Our ‘Frankenstein’ fixation

More than 200 years after the publication of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus,” the story continues to inspire writers, artists, and filmmakers, including Guillermo del Toro and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

In this edited interview, Deidre Lynch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature, who has taught the novel in the course “Modern Monsters in Literature and Film,” discusses the historical context behind Shelley’s creation and why “Frankenstein” remains alive in the cultural imagination.

---

You have said that the novel “Frankenstein” is dear to your heart—why?

It has as much to do with the form of the novel as the content of the novel. I love that it’s a story inside a story inside a story. I love the fact that the first thing we encounter are these letters that this polar explorer is writing. He writes — as everyone knows now that Guillermo del Toro has preserved that part of the novel in his adaptation — that he comes across Victor Frankenstein as he is pursuing his monster, aiming to take revenge on him. Frankenstein tells his story, and then within Frankenstein’s story, we get the story of the monster, which he tells himself. What I love about that complicated structure is how Shelley has set things up in such a way that it becomes such a surprise when the monster begins to speak for himself for the first time. We go from thinking that the creature is repugnant in his monstrosity to realizing that he’s eloquent and persuasive, and maybe more human than his creator.

Mary Shelley wrote this novel at age 18. How did she do it?

She was the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, two literary celebrities in the 1790s, who were notorious for their support of the revolution in France and progressive politics. Shelley had a strong education and was exposed to literary people through her childhood.

So, if anybody was going to be able to do something like that at age 18, it would have been Mary Shelley. But what I find more astonishing is that by the time she writes “Frankenstein,” she has eloped with a married man, and by the time the novel is published in 1818, she has been pregnant more than once. She had to become an adult very quickly. The ways in which Victor Frankenstein responds with horror and disgust when his creature comes to life might resemble those of a new mother who’s horribly frightened by the responsibility of having to care for a newborn infant.

In the backdrop of the early 19^th century, a time of turmoil in Europe, Mary Shelley crafts her novel. What historical contexts shape “Frankenstein”?

From the preface to the novel that is reissued in 1831, we know that “Frankenstein” was her contribution to a very famous ghost storytelling contest among her; her husband to-be, poet Percy Shelley; the poet Lord Byron; and John Polidori, the author of the first English vampire novel.

It’s the summer of 1816 when Shelley and her friends end up in Switzerland in a sort of self-imposed exile from England. By then, the long war between the British empire and the Revolutionary France and then Napoleonic France had been over only for a year. Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley come of age at a period of terrible political repression, and of immense unrest and immense injustice in England. That sense of injustice is important in the novel. It strikes me that the creature is asking Victor Frankenstein for justice: “Do right by me” is his plea. In a way, the novel is a response to a time when notions of equal rights are circulating, but there aren’t the legal structures to ensure that rights are observed or secured for those who need them.

“The novel is so rich that it is eternal, and the questions that it raises are existential questions.”

Some scholars have said that the novel is a cautionary tale about science. What is your view?

It’s important to remember that the novel’s subtitle is “The Modern Prometheus.” In classical mythology, Prometheus is the titan who steals fire from the gods of Olympus in order to benefit humanity. So, there’s a notion of technological progress written into that subtitle. By the time she composes “Frankenstein,” Shelley is aware of experiments with galvanism, which used electricity on corpses to communicate the spark of life to the dead, and she also knows that some of those experiments often involved the corpses of convicts, and she seems to be reflecting on how these experiments disrespect the humanity of other human beings. Shelley explores the ethical consequences in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, when ambition overpowers people’s sense of what they owe to one another.

How have perceptions of Frankenstein changed over the years?

It got fairly harsh reviews when it was first published anonymously, maybe because of its dedication to William Godwin, which was catnip for conservative commentators who decided that anything that was dedicated to Godwin had to be politically dangerous. The novel’s political stand has been in some ways overshadowed by an 1823 play based on “Frankenstein” titled “Presumption! or, the Fate of Frankenstein” and the dramatic adaptations that followed. The consequence is that what disappeared from the cultural memory about “Frankenstein” is the fact that the creature speaks and tells his own story and tries to persuade Victor to do justice. In the 1823 play, the creature is barely a speaking part. And beginning with the 1931 film, where Boris Karloff plays the monster, the many spin-offs gave us a silent monster in ways that might make him less human than he seems when you read the book. That was one of the ways in which the novel got misremembered over the course of the 19th century. Part of that misremembering would include the many allegorical representations of class relations and race relations that used the image of Frankenstein as a vengeful monster.

Of the many screen adaptations of Frankenstein, which one is your favorite?

I would say that the James Whale from 1931 is my favorite version because it’s a black and white film, and even though the monster, played by Boris Karloff, doesn’t speak, his hands are astoundingly eloquent. Guillermo del Toro promised more fidelity to the original text by including the polar explorer’s storyline in his movie, but he continues to leave out the story of Justine, a working-class woman who is executed because of Victor’s hubris and his failure to be accountable for the catastrophes that he’s unleashed. I also think that del Toro’s movie makes the morality really obvious and includes a scene of forgiveness between Victor and the monster at the end, which Shelley never wrote. By leaving things mysterious and ambiguous, Shelley gave us something that our imaginations will be able to feed on for as long as we’re still reading books. Movies for the longest time have overshadowed the book. But “Frankenstein” is now one of the most frequently taught texts in high schools and English departments.

Why does the story of “Frankenstein” still fascinate us to this day?

It’s always going to be relevant because it deals with issues of justice, equality, and how we exclude versus include other people within our community; a lot of stories of racism and racial exclusion have often been rooted in the “Frankenstein legend.

The novel is so rich that it is eternal, and the questions that it raises are existential questions: What does it mean to be human? What is it like to belong or not belong? When we don’t ask to be born, and yet here we are, how do we make the best of it? All of those are profound questions that go with being human. And I don’t know of many novels that raise them as effectively as Shelley does in “Frankenstein.”