The Science of Destruction

The book Frankenstein so far has been focused on science. We can see Victor's obsession with understanding and learning everything he can about life and death. After he is creation of the monster we are forced to ask ourselves if we have gone too far. By creating this monster has he done something that cannot be retracted and will lead to unimaginable horrors.

We have made this mistake before in the exploration of science and the creation of explosives. During World War 2 we created and dropped the first dirty bomb. The Japanese Minister of War pushed for the soldiers to continue fighting, but the Emperor of Japan overruled him saying that Americans have used the first "Cruel Bomb." In a video on youtube by Vsauce he describes how horrible atomic weapons are.

According to the pop culture idea of Frankenstein the monster, Adam, is considered a thoughtless killing machine that just terrorizes villages and attacks everyone it meets. This story was written long before the first "cruel bomb" and obviously before WWII, but Frankenstein seems to be their version of the ultimate weapon. Both of these abominations were created in pursuit of pure science, but they ended up causing massive damage. From what we've read so far we can see that the monster is nothing like what we have all seen from the movies, but it may have been adapted to be like that as a commentary on how science can not be separated from what it creates. It can be seen that Dr. Frankenstein is just trying to pursue the creation of life, and not making a monster, but that is what results. The scientists leading the project on the Atomic Bomb were just creating a way to produce large quantities of energy, but it ended up being turned into a weapon. Just because the scientific work was done for the sole purpose of scientific exploration it's consequences cannot be excused.

Psychopaths on the Moors

   Psychopathy is a mental illness that has been most recently characterized by a general lack on empathy for other humans. This may be counter-intuitive to the view that many people have of psychopaths, which is generally that they are those people that intentionally harm others for the pleasure of it. But this is not the case. One percent of our current population is most probably psychopathic, and while this concentration jumps to 33 percent in our prison population, it does not account for the entirety of the psychopathic population. The rest of this subset concentrates in areas of business and media that require the ability to make decisions that could destroy the lives of other people, a spot light or that involve control over a large group of people, such as cooperate executives, media, the political arena, and even clergy, which spike at ranges of four percent to 15 percent.

Top 10 professions that attract psychopaths

   This is because psychopathy is a illness that is related with either the inability to empathize with other human beings, thus making it easier to manipulate or harm others that are simply seen as obstacles, which is where we see many of the violent psychopaths. Or to control and compensate for their lack of empathy so that they may put on a front for the whole of society, which is many “victim” psychopaths and manipulators come from.

   Now, what does this have to do with Wuthering heights? Well, many of the characters in the novel displayed psychopathic tendencies, and together they covered a wide spectrum of psychopathy. Heathcliff took the role of what we think of as the traditional psychopath, violent, manipulative, and generally apathetic to the feelings of others. Catherine Earnshaw and Linton took on the more manipulative mentality that fed off of the kindness of others to get what they wanted and then discarded them. But my fascination in this book is not with the characters, it is with the author that imagined these characters without meeting more than a few dozen people in her entire life. The fact that Emily Bronte was able to recreate the spectrum of psychopathy with her characters suggests that many people around her displayed similar tendencies, or that even she herself was a psychopath. This would mean that the area that Emily lived in would have had a psychopathy rate somewhere between law school and prison, which is an interesting scale in its own right. It is not hard to imagine that a person capable of creating such characters must project themselves onto the page as well, but it is an interesting prospect none the less.