The Creature's Language Classes and Modern Political Photography

I can’t help reading Barthes’ “Photography and Electoral Appeal” without thinking of the U.S. Senate hopeful Christine O’Donnell’s ad which goes one step beyond Barthes’ “Look at me: I am like you” (1320.) In it, she explains that, “I’m you.”

Check it out: http://tinyurl.com/26b2xuu

Though I enjoyed reading Barthes, I feel that many of our conversations about Shelly and Frankenstein would be squashed if we apply his comment about the Author: “The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end…the author ‘confiding’ in us” (1322). This is especially true when Barthes disagrees that the Author, “is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child” (1324) or, in our case, a mother to her child.

We seemed to have been able to draw many plausible parallels between Frankenstein and Shelly through her biography and in constantly comparing the two prefaces that preface the novel. While each analysis has their strengths and weaknesses, why can’t these different critical styles enhance each other?

On another note, I found De Saussure’s concepts from “Course in General Linguistics” extremely relevant and exciting when applied to the creature. De Saussure states, “Language is a well-defined object in the heterogeneous mass of speech facts” and “It is the social side of speech, outside the individual who can never create nor modify it by himself; it exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community” (850).

Isn’t it clever how Shelly constructed the monster’s education of language? She faced the challenge of: how would one learn to read and write without being among people? The creature may have been able to make some sense of the books that came into his possession, but without the context of the family speaking, without his “social community,” he would not have been able to further decode the text and apply it linguistically. Were there any other ways in which this could have been accomplished in the text?

Having said that, there still appears to be some disconnect between the creature’s ability to speak and his ability to read. While he was carefully studying the family and Felix and Safie, he may have had trouble being able to decode the books that he found which were “fortunately…written in the language the element of which I had acquired at the cottage” (Shelley 86). De Saussure tells us on pg. 862 that, “The signs used in writing are arbitrary; there is no connection, for example, between the letter t and the sound that it designates.”