Literature has certainly been a medium in which people hide political or social agendas behind the imagery. Look at Thomas Moore’s Utopia for example. Moore lived in an influential position that gained his status with his peers. However, he was fairly unhappy with the political power and the function of the state in England at that time. So in order to express his agenda/ positions on this system, he wrote a literary masterpiece depicting an alternate “perfect” society. In this piece, he displayed aspects of his current society that weren’t working. However, readers didn’t pick up on this at first since the ideas were taken to an extream and the story was far removed in the reader’s mind from what they were experiencing in real life. So literature was created in order to fulfill an agenda of the writer. However, literature that has already been created can represent more than just the original writer’s agenda. Often times people read something and decide to use the ideas in it to create something new. These new works of art may match the original writer’s ideas, however, a lot of literature can and has been molded to fit into a different argument. One example I can think of this is how Frankenstein has been the reference point of numerous political cartoons. In our edition of the novel, the editor highlights a couple of these that were vastly successful. A notable one created by Steve Greenberg (pp. 252) depicts the monster as a large fish in order to represent genetically modified foods. This takes the image of Victor Frankenstein and applies it to a more recent issue of creating new things. One character in the cartoon questions if the monster/”Frankenfood” is safe for people to eat and the other character shows the creators claim that these companies creating these foods aren’t as concerned with public safety and health as they should be. So political cartoons are just one example of how literature can be molded in many different ways in order to portray a new message.
