Despite the opinion of James Howe ( " Aronson is dangerous ")
I doubt if Dr. Stanley Aronson's erudite columns will bore
most of your readers to death. The intellectually comatose
will not even attempt to read him. To be sure his style and
pedantic tone seem odd in the daily newspaper. Those
gargantuan paragraphs really belong in a 19th century
Encyclopedia Britanica.
Today's column " What hath science wrought "(June 21)
focuses on Mary Shelly and her gothic classic " Frankenstein ".
Aronson refers to the monster as "lacking a soul " and
thinks him fated to do nothing but EVIL, having been brought
to life " not by love but by electricity ".
As a matter of fact most human beings are brought into
being not by love but by lust -frequently drunken lust.
If you READ the horror classic, you will see Shelly's
monster has an exquisite soul, sensitive to the beauty of
nature and to the simple goodness of his first human mentors
in the cabin in the woods.
The monster bares his soul in language worthy of Milton.
He becomes a fiend when he perceives that unlike humans, he
has been abandoned by his Creator, Viktor Frankenstein.
The monster -you might say - was an abused and abandoned
child !
He haunts his creator : " I will be with you on your
wedding night " - one of the most frightening utterences
in all Gothic fiction.
If the monster did not have a soul then neither did
his creator.
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