REVIEW-ESSAY
J. Stephen Addcox
The Frankenstein Family Tree: Two Hundred Years of Mary Shelley’s Descendants
Lester D. Friedman and Allison B. Kavey. Monstrous Progeny: A History of the Frankenstein Narratives. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2016. 256 pp. $99.95 hb, $27.95 pbk, $27.95 ebook.
Christopher Frayling. Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years. London: Reel Art, 2017. 208 pp. $39.95 hc.
Frankenstein will always be with us, as a character (both creature and scientist, now almost joint owners of the name through cultural squatter’s rights) and as an emblem of what is troubling or unnerving at any particular period since its original inception. As the articles in this special issue demonstrate, interest and fascination with Frankenstein and the mythology that it created remain strong two hundred years on. And yet, to understand Frankenstein today requires more than an intimate familiarity with the novel (or novels, as Anne K. Mellor argues that the original 1818 and the revised 1831 editions reveal “a text and an author without stable boundaries” [211]). Just as Shelley took her original text and remolded it to conform to her aesthetic sensibilities almost fifteen years after she first wrote it, so too have authors, playwrights, screenwriters, and many others refashioned Shelley’s characters over the last two centuries.
What these adaptations, remediations, and transformations (or mutations) demonstrate is not only the pervasive and persistent power of Shelley’s original vision, but also the extent to which that vision is amenable to a whole host of narratives conveying various cultural, historical, societal, and scientific anxieties. As a result, as we read Frankenstein it behooves us to understand the effects of its cultural wake; like Walton’s ship plowing into the ice and frost of the inhospitable northern ocean, Frankenstein has left ripples and waves in its path. Understanding how those reverberations have influenced and inspired later stories is crucial in appreciating Frankenstein’s significance today.I recently had a conversation with a colleague who screened Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974) for his students after they finished reading the novel. He expressed disappointment that the class did not seem to grasp Brooks’s satire and humor in the film, despite their knowledge of the novel. While the students’ confusion may have stemmed from the film’s age, I could not help but wonder what their reactions would have been if they had seen James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931)and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) first? In a way, familiarity with the cultural history of Frankenstein on film is necessary to appreciate how the later satire functions. This story also underscores how much Frankenstein’s afterlife, so to speak, has been the result of a constant shifting of the narrative between a variety of modes and media. Appreciating Frankenstein’s contemporary influence is as much a function of reading as it is the result of listening, viewing, and even playing and/or interacting.
Contemporary scholarship should maintain a focus, then, not only on the text of Shelley’s novel, but also on the wealth of material that has emerged in the aftermath of the novel’s publication. Lester D. Friedman and Allison B. Kavey’s book Monstrous Progeny: A History of the Frankenstein Narratives (2016) captures the significance of this as much in its title as in its content. The immediate implication is clear: Frankenstein is cast as a kind of literary mother, giving birth to numerous monstrous offspring, a notion that Shelley herself suggested by referring to the novel as “my hideous progeny” in her introduction to a susequent edition of the novel in 1831 (Shelley 169). Furthermore, the plural “narratives” brings into sharp relief the variety and abundance of stories that can trace their lineage back to Frankenstein. In this review, alongside Friedman and Kavey’s more traditional scholarly monograph, I also examine Christopher Frayling’s Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years (2017). Both books are distinctive in design and purpose but work well together as they address the question of Frankenstein’s continued longevity in complementary ways. Whereas Friedman and Kavey focus on tracing the critical and scholarly history of Shelley’s novel, along with a series of chapters on a whole host of films that are either direct adaptations or reveal a strong influence of the novel on their narratives, Frayling begins earlier with the history of the novel’s composition. Then, after taking his readers briskly through some of the novel’s adaptations, the remaining pages of Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years are reserved for images of book covers, film posters and stills, as well as paintings all inspired by Frankenstein. Frayling’s choice to devote so much of his book (nearly half) to images works well with its large-format publication, which highlights the extraordinary creativity and craft that infuses so many of the stories that have grown from the root of Mary Shelley’s imagination.
Rather than taking each book in turn, an integrated examination of Friedman and Kavey’s work alongside Frayling’s better serves to convey how each text contributes to the growing scholarship not only on Frankenstein itself but also on the narratives it has spawned. In stitching together these two approaches to studying Frankenstein’s influence, Frayling’s book offers an ideal starting point with its meditation on the novel’s origins. Upon being asked during an interview what single day from history he would most like to have witnessed, Frayling turns to June 17 or 18, 1816 (the precise date being uncertain), when Mary Shelley first related to Percy, Byron, and Polidori (Byron’s physician and traveling companion) the creation of Frankenstein’s monster as part of their group project of each writing a story of the supernatural. Not only is this evening the beginning of Mary Shelley’s composition of the complete novel, Frayling identifies in this moment the impetus from which flows the entirety of the Frankenstein mythos. His subsequent chapters also take up the scientific history of the period, with a focus on the question of vitalism, a debate on “the very origins and nature of life. Where did the ‘vital spark’ of life actually originate from—from God or from biology or rather from parents? What of the soul? And what happened to the soul after death?” (21). Frayling shows how these scientific, philosophical, and theological questions informed Shelley’s early framework for her novel, and that her creation of Victor Frankenstein’s mentor in Ingolstadt, Professor Waldman, was likely based on Humphry Davy, whose discussions of the failings of alchemical science provide a model for Waldman’s dismissal of Frankenstein’s early and misguided research into alchemy.
Mirroring the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century scientific search for the existence of a single spark to define the nature of life, Frayling’s fascination with the late June evening of 1816 suggests the presence of a literary vital spark that illuminates all of the Frankenstein stories. Friedman and Kavey, on the other hand, begin by curating a number of scientific developments from the same period as Frayling, but their argument focuses on drawing out how those developments find parallels not in Shelley’s composition of the novel, but in the narrative itself. In particular, their first chapter, “In a Country of Eternal Light,” draws attention to the moral facet of scientific research in the early-nineteenth century by highlighting Walton’s role as a lens through which we judge Victor Frankenstein’s approach to his project. At the novel’s end, when Frankenstein urges the crew to follow Walton and continue toward the North pole, Friedman and Kavey point out that “knowledge produced at the expense of those subject to the whims of the expedition’s leader is morally suspect because the man who generates it has abdicated his social responsibilities in a quest for personal aggrandizement” (22). The authors’ argument draws out the way in which Shelley’s Frankenstein falls into a kind of moral indeterminacy insofar as his own project to create a living being from dead matter cuts against the move toward communal and peer-reviewed scientific study in the early nineteenth century. Frankenstein’s refusal to conform to the emerging professional standards for scientific study and practice functions to reveal his need to “prove his superiority” (29).
So, while Friedman and Kavey couch their discussion of scientific developments and Frankenstein in an intra-narrative perspective, and Frayling’s approach draws a more direct connection with Shelley’s own creative process, both books establish the importance of historical scientific study as a foundation on which Shelley builds Frankenstein. This initial discussion sets the stage for what ultimately becomes the focus of both books: the cultural influence and lineage of the entire mythology spawned by the novel. For Friedman and Kavey, “Frankenstein serves as an early example for why lone scientists pose a danger to themselves and the social fabric they abandoned when they chose to pursue natural knowledge outside the bounds of peer review and social oversight” (39). Frayling, furthermore, points out that as Frankenstein adaptations began to appear in theaters soon after the novel’s publication:
The Franken-label was beginning to catch on. The monster himself came to be associated, in political cartoons, with a whole range of perceived social dangers—in the form of agitating workers, Irish peasants, radical reformers, Russians—which were thought to be out of control: the monster of mob rule; a symbol for readers who were anxious about change. (89)
The use of “Franken” as a prefix to describe problems or issues that generated fear and anxiety allowed the novel and its mythos to spill out into other areas of life and culture. This relatively rapid expansion of the novel’s influence seems to be based, in Frayling’s estimation, in the way that the name “Frankenstein” came to represent both the fear of the science (and the scientist) that created the monster, as well as the monster itself. This tendency, which continues even today, to take the title of Shelley’s novel and use it to describe events or ideas completely unrelated to her work suggests that the narrative’s focus—the creation of a being formed from disparate parts—perhaps gave rise to the practice of affixing part of her title to other terms, creating monstrous nomenclatures whose very origins hearken back to Frankenstein’s project.
While Frankenstein’s influence grew throughout the nineteenth century, it was the twentieth century that saw its pervasive power spread throughout the entertainment industry, particularly film and television. Indeed, more than half of Monstrous Progeny is devoted to considering the way that film has drawn on and developed the narrative and themes of Frankenstein. Friedman and Kavey, while acknowledging earlier silent film productions, begin the core of their argument with James Whale’s iconic 1931 adaptation for Universal, which has given us the most memorable and reproduced representations of the monster. Indeed, Boris Karloff has nearly usurped the image of the creature from Shelley’s descriptions, and Friedman and Kavey are careful to point out how unique his appearance would have been to audiences in 1931. In particular, they draw attention to the ways that Whale uses light in his film to reveal the creature methodically, exposing him one piece at a time, as if the creature himself is being constructed through the scene’s balance of light and shadow, the shots cutting between the illuminated parts of the creature before finally putting his full figure on display.
Furthermore, Kavey and Friedman suggest that Whale’s use of lighting is part of what has made his film iconic. They identify three light sources with which Whale builds the world of his film: “untamed natural forces, such as lightning, the sun, and the moon; the light made subservient to man, such as lamps, candles, and matches; and the light that exists somewhere in between, like torches, that can either illuminate or destroy” (111). In this way, they demonstrate how the film’s lighting develops a metonymic connection to the concept of unbridled scientific knowledge—sources both of light and knowledge can cause great destruction or render great benefits. The torch’s flame that illuminates the laboratory can also burn it to the ground.
The film’s emphasis on light and shadow finds its origins in the novel: during the creation scene, Frankenstein’s “candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, [he] saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open” (Shelley 35). One wonders if Frankenstein’s subsequent revulsion is a result of the poor lighting in the room as much as the creature’s “yellow eye.” But the modest illumination of the candle also becomes distorted and mutated into the destruction of the torch in many film adaptations. Kavey and Friedman underscore the extent to which the Universal Frankenstein films elected to place greater emphasis on the concept of a violent, torch-bearing mob as a response to the creature. The stereotype of the vigilante mob largely originates in Whale’s films and later sequels, which show how “the townspeople band together to destroy whatever threatens their stability” (127). The inadequate light of Frankenstein’s original laboratory is contrasted with, and ultimately succumbs to, the destructive force of the mob in these early film adaptations and expansions.
What Christopher Frayling’s book contributes to the conversation surrounding the evolution of the Frankenstein mythos is its wealth of images, which illustrate and illuminate many of the arguments that Kavey and Friedman convey in their text. The first-ever illustration for the novel, Theodor von Holst’s 1831 engraved frontispiece, is reproduced as a full-page image, demonstrating that von Holst took pains to recreate Shelley’s description of the contrast between light and shadow in his envisioning of the moment when the creature is “born.” Because Frayling’s book is 9.5 x 11 inches, readers can appreciate the level of detail in the frontispiece, which shows a flood of light emanating from Frankenstein as he flees the room where the creature now lies, bewildered. The light shining down on the creature does not, as it does in the novel, come from a candle, since both of Frankenstein’s hands are visible and empty; rather von Holst envisions a light that seems to proceed from Frankenstein himself, a light that escapes from the creator to imbue the creature with life. The image also foreshadows Frankenstein’s decline in the novel as he flees into a darkened hall, leaving the light of his discovery to illuminate his creation. Moving the created being into the light while its creator escapes into darkness is also descriptive of the implicit argument that Frayling’s book makes as it proceeds from the story of Shelley and her composition of the novel to the stories that have flowed from Frankenstein in the years since. It becomes apparent as the book continues, giving way to more and more images from all sorts of adaptations, that Shelley’s vision for her story has slowly been supplanted by the new creations of stage and screen. Like a literary Ship of Theseus, Frankenstein’s narrative detailhas been dismantled, changed, supplanted, and reformed time and time again.
The images that form the second half of Frayling’s book are presented under the heading “Frankenstein—A Visual Celebration,” emphasizing that part of what has given Shelley’s novel such longevity is that it has leapt into a new medium and remained there, almost since the advent of film. The visual celebration devotes a great deal of material to images from the original Universal productions, suggesting that these films, although not the first to adapt the novel for the screen, have been and remain the most influential. One particularly telling image shows Boris Karloff being led to the set on the Universal backlot—Karloff’s face is obscured by a hood, since the studio did not want the public to be aware of what the monster would look like. The iconic design for the creature that makeup artist Jack Pierce developed is so ubiquitous today that imagining a time when it needed to be kept secret helps to crystalize the extent to which these films have influenced the broader cultural image of Shelley’s work. What follows is a series of publicity posters for the first Universal Frankenstein film, and several thematic parallels between them begin to emerge. First, the creature’s face looms large in almost every poster, contributing, no doubt, to the tendency for viewers to equate the name “Frankenstein” with the creature rather than the creator. These posters also consistently display the creature with greenish skin, which, although in direct contradiction to Shelley’s description of the creature as having yellow skin, remains a staple feature of Frankenstein-style creatures to this day. Finally, in almost all of the images, the creature is shown as a dominant and dangerous force. Two early promotional posters represent the creature as a giant, picking up hapless victims while shooting destructive laser beams from his eyes. Clearly, imaginations ran wild in an anticipation of the film.
These visual consistencies further expose how much film culture has directed the expansion of the Frankenstein mythos. This expansion is also shown in the way that Frankenstein movies increasingly jumped between a variety of genres to explore new territory. In some cases, films relied on a heightened sensuality, in which the creature is depicted as a dire threat to sexualized and victimized women. Earlier in his book, Frayling draws attention to Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781), which served as a template for some of the staging and publicity for James Whale’s Frankenstein. Fuseli’s terrifying painting becomes an archetypal representation of the danger to women posed by a succession of Frankenstein-style creatures. The gendered nature of the threat posed by these creatures is highlighted in Frayling’s “visual celebration” by a collage of grindhouse film posters in which the monster’s previous centrality has given way to his potential victims, often clothed such that little is left to the imagination. Films inspired by Shelley’s novel, however, have not moved solely in the direction of darker and more salacious. Lighter fare such as Young Frankenstein, The Munsters (1964-1966), and Frankenweenie (1984, 2012) have delved into comedy or children’s entertainment while still drawing on elements from the novel. But as these films tack farther and farther from Shelley’s work, a reality emerges from the successive images that Frayling presents: filmmakers in many cases are not adapting or drawing from Shelley’s novel; they are crafting new work based on earlier films. The original material of the novel has slowly given way to copies of copies and modifications of modifications, drawing Frankenstein into all kinds of narrative genres.
Friedman and Kavey refer to these more distant adaptations as “Mary Shelley’s Stepchildren” in their penultimate chapter. They offer a kind of taxonomy for understanding how different films have drawn on Shelley’s source material; their three broad categories are transitions, translations, and transformations. The first two show the most direct debt to Frankenstein; “transitions” describes any film that focuses on “organisms that were never alive being given life,” and “translations […] incorporate tales about hybrid creations” (147). The final category, “transformations,” turns to robots and cyborgs as “a logical evolution of Shelley’s novel” (147). Taken together, these categories allow Kavey and Friedman to explore a number of contemporary films, including the Blade Runner (1982, 2017) and Robocop (1987, 2014) franchises, as the most recent offspring of Frankenstein, demonstrating that the novel’s influence shows no signs of abating anytime soon.
Both Monstrous Progeny and Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years recognize that much of what we now associate with Frankenstein developed as a result of the creative inspiration that Shelley’s work spawned in others. Just as Shelley herself was inspired by the nascent work of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century scientists, so have artists, writers, and performers continued to find their inspiration in her story. If anything, the novel remains, to some extent, shrouded in mystery and wonder, and perhaps it is this very quality that has led so many to give it new voice through the medium of film. What neither book particularly addresses, however, and which should be of interest in the digital age, is the way that Shelley’s work is moving into digital genres such as interactive fiction and video games. These new media forms offer innovative ways of retelling the novel so that now the reader can take part in the story. Inkle Studios, well-known creator of interactive fiction games, released an interactive version of Frankenstein in 2012, and many other modern video games draw on the concept of a created being gone awry. As we continue into the twenty-first century, this will become a rich area for continued adaptation and expansion of Shelley’s work, birthing more stories from her “hideous progeny.”
WORKS CITED
Mellor, Anne K. “Choosing a Text of Frankenstein to Teach.” Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. 1818. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: Norton, 2012. 204-11.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1818. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: Norton, 2012.
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