On Tuesday morning I skipped working out chords for songs and also did a shortened song practice so I could get to work sooner on finishing the essay that was due at midnight.
I weighed 84.7 kilos before breakfast.
I piddled with the essay but at 9:30 I felt sleepy and so I took a siesta for ninety minutes. When I got up I immediately had to spend twenty minutes on the toilet and right after that I had go again for ten more minutes.
I got started on finishing my essay at 11:30. I wrote my conclusion at about 13:15 and then stopped for lunch. From 14:00 to 15:30 I worked on citations. I felt confident that I could afford to take a bike ride so I rode to Bloor and Bathurst.
I weighed 84.3 kilos at 16:30.
I returned to my paper, finished it and I handed it in just before 18:30.
Here it is:
The Weaponization of Aesthetics in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
I perverted the Golem formula / and fashioned you from grass - Leonard Cohen
In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the creature's rejection by his creator is a metaphor for the disenfranchisement of women and others who do not enjoy sufficient membership in society. Society is symbolized by Victor Frankenstein, who tries to draw a direct line between external characteristics and internal qualities, thereby imposing restrictions on learning and consequently on existence.
As proper existence in society depends upon learning, I will begin by pointing out, with the help of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, that the creature's secret process of achieving literacy is analogous to the difficulties faced by women who strive for education. I will show further that the connection between women and the creature goes deeper than their common educational limitations. Both are judged by appearance and rejected when there is an absence of beauty. These aesthetics based criteria are imposed by society, which I will show to be personified by Victor Frankenstein. I will then give evidence that these standards of aesthetic judgement are based on something akin to the pseudo science of physiognomy, which believes that physical features reflect the inner nature. This verdict as applied to Victor's creation leads to him being called a "monster", which ironically begins the process of him becoming a monster. I will then illustrate with the help of Michel Foucault that the conclusion that someone is a monster is the same in society's determination as calling them a criminal. When society creates criminals it sabotages itself and I will show that this is exactly what Victor does by turning his creation into a monster. I will conclude by returning to the comparison between the monster and women, ending with a warning from Mary Wollstonecraft that society is in danger of making monsters of women and other outcasts by excluding them and is therefore sewing the seeds of its own destruction.
Although excluded from Frankenstein's society, as a thinking being, Victor's creation nonetheless has a natural inclination to communicate with other thinking entities (Shelley 58-59). In order to do this he feels the need to become literate so as to gain the ability to converse and thereby attain fellowship with and the acceptance of humans. He learns to read by secretly looking at the text through a small hole in the wall while hearing Felix read to Safie and connecting the written words to the sounds of their pronunciation (121-122). In this way he learns to read in about a year. Even achieving this by direct instruction would have shown him to have superhuman intelligence, let alone gaining that skill indirectly as he does. Such a circuitous means of acquiring an education is a metaphor for the academic limitations many women are stifled by. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Shelley's mother Mary Wollstonecraft says, "The little knowledge acquired by women is... random and episodic... acquired by sheer observations... What women learn they learn by snatches" (15). This speaks of a narrowness of range of educational opportunities for women that can be symbolically represented by learning through "a small but imperceptible chink" in the wall as Frankenstein's creation does (110).
The analogy between the limitations of women's education and that of the creature connects them on the spectrum of aesthetic judgement. Women are held accountable by society for the degree to which they are beautiful and "those who fail at female beauty are less than human", meaning not fully part of society and therefore partially monsters (Zimmerman ch. 1). Frankenstein's creation is also condemned for ugliness and this puts women and the creature in the same purview of objectification, albeit at different extremes (Shelley 108-109). The creature exists at the ugly end of the scale beyond what Victor's society allows. Women, in order to remain relevant to society, are expected to settle for being anchored to the parts of the aesthetic range that coincide with what is considered pleasing to the eye. If women deviate from the aesthetic realm and try to position themselves for equal respect on the male dominated societal scale of intelligence, they are, as Wollstonecraft says, "hunted out of society as ‘masculine’" (23). This societal assessment of scholarly and intellectual women as "masculine" can also be read as "monstrous" because to whatever degree one is excluded from society, one is to that extent a monster. Frankenstein's creature experiences the full extent of being "hunted out of society" because society stops at the visual surface in judging him just as it does women. The creature then is an ironic woman in that he is judged aesthetically as feminine bodies are, although he has a masculine body.
Victor refers to his creation with masculine gender pronouns from the moment of his animation (Shelley 58). Captain Walton as well writes of him that he and his crew saw "the shape of a man" and later tells Victor that they "saw... a sledge with a man in it" (25, 27). When the creature asks Victor to create a mate for him he specifies that he wants a female, and also says that she should be of "another sex" than himself, which shows that he agrees with Victor's perception that he has a masculine gender and sees himself as the male of his unique species (147-148). Victor fears the possibility of his creation reproducing with a female of his kind, which indicates that he constructed him with a penis (170). He has a character and physique with many elements that coincide with the masculine end of the gender spectrum. He is symbolically masculine in relation to the jagged, icy, rocky, lifeless features of the masculine sublime in the Alps and in the Arctic over which he flows effortlessly and into which he sometimes blends (150). In body he is also masculine in relation to the other characters of the novel. For example, his murder of Henry Clerval by manual strangulation is a very masculine act of domination (179, 181).
Despite the creature's masculinity his circumstance of being judged by appearances is an exaggerated inversion of the aesthetic determinations that govern the lives of women. Someone acknowledged as male would not normally be critiqued aesthetically to the degree that a woman experiences. But the fact that the creature's only insurmountable disadvantage is his appearance speaks also about society's aesthetic judgement of women. Women are expected to be primarily attractive while any intellectual assets they have are considered to be secondary. At best a woman's intellect may serve as a compliment to her beauty, as if it were one of those moles that is known as a "beauty mark" because it draws attention by contrast to her more pleasant aesthetic attributes. Wollstonecraft says this secondary charm of the intellect will no longer be directly noticed when a woman's physical beauty fades and is no longer there to illuminate it. "The woman who has only been taught to please will soon find that her charms are oblique sun-beams... when the summer of her physical beauty is past and gone" (18). And so women face the disadvantageous experience of being judged by personal appearance and shut out from full participation in society because of deviation from accepted understandings of beauty. This circumstance is exaggerated into a gender reversed hell for Frankenstein's masculine creation as he is perceived to be ugly, disgusting and lacking in "the superior beauty of man", he is condemned to exile from society (170).
We are all creations of the society in which we live and therefore society for each of us is our own Victor Frankenstein. When Victor tells his origin story to Captain Walton, he begins by declaring, "I am by birth a Genevese, and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic. My ancestors had been for many years counsellors and syndics" (Shelley 33). Compare this with the creature's account of his own origin: "A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt at the same time; and it was... a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses" (105). The creature's account establishes that his identity stems from his arrival at awareness, while Victor's makes it clear from the start that his identity is rooted deeply in being from Genovese society and in his family's history of being woven into the judicial foundations of that society. With this self-introduction Victor is essentially saying, "I am society."
Victor represents a society that judges character based on appearance. This is evident from the moment of his childhood when he first sees the young Elizabeth in a peasant cottage among little "vagrant" children: "She appeared of a different stock... Her hair was the brightest living gold, and... seemed to set a crown of distinction on her head. Her brow was clear and ample, her blue eyes cloudless, and her lips and the moulding of her face so expressive of sensibility and sweetness that none could behold her without looking on her as of a distinct species, a being heaven-sent, and bearing a celestial stamp in all her features." She was "fairer than a garden rose among dark leaved brambles" (Shelley 36). Victor's initial impression of Elizabeth's character is based entirely on her appearance, with no mention of her behaviour, mannerisms, ability to communicate, or any other indicator of awareness and intelligence. In his assessment, Elizabeth's blonde hair is a royal "crown" which elevates her in class above the dark haired children she is playing with. Victor does not explain what characteristic Elizabeth's "clear and ample" brow indicate, but a look at the published belief of the prominent physiognomist of Shelley's day, Johann Kaspar Lavater shows that Victor's description is paraphrasing Lavater's interpretation of "a smooth, open forehead", which he claims "indicates peace of mind" (20). So based entirely on a view of Elizabeth's hair and face, Victor determines that she is regal, with clear vision, a calm temperament, sensible, angelic, and sweet. All of these traits would be considered a compliment to a woman's beauty, but as Wollstonecraft reminds us, they would be treated by society as "oblique sunbeams" when a woman becomes older and less beautiful (Wollstonecraft 18). Victor's dismissal of the Italian peasant children Elizabeth is found with as dark weeds serves as a mild prelude of how years later he will respond to his creation's physical appearance.
Further evidence of Victor's blindness to qualities beneath the surface can be found when he goes to college. M. Krempe, the first professor he encounters is gruff voiced, and has what he considers to be a "repulsive" face. Because of these features Victor is disinclined to study with him (Shelley 47). By contrast he sees M. Waldman, the other professor to have a sweet voice and an appearance "expressive of the greatest benevolence". It is his appearance that expresses benevolence and so he is worthy of being listened to (48). So we see from Victor's response to the surface features of his teachers, that he does not want to learn from the ugly teacher but becomes a disciple of the one he finds attractive.
Just as Victor believes that he can discern the internal characteristics of Elizabeth, Krempe and Waldman by visually observing their physical features, he does the same with his creation, who he sees to be a monster as soon as he begins to move his body. He observes that "a convulsive motion agitated its limbs (Shelley 58). Convulsion in the eighteenth century, as Michel Foucault tells us, was seen as "the automatic and violent release of basic and instinctual mechanisms of the human organism". This "involuntary release of automatisms" was determined to be the primary physical symptom of madness (Foucault 224). And so when Victor sees the creature's first movement as a "convulsive motion" he is geared by societal belief to read that as a symbol of mental illness. He thinks that he has created a mentally ill creature and therefore a monster. This response combines with Victor's physiognomic judgements of the creature's other parts, such as his eyes.
The opening of the creature's "dull yellow eye" is contrasted with the "cloudless" blue eyes of Elizabeth to present him as her opposite (Shelley 36, 58). With Victor's obvious belief in physiognomy it is clear that when he says that Elizabeth's eyes are cloudless he understands this to mean that their visible clearness indicates also a clarity of perception and he believes the opposite to be the case with his creation's dull eye. But the creature's yellow eye is the same one that later shows itself to be so clear of vision that it allows him, while secretly watching through a small hole in a wall, to acquire the basics of literacy by viewing the text that Felix reads to Safie in another room (121-122). Victor's faulty assessment of the creature's eye is a clear indication that his faith in his own ability to read faces is unfounded. Along with the eyes and the "straight black lips", another source of repulsion for Victor's sensibilities is his creation's yellow skin, which "scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath". The creature then is almost an x-ray image of himself, and given Victor's obsession with stopping at externals when he looks at others, it points to his fear of truly seeing beneath the surface.
The surface of the creature appears almost as the inside of its body. Victor can see "the work of muscles and arteries" (58). He can see the subdermal systems moving, the blood flowing, and the muscles flexing. He can see the dynamic pulsations of life but they look like death to him and therefore they are ugly. Ugliness alone is the criterion by which Victor judges his creation's inner character from the time of his first animation until he suspects him of murder. But the virulent language that Victor uses to name him is more caustic before he guesses that the creature killed his six year old brother (Shelley 73). Based entirely on his appearance he calls the creature a "miserable monster", a "demoniacal corpse" and a "filthy daemon" (59, 77). After William's murder and the subsequent strangulations of his friend and of his wife, Victor uses the same words "monster" and "daemon" many times, but never propped up with the added poison of supporting insults like "miserable", "filthy", or "corpse" (170, 172, 181, 200). This shows that Victor is more angered by the creature's ugliness than by the killing of his loved ones. His crimes are secondary to the offensive sight of his "detested form" (104). Later while Victor is building a mate for his creation and looks up to see him watching, it is only in response to the belief that "his countenance expressed the utmost extent of malice and treachery" that Victor aborts the construction of the creature's female counterpart (171).
Denying the creature a mate or any kind of society renders him more monstrous because it makes society his enemy. Victor only begins building a monster in the first moment that he sees his creation as monstrous and excludes him from his own society. His continued separation from responsibility for the creature leads to further exclusions from other societies. Without a parent's guidance he is also rejected by the society represented by the humble but educated De Laceys and even the society of rustics as characterized by the father of the girl that he rescues from drowning. These exclusions each advance the process of monster construction by breaking the tenuous links of hope that hold him to the world (Shelley 137-138, 140, 143). The raising of a monster is completed when Victor denies him society with even one of his own kind (171).
In transforming his creation into a monster Victor also renders him a criminal. Criminal status, Michel Foucault writes, was given to monstrosity because "it was a transgression of an entire system of laws, whether natural... or juridical... until the middle of the eighteenth century" (74). Even after that period, monstrosity continued to be "a possible qualifier of criminality" (75). The monstrous are suspicious and profiled as criminals, as is clear from Victor's suspicion of his creation having murdered William, even though he has no grounds at the time on which to base that suspicion. This is part of Victor's unconscious construction process of building a criminal and a monster that continues until he denies his creature a mate, which completes the process (Shelley 78). Now fully constructed, the monster has no choice but to enact a revolution by deconstructing the society that built him, which is personified by Victor.
Victor can be deconstructed because, as has been established from his self-introduction, he is society (Shelley 33). Society is a construct, and therefore so is Victor. He has been fabricated on the one side by his counsellor and syndic ancestors, as well as by his father's public life and power. These forces have molded him into having a belief that he has a familial relationship with the law that has interwoven his consciousness with its workings to give him the privilege of judgement. He has also been fashioned on the other side by his mother's iconic mourning for a father who died from grief over the loss of his status as a wealthy merchant. Caroline's grief is an inheritance of her father's sense of loss just as the Frankenstein sense of law is Victor's paternal legacy. She weeps bitterly also for being reduced to poverty that threatens to render her a beggar. It is the blow of being left a beggar that overcomes her more than the loss of her father and so her grief like her father's is financial in nature. She is saved by Alphonse Frankenstein because there is "a sense of justice" in his "upright mind, which renders it necessary that he should approve highly to love strongly" (34). What he approves highly is Caroline's proper mourning over the loss of wealth, and he wants to recompense her for the sorrows she has endured as a result of this deprivation (35). To be poor from birth is far less unfair to the Frankenstein sense of justice than to be destitute from having lost one's fortune. This marriage of the rightness of wealth and the injustice of the loss of financial power allows Alphonse Frankenstein to replace Caroline's father as her benefactor and then become her husband. Alphonse places so much value on Caroline's grief over her loss of affluence as an enhancement of beauty that he immortalizes it in a portrait that he has commissioned and placed prominently in the Frankenstein home (79).
This painting also serves as a symbol of self-congratulation for Alphonse Frankenstein having saved a member of his class from ruin. His class, his society and that of his heir, Victor, values beauty as a sign of merit. Only the beautiful are noble and therefore deserve to be wealthy. The grief of the beautiful elevates that which is grieved over to a higher state of value. The painting that portrays the beautiful Caroline's exquisite lamentation over being deprived of money, mounts capital to a towering status of importance (79). The poor are meant to be poor but for the rich to fall into poverty is a tragedy. We see this same sense of beauty elevating a source of sorrow while at the same time being enhanced by that tribulation, when Justine is awaiting trial for murder. Justine is of the Swiss servant class but she is beautiful and also deserving of the love of her wealthy masters. Her sorrow is also an enhancement to her beauty as Victor observes that "her countenance... was rendered, by the solemnity of her feelings, exquisitely beautiful" (83). This sense of the beauty of women enhanced by grief weds itself with the Frankenstein male command of justice to construct Victor. Wealth brings a command over beauty which sadness only enhances. Beautified sadness and bereaved beauty are symbolized by the Frankenstein matriarch mourning over a coffin that may as well be full of dead money. That such melancholy is personified as a cherished member of the Frankenstein family is emphasized by Elizabeth's statement that "misery has come home" (95). She says this to mean that misery had belonged to others before this and now it is hers, but on a deeper level it points to the fact that she is now being called upon as a Frankenstein woman to fulfill the Frankenstein female legacy of decorating grief with beauty. She does not realize that Victor is the actual cause of the grief she is experiencing and so her statement to the recently returned and miserable Victor that, "misery has come home" is rendered poetically more powerful. It points to the societal destiny that she was designed for in relation to Victor.
Elizabeth was brought into the Frankenstein family as a "pretty present" for Victor because she is a crucial cog in the design of his construction (Shelley 37). She serves as a pre-packaged ready made wife meant to live in storage for many years as his friend and cousin until he is ready to marry her and carry on the Frankenstein line (33-37). This shows that even Victor's future has been manufactured by his parents as an extension of his function of being their plaything and idol (35). Victor's status as a plaything and Elizabeth's function as a pretty present show them both to be toys and dolls. Following a law in his temperament or programming, Victor the doll or automaton decides to improve upon his own design and build an improved, invulnerable and beautiful Frankenstein doll (42). Victor says, "I had selected his features as beautiful" (58). He has described the three women who are considered part of the Frankenstein family, Caroline Beaufort, Elizabeth Lavenza, and Justine Moritz as beautiful (37, 79, 83). The only male that Victor calls beautiful is his friend Henry Clerval, whose form was "divinely wrought and beaming with beauty" (162). But although Elizabeth and Justine are no more genetically connected to Victor than Henry, they are both referred to as "cousins" and "sisters" in relation to him, while Henry is never called a cousin or a brother (65, 85). Victor's creation however, being of Victor's design, is Victor's child and is therefore a Frankenstein and a legitimate member of that society. In his attempt to make a creature that is beautiful he is trying to bring into the family its first beautiful male Frankenstein. But Victor not only fails to make his creation aesthetically beautiful, but he renders him ugly. Not being beautiful is normal for a male Frankenstein, but ugliness is unacceptable. So the creature is effectively thrown away, thereby making it a monster and criminal.
In discarding his aesthetically faulty creation Victor frees it from the Frankenstein legacy and any loyalty it might have had towards it. Now Victor is ironically dismantled by the monster that he assembled, beginning with the destruction of Henry Clerval, who is Victor's only real connection to the world outside of his self-contained clan (Shelley 39, 181). This returns Victor to the isolation of his childhood when he had nothing but his kin whose deep roots in the past are the foundation of his identity (35). Then what is left of the Frankenstein family that has relevance to Victor's construction is removed by his creation. The creature seems to know that the murder of Elizabeth is the final violence required to dismantle Victor because it inadvertently causes the death of Alphonse (199, 201-202). He does not kill Victor's surviving family member, his brother Ernest because he is not part of Victor's design. Ernest Frankenstein is a not a constructed being in the same sense that Victor is. He has not been given a "pretty present" like Elizabeth in early childhood who was groomed to be his wife. Just as Elizabeth had taken the place of Caroline, Victor has been designed to eventually replace Alphonse as the head of Frankenstein society (44). That planned society is thus thoroughly destroyed by the monster all because Victor rejected his creature from membership.
Victor's rejection of his own invention based on aesthetics is atypical behaviour for the scientist that he purports to be. He has already spent several months gathering the parts of dead animals and humans from slaughterhouses, graves and dissecting tables (Shelley 55). These materials are grotesque to him and he turns "in loathing" sometimes but persists in his work. The creature is ugly before animation and yet Victor brings him to life anyway. He should be acclimated by this type of work to things that are unpleasant to look at but when his creation gains movement he is now a being with facial expressions that become subject to Victor's belief in the pseudoscience of physiognomy. He takes no scientific interest in the mental capabilities of his creation, which upon even the most superficial examination would reveal a mind that is a thing of beauty (110).
For Victor, a mind cannot be beautiful unless the thinker has a beautiful face. The world must be simply understood with the inside revealing an unmistakeable reflection of the outside. There are no hidden meanings because the world must be literally as it appears to be as revealed by physiognomy and pathognomy. But the creature is proof that Victor's belief in appearances is a self deception. He demonstrates that he can reason, learn, and develop senses of fairness and charity (Shelley 114). As Wollstonecraft says, "to bring into existence a creature... who could think and improve himself" is an "incalculable gift" that should not be called a curse (9). But Victor does see his creation as a curse and refuses responsibility for it (Shelley 104), thereby forcing it out into the world before its mind has "been stored with knowledge or strengthened by principles" (15-16). Wollstonecraft is writing here of the educational paucity that women experience. But her statement also applies to all othered genders, and to many groups and individuals that are excluded by society because of deviations from accepted norms of appearance as they manifest themselves in body, dress, behaviour, culture, sexuality, or form of artistic expression. Frankenstein's creature turned monster represents all of these, while Victor stands for the societal gate keeper against the deviant Other.
Having brought his creation into the world Victor is surprised when it is not an extension of himself but rather the aesthetic Other who has no place in Victor's society (Shelley 58). The creature's positive potential and inner beauty are meaningless because they appear on the surface as Other and must not exist. Victor therefore excludes him from participation in society, making him a monster, and consequently damning him to a life akin to that of a wild animal. Any society that does this to a thinking being, Wollstonecraft warns while quoting the French revolutionary Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, "can expect to see him at any moment transformed into a ferocious beast". This is so exactly what Victor does to his own creation that it is as if Wollstonecraft is directly addressing him when she quotes Riqueti further, "You have loosed the bull. Do you expect that he won’t use his horns?" (43).
This story is about the weaponization of aesthetics. When aesthetic beauty is believed by society to mean something deeper about human correctness than the simple pleasure it inspires, then beauty becomes a mined commodity. There are many victims of the commodification of beauty but Mary Wollstonecraft would agree that historically the most consistently enslaved group of this type of colonization is that which is generally recognized to be women. But as Frankenstein illustrates, such objectification of beauty casts the shadow of the perceived extreme absence of beauty. This shadow or ugliness is seen as meaning something other than human correctness and leading the assumed ugly other to being profiled as criminal and therefore monstrous. Victor Frankenstein makes a monster of his creation because he is caught up in the dangerous dichotomy of beauty meaning goodness versus ugliness meaning evil. As his creation demonstrates with what he reveals about his thoughts and feelings, there is great beauty beneath unattractive surfaces. Victor and all of us could save ourselves from self destruction to the degree that we do not become ugly about appearances.
Works Cited
Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974-1975, Edited by Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, Translated by Graham Burchell, Verso, 2003, pdf.
Lavater, Johann Kaspar. The Pocket Lavater, or, The Science of Physiognomy, Van Winkle and Wiley, 1817, chrome-extension: //efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https: //www.actingarchives.it/catalogo_files/Th e%20Pocket%20Lavater,%20or,%20The%20Science%20of%20Physiognomy%20- %201817.pdf. PDF download.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, Penguin Classics, 2003.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, Quercus, uploaded by Audrey Jaffe, 4 Jan. 2023, https://q.utoronto.ca/.
Zimmerman, Jess. Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology. E-book ed., Beacon Press, 2021. E-book viewer.
I was caught up on my journal at 19:15.
I looked at two or three videos of me singing "Joanna" in French and English. Two of them were fine, one got cut off and another I screwed up near the end and gave up.
I cut out half of the wolf attack footage in my Movie Maker project for Instructions for Electroshock Therapy. But I'm not sure if the clips I have will work since the screen size is narrower from top to bottom.
I made a new batch of gravy from yesterday's chicken drippings. I had it with a potato and a chicken leg while watching season 6, episodes 26 and 27 of The Beverly Hillbillies.
Granny has gotten Jethro to turn the truck into an ambulance. Since no patients are coming to her she's going out to look for them on the highway. Jethro says that should be easy since he causes most of the accidents. Elly May talks with Jane Hathaway on the phone. Jane is with the other secretaries and they are on their lunch hour, about to watch their favourite soap opera A Journey to Misery. Jane tells Elly she has to go because today they find out if Rex Goodbody needs an operation. Elly thinks she's talking about a real person and tells Granny. Granny heads down to the bank and sees Rex on TV. The doctor is telling Rex he's a sick man and needs an operation but Granny can see he doesn't. When Drysdale learns Granny's looking for Rex he thinks she's a fan of the actor. He tells her he lives at the end of her street and his real name is Gene Loughery. Drysdale gets in touch with Loughery and tells him he's being killed off on the show but also tells him he's put a mortgage on his house and he should go see Granny. Loughery goes to see Granny and since he's about to lose his job he decides to make a pass at Granny so he can marry her and get rich. She throws him out. The next day the Clampetts are watching the show and when they see that the operation is about to begin, they drive to the studio and storm the set. They take Loughery away while he's yelling for help.
The soap opera doctor was played by Grandon Rhodes, who worked in repertory theatre in Canada and the United States and didn't appear in a film until he was forty. His first movie was Follow the Boys. He played Dr. Keefer on Bonanza, a judge several times on Perry Mason, and the banker Chester Vanderlip on the George Burns and Gracie Allen Show.
In the second story Elly May now has 40 dogs that trample Granny every time she calls the family to dinner. Every time they trample her she says either they go or she goes. Elly gets her dogs to carry signs saying "We love you Granny" and her heart melts. Jed had sent Elly to give the dogs to a pet shop but instead she goes with no dogs and comes back with a truckload of more dogs because she can't stand to see them in cages. They trample Granny again and she wants to give them away again. A sign is made advertizing free dogs but Granny's heart melts again when she's trying to decide which one to give away first.
For the thirty-ninth night in a row I found no bedbugs.
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