The name Frankenstein has often been used in Movies, Comical books, Novels, and even in Music to create a dark, morbid and gloomy allusion. It entails an agency or creature that ceases to be under the control of its creator and causes harm or destruction of the latter. It is comparable to the Beast of Gevaudan' or the Grim Reaper of 17th Century France and 18th Century England, respectively.
Frankenstein, as a character, has influenced many modern days' works in the fields of popular culture and science. The paper aims to explain just how Frankenstein has had such an impact using quotes from research and the book, Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. According to the definition given, it is safe to say that sometimes people try to create a new concept or thing to alleviate human suffering or solve a problem, but their creation ends up being their fate.
Perillos of Athens( Ancient Greece) is believed to have developed the Brazen Bull, a grue-some criminal execution tool. It was a life-sized bull made of bronze with a hollow underbelly into which a criminal was put, and then a fire was lit under the beast. The victim was roasted alive, and the blood-curdling screams would go through an acoustic apparatus producing sounds like those of an angry bull, to the horror of witnesses.
Under the hands of one of the tyrant rulers of (Sicily) Greece, Phalaris, Perillos himself ended up a victim of his own 'Frankenstein.' Phalaris was using him as a guinea pig to test whether the invention was useful. This strange occurrence did not discourage people from making further inventions, e.g., the Telephone(Graham Bell), the Internal Combustion Engine(Gotliebb Daimler) Yellow Fever Vaccine(Hideyo Noguchi), etc.
A significant Modern Day Frankenstein is the; 'splitting of the atom.' (Garwin, p. 7) It has led to the creation and harnessing of nuclear/atomic energy. However, nuclear power has sometimes gotten out of hand with deadly consequences on man, the very creators. For example, the Chernobyl and Fukushima Nuclear Power station accidents in 1986 and 2011, will remain to be some of the worst nuclear disasters of all time. It led to the release of radioactive materials that brought cancers and other genetic abnormalities among people.
The result was 41 dead: 1000 acute and eventual cases of cancer and 18 injured(hydrogen and radiation burns). Death is the fate of all life-forms, no matter how long they live. Whether a MayFly that lives 24 hours or a giant tortoise that lives up to 180 years. The longest living person was Methuselah, according to the excellent book, The Holy Bible(New King James Version). 'The days of our lives are seventy years, and if by reason of strength, they are eighty years’(psalms 90:10).
The average person's life is 70 to 80 years in most cases. Most because nonagenarians(90+ years) and centenarians(100+ years) exist. Death and short life span are attributed to sin (Romans 6:23). 'For the Wages is death.' People have often tried to challenge this finality. They have often attempted to depict things widely considered impossible. Like the possibility of resurrection from death. By using fiction.
A famous 1931 Movie is one named, as expected, Frankenstein with the story-line by Mary Shelley and John Balderston. A science-fiction/horror film that talks of a brilliant but morbidly obsessed scientist(Dr. Frankenstein) who digs up corpses to use them to assemble living beings. He uses an extraordinary ray to restore life to lifeless bodies. In the end, the Frankenstein Monster is born.
He is assumed to be dangerous and is locked up in a cage from which he escapes but not after killing, Fritz, the assistant to the Scientist. He goes to ravage the community and gets out of control, killing a young girl by a river. The villagers later trap him in a windmill then set it on fire. Frankenstein, has upsides and downsides, as an archetype of creation that results in calamity.
First, he depicts hope that maybe someday, life after death, will not be fiction but a real-life experience as the fields of science and culture advance by the day. But the sad thing is that it creates morbid superstitions and practices like; necromancy and the consciousness of people after death, e.g., that dead people become spirits that have supernatural abilities (Finkel, p. 1-17). This is the wrong place to start because, as of right now, these beliefs sound highly impossible just from scientific stand-point. In the current world, things only become accurate after scientific proof.
Conclusion
Frankenstein represents a legendary figure that is not tied to any particular person. Even so, it has shaped the scientific explorations and cultures of humankind. It is, for example, why people pay money to buy a chance to go to heaven or believe in life after death. Like the Vikings, believe in Valhalla (paradise) for those who live courageous and honourable lives (Bensel, p. 386-393). Bottom line, it is all a matter of choice on what to think.
