A Comparison of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Alice in Wonderland

Frankenstein and Alice in Wonderland

The notion of the monstrous, the line between what is acceptable or unacceptable in society, has been stretched thinner and thinner through time. But the concept that what is unlike ourselves challenges existing social relations. In other words, bodies that appear different or fail to perform as expected threaten not only the success of the individual, but the basic ideological assumptions upon which society itself is founded. Who is to blame? Probably society and the media. In the last couple centuries, humans have gone from living in a "natural world to living in a manufactured one" (Lasn 4). But before you curse at the television shows and magazines of today, realize how far back this cycle of rejecting the abnormal, shunning the so-called "freaks" of time, extends. Starting with modern times, where putting silicon pouches in one's chest or injecting botulism, a deadly toxin, into one's face is considered normal, if not encouraged, by today's society, to the 1930s-40s, when side shows and traveling freak exhibitions were at their peak in popularity, even as far back as the 1800s, with Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein--both fervently admired both then and now for manifesting the "outcasts" of 18th century literature, the "freak" and "freaky" of society have always been part of our culture.

In both Frankenstein and Alice in Wonderland, both written within 50 years of each other, the reader is introduced to characters considered abnormal, either an outcast or freak or both.

In Frankenstein, we have Victor and his monster, creator and creation, outcast by society and in some ways by ea...

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...e and troubled outcasts of their societies, show the reader where true logic can be found, even when that logic may be "the logic of the illogical," to the reader's delight and confusion.

Works Cited

Blumberg, Jane. Mary Shelley's Early Novels. Pgs. 1-39. Iowa City: University of Iowa

Press, 1993.

Carroll, Lewis. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (unabridged). Pgs. 39-48. 1865. New

York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1993.

Gilman, Sander L. Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul. Durham: Duke University Press,

1998.

Lasn, Kalle. Culture Jam. Pgs 4-7. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 1999.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost and other poems. 1831. New York: Mentor Books, 1961.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1994.