So, a fun fact for you reader-types out there: two hundred and two years ago on this very night, between the hours of 2am and 3am (a fact which has been verified by astronomers who are much, much smarter than humans should ever be and can somehow actually calculate such things), a nineteen year old girl jolted out of her sleep in a cold sweat, while rain and hurricane winds lashed outside at her windows. She was staying at a Genevan villa for the summer with her poet husband, along with their mutual poet friend and a doctor, who had all challenged each other to see who could spin the best ghost yarn over a stormy weekend when they had nothing else better to do. This girl, who had come up blank while the others wrote circles around her -- the doctor, as a matter of fact, wrote the first ever work of vampire fiction, some seventy years before Bram Stoker came along with his offering -- had just had a nightmare so vivid and unnerving that, when she put it to paper, it was enough to beat out all the other participants' entries to become the scariest story produced in that one feverish weekend. As taken from her notebook:
"I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world."
This girl was Mary Shelley, patron feminist of goths and hipsters the world around, and at nineteen years old, she had just created the genre of science fiction, over a weekend, on a dare.
And now, for the biggest whiplash between settings and dramatic tableaus you're likely to encounter today:
Over the course of my elementary-middle school years, few events in the rotation of school months could be relied on to bring me as much excitement as the annual Scholastic book fairs. In the preceding weeks, I’d comb through the advance catalogs provided by the school with a red marker, circling and prioritizing and saving up allowance money for the day when Scholastic representatives, those strange and wonderful tribes of roving salespeople, descended into the school’s tiny library with book caravans in their wake. On the day itself, I’d wander wide-eyed through the makeshift aisles and calculate (with math skills that haven’t improved much in the time since) just how far the crumpled wad of dollar bills in my fist could be stretched to allow for the biggest stack of books to bring to the register.
It was on one of these Christmas-like occasions that I first noticed a book cover that would come to haunt my imagination in the times between lying down and falling asleep, for many nights to follow: gazing with hatred directly through the plane of the cover at unsuspecting passers-by, a stitched, mangled figure was making his way through a hellscape of a swamp, under the words Great Illustrated Classics: FRANKENSTEIN. As is sometimes the way with kids, rather than run from the frightening and unsettling content which the ominous cover promised lay inside, I immediately picked it up and added it to my stack for that year. Now, over a decade or more later, I can’t remember a single one of the other books I brought home with me that day. The ones I circled with red marker have long since been donated or stored away, but Frankenstein nestled itself DEEP into my consciousness – maybe even subconsciousness – and has lurked there ever since.
Mary Shelley's waking nightmare descended through two centuries to land there on top of my little book pile, and realistically, I was too young for it. Way too young. There’s not much gore in the plot, so much as Gothic creepiness, but that’s what probably unsettled me so deeply; it’s not a non-stop murderous rampage of limbs being ripped apart – kids are so inundated with layers of unreality in superhero movies and sci-fi video games now, how scary would that even be, I wonder? – it’s an obsessive man trudging through misty city streets with grave-mud on his boots. The Monster (far more articulate and philosophical in his book form than Hollywood would lead you to believe) doesn’t use any R-rated language; instead, he learns language by hiding for shelter in the crawlspace of a mountain cottage and listening in on the happy family inside. That crawlspace just happened to be identical to the one on the other side of the same wall where I laid my head down on the pillow every night… so you BET I lay awake there on several occasions, certain that a wretched, reanimated being crouched down just feet away, listening through the panels to pick up snatches of language.
What most unsettled me, however, was that the “Creature” promised by both the nightmarish book cover and general society to be a brutish, rampaging villain, deserving of fear and hatred, was nowhere to be found. This being, abandoned by his creator at birth without a name (to the headache of all English majors in the centuries since), was nothing whatsoever like the moaning, stiff-limbed, flat-topped and bolt-necked caricature known around the world. Legendary makeup artist Jack Pierce used his brush and spirit gum appliances to sculpt that interpretation onto the canvas of Boris Karloff, who then entered into immortality with his performances in the golden age of Universal Horror. It’s a totally brilliant and wonderful creation in and of itself, but in terms of adapting its source material, it may as well be a totally different character altogether. At the risk of reverting into lecturing teacher mode, the Creature in the book is superhumanly fast and strong, with flowing locks of black hair, a tendency to quote passages from Milton’s Christian epic Paradise Lost, and, most importantly, a broken heart. He should be, physical scarrings from his creation process aside, the epitome of the lonely Romantic hero that dominated the age in which Mary Shelley wrote her masterpiece, but the irony is that no one can get past those deformities, that otherness, and he is consequently reviled.
That outcasting really got under my skin, and has ever since; yes, the Creature descends into some less-than-savory courses of action as the novel unfolds, arguably earning himself the Monster moniker he’d been mislabeled with for so long after one or two acts of revenge against his maker, but – to my reading, anyways – there was always reasoning and sometimes even justification behind such behavior. Met with horror, rejection, and oftentimes outright violence during his every interaction with humanity, it’s really only a matter of time before the empty page of his newly-reanimated brain begins to give it all back in kind. You think I’m a Monster? Fine. I’ll give you one, then. For this reason, the Creature has always been a lightning-rod of sorts for outcasts, misfits, and anyone else shunned by general society as “other.”
Case in point: in the Karloff films (and parodied spectacularly in Mel Brooks’ & Gene Wilder’s masterpiece spoof Young Frankenstein) Frankenstein the scientist demands for his hunchbacked lab assistant go to the local medical college to find a brain suitable for transplant into his waiting creation. A “normal” brain is initially chosen, but then smashes to pieces in an accident, causing the hunchback to double back and pick out an “abnormal” brain instead (in the Brooks/Wilder film, the hunchback tells Frankenstein it’s from “Abby someone.” “Abby someone? Abby who?” “Abby…normal... I'm almost sure that was the name”). On a macro level, that seems a pretty apt statement for the movie, and for Frankenstein lore as a whole: abnormality reigns. The movies' scenery tilts in at 45 degree expressionistic angles that seem to trap viewers within their frames, the percussion section of their soundtrack is supplied at one point by a beating heart stimulated by electrodes, the actors' performances range from camp to manic hysteria. It's all weird and mesmerizing and not quite able to be pinned down satisfactorily, a glorious tightrope between dream and Mary Shelley's original nightmare.
That's also probably one of the main reasons I've never really been able to escape Frankenstein since that time of first discovery: it challenges you, asks the biggest possible questions about creation and death and what we owe to each other here in the time in-between... but since those questions can't be answered by any human, it remains rewardingly mysterious in the end. Assigned readings in high school, a focused college seminar, and countless late night movie viewings have all given me a greater sense of context for all things Frankenstein -- for example, did you know that James Whale, the Universal films director, filled his masterpieces with LGBTQ overtones that are now surprisingly (but commendably) overt for their release dates in the 1930s? -- but that prevailing sense of mystery and spookiness means that this story still has a primal immediacy with every encounter. I'm still there, hardly daring to breath beneath my covers, because I'm certain some behemoth is lurking just feet away, with a soul that's even more hurt and damaged than his patchwork anatomy. Anyone who's ever had to go through periods with that same perspective from the outside looking in... aka my time in middle school when I discovered Frankenstein in the first place... aka a young woman author in Geneva whose attempts at writing a ghost story are being scoffed at by the men around her... can understand why the Creature and his situation there ring such a bell, and it's one of the things I think all Frankenstein studies deserve such attention for.
The Creature finds his solitude, his voice, his sense of self-expression through books and reading. As someone who's still chasing down the sheer adrenaline high of those Scholastic fairs all these years later, I can't thank Mary Shelley enough for crafting this book for all of us who choose to do the same.
Go find what makes you "other," abnormal, Monstrous. Go chase it down and unleash it on the world. In the end, it's what makes us each of us, and the world at large, so much more ALIIIIIIIIVE.
Case in point: in the Karloff films (and parodied spectacularly in Mel Brooks’ & Gene Wilder’s masterpiece spoof Young Frankenstein) Frankenstein the scientist demands for his hunchbacked lab assistant go to the local medical college to find a brain suitable for transplant into his waiting creation. A “normal” brain is initially chosen, but then smashes to pieces in an accident, causing the hunchback to double back and pick out an “abnormal” brain instead (in the Brooks/Wilder film, the hunchback tells Frankenstein it’s from “Abby someone.” “Abby someone? Abby who?” “Abby…normal... I'm almost sure that was the name”). On a macro level, that seems a pretty apt statement for the movie, and for Frankenstein lore as a whole: abnormality reigns. The movies' scenery tilts in at 45 degree expressionistic angles that seem to trap viewers within their frames, the percussion section of their soundtrack is supplied at one point by a beating heart stimulated by electrodes, the actors' performances range from camp to manic hysteria. It's all weird and mesmerizing and not quite able to be pinned down satisfactorily, a glorious tightrope between dream and Mary Shelley's original nightmare.
The Creature finds his solitude, his voice, his sense of self-expression through books and reading. As someone who's still chasing down the sheer adrenaline high of those Scholastic fairs all these years later, I can't thank Mary Shelley enough for crafting this book for all of us who choose to do the same.
Go find what makes you "other," abnormal, Monstrous. Go chase it down and unleash it on the world. In the end, it's what makes us each of us, and the world at large, so much more ALIIIIIIIIVE.
