Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Group

Topic: Evil Characters

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1

dmanto02

Do you agree that when authors create evil characters in their books, they project fears of the opposite sex into their characters?Monsters with male attributes are created by female authors and monsters with female attributes are created by male authors.

2

This is a good question for the discussion board.

If the premise is true that female writers create male monsters and male writers create female monsters, then the writer of Beowulf must have been a hermaphrodite, because that story has monsters of both sexes. And poor old Homer must have been more than just blind because he had the female Medusa and the male Polyphemus; and wasn't Cerberus male?

You might use more modern writers as examples of that pattern. Mary Shelley's monster is male, and Lewis Carroll's monster of a Red Queen is female. But then, again, you have Bram Stoker's male Dracula and Robert L. Stevenson's Mr. Hyde.

I think each writer depicts evil as he or she sees it.

3

In reply to #1: Although there are certainly instances of this, I believe that authors truly go with what their instincts reveal or what they've imagined.  Poe is a prime example here.  Poe had many horrible characters in his fiction and they were all male (I can't think of one female actually). 

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