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Frankenstein (novel)/Headscratchers (view source)

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* Every adaptation of this just bugs me. In the original, the monster is very eloquent, delivers long monologues, teaches himself how to speak fluently (in two languages!) simply by eavesdropping on a family for half a year, and reads books like ''[[Paradise Lost]]'' - in general, he is very intelligent. But whenever the original novel is adapted, the monster comes out speaking [[You No Take Candle]].
** It's [[Adaptation Displacement]]. The movie with Boris Karloff was so famous that it's what comes to mind in regards to Frankenstein's Monster, hence why FM is frequently shown as a simple if tragic, brute.
** [[Magic Aa Is Magic A|But don't those adaptations make more sense about it?]] I mean, it's a bit of a stretch to think a creature of ''any'' intelligence would pick all that up just by eavesdropping. That's not how learning languages work. It's not a question of how smart he is.
*** Some adaptations presume that the creature wasn't so much learning speech as ''remembering'' languages once known to the person(s) who'd contributed its secondhand brain.
** Hey, Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein is a 20-year-old college kid; his age change in movies is even worse than Hamlet's! Have any adapters actually read the book?
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** Victor mentions being fascinated by the power of lightning, so you can kind of see where the idea might have come from... There's a specific passage where it talks about seeing a tree struck by lightning, which leads to his interest in science.
** The story kind of rushes over the actual moment of creating life. Yes, the lightning (and electricity) is mentioned, and great stress is put on Victor's fascination with alchemy, which would suggest this. However, the book leaves the process to the imagination.
* Okay, so Frankenstein's monster, a perfectly proportioned 8 foot tall man (for reference, that's about the size of the [[The Incredible Hulk (Filmfilm)|Hulk]] in the Edward Norton movie), strangles a little boy. He then places a photo the boy was carrying in a young woman's pocket so she would be implicated in the crime. And people end up believing it? What the heck? When the boy's body is found it says that, "the print of the murderer's finger was on his neck." Since the monster was 8 feet tall, he must have had HUGE hands. The strangle marks left by his hands are left on the boy's neck and everyone thinks that they were made by a young woman? Am I the only one who had a serious WTF moment at this? I know that criminology didn't really exist yet, but just how dumb would you have to be not to notice that the strangulation marks on the boy are WAY too big for a woman to have ever made?
** Well, all they had to go by in those days was observation and the means, motive, and opportunity. What would possess a servant woman to throttle the son of her master (I'm assuming she was a servant)? Means: Hire a big guy to do the deed so she can stay 'clean'. Motive: Revenge? Jealous love (the kid should've been hers, but wasn't. Crazy, I know.)? Maybe the kid was hers and she thought him a mistake? Maybe she just got fed up with the brat and decided to snuff him out? Opportunity: They were out on a trip together, and the boy managed to get himself seperated from the family. Of course, we ''know'' what really happened. I'm just considering what the police may have thought and discovering that photo in the woman's possession may have had confirmed it all for them. They got the woman who concoted the murder, but not the man who actually killed the boy.
*** The motive given in the court was theft of the locket the boy was carrying. It wasn't just a picture; the picture was in a valuable locket. It's implied, however, that the jury is horrified at the crime and just looking for someone to pin it on. When Elizabeth offers a strong character witness, the jury hates Justine even more because of her ingratitude toward one who loved her so much. To them, Justine's guilt was a foregone conclusion.
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* Frankenstein creates the monster by stitching together body parts, which really makes no sense. Surely it would be way more practical to find one intact corpse than to string together parts from different bodies.
** That's the route taken in Young Frankenstein, where the good Doctor and Eyegore make off with an oversized corpse.
** Also in [[Mary Shelley's Frankenstein|Branagh's version]], where the monster is built from the base of recently-executed [[Robert De Niro]] and given the dead brain of [[John Cleese (Creator)|John Cleese]]. What a weird movie.
** Well, there aren't really that many "intact" corpses since you usually either die of injury or die of old age. If Frankenstein doesn't want his creation to have an elderly the body his only option is to find young ones, hence the injuries and need for stitching. And he probably knows better than to handle corpses of people who died of diseases.
** In the book, he doesn't stitch pieces together. He constructs a man completely from scratch, albeit with raw materials taken from cadavers. He cites the minuteness of the parts as his chief difficulty, so he increases ''everything'' in size, right down to the veins.
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* The monster is created over the course of months, from many different body parts. How did Victor keep the body from decaying?
** The story mentions (at the very end) the monster's mummy-like skin. Could he be mummyfied?
* On occasion, the monster being called "Frankenstein" is justified by saying that he inherits his master surname. Fair enough, but isn't he technically the biological offspring of the people whose bodies were used to create him? Also, there does not seem to be much of a precedent in artificial life-forms inheriting the names of the scientists who created them unless the scientists were intending to raise them as children. No one ever gave [[Star Trek: theThe Next Generation (TV)|Data]] the surname Soong.
** Perhaps the more salient point is: it's not the like the novel calls him that, or any other source for well over a century. It's a persistent misnomer born of confusion and ignorance.
** I'm completely aware that the monster in the book was never called "Frankenstein." I'm talking about a common justification by people in [[Real Life]] who are used to calling him that.
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