieving mother crying over their dead children.

Upon further probing, there is perhaps a deeper terror rooted in Frankenstein, which subtly appears to stem his hesitancy at creating not just another monster, but specifically a female monster. Because Victor Frankenstein fears the existence of a female free of restrictions that he cannot impose, he destroys her, thus eliminating the female’s options of becoming either completely feminine through becoming a mother and mate, or totally unfeminine by opting to leave her partner and face the world alone.

The treatment that the monsters receive in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ "The Monster Men", perpetuates the theme that in this story men are the real monsters. There are times that men make it obvious that they are monsters and will do terrible things no matter who is hurt. In the beginning, it was quite clear that Muda Saffir was a monster and

In the novel Frankenstein, the author Mary Shelley reinforced the role of female nature in a book that is predominantly male-oriented. The female character is an underlying feature throughout the whole novel. For example, when Victor Frankenstein created his Monster from dead body parts, he disregarded the laws of female reproduction. Both Anne K. Mellor and Jonathon Bate argue that Victor defiled the feminine nature when he created his Monster from unnatural means. Mellor argued in her essay, “Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein,” that Victor eliminated the necessity to have females at all (355). There will not be a need for females if new beings are created in a laboratory. The disruption of mother nature is one of the novel’s original sins (479). In Bate’s essay, “Frankenstein and the State of Nature,” he argued that Victor Frankenstein broke the balance between female principles of maternity and mother nature (477). Frankenstein broke nature and undermined the role of females. The argument of Mellor was more persuasive than the discussion of Bate because she was able to provide more evidence that Victor Frankenstein dishonored the role of female nature.

Following this encounter, the monster-hunting gentlemen are put in a more precarious position, perhaps because the threat of virtuous woman becoming monstrous is more terrifying than facing a woman who was monstrous from the onset. I have previously alluded to the unholy trio of female vampires as fatal figures of the unfeminine: they are insensitive, aggressive, and, most

Mary says that women in the “physical world [are] inferior to the male”(2). She goes on to say that women are “intoxicated by the adoration [of] men” (2). Mary thinks “[men] firmly believe that [they] are acting in the manner best calculated to promote [womens’] happiness, which she states is very wrong” (12). Mary saying that women are inferior and need men to feel beautiful shows how society in the past viewed women. In that same aspect, the monster is viewed the same way as women.

In another one of Carter’s stories ”Lady and the House of Love”, Carter instills fear by utilizing a female monster. Despite embodying the ideal “woman”, Carter slowly unveils the ambivalent, somewhat-empathetic nature of the Countess. This slow revelation, paired with the use of symbols that suggest monotony and entrapment, Carter once again reveals that despite human societies being painted out as utopic, perhaps “it [actually] means ultimate death.” (citation) Although Carter’s works deter readers from some sort of external patriarchal power, horror does not always require some outside force.

Here we see Lady Macbeth calling dark spirits to take away her pureness and give poison just so she could have the power to kill the king showing us she has no guilt, which shows us the non-violent “female” traits are just as powerful as violent “male” ones.

For example, Frankenstein is afraid of the female creature’s “reproductive powers” and her aesthetic as a whole that seeing as her monstrous stature defies the stereotype that “women should be small, delicate, passive, and sexually pleasing” (7). On top of this, Mellor claims that Frankenstein’s unwillingness to complete the female monster stems from being “afraid of an independent female will” that “cannot be controlled” , thus implying that “female sexuality is strikingly repressed”

Throughout history, cultures and societies across the globe have used monsters or any sort of creature to exemplify anxieties and fears that they have. The same can be said for works of literature and art. These authors use these anxieties, personify them, and use them to exaggerate the fears of the readers. In short, the monsters/creatures that are created in each literary era depict and personify the biggest fears and viewpoints of the society that it was written in. In the case of the Victorian/Romantic era in British Literature, many authors discuss the many different feelings about science and the role of women at the time.