The Failure of Maternal Domesticity: An Evaluation of Frankenstein as a Didactic Source

Is man inherently good or evil? Nineteenth century Romantics, inspired by the doctrine of Jean Jacques Rousseau, hypothesized that man is a product of his or her environment. Middle class society imputed the mother as the gateway by which a child learns to become a model human being. This theory held that mothers nurture their offspring naturally. Children learn proper morals and social conduct based upon a female-inspired education. Without this domestic influence on their lives, children fall into the trap of an “eye for an eye” ideology. The monster that Mary Shelley conceives in Frankenstein defies the domestic conception of a maternally guided household. The piece serves as a didactic tool; Shelley, in representing the Romantic Movement, warns nineteenth century society about the dangers of a maternally void world, a world that contradicted the Romantic conception of proper maternal guidance in both the home and in society

An Ideological War of \u27Blood and Soil\u27 and Its Effect on the Agricultural Propaganda and Policy of the Nazi Party, 1929-1939

“One then builds a whole system of thought on such a brief, crisply formulated idea. The idea does not remain limited to this single statement; rather it is applied to every aspect of daily life and becomes the guide for all human activity. It becomes a worldview.” Dr. Joseph Goebbels spoke those words on January 9, 1928 to an audience of party members at the “Hochschule fuer Politik,” a series of talks that investigated the role of propaganda in the National Socialist movement. A few months prior to this event, voters had elected a farmer, Werner Willikens, in the South Hanover-Brunswick district of the Reichstag over a railroad worker. Seemingly, this election was unrelated to Goebbels’s speech on the purpose of propaganda; however, Willikens’s election to the Reichstag reflected Goebbels’s call for diversified propaganda that would highlight “every aspect of daily life.