Frankenstein (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (2 page)

Cursed Tellers, Compelling Tales—The Endurance of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

WHO IS MEANT TO give voice to these lines, which comprise a late entry in the journal of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley (Journals, vol.2 p. 573)? Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” had been one of her favorite poems since the poet had recited it in her father’s study, so Shelley may simply have meant to reanimate the seafaring protagonist. These lines also speak for many of her own literary creations, including the main characters in her most popular novel, Frankenstein. Captain Robert Walton knew the poem well, attributing “passionate enthusiasm, for the dangerous mysteries of ocean, to that production of the most imaginative of modern poets” (p. 18). Coleridge’s mariner experiences the utter desolation of being the last living soul on board his ship, and comes to sense that he is living under a ban that deprives him of human company; Shelley’s mariner, too, mourns his isolated state, and desperately longs for a sympathetic friend. Victor Frankenstein also decries the pain of living his nightmare existence, as his loved ones die off one by one. But it is the monster who most deeply feels the utter misery of an enforced solitary existence. Declaring itself “godless” and “wretched” in the final scene, the creature is the living embodiment of these four bleak lines as it is carried out of human earshot and off the pages of Frankenstein by icy waves.

Even in her journal, Mary Shelley used fiction and foils to explore her innermost feelings. By her mid-twenties, the lonely misery of Coleridge’s mariner was all too familiar to her. Nothing in her life seemed to endure. Her mother had died as a result of giving birth to her; her half-sister, Fanny, had committed suicide about a month after Mary’s nineteenth birthday (and two months before Percy Shelley’s first wife killed herself) ; four of her five conceptions ended tragically, the last a near-fatal miscarriage; her husband, Percy, was drowned in 1822, six years after their marriage, and their friend Byron died two years later. Later attempts at romance (such as her interest in Aubrey Beauclerk) and even friendship (with Jane Williams, for example) tended to be short-lived, or simply ended disastrously. She outlived every major Romantic writer and attended the funerals of almost every one of her loved ones. As early as age twenty-six, she wrote, “The last man! Yes I may well describe that solitary being’s feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me” (Journals, vol. 2, p. 542).

Her urgent desire to “enrol myself on the page of fame” (p. 6) was quashed upon the death of Percy, her great love and literary mentor. His loss made her surviving son all the more precious to her, and as their financial problems persisted Mary turned to writing for money rather than literary reputation. Many of Frankenstein’s readers are surprised to discover that Shelley wrote steadily through her life, producing six novels after her first, Frankenstein, two verse plays, two travel works, several biographies, translations, children’s stories, and edited works. In addition, she composed numerous essays, poems, and reviews and more than two dozen short stories. Most of the major writings suffered from unfavorable comparisons to Frankenstein; several of them received negative reviews or were cited as morally corrupt (The Last Man was even banned in some European countries). Most of her work has been long out of print, and until about forty years ago, Mary was not given serious consideration as a writer. She seems to have anticipated the potential uselessness of her literary labors relatively early in her career: “What folly is it in me to write trash nobody will read,” she complained in her journal in 1825. “All my many pages—future waste paper—surely I am a fool” (Journals, vol. 2, p. 489).

What did endure was her waking nightmare: Frankenstein. First published in 1818 when she was in her late teens, the novel is her only work to remain in print since its first publication. Frankenstein has lived on as Shelley’s self-proclaimed “hideous progeny” despite efforts to take it away from her by attributing its authorship to her husband. It has survived more than a century of academic scorn and neglect, gaining a place on college syllabi only in the 1960s. It is a tale that possesses the compelling quality of the ancient mariner’s saga, a story that nearly two centuries of readers have confirmed they “cannot choose but hear.”

Werewolves, vampires, witches, and warlocks have been the stuff of folklore, legend, and nightmare for centuries, yet none have so haunted the public imagination as the monster created by eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley in 1816. From the start, we have been eager to help the monster live off of the page, to interpret the tale for ourselves. Within five years of the novel’s initial publication, the first of what would eventually be more than ninety dramatizations of Frankenstein appeared onstage. Shelley herself went to see one of the thirty-seven performances of Presumption that played in London in 1823. Lumbering violently and uttering inarticulate groans, the monster attracted record numbers of theatergoers, as well as a series of protests by the London Society for the Prevention of Vice. Mary was pleased and “much amused” by Thomas Cooke’s attempts to portray the monster, and even made a favorable note about the playbill to her friend Leigh Hunt. “In the list of dramatis personae came,—by Mr. T Cooke: this nameless mode of naming the unameable [sic] is rather good,” she wrote on September 11 (Letters, vol. 1, p. 378).

A familiar yet ever-evolving presence on the Victorian stage, the monster also haunted the pages of newspapers and journals. Political cartoonists used Shelley’s monster as the representation of the “pure evil” of Irish nationalists, labor reformers, and other favored subjects of controversy ; it was often depicted as an oversized, rough-and-ready, weapon-wielding hooligan. In Annals of the New York Stage, George Odell notes that audiences were entertained with photographic “illusions” of the monster as early as the 1870s. And the cinema was barely ten years old before the Edison Film Company presented their version of the story, with Charles Ogle portraying a long-haired, confused-looking giant. Virtually every year since that film’s appearance in 1910, another version of Frankenstein has been released somewhere in the world—though the most enduring image of the monster was the one created by Boris Karloff in James Whale’s 1931 classic. The creature’s huge, square head, oversized frame, and undersized suit jacket still inform most people’s idea of what Shelley’s monster “really” looks like.

As strange and various as the interpretations of the creature have been, the monster has retained a surprisingly human quality. Even in its most melodramatic portrayals, its innate mortality is made apparent; whether through a certain-softness in the eyes, a wistfulness or longing in its expression, or a desperate helplessness in its movements, the creature has always come across as much more than a stock horror device. In fact, several film adaptations have avoided the use of heavy makeup and props that audiences have come to expect. Life Without a Soul ( 1915) stars a human-looking, flesh-toned monster; and in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), actor Robert De Niro, who is certainly neither ugly nor of great stature, did not wear the conventional green face paint and restored the monster’s eloquent powers of speech.

Like Satan in Paradise Lost, Mary Shelley’s monster was given a shadowy and elusive physical presence by its creator. It moves through the story faster than the eye can follow it, descending glaciers “with greater speed than the flight of an eagle” (p. 130) or rowing “with an arrowy swiftness” (p. 150) . The blurriness of the scenes in which the monster appears allows us to create his image for ourselves and helps explain why it has inspired so many adaptations and reinterpretations. Certainly, too, both Milton’s Satan and Shelley’s creature have been made more interesting, resonant, and frightening because they have human qualities. The monster possesses familiar impulses to seek knowledge and companionship, and these pique our curiosity and awaken our sympathies. Its complex emotions, intelligence, and ability to plan vengeful tactics awaken greater fears than the stumbling and grunting of a mindless beast. A closer look at Shelley’s singular description of the monster’s features reveals its likeness to a newborn infant rather than a “fiend” or “demon”: Consider its “shrivelled complexion,” “watery eyes,” and “yellow skin [that] scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath” (p. 51) . The emotional range of De Niro’s monster, the gentle childish expression in Karloff’s eyes, even the actor Cooke’s “seeking as it were for support—his trying to grasp at the sounds he heard” (Letters, vol. 1, p. 378), suggest that we have sensed the monster’s humanity all along.

Another trend in the way the monster has been reinterpreted is equally suggestive. Movie titles such as Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) , and Dracula Vs. Frankenstein (1971) testify to the fact that the monster has taken on the name of his creator in popular culture. In Frankenstein, the monster is called plenty of names by his creator, from at best “the accomplishment of my toils” to “wretch,” “miserable monster,” and “filthy daemon”; significantly, Victor never blesses his progeny with his own last name. Our identity of the creature as the title character does, of course, shift the focus from man to monster, reversing Shelley’s intention. Reading the book, we realize that Frankenstein‘s lack of recognizing the creature as his own—in essence, not giving the monster his name—is the monster’s root problem. Is it our instinctive human sympathy for the anonymous being that has influenced us to name him? Is it our recognition of similarities and ties between “father” and “son,” our defensiveness regarding family values? Or is it simply our interest in convenience, our compelling need to label and sort?

Our confusion of creator and created, as well as our interest in depicting the creature’s human side, indicate an unconscious acknowledgment of a common and powerful reading of Frankenstein: that the monster and his creator are two halves of the same being who together as one represent the self divided, a mind in dramatic conflict with itself. Walton notes to his sister the possibility of living a “double existence” (pp. 24—25), bringing to mind his and Frankenstein’s struggles between their creative and self-destructive energies. The monster/ creator conflation most forcefully conveys this idea of humanity’s conflicting impulses to create and destroy, to love and hate. Shelley could not have chosen a subject with more relevance to twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers than humankind’s own potential inhumanity to itself. Our ambitions have led us to the point where we, too, can accomplish what Victor did in his laboratory that dreary night in November: artificially create life. But will our plan to clone living organisms or produce life in test tubes have dire repercussions ? We build glorious temples to progress and technology, monumental structures that soar toward the heavens; and yet in a single September morning, the World Trade Center was leveled—proving once again that man is his own worst enemy.

In Frankenstein, Shelley exhibits a remarkable ability to anticipate and develop questions and themes peculiarly relevant to her future readers, thereby ensuring its endurance for almost 200 years. To understand why and how this ability developed, we must take a closer look at her life, times, and psychological state. Certainly, Frankenstein details a fascinating experiment, introduces us to vivid characters, and takes us to gorgeous, exotic places. But this text, written by a teenager, also addresses fundamental contemporary questions regarding “otherness” and society’s superficial evaluations of character based on appearance, as well as modern concerns about parental responsibility and the harmful effects of absenteeism. Anticipating the alienation of everyday life, Robert Walton and the monster speak to those of us who now live our lives in front of screens of various kinds—computer, television, and film. Other readers may feel stabs of recognition when confronting Victor, a perfectionist workaholic who sacrifices love and friendship in the name of ambition. Frankenstein is a nineteenth-century literary classic, but it is also fully engaged in many of the most profound philosophical, psychological, social, and spiritual questions of modern existence.

The endurance of Frankenstein has much to do with the particular circumstances under which the text was written: the moment in history and place in time of its creation, as well as the particular background and preparations of its creator. In the years leading up to the story’s conception on a June evening in 1816, Europe and America experienced a profound shift in sensibility that initiated the modern era. Romanticism had its beginnings in the democratic idealism that inspired the French and American Revolutions, and in the progressive thought that brought on the industrial and scientific revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Though most historians cite the movement’s end-dates as somewhere around the mid-nineteenth century, the strength and appeal of the “spirit of the age” (as identified by Percy Shelley in A Defence of Poetry) continue to affect our present political, social, and intellectual lives. Those exemplifying the spirit during Shelley’s time railed against authoritarian government, conservative morality, classical models, personal insincerity, and moderate, “safe” behavior. In the arts, Romantics brought into their work a new emphasis on individualism, personal feelings, and expression, as exemplified by Goya’s Black Paintings and Cho-pin’s Preludes; a focus on emotional, subjective response rather than the objectivity and intellect favored during the Age of Reason, which can be detected in the difference between Beethoven’s earliest and later works; a celebration of spontaneous expressive intensity, seen in Turner’s oil paintings and heard in Bellini’s operas; and a keen interest in the exotic and erotic, as in Delacroix’s scenes inspired by his North African travels.