You Do Not Have to Become Less of a Monster to Create Art

Abstruse

In that location is a continued fascination with all things monster. This is partly due to the popular reception of Mary Shelley's Monster, termed a 'new species' by its overreaching but admiringly determined maker Victor Frankenstein in the eponymous novel start published in 1818. The enduring bear on of Shelley'south novel, which spans a plethora of subjects and genres in imagery and themes, raises questions of origin and identity, death, birth and family unit relationships, equally well as the contradictory qualities of the monster. Monsters serve equally metaphors for anxieties of abnormality and innovation (Punter and Byron, 2004). Stephen Asma (2009) notes that monsters represent evil or moral transgression and each epoch, to speak with Michel Foucault (Aberrant: lectures at the Collège de French republic, 1975–75, 2003, p. 66), evidences a 'particular type of monster'. Academic debates tend to explore how social and cultural threats come to exist embodied in the figure of a monster and their deportment literalise our deepest fears (Gilmore, 2009; Scott, 2007). Monsters in gimmicky culture, however, have become more humane than ever before. Monsters are strong, resilient, creative and sly creatures. Through their playful and invigorating energy they can be seen to disrupt and unsettle. They nonetheless cater to the appetite for horror, but they also encourage us to feel empathy. The meet with a monster can enable us to end, wonder and alter our attitudes towards engineering science, our torso and each other. This commentary article considers the use of the concepts of 'monsters' or 'monstrosity' in literature, contemporary inquiry, civilization and teaching contexts at the intersection of the Humanities and the Social Sciences.

Introduction

The reception of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) offers many opportunities for bookish research to intersect with popular culture. Frankenstein has become a significant cultural reference point. Indeed, responses to Shelley'southward novel have proliferated across a range of genres and media since its publication and continue to spawn gimmicky reactions. In the twentieth century, these include sequels (Myers, 1975) and retellings (Ackroyd, 2008; Aldiss et al., 2016), also equally the use of the proper noun 'Frankenstein' as a token for horror in subsequent novels from the 1950s onwards (Carrière, 2016). Performance adaptations started with Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein, written past Richard Brinsley Peake, commencement shown in London in 1823 and the most recent is Liam Scarlett's adaption for the Royal Ballet (ROH, 2019). Frankenstein has also inspired many movies with the Monster being portrayed as a grotesque, an innocent and a source of humor, farther influencing a range of motion picture hybrid genres, such as Science-Fiction Horror (Picart, 2003). The novel has been considered as a pre-cursor to Scientific discipline Fiction (Seed, 1995), it has been interrogated through feminist approaches (Hodges, 1983), queer theory (Rigby, 2009), and in the context of the Gothic equally well as in examinations of slavery and racism where Frankenstein functions as a metaphor to politically critique discourses of ability, identity and nature with (Sterrenburg, 1979; Collings, 2009; Mulvery-Roberts, 2016; Young, 2008). Assay of Frankenstein's Monster has led to discussions of new forms of humanity and reflections on social relations likewise every bit gender (Hedrich-Hirsch, 1996; Creed, 1993). ^{Footnote 1}

The range of literary perspectives and multidisciplinary connections across this special collection brings into focus the pertinent theoretical and methodological challenges relating to how the monstrous finds awarding not only in critical thinking merely too in teaching contexts. Monsters, despite any kind of reservation, have a lot to offering. When it comes to defining 'monster' and 'monstrosity', Foucault in his lectures on the Abnormal (2003) differentiates betwixt three, different figures: one, the 'human monster', i.e., someone or something who has the 'capacity to create anxiety […] due to the fact that information technology violates the law […] by its very existence' (p. 56). Two, the 'individual to exist corrected', then that they confirm with the constabulary, and three, specifically the 'masturbator' who breaks moral police force. Foucault, in his archaeology of the Abnormal, reviews the shifting relations between the normal, the aberrant and the sexually deviant to explain the transgressive quality and moral challenge embodied by the monster, which, in Foucault's words, is 'a monstrosity of deport rather than the monstrosity of nature' (p. 73). The issue here is the normative approach to the human condition. This drove is, in the first instance, concerned with the relationship between figures one and two which Foucault explains thus:

The monster's frame of reference was nature and society, the system of laws of the world: the monster was a cosmological or anticosmological being. The frame of reference of the private to exist corrected is much narrower: it is the family exercising its internal power or managing its economic system, or, fifty-fifty more, in its relations with the institutions adjoining or supporting it. (p. 57)

For our purposes, the combination of the categories ('homo monster' and 'individual to be corrected') raises the question of what is acceptable or desirable in human beings as well as in social contact. Turning to these questions from within a literary framework, we note that English Literature abounds with monsters, ranging from Grendel to Voldemort. Monsters are also familiar figures from our consumption of Greek myths, Ovid's Metamorphoses and, of course, Fairy Tales. Monsters in all these stories must be fought and victory tends to be conquest followed by relief or emotional stillness. Subsequently the fight the protagonist, to regain his humanity, has to let get of everything (monstrous), everything they used to conquer the opposing force with (Botting, 2008). Only then will they have grown and only and so tin can they embrace their new, better cocky and beginning afresh. Traditionally, the effigy of the monster has been used to measure the status of 'the human being' both in terms of appearance and upstanding choice or agency. Conflict exists and inappropriate behaviour needs to be addressed to improve and guarantee the functioning of human relations too as political systems. What does it mean to be human? This question has been posed continually in Literature but also in the context of Instruction, particularly through curriculum soapbox in Religious Education (R.Due east.), Citizenship and Personal Social and Emotional teaching (P.Southward.I.). It is all the more than pertinent in an historic period in which we talk virtually the mail-human, which includes hybrid human and technological modes of life and living. School is one site where the nurturing of man values and attempts to course or rather transform society for the improve commence. In a time of societal change, the application and integration of technology is oftentimes perceived to exist a threat to human integrity, as well as to emotional relations betwixt human beings. Furthermore, at a time of conflict and division in politics and society in the Great britain and beyond, groups of various perspectives, religions and cultures can be 'othered' in a way that they become regarded as monstrous (Struthers, 2017; Kenny and Ghale, 2015). This othering is both constructed and contested by some educational opportunities and expectations. More often, monsters represent the unfamiliar and threatening and sometimes the soulless and inhuman.

Where does 'the monster' end, and where does 'the human' start? The boundaries between these categories are fluid equally the description of enquiry on Shelley'south Frankenstein beneath will indicate. In The Order of Things (2005) Foucault outlines the part of monsters and operation of monstrosity for the concept of 'the homo' and, quoting Foucault, Fred Botting (2003) delineates the cultural significance of monsters thus:

At that place are two natures disclosed by monsters: that which is ordered, classified and regulated past scientific soapbox, and that which remains undifferentiated, in process. Monsters from the point of articulation betwixt the two, located equally part of the undifferentiated murmur or dissonance of natural process and marked out in the identification of proper and recognisable species: 'on the basis of the continuum held by nature, the monster ensures the emergence of difference' (cited in Foucault, 2005, 156). (p. 344)

Botting, like Foucault earlier him, deliberates nomenclature. His neat summary should not accept away from the fact that monsters—by their very nature—face us with excess, a circumstance, which strictly speaking should make classification impossible. Still, every bit Botting suggests, the apply of 'monster' as metaphor enables the interrogation of social or intellectual problems: monsters embody fear or excitement and monstrosity represents amoral or uncontrolled behaviour. All is channelled into emotional expression through language and in particular through metaphor. Monsters, in improver, put into words feelings that we struggle to express ourselves. A metaphor, to return to Foucault still, can really only be an indirect approach to a challenge or social problem, one which falls into the 'regime of silence' or within the realms of 'censorship' (2003, p. 70). This means that monsters are often mysterious because they represent what cannot exist articulated. Foucault, moreover, viewed teaching itself equally a monstrous forcefulness of power and discipline, which enacts command over the transgressive intents of childhood (Deacon, 2006, p. 184). Similarly, institutional racism, labelling and othering of pupils and families also highlight the Foucauldian perspective in which 'the natural' is fabricated monstrous past society (Harwood et al., 2014). Equally a phenomenon, consequently, monsters or monstrous acts can prompt the impulse to imagine new social relations both during the reading and instruction processes.

The afterlife and legacy of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Shelley's novel engages with questions of origin likewise every bit identity via the complex human relationship betwixt Frankenstein and the Monster (Smith, 2016). The 1818 edition (now the preferred pedagogy text) never reveals how Frankenstein fabricated his monster or indeed animated its lifeless body. Only in the introduction to the third edition, published in 1831, did Shelley mention 'galvanism' (Baldick, 1987, p. iv; Vasbinder, 1984, pp. 32–37). This scientific practice, which needs to be contextualised with the Enlightenment soapbox of progress equally well every bit the Industrial Revolution, harks back to the experiments of the Italian physician and philosopher Luigi Galvani (1737–1798), who used electric currents and discovered their electro-magnetic effect on frog legs. Galvani saw the muscles of dissected brute limbs contract (Turney, 1998, pp. 19–22). It appears that information technology is due to Shelley's belated explanation that Frankenstein has become the epitome of the mad scientist, besides as a shorthand for advances in scientific discipline or technology gone wrong. Shelley, furthermore, refines much of her clarification of Frankenstein's character in the 1831 version of the text. In 1818, the narration and its handling of point of view is delicately balanced, allowing both creator and cosmos to emerge as heroic. In 1831, self-torture and histrionic regret dominate the delineation of Frankenstein's inner life. Well-nigh Shelley's rewriting and the shift from scientific break-through to moral disaster, Marilyn Butler writes: 'her alteration were acts of damage-limitation rather than a reassertion of say-so' (1993, p. 313): 'in 1831 Mary Shelley added long passages in which her main narrator, Frankenstein, expresses religious remorse for making a creature, and it is on such passages of reflection and analysis that the empathetic modern reader is encouraged to dwell' (p. 303). While the Monster is of nature every bit it is a walking assemblage of corpses, it is likewise beyond nature considering it is badly made by someone who acts outside nature. This creature is not built-in (Huet, 1993) and Frankenstein has made many claims nearly his probing securely into the secrets of life; he deems himself able to chief natural laws. The Monster, to be articulate, is ugly but kind and these qualities coexist throughout the story. To explain the Monster's complex beginning from a Feminist perspective scholars have turned to Shelley's life-story, and, in particular, the themes of death, birth and family unit relations, in an attempt to explicate the motivation behind some of her creative choices (Mellor, 1980).

Frankenstein has a resonating cultural presence. Why has Shelley'southward story been so successful? In view of the existing interpretations, the reason appears to be 2-fold: one, the theme of monstrosity, i.e., the impact of Frankenstein'southward disastrous cosmos and abandonment of his creature (Bann, 1994), and two, monstrosity every bit writing process (Clark et al., 2001), i.e., Shelley's artistic conception of a novel that blends disciplines and twists genres. The story has also a neat number of historical reference points. Shelley implies the context of Romantic scientific discipline (Shelley, 1994; Mitchell, 2013) and includes quotations from John Milton'due south Paradise Lost, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'The Rhyme of the Aboriginal Mariner' and William Wordsworth's 'Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey'. The patching together of texts (as well as trunk parts) is feature of the Gothic and Judith Halberstam, whose Skin Shows (1995) combines Foucauldian reading with psychoanalytic estimation, comments that monstrosity is foremost textual: 'multiple interpretations are embedded in the text and part of the experience of horror comes from the realisation that meaning itself runs anarchism' (p. 2). Gothic texts are layered and purposefully construct different significant-systems whose contradictions are suspended rather than resolved. The role of the monster, consequently, tin can be part of a multi-faceted signifying net and multimodal; it 'condenses', she writes, 'diverse racial and sexual threats to nation, capitalism, and the bourgeoisie into one body' (p. three).

Frankenstein'southward Monster has no name. It is referred to as 'monster', 'wretch', 'daemon', 'brute' and 'fiend' (Baldick, 1987, p. 10) and in her novel Shelley uses the give-and-take 'creature' (nowadays a pop name for the Monster) to refer to other characters. Nevertheless, e'er since Nick Groom'southward edition of Frankenstein (2018) 'being' appears to be the right or rather the most adequate term for Frankenstein's creation. This is regardless of anyone's personal preference. The gravitation towards a term that evokes this figures victimhood leads us to the symbolic power of naming, considering what Frankenstein'south creation is depends on what we phone call it (Lacan, 1966). Interestingly, and this tends to happen oftentimes, the names of creator and creation get mixed up. This confusion dates back to the nineteenth century and has long since invited the concept of a double-being and literary device of Doppelgänger and the conclusion that Monster is a projection and that Frankenstein is the real monster. The concrete reality of the Monster'south deformed body, on the other hand, cannot be ignored. To quote Baldick: 'the novel provides no caption for the creature's ugliness, and if we are tempted to account for information technology psychologically as a mere project of Frankenstein's guilty revulsion of his dead, we run upwardly confronting the evidence of the other character's reactions' (p. 33). The Monster is a existent enough entity and albeit its freedom to disobey fascinates, a better understanding of the reasons backside its monstrous acts does non necessarily atomic number 82 to a defeat of fear. The reason being that the permeable boundary betwixt 'the human' and 'the monstrous' never settles (Feder, 2010). The Monster may non look like Frankenstein only they are definitely connected (Botting, 2008). Shelley explores this through the Monster's reading to Paradise Lost and its consequent identification with Adam and Satan (Cantor, 1984; Newlyn, 1992). Through this shift in self-perception Shelley presents deformity as divergence in the strength field of natural philosophy, as well as organized religion (see Foucault, 2005). She delves deeply into the deviant anatomy of the man body (Youngquist, 2003). The Monster cannot fit in and its hybridity, begetting in mind that Frankenstein united human with brute parts, speaks strongly against a identify in God'south creation fifty-fifty though information technology is a perfect artwork earlier information technology starts to motility. This ways that Frankenstein's Monster is an object of desire besides as disgust (Wright, 2018; Erle, 2018b). Frankenstein wanted to create a new species just he terminates its future when he breaks his promise and aborts the female person monster, which is Frankenstein'due south ultimate act of monstering. He socially isolates the Monster. The Monster's response, however, is so familiar, and then human. Information technology is angry and demands revenge and justice.

Monsters are familiar and part of everyday life (Canguilhem, 1962; Auerbach, 1995; Botting, 2008). Nevertheless, Frankenstein'southward Monster is special because Frankenstein formulates the tensions arising between nature and nurture besides as self and society (Gilbert, 1978, pp. 59–63). Monstrosity in Frankenstein is not merely associated with appearance but also with actions: Frankenstein's creation is a killer. In spite of this fact at that place exists a tendency to explain away its monstrous acts with neglect or bad treatment. The Monster kills Frankenstein's youngest brother William simply is not to blame because information technology was abandoned by its maker; it is a victim and we—readers of Shelley's novel—should experience pity and, according to a recent newspaper article, near of our electric current students do (O'Shea and Jacobs, 2018). This motility towards more empathy implicates the reader in new and interesting ways. Should we understand and ultimately forgive absolutely everything? This collection starts with the premise that Shelley's monster is not but larger than life, it has also assumed a life outside the novel. The drove, consequently, wants to position Shelley's Frankenstein beyond its firsthand Gothic and literary contexts. The meaning of the monster is in the centre of the beholder and therefore they can be therapeutic, familiar, reassuring also as evil. Monsters do non ever repulse nor do monstrous acts always evoke fear and disgust (Wright, 2018), which is why they are connected to a whole range of disciplines, such as compages, counselling, drama, ecocriticism and children'southward literature.

Monster theory and monster studies

In his foreword to The Ashgate Inquiry Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (2012) John Block Friedman, writer of The Monstrous Races in Medieval Fine art and Idea (1981) proclaims that monsters are 'ubiquitous […] [they] are all around us, in our dreams our children's reading, in accounts of postcolonial commercialism and exploitation and films detailing the ability relations between men and women, in our perceptions of disabled people in the streets; sometimes, even, they are us' (xxvii). The Ashgate Companion, consequently, gives an extremely useful overview of monster traditions and in his introduction Asa Simon Mittman justifies the being of Monster Studies, emphasising impact over qualities of monsters: 'the defining features cannot be considered essential, every bit it were, as the sources are too varied, to wonderfully divergent to be summarised or contained by such characteristics' (p. 9). Regarding bear upon, which results in a change in attitude towards difference, Patricia McCormack's definition of 'encounter' is helpful: 'The Monster' refers to the chemical element outside the observer that sparks and creates an consequence of perception that necessitates the participation of two unlike entities.' A monster, she writes, is 'a catalyst toward an encounter' (2012, p. 294) and this 'run across' is productive. Consequently, what is unacceptable considering information technology is morally transgressive can still advise new possibilities for human interaction. In this sense, it was our aim for this collection to juxtapose different approaches which, nosotros promise, will facilitate a dialogue betwixt the Social Sciences and the Humanities.

What makes a monster 'a monster'? Jeffrey Weinstock explains that monsters 'are things that should non be, but notwithstanding are—and their existence raises vexing questions about humanity'due south understanding of and place in the universe […]. The Monster', he writes, 'undoes our agreement of the manner things are and violates our sense of how they are supposed to be' (2014, i and 2). Foucault, when defining these categories, emphasised the quality of mixing or 'blending' of species, sexes and forms (2003, p. 63). His definition acknowledges that the notion of a true or accurate self is a construction; it is indeed problematic on the basis of lived experience to insist that one gender or one race are enough to categorise human beings with. If we, however, care for 'monsters' or 'monstrosity' as fright projected on to another, then 'otherness' comes to include all those traits (of the states as individuals or a society), which we know exist only refuse (consciously or subconsciously) to acknowledge (Kearney, 2013). Halberstam, as well, pays tribute to the psychoanalytic dimension of monsters every bit a category for conceptualisation, when summarising the trends in scholarship on Horror, and in particular in relation to Freud'south Studies on Hysteria (1995, pp. 18–20). Barbara Creed, in turn, investigated the connection between the female and the monstrous (1995). Mitman, by comparison, asks a simple but stiff question which entirely discards the Gothic and ignores whatever literary conventions to do with the supernatural. To paraphrase Mittman: does the fact that people believe in monsters make them 'real' (p. 4)? Mittman then traces this phenomenon (the apparent reality of monsters) back to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's Monster Theory: Reading Civilization (1996), i of the founding texts of Monster Studies (Cohen argued that monsters were a product of culture, functioned as signs and symbols for societal problems and demanded to be acknowledged on account of their mere presence). Mittman essentially suggests that when we experience monsters through the emotional effect ('affect') they have on the states, they become a physical reality for the states (p. 4). This is, we think, why monsters are both a metaphor and a tool to tackle the moral and ethical consequences of science's potential to raise life and human bureau (Ryder, 1990).

One reason for the standing fascination with Frankenstein is its othering of creator and creation and the dubiety this act of separation brings almost. It links to the fright of losing status, which, equally stated above, is caused past shifting boundaries between self ('the human') and other ('the monstrous'). With regard to enhancement, which is of grade Frankenstein's starting point, improvement can also be perceived as other. Fear, it seems, is acquired by technological determinism, which is only hinted at in the novel of 1818 but developed through the reception procedure. So, where exercise we draw the line? Georges Canguilhelm (1962), for whom monstrosity was primarily a biological concept, argues that to exist a monster, the thing has to be alive: 'the qualification of monster must be reserved for organic beings. There is no such matter as a mineral monster. There is no such affair as a mechanical monster' (p. 28). The monstrous quality of life comes to the fore in Frankenstein's laboratory and at the very moment the new species opens its eyes. Frankenstein overreacts but he does come to his senses; he recognises that he has created a monster and that he is unable to handle information technology. A monster is always live and, therefore, a negation of man values and, therefore, 'valuable only as a foil'. Canguilhelm writes further: 'past demonstrating how precarious is the stability to which life has accustomed us—yes, only accepted, but we fabricated a constabulary out of its custom—the monster gives an all the more eminent value to specific repetition, to morphological regularity, to successful structure; information technology makes us realise that these are not necessary' (p. 29). Nosotros have come a long manner (see McNally, 2011). The imaginings of what can count as 'normal' and by default 'human' have since incorporated enhancement of potential through the discourses of robotics and bogus intelligence and in Scientific discipline Fiction. Medical science can now filibuster death and digital technologies appear to enable us to plan our afterlives. The moral and ethical implications of this paradigmatic shift in man existence are obvious. We may make up one's mind to think of the expressionless version of ourselves every bit monstrous.

Frankenstein is office of discussions of the post-human condition. In this context, the question of what it means to be human contests with the transformative powers of applied science, which are either welcomed equally an extension or dreaded as an invasion (Zylinska, 2002; Szollosy, 2017). Analysis and critical framing of the technological evolution and consequences for human relations is in Donna Haraway (1991), Bruno Latour (1993), Chris Hables Grey (1995) and Elaine Graham (2002). Reviewing the existing literature, Graham (2004) notes 'contemporary technology […] will shape our understandings of what it means to be human into the next century. For embedded in the various technologies are crucial issues of identity, customs and spirituality' (p. 12).

The flourishing interpretations of the relationship between Frankenstein and the Monster speak of of changes in civilisation. What qualifies as a monster has been thrown into relief through the shift in appreciation of the problems the monster embodies (McNally, 2011). Frankenstein's Monster is a hybrid because it is not born but fabricated with 'instruments of life'. Technology is transformative, non neutral, but yet the always so important story of origin remains vague considering Frankenstein never specifies what these 'instruments' are. Shelley may have given an explanation in the introduction to the 1831 edition (Hitchcock, 2007), simply 'instruments of life' and 'spark of life', which tin be read as either electrical spark or indeed soul, is all the novel gives; to offset with, body and soul were not separated, at least in the Greek tradition. Today it is the priest who deals with the soul and the undertaker who deals with the body. It is perchance through the movies and Hollywood adaptations that the laboratory scene, that ur-story told on Lake Geneva in 1816, has been fleshed out, as well equally repositioned within different critical frames. In the novel, it is when the Monster starts to move, co-ordinate to Frankenstein, that everything changes (Erle, 2018a). The so-called creation scene appears to equip the Monster with a body too as feelings. Frankenstein'due south creature resembles no one only it tries to bail. Frankenstein, withal, cannot bear the sight of it; he rejects and abandons it. The Monster later articulates its demand for amore and attempts to come up to an agreement with his maker; its asking for a partner is somewhen denied on account of the potential monstrousness of that future partner and yet, it is most likely that it is the pleading with its principal and subsequent thwarting that transforms this monster from an 'it' into a 'he'. Frankenstein has referred to his creation as both 'he' and 'it', designations, which reflect his ambiguity, and with the narrative unfolding and points of view complementing each other, Frankenstein'south creation becomes more and more familiar. He has real, recognisable needs and desires. Frankenstein's decision, his sudden moral qualms or realisation that he ought not to go alee however, condemns his animate being to utter loneliness. Frankenstein's Monster is on his own forever. Pop civilization, on the other manus, teems with monsters and many of them can keep each other company.

Monsters in teaching contexts

Popular cultural representations of monsters include their ubiquitous presence in children's literature. Monsters are therefore an important part of children's lives through reading and storytelling both within the classroom and at dwelling. Like Frankenstein, the monsters of children's literature are often multi-faceted, with their motives and imagery open to interpretation. They can represent fears of children and adults, the kid protagonist's alter ego, or inner-self, or even be an interesting bailiwick of analysis as a character with their own needs and challenges (Papazian, 2014). For these reasons, discussion of monsters and the monstrous in children's literature provides an obvious vehicle for teachers to connect to curriculum and teaching about personal, social and emotional issues, character and motivation. For example, monsters can be a focus for considering relationships, differences, bullying and overcoming fears. Rather than using texts every bit a style of teaching a directive moral lesson, a socio-cultural approach to teaching emphasises that children and young people larn through participation or 'dialogically' constructing their own meanings and agreement through discussion with others (Alexander, 2008; Cox, 2017). Children'due south literature offers a unique and flexible identify for such construction. Furthermore, 'monstrous' visions of the future and societal change presented through dystopian young adult fiction such as The Hunger Games (Collins, 2009) and picture show books or blithe shorts such as 'Varmints' (Craste and Ward, 2013) let teachers to open up sensitive give-and-take near challenging concepts and issues, including human rights, democracy and conflict:

Such narratives play upon deep, unresolvable fears from 'reality,' exaggerating (and sometimes solving) them in fictional scenarios. In the example of young adult dystopia, it is the young people—willing or not—who must confront these fears and ultimately solve the problems that spawn them (Ames, 2013, p. 6).

Ames argues that these texts offer a way of connecting pupils with political and social challenges in an environment that is safely removed from their real lives. These teaching possibilities are particularly of import when pupils witness conflict and sectionalisation in the media and mean solar day to day lives or are coping with making sense of conflicting perspectives on challenging problems such as gender identity and the treatment of refugees (Woolley, 2010; Hope, 2018).

Children and young people'south mental and emotional health and well-being are a significant area of business organisation for health services, families, educators and policy makers (NHS Digital, 2017; Patel et al., 2007; PHE, 2016; PSHE Association, 2019). This topical concern links to the use of monster characters in fiction as a possible teaching tool, as PSHE guidance emphasises that 'distancing' learning about sensitive bug by using fictional characters could assist pupils to engage with the topic rather than becoming overwhelmed by their ain emotional responses. Similarly, the threat and opportunity of technological change looms big in teaching contexts where teachers and pupils must navigate the creative potential of cyber-infinite with circumspection (DfE, 2019; UKCIS, 2018). Schools must equip pupils to avoid 'monstrous', transgressive uses of technology equally either recipients or participants and this besides tin be raised through literature, for instance in Penguinpig (Spendlow, 2014), the tale of a little girl misled by the internet to search for an unobtainable animal.

Themes emerging from connections with Frankenstein in teaching contexts move beyond using monstrous imagery and characters in children's literature to spark give-and-take. There are many more monstrous bug that influence research and debate well-nigh education itself. In England, the terminology of 'British Values' and the expectation to uphold these every bit part of the standards for qualified teachers (DfE, 2011) is felt by some to connect 'British Values' with whiteness and demonise people of 'non-British' origin, setting upwards a false division and potentially encouraging a backfire against indigenous minority cultures (Maylor, 2016; Phillips, 2010). Furthermore, the 'Prevent' duty placed on schools to monitor and written report concerns about pupils at chance of radicalisation has been noted to be socially divisive and create a particularly negative focus on Muslim pupils, potentially 'othering' them within school communities (Kenny and Ghale, 2015; Lumb, 2018). Similarly, only affecting both the Britain and beyond, interest in the ability of education to address social disadvantage and disparity in pupil outcomes has led to the development of character and resilience education (Paterson et al., 2014). In some cases, this has focused on what McDermott and Nygreen (2013, p. 93) call 'new paternalism':

New-paternalist schools promise to reduce social inequality by teaching depression-income students a set of character traits and rewarding good behaviour

Originating in the Us every bit KIPP schools, this approach has transferred to some academies in England and emphasises field of study and a strict adherence to set behaviours, which has been described as militaristic (Lack, 2009). While in that location is a positive intention underlying this approach equally a style of 'levelling the playing field' for students from less advantaged social and cultural groups, this view of character instruction has been criticised for unchallenged underpinning deficit assumptions about low socio-economic status students (McDermott and Nygreen, 2013). In that location are also concerns nearly the mode that graphic symbol and resilience education is applied, either by ignoring pupils' fund of noesis and attempting to eradicate cultural differences in communication in the name of 'character' (McDermott and Nygreen, 2013) or by pursuing the cess of resilience as a measure of both pupil and schoolhouse success (Duckworth, 2016). In this climate, monsters and the monstrous may not simply be something that teachers teach about simply they may, inadvertently, exist created by the educational system in which teachers function.

Conclusion

Monsters and monstrosity in literary texts and social contexts often work as a metaphor or a tool to tackle individual or social bug with. Gothic characters and themes are pop with students but have as well invigorated electric current academic debates. They help to highlight, accost also every bit work through societal challenges as the range of contributions to this collection has shown. Monstrosity continues to be closely linked to the visual, which invites the question if Frankenstein's Monster would have integrated, had information technology lived today. When it meets and talks to the blind old man DeLacey, the Monster appears to exist at ease. For once it is able to reach out and connect to another (homo) being. The scene of social bonding, unfortunately, is cut short by the return of the rest of the family. There is no time to consider, recall or acknowledge the Monster's kindness towards the De Laceys. They may not have survived, if it had not been for the Monster. This leaves us with their ungrateful and monstrous behaviour. Monsters, in other words, force us to take a expect at ourselves. Ideas of progress have ever been twined with fearfulness of progress, science and technology and in an age, on the brink of postal service-modernity, the all-enveloping claim on the and then-chosen man essence of our identity appears to be nether threat. Should we embrace or refuse the changes? Time has shown that monstrous advent and behaviour tin can be healed, remedied or corrected to suit cultural norms. Bodies tin can exist operated on and personality disorders can be treated by therapists or medicated by psychiatrists. There are many options with which to enhance the bodies we accept been given, likewise as the connections nosotros tin forge in and beyond the communities we live in. Contemporary technology, in add-on, improves human relations in that it gives better access to individual lives. These lives, on the other hand, are prone to manipulation. Photos and images can be edited and fears of losing face or a damaged reputation prevail and dominate social interaction, be it concrete or real or digital or virtual. This takes us right back to Frankenstein because Frankenstein's biggest failure was to requite his creation life but not a skillful confront. By paying attending to processes and acts of monstering in teaching contexts and wider society nosotros can larn to straight our attention towards ourselves to then understand and re-connect with all those 'others' (Wright, 2013).

Notes

1. We are grateful to our assistant Michael Hendry who contributed to this section past researching the contemporary, pop reception of Mary Shelley's novel. Michael's inquiry highlights Frankenstein's pervading cultural presence.

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   Sibylle Erle & Helen Hendry

2. The Open University, Milton Keynes, U.k.

   Sibylle Erle & Helen Hendry

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Erle, S., Hendry, H. Monsters: interdisciplinary explorations in monstrosity. Palgrave Commun half dozen, 53 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0428-1

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• Received: 03 March 2020

• Accepted: 04 March 2020

• Published: 25 March 2020

• DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0428-1

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