Taking a break from my Yuletide reading to resume December Meme duties, to talk about today’s requested topic.

Just about the first thing you have to explain to people who never read Mary Shelley’s novel is that Frankenstein (first name Victor) is the name of the creator, not of the monster, that’s how much the Universal movie icon came to dominate pop culture consciousness. (Though Boris Karloff’s character isn’t called Frankenstein in the two Whale films, either.) Mind you, today I just probably exempt Benedict Cumberbatch and/or Johnny Lee Miller and/or Danny Boyle fans, since Boyle’s stage production starring these two actors switching between the roles is very much based on the novel, not the movies.

So, the novel. Very much a product of the Romantic era, with its author being the daughter of two revolutionary philosophers, book-obsessed, and already with some traumatic events in her own nineteen years old life behind her. Starting with her mother, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, having died shortly after her birth. There is a notable absence of mothers in “Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus” - the full title of the novel – safe in a nightmare, Victor F. embracing the rotting corpse of his dead mother. And of course the whole premise is an all male act of creation turning into a nightmare birth sequence, with the second attempt – when Frankenstein comes near creating the woman his first creation requested, and then destroys her just before completion, deciding this is the responsible thing to do – a miscarriage, an abortion or horror of the female form, however you want to interpret it. Mary Shelley – at this point still Mary Godwin, Shelley’s first wife still being alive – would lose all but one of her children, and the death of the first one wasn’t far away. Her older half sister Fanny, her mother’s illegitimate daughter, would kill herself, if I recall correctly (though I haven’t looked it up and may misremember).

But Victor Frankenstein isn’t a mother. He’s a father, and a pretty rotten one. It’s not surprising that the character who changes most in the adaptions tends to be Frankenstein. With the caveat of the major, major change James Whale made when letting Karloff’s monster be inarticulate in the first of his two films and only capable of a few words in the second; Mary Shelley’s monster learns to speak, read and write in true Rousseau fashion, by observing the family he’s, unknown to them, hiding with and narrates a third of the novel in first person. The principle of the monster not starting out evil, only horrid to look at, but turning violent as the result of the universal hatred he meets remains. (Mary Shelley starts her novel with a quote from Paradise Lost, created reminding creator he didn’t ask to be made.) Frankenstein, on the other hand, can be an obsessive amoral scientist not caring about victims when played by Peter Cushing in the Hammer horror movies, or a well intentioned and misled obsessive scientist in the Universal horror movies, or, in Kenneth Branagh’s adaption a noble scientist eager to defeat the death who took his mother and who makes a fatal mistake when abandoning his creation, but is excused from this mostly by illness and trying to make up for it later. This isn’t just cinematic convention but something of a necessity when adapting the book; Victor Frankenstein in the novel is one of those characters who may have been intended as sympathetic but effectively never is, all high flown Romantic language and callous behavior, abhorring his creation for looks alone the moment it becomes animated, not daring to reveal the truth even when Justine dies for it (but expecting to be the one deserving pity for this), managing to make the one attempt to actually do something for the being he created into yet another disaster, and then somehow missing the point of the “I’ll be with you in your wedding night” threat by immediately proposing to Elizabeth and leaving her alone in said wedding night, looking for the monster.
I say “may have been intended as sympathetic”, because I can’t be sure. Mary gave a third of the novel to the monster to narrate, after all, making his case quite fervently (also, the one still alive at the end of the book isn’t Victor, though the monster announces the intention of suicide); and her own father had disowned her for practicing his own philosophical principles by running away with Shelley (whose money he however was quite eager to take). And then, there may have been an ambivalence in her not only about parents and children and the act of creation but also about romantic heroes; Shelley had already tried to get her in a three way situation with one of his friends en route to Switzerland, which hadn’t been her idea of free love, and she had an illustration of what can happen if you crush on someone who just sees you as a brief diversion by her stepsister Claire and Byron.

The big confrontation between Frankenstein and the Creature which starts with Frankenstein being outraged about his brother’s and Justine’s death and ends with him promising to create a mate for the Creature after the later had accused Frankenstein in turn is one of the novel’s highlights and the one where I’m sure we’re meant to sympathize with the Creature the way we do. Incidentally, my favourite adaption of this isn’t in any of the Frankenstein movies but in Blade Runner - the scene where the android Roy Batty meets his maker. “I want more life”, yes indeed.

The idea of a man-created humanoid becoming a monster and/or demanding justice has haunted sci fi and fantasy ever since Mary wrote it. And I think it will do so for quite a while yet. It’s the most powerful legacy of the novel, and I wish, between all those dead children, Shelley and her father, she could have known.

Two reviews written a while ago, which I hadn't gotten around to posting yet, about two historical novels by the same author I enjoyed a lot, set in two very different periods.


( Restoration, Stuart family drama, and a first person narrative )

( Byron, Shelley, Keats: you don't want to be a woman who loves them, but it makes for a great ensemble story )