The Monster In Margaret Atwood's 'Lusus Naturae'

In Margret Atwood’s “Lusus Naturae,” set in the 1800’s, a period where a multitude of people remained annexed by those they loved due to ailments that were deemed uncommon; to illustrate this phenomenon Atwood engages us through the intertwining story, told by the protagonist, who is kept unnamed. The protagonist is not only affected by her physical disease, but also the psychological affects from remaining isolated from her community. The tale is crafted to criticize how severely society treats others in the face of diversity and disability. The protagonist not only accepts the abuse, but she also agrees with it because instead of viewing herself as someone who has worth, she only sees herself as an inhuman burden. Through obstacles our narrator faces, because of her disease, we can see how truly cruel society can be. Atwood calls the audience’s attention toward the damaging behavior demonstrated by the community of the healthy population when faced with someone with disability due to no fault of their own.

Frankenstein just like many falls under the archetypal horror character. One might compare Frankenstein to other characters like Shere Khan from the Jungle Book and Long John Silver from the movie Treasure Island. So the question stands, how does the creature Frankenstein fit into the archetypal horror character? Mary Shelley more than likely created the creature to fit the archetypal character to separate him from the other characters. Frankenstein is separated from the other characters by his physical features, his isolated lifestyle, as well as his antagonistic behavior.

By all appearances, Miss Strangeworth is a sweet, old lady, living in a perfect, shiny, happy town. But appearances are not everything, especially in the case of Miss Adela Strangeworth of Pleasant Street. Miss Adela Strangeworth, a character in the short story “The Possibility of Evil” by Shirley Jackson, is a 71-year-old spinster living in a small town in the 1940’s. At the beginning, she seems like any normal old lady, but it is quickly realized that this is not the case and that she has a dark side. Of the many traits that Miss Strangeworth possesses, the most prominent are her deceptiveness, perfectionism, and the god complex that has developed.

The narrator depicts her memories of her fifth-grade summer in Maxine Clair’s Cherry Bomb. Through the narrator's story of her private box and cherry bomb, Clair captures the innocence and youthfulness of her childhood summers.

What would one expect from a father who kept his daughter locked in a cell for decades to Abu Ghraib? Tracy K Smith, in Life on Mars, shows herself as the poet of extraordinary ambition and rage. In No-Fly Zone, Smith has ambiguously talked about a girl (can be the poet herself) tracing a growth of African-American girl who must learn hard lessons of puberty and early adulthood and linking it to the history of America by depicting what it meant to be a black woman. With the use of elegy, figurative language, socio-political commentary, and metaphors in the third section of her collection, mainly in No-Fly Zone of Life on Mars, she talks about the ambiguity of what a girl has to fear in the society, her loneliness without parents, and why a girl has to save herself for her husband.

Margaret Atwood’s short story, “Lusus Naturae” portrays the story of a woman who has to face the problem of isolationism and discrimination throughout her whole life. In this short story, the protagonist very early in her life has been diagnosed with a decease known as porphyria. Due to the lack of knowledge at the time, she did not receive the help required to help her situation. Thus she was kept in the dark, her appearance frightens the outsiders who could not accept the way she looks, slowly resulting in her isolationism physically and mentally from the outside world. This even caused her to separate herself from the only world she knew her family. Ultimately resulting in her death. In Margaret Atwood’s short story, she asserts that being discriminated and isolated causes the narrator to have deep mental issues that lead to signs of depression through the protagonist’s unorthodox way of accepting her fate without any hesitation to prevent her life being taken away.

A good monster is never human or inhuman. Monsters serve as cautionary tales about the consequences of reckless abandon, and far more often than appearing as metaphysical beings, their true form is an idea. When children check under their beds and inside of their closets for a pair of yellow eyes and a toothy grin, they do not dispel any physical entity. Instead, they dispel the unknown. Similarly, in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein grapples not with a physical entity, but his own personality flaws. His weakness and self-absorbance spur him to create The Creature, intended to cement his fate as a renowned scientist in the world’s history books, and this blind ambition makes him unable to acknowledge the implications of

Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe were Gothic novelists who lived and wrote in the 19th century. They both led unconventional and even controversial lives and their behavior could be described as unethical and scandalous. They both created characters who were inhuman and monstrous. The plots of their stories were frightening, included themes which were unethical, immoral and even anti-religious.

In the short poem “Marks” my Linda Pastan, you are given an insight on the life of a wife who is also a mother of two. The setting of the story takes place in a standard family home, but instead of feeling like you were home it felt more like school. This poem is an extended metaphor; the author uses grades a student would normally get in school to compare to how her family measures to being a mother as well as a wife. Now through dialogue you can tell that she is not actually receiving grades for the required chores she has to do but it helps communicate the message to the audience. Due to the fact that it’s easy for just about any one reading this to relate to a grading system cause we all have received an amount of schooling before. The

Everyone at one point in their life has felt isolated in more ways than one. None so ever as Ethan from the book “Ethan Frome”. In this book from humble beginnings Ethan’s parents became very queered his father became ill and his mother queer minded, every-time he tried to talk to her she was say shhhhh I'm listing or someone is talking so he would just leave.

Many believe that the parents of the Sandy Hook victims conspired to murder their children, but what they fail to realize is that all their “ evidence” is just circumstantial. In court all types of various evidence is presented to the jury. According to Citizens Information “ The general rule is that circumstantial evidence is admissible. However, the courts are careful when the only evidence in a case is circumstantial evidence. Circumstantial evidence must be closely examined and it must be looked at cumulatively. In other words, a court would be very slow and unsettled to convict a defendant on the basis of a few pieces of circumstantial evidence” ( 4). In court the Sandy Hook Conspiracy would have trouble being found true due to the giant amount of

Never having a boyfriend, she wants to be desired by men and worries that she is a lesbian since she does not look like a typical female. She tries to find a boyfriend since “[his] acceptance of [her] would guide [her] into...femininity,” but her plan to be accepted seems to backfire when she becomes pregnant by a guy she does not love (280). Marguerite hides her pregnancy until the baby is born because she is scared that others will not accept her since she is becoming a mother, something different that she has never been. Marguerite goes through her pregnancy alone, just like she feels like she has gone through most of her life (McPherson, 33). Once the baby is born, she is scared of hurting him but soon realizes that her motherly instincts will guide her. She accepts her new role as a mother because she knows that in the eyes of her baby, she has been

In Margaret Atwood’s story “Lusus Naturae”, she talks about a young girl who was born with an incurable genetic disorder which made her seem like a freak to everyone else. “In the daytime I stayed shut up in my darkened room: I was getting beyond a joke.” (Norton 226). She could not be in the sunlight because of the disorder, so she stayed inside her family’s house during the daytime. The house is the main setting of the story, although there are a couple other places mentioned. The girl felt her best at night since the sun was down, she explored the house, and even wandered outside.

Every child loves the story of Little Red Riding Hood not only due to her innocence and purity driving her in a great danger, but her fatal destiny also slightly implies the truth that the sweeter the strangers’ mouths speak, the sharper their teeth could be. The tales of Little Red Riding Hood describes a young girl’s journey to her grandmother along the path in the forest, breathtakingly discover that a wolf has eaten her ill grandmother, dressed in her clothes, and yet plans to devour the little girl. Upon reading the stories, many of the readers, even a four-year-old child, suspect the intention of this young girl of exposing the exact location her grandmother when a random wolf in a middle of the forest inquiries about her destination. In the various tales, Little Red Riding Hood seeks out a father figure in predatory negative male figures, therefore she suffers from oppositional defiant disorder afterward explicitly realizes the mortal consequences of indulging.

Monstrosity is a deceiving word that can cause society to act in a particular way blinding them from looking at the inner traits and rather focus on the physical traits. A person 's personality has now no longer defined whom they are but instead, their physical appearance has. For quite some time society have judged those who are any different and don’t meet the standard of normality and as a result, people tend to lash out of anger, leading many people to accept the fact that mankind is nothing but corrupted and evil. One of these people being Mary Shelley 's who shared her views on mankind in her novel Frankenstein, as she presents a creature that had been viewed as an abomination to society for its appearance and wrongdoings. However, these