One cool and rainy summer night in 1816, a group of friends gathered at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva. “Each of us will write a ghost story,” Lord Byron announced to those present, among them Dr John Polidori, the poet Percy Shelley and 18-year-old Mary Walstonecraft Godwin (later Shelley).
“I have begun to compose a story,” she wrote. – One that speaks to the mysterious fears of our nature and evokes terror.
Her story became a novel, which was published two years later under the long title: “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young naturalist student who, blazing with fierce ambition, brings a body to life, but rejects with horror and disgust the terrible creature he has created.”
“Frankenstein” is at the same time Rocky Horror’s first science fiction.
There are Italian and Japanese Frankensteins. Mel Brooks, Kenneth Branagh and Tim Burton also have their own versions.
“Frankenstein” characters or themes have inspired comic books, video games, spin-offs, TV series and songs by so many different artists including Metallica.
Author photo by Alamy
The novel has been used as an argument for and against slavery and revolution, vivisection and empire, and as a dialogue between history and progress, religion and atheism.
The prefix “Franken-” flourishes in the modern lexicon as a synonym for any anxiety about science, scientists, and the human body.
It has also been used to shape fears about the atomic bomb, genetically modified crops, strange foods, stem cell research, and to characterise and assuage fears about the notion that ‘scientist’ did not exist.
Big changes are scary, as Fiona Sampson, author of In Search of Mary Shelley, says:
“With modernity comes a sense of anxiety about what humans can do, and especially anxiety about science and technology.”
Frankenstein combines these modern concerns about the possibilities of science with fiction for the first time – with startling results.
The novel is not absolute fantasy at all; it is a speculation about what might happen if people – and in particular scientists who are overly fascinated or out of control – go too far.
There are several moments in the novel of popular nineteenth-century intellectual discourse. Mary Shelley’s writings show that at the Villa Diodati in 1816, Shelley and Byron discussed “the principles of life.” oh, Alamy
Despite these elements of modern thought, Frankenstein had his own theory, method, or scientific details.
The culmination of creation is described simply: “With a restlessness almost agonising, I gathered round me the instruments of life to infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing lying at my feet.”
“The “science” of this novel is rooted in its time, yet timeless. That’s why it is so vague, it serves as a flexible point of reference for the next two centuries of great change and fear.
Monster Mash
But surely the reason Frankenstein has become synonymous with concern for science is because audiences were impressed by the “monster” and the “mad scientist”. How did this happen?
Just as the scientific descriptions in the book are rather vague, Christopher Frayling, in his book Frankenstein: the First Two Hundred Years.
The novel became a scandalous play and a huge hit, first in the UK and then abroad. These early plays, writes Frayling, “set the tone for future productions.”
They concentrated the story in basic archetypes, adding many elements that audiences recognise today, including a comic “nerd”, the phrase “He lives!” and a monster who grumbles something.
Author of the photo, Alamy
Perhaps it’s a double-edged sword: the success of the Hollywood incarnations (notably and James Whale’s 1931 film featuring Boris Karloff as the “creature”) has largely ensured the loneliness of the story itself, but has somewhat overshadowed Shelley’s original version.
“Frankenstein” [fiilm] created the definitive cinematic image of the mad scientist and in – variously stealing fire from the gods and giving it to man, as well as personifying the dangers of crossing the line.
Another great allusion of the novel concerns God and Adam, and a quote from Paradise Lost appears in the book’s epigraph: “Did I ask thee, Creator, to mould me a man out of clay?”
Perhaps it is the creature’s humanity – and its tragedy – that has often been forgotten in its cinematic transformation into a silent but terrible monster.
Shelley gave the creature a voice and literacy so that it could express its thoughts and desires (the creature is one of three narrators in her book). Like Caliban from The Tempest, into whose mouth Shakespeare puts poetic and moving speech, the creature’s cry haunts its creator:
“Remember that I am your creature. I should have been your Adam, but I am rather a fallen angel, whom you gladly cast out without and alienate still more when society repels him. He is created good, but it is the rejection that breeds his murderous vengeance.
It is a powerful allegory of responsibility to children, strangers, or those who do not conform to conventional ideals.
“Just as we sometimes identify with Frankenstein (because we’ve all taken risks, we’ve all had moments of hubris) and, in part, with the creature. They are both aspects of ourselves – all of us,” says Fiona Sampson. “They both tell us how to be human.” And that’s incredibly powerful.”
But the latest adaptation, which is being released in cinemas, restores empathy and humanity – central values from Shelley’s novel that have often been lost in productions of the work.
Ahead of its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in August, director Guillermo del Toro said of the film and the creation:
“Frankenstein is a song about the human experience… There is so much of my own biography in the DNA of the novel.”
When he won the 2018 BAFTA Award for another monster fable, The Shape of Water, Del Toro thanked Shelley for the inspiration.
“She shared the burden of Caliban and gave weight to the burden of Prometheus, gave voice to the silent and presence to the invisible, and showed me that sometimes to talk about monsters we need to create our own, and literature does that for us.”
It is certainly unlikely that when Mary Godwin first came up with her story of the creepy monster in the summer of 1816, she could have imagined how powerful and influential it was in culture and society, science and fear, continuing to inspire debate – and art – well into the twentieth century “.
” And now I call on my despair again after this to go forward and flourish.”