A Female Frankenstein?
A 2003 film and Oscar winner for best leading actress: Charlize Theron, but you probably won’t be able to recognize her. It’s a little scary what make-up can do.
My writing 20 topic was called Crime Scene Imagination and it was basically a study of serial killers, so for my final paper, I decided to focus on a comparison between male and female killers. So far in Frankenstein, we have only been introduced to primarily male characters. Women have a much smaller role; it is almost as if they were created only to be destroyed. The mothers have all died of illness, Elizabeth Lavenza was strangled by the monster, and the second creation was quickly torn to pieces. In class, we have mentioned how women and mothers are loving and affectionate; they are the caretakers. However, after studying a good deal about serial killers, I was surprised to find that women can be quite monstrous as well.
Take for example, Aileen Wuornos, the first nationally publicized female serial killer. If you watch the film that I mentioned above, you can get a good documentation of her life story. She was, in my opinion, one of the worst cases having killed seven men on separate occasions. But what I found particularly interesting about her was that instead of missing a mother figure in her life, she grew up without a father. Actually, in many cases of serial killers, the individuals were missing some sort of parenting figure or were abused/neglected by them during their developmental years. I wonder if this has anything to do with violence at a later age. Is anger and violence tied with resentment for not having both a present and nurturing mother and father?
posted by turtle soup at 6:55 PM
4 Comments:
I don't believe that the lack of both a present and nurturing mother and father is completely responsible for anger and violence; however, I do think that there are certain things that you must learn from both your mother and father during your growing years. In some cases, the loss of a parent or the absence of a parent can lead to feelings of abandonment, which can later translate into anger, and sometimes subsequently violence. I think it all boils down to the issue of stability. Although it is not always enough to have a present mother and father, it does provide a person with some sort of familial foundation from which to build upon. Without one or the other, the foundation is quite shaky and we believe that the parent that is left must do whatever in is their power to pick up the slack (which does not always happen).
Yes, abandonment may be part of this feeling. However, I think more importantly is that those families that tend to have one parent figure will also be the same families that are part of a lower socioeconomic class (the overall trend). This lower class then translates into the lack of opportunities of education, which often leads to crime. The crime could start off as minor as shoplifting and then slowly grow into more severe acts, eventually leading to murder. However, these murders are committed out of want of something (money, etc.), while if one limits the discussion to serial killers (seeking enjoyment or satisfaction out of killing humans), then the problem is much more psychological.
I agree that while the lack of a nurturing mother or father certainly contributes feelings of abandonment, it is certainly not the sole reason serial killers turn into killers. After all, single parent families, aside from being of a lower class, typically tend to be more unstable and maligned. For instance, if a single mother gave birth to her children at an extremely young age, she may have consequently been estranged from her own community due to societal perceptions of propriety. Her children may suffer the same fate. Raised as pariahs, these kids are more susceptible to resentment and such.
In my Writing 20 class, Childhood in Victorian Literature, in almost all of the books and fairy tales that we read, the main character was missing a mother. However in most of these stories, the main character does not resort to violence but is usually just pathetic. In Oliver Twist, Oliver is always crying; Cinderella cries three times a day due to the fact that she lost her mother; Snow White shows no common sense and is tricked into being poisoned three times in very similar ways. Lack of a parent, especially a mother figure does not always lead to violence, there has to be some confounding factor that turns parentless children into monsters.
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