Rationality behind Benjamin Button and Frankenstein’s Monster: Assessing the Interplay of “Madness” and “Civilization”

Abstract

The year 1922 ushered with it a plethora of literary masterpieces from all over the world. Not only was the year fertile with the publication of an immense number of books but also the year was fruitful for the variety of subjects that the books dealt with. Amidst such a literary and cultural climate, F. Scott Fitzgerald popularized the term Jazz age using it for the first time to title his collection of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age. The 1920s rose to uphold a cultural shift and breakaway from the regressive traditions of the past. Fitzgerald’s stories and novels best depict the flamboyance of the age. Such a story is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, written in the year 1922, introducing to us the reversed biography of Benjamin Button who is born as an old man and ages backwards only to end his life as a baby. The fact that his life goes against the natural chronology from “cradle to grave” and that he is capable of disrupting the set order of a normative biological course makes him a recalcitrant figure and social misfit. His disruptive existence reminds us of the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein whom Shelley describes as “a creature of hideous contrasts.” The monster makes several attempts to fit into society but is shunned repeatedly, making him an outsider. This paper attempts to trace how Benjamin Button and the monster in Frankenstein are posited by society as chaos because they do not fall into their imagined territory of “us.” Being victims of the Foucauldian concept of constructed madness, both of them channelize their anger through repression and resistance respectively. More so, the paper would incorporate how both their journeys are inherent with inverted notions of innocence and experience.