Throughout time people have used writing as a form of communications in an attempt to talk about or shed light on serious issues. These issues range from the proper way to raise a child to how science can go horribly wrong, but one topic that I think most writers try to talk about the most frequent, because no one wants to talk about them outright, is the oppression of different people and cultures throughout time. This issue spans time and even in modern society no one wants to willingly talk about these different groups of people or cultures that are being held down or left behind. If you look at older stories such as Prometheus, Frankenstein, and even The Tempest, you can find a common ground of an oppressed people (or person) that can be
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In an essay by Allen Lloyd Smith titled “This Thing of Darkness”: Racial Discourse in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein he says “But the hyper-masculinity of the monster suggests a different original figure, Caliban, the enslaved native of the island in The Tempest, a vengeful ‘thing of darkness’ having ‘a certain crude tenderness and heavy grace of expression’” (550). What the author is trying to say is that Frankenstein’s monster is a representation of what is wrong with colonialism. I don’t think that is the case. I think that every fiction out there boils down to morality, with small minor themes. If someone was not educated in what to look for when it comes to reading they would default in some way to the moral of a story and how it affects them or others. So I don’t think that any other way of looking at these stories is prevalent, they may teach us something, or show us something new but collectively they don’t add much in the way of thought creation. It only disables our ability to take these stories and live them out to bring our own thoughts on the given situations to bear. This isn’t to say that the other ways of looking at these stories is not needed, it’s simply saying that someone should fist experience these stories without a filter that removes their need to feel a connection to the given world. When it comes to oppressed groups it’s important that we read these stories without a filter so that can feel the raw emotion behind the characters to better understand their struggles so that we as a society can lend a helping
In an essay by Allen Lloyd Smith titled “This Thing of Darkness”: Racial Discourse in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein he says “But the hyper-masculinity of the monster suggests a different original figure, Caliban, the enslaved native of the island in The Tempest, a vengeful ‘thing of darkness’ having ‘a certain crude tenderness and heavy grace of expression’” (550). What the author is trying to say is that Frankenstein’s monster is a representation of what is wrong with colonialism. I don’t think that is the case. I think that every fiction out there boils down to morality, with small minor themes. If someone was not educated in what to look for when it comes to reading they would default in some way to the moral of a story and how it affects them or others. So I don’t think that any other way of looking at these stories is prevalent, they may teach us something, or show us something new but collectively they don’t add much in the way of thought creation. It only disables our ability to take these stories and live them out to bring our own thoughts on the given situations to bear. This isn’t to say that the other ways of looking at these stories is not needed, it’s simply saying that someone should fist experience these stories without a filter that removes their need to feel a connection to the given world. When it comes to oppressed groups it’s important that we read these stories without a filter so that can feel the raw emotion behind the characters to better understand their struggles so that we as a society can lend a helping