Untitled - California State University, Long Beach

ut must continually hide them behind representations. Finally, the
creature becomes the quintessential scapegoat for whatever fears we wish
to heap upon him. At the end of each Frankenstein movie, one thing is
certain: the monster must be destroyed. We must send the creature back
to the void from whence he crawled (or out of which we dragged him),
but the body is continually resurrected as we find new uses for him, new
fears to cast upon him, and new ways of explaining his monstrosity.
_________________________
Notes
1
From here on, I will continue to refer to ratios which compare usage of collocates in the
1810/1840 decades to those of 1940/1990 without explicitly mentioning these dates.
The numbers have also been rounded to the nearest whole.
2
I disagree slightly with Clayton’s overall argument here: that the post-modern study
of the past necessarily produces incongruities of visions (i.e., the lenses of theoretics)
that appear to us as monstrous. I think we recoil in horror more over our contemporary
misunderstandings—the actual build-up of narrative that the sediment of history
has deposited on today’s culture—then on academic perspective (which tries to cut
through the former), which, at least to me personally, is often refreshing.
112 | Allen
Allen | 113