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Who the heck are you?" Victor Frankenstein cried. "What the heck are you?"I am the wretch created by your beloved Elizabeth, " cried the vaguely female wretch. "Elizabeth has passed the limits of the human realm and in her feverish pursuit of the essential knowledge of the world she has spawned the being that you now see before you!"And what do you want from me, you frightening monstrosity whom my innocent and sheltered eyes should never have been made to look upon?" The wretch snickered. "I am a monstrous version of Elizabeth, her child, brought forth by her own hand. She has forsaken me, cast me aside and thus made me miserable! Therefore I have vowed to destroy everything she loves, even sweet and mild Victor, just as she destroyed all happiness for me. Rrrrr!"Oh, help me! Help me!" Victor Frankenstein cried. "Oh! Oh!" Now wait just one second.
Very funny, but that's not how the story goes. For one thing, Victor Frankenstein does not squeal like a-girl? Victor Frankenstein created the monster. Victor Frankenstein was the ambitious one who took his experiments too far. A monstrous version of Victor destroyed everything he loved. Elizabeth was sweet and mild.
Elizabeth was the innocent who died because of Victor's work gone wrong. Frankenstein would have been a remarkable book if Elizabeth had taken on Victor's part, if Victor had taken on Elizabeth's part, and if the wretch had been female. Imagine Victor staying at home and being the best example of the sweetest nature anyone ever did see. Imagine Elizabeth storming acro's the icy mountains after the wretch, and imagine the wretch demanding a husband to be a boon to her, sweet and supportive company when she became tired of the world. Switching the gender roles in such a way would be comical because that's not the way it's done. When we read about, watch, or listen to our fictional heroes and heroines, we expect certain behaviors from them.
We have a set of rules by which we define male and female characters, and characters that don't adhere to the general rules are anomalies and misfits. Sometimes we may want a character to be a misfit. Most heroes, for example, are misfits in some way. Look at Batman. He might have some issues, but by golly, he really did something about them. A man or woman must deviate from some set of dictates in order to be remarkable.
And yet, even people as unrealistic as superheroes don't break from one particular set of rules-the delineation between male roles and female roles. Why not? They fly, don't they? The people who exhibit the qualities that we want to hear about or who experience the troubles that we wonder about seem to be men. Who wants to read all about Daisy in The Great Gatsby? Who wants to read all about Sonia in Crime and Punishment?
Who thinks Cordelia in "King Lear" is really exciting? On the other hand, who thinks Gatsby deserves some attention? Raskolnikov? D'Artagnan? Oedipus? There are certainly exceptions, such as the gender defier's Mulan and Teiresias, but we generally want to hear about a hero, like Peter Pan, not a heroine, like Peter's counterpart, Wendy.
A heroine gets caught up in womanish fancy (any girl in a fairy-tale), or she gets struck down by womanish weakness (any man's wife in a fairy-tale). A hero equals action-except for Hamlet. A hero is irrepressible, someone who has his share of faults but who struggles for something. Hero, heroine, whatever-we read about them because we want to see somebody take hold of or question his or her life, whether it's his life or her life. In most cases, being a man or woman doesn't make that much of a difference. Or does it?
Admittedly, switching around the genders of some characters wouldn't make much of a difference to their identities. Deals, the goat in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, would have done just as well as a boy goat. In Pride and Prejudice, Bingley could have been Jane, and Jane could have been Bingley. Certainly, for many characters, gender isn't a big issue-it's not as if we tailor heroes to boys and heroines to girls. But if Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye were a girl, he wouldn't be quite the same, would he? And if D'Artagnan were a woman-well, sure, but he just wouldn't have the same dash.
Elizabeth, for one, would have to remain a woman. If she were a man, the boldness of her personality would probably lose much of its charm. Apparently, the characters who are developed enough to be real people have some of their identity rooted in their gender. We don't rise up in arms about this because many of us feel that there are inherent differences between men and women in real life, too, and we are willing to see this difference reflected in our fiction. But the difference between heroes and heroines is a little more subtle than the difference between ordinary men and women. My theory is that a hero is a man unless there's a reason for him to be a woman.
Men in fiction tend to embody qualities that we like to see in a Person. This Person is courageous, intelligent, and either all-around likable or cool. These are people like Wolverine from the X-Men, Robin Hood, James Bond, and Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness. Heroes have some kind of male coolness that sets them apart from other characters, and this is why we like or admire them. Take Professor X for example, the founder and mentor of the X-Men group in the X-Men comics.
Professor X is a male character whom all the X-Men rely on, and he is crucial to the success of the group, but really-he's kind of wishy washy, and he's so safe. Optimus Prime, the leader of the good guys in the cartoon series "Transformers, " on the other hand, can become formidably angry. Team members who betray him have reason to fear destruction. Wolverine, even more on the other hand, ditch...
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Research essay sample on Man Or Woman Men And Women
