From the Revised Joy of Cooking

Today I talked with my students at the University of Iowa about Mary Shelley’s novel "Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus". The course is called: "Disability in Contemporary Literature and Theory".

Some days when I walk into a classroom I decide to throw away my lesson plan and try something different. I asked the class to think of Mary Shelley’s novel as being a kind of cookbook. (We all know it’s a "Gothic" novel. (In a prior class we talked about the early "Romantics" and their place in British social and intellectual history.)

I wondered aloud if today’s students even read cookbooks. "I mean," I said, "I mean you are all from the microwaveable food generation."

But my students are from Iowa and God Bless Them; they have all read at least one cookbook.

"What if," I asked them, "Mary Shelley’s novel can be read as a recipe for how to make a disabled person?"

Here is what the class came up with:

Recipe: "How to Create a Disabled Person"

Ingredients:

A hundred human parts

Equal portions dread and hubris

At least 1 "mad scientist"

Needle and thread

Science without ethics

Next:

Throw big switch (otherwise known as vast, industrial gizmo)

Once disabled person "comes to life" do the following:

Make certain the "DP" can’t have access to language

Deny that the "DP" exists

Refuse to let the "DP" have a husband or wife.

Stigmatize the "DP" because he or she looks very different from the rest of the children.

And while you’re doing all of this, tell everyone you meet that you’re a very advanced thinker…

S.K.

Of course, to put this "creature" together, we’ll need BOLTS