Introduction
"Edward Scissorhands" is, if you understand the movie, actually a very serious movie reflecting on how bad some neighbourhoods are at accepting different people into their closely knit society. Edward Scissorhands is created by his 'inventor', who builds his different body parts and organs and at the end, dies of old age just when he was about to attach Edward's hands onto him when Edward still had hands of scissors. Edward is created much like Frankenstein's monster is- by electricity or a theory now called Galvanism.
VICTORIANS AND 'CREATING' HUMANS
In the Victorian era, Scientists were eager into pumping electricity into dead animals, humans and any corpse they could on the belief that with enough electricity, they could return the figure back to life. Beliefs like these are echoed in Frankenstein and other papers and novels in the era.
In Victorian era, scientists were trying to find another way of creating humans and they experimented.
Steel engraving (993 x 71mm) for frontispiece to t...
English: Portrait of Mary Shelley
English: Cropped portrait of Mary ShelleyIt was almost the equivalent of alchemy in the medieval ages. It was not just bringing corpses back to life, but also putting together body parts, literally sticking together or nailing them with skin and all the organs. THEN expecting them to jump back to life when given a huge shock of electricity. Sounds Uncanny?
Well, in the Victorian era this was happened more often than not. People actually believed it to be true. These kinds of people were called Galvinists. Galvinists were usually the richer doctors who had the money to spend on expensive equipment for the amount of electricity they needed and most of the body parts they actually bought from the black market.
Galvanism was named after Luigi Galvani and started when Luigi found out that when he pumped electricity into dissected animals, some actually came to life. Galvinists...