I’ve read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein several times, and on my bookshelf I have a copy lavishly illustrated by comic book artist Bernie Wrightson. The story has been told and retold and re-imagined. Indeed Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein is one of my favorite films.
But the Hollywood versions of the book tend to focus on “the monster” — bolts in the neck, bad haircut, arms extended, clumping along as if sleepwalking.
The book, however, is more complex and nuanced. It can be read many different ways. It is, on its surface, a great monster tale. It’s a book that is often credited with launching science fiction as a genre. Its subtitle, “The Modern Prometheus,” implies a morality tale in which Frankenstein’s creation is an affront to God, or that Frankenstein himself has defied God by creating life through unnatural means.
Now, as Ruth Franklin writes in The New Yorker, a new novel by Dutch writer Anne Eekhout, Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein, poses the idea that the novel may have resulted from Shelley’s relationship with another woman. Indeed, in the original book, female characters are minor. But Victor himself could have been a proxy for Shelley, and his loathing and fear of “the fiend” his struggle to come to terms with homosexuality and the social stigma associated with it at time.
While Hollywood has made Frankenstein’s name synonymous with the monster, in the book, Victor Frankenstein refers to his creation in vaguer terms — “the being,” “the fiend.” The ambitiousness of the horror has allowed numerous interpretations over the years. The origin of the story is well-known. Shelley began writing it at age 18, after the death of her first child, and her grief is thought to have inspired the original idea of bringing the dead back to life.
As Franklin writes:
The novel can be read as a fantasy of reproduction without women, giving rise to queer-oriented interpretations. Critics have noticed that the horror and revulsion with which Victor reacts to his creation, which is male, resemble the “homosexual panic” sometimes manifested by men confronted with homosexuality in nineteenth-century England, where sexual relations between men had been criminalized for at least five hundred years. The creature initially appears at Victor’s bedside as he awakens from a nightmare about kissing Elizabeth, his cousin and intended bride, who turns into a corpse in his arms. Victor, whose closest relationship is with his boyhood friend Henry Clerval, refers to his creation as a “dreadful secret” that he can reveal to Elizabeth only after their wedding night.
In the introduction to the Wrighson illustrated edition, Stephen King says he believes most modern readers find Frankenstein disappointing. There’s been too many movies and attempts to play up the horror. What’s lost is the subtler aspects of the book. King calls it “a wild tale” with “joyous, energetic, representations of life.”
Indeed, those representations are open to a wide range of interpretations, and that’s what makes Frankenstein so captivating. I haven’t read Eekhout’s book, but just hearing about it makes me want to re-read Shelley’s original.
Life in the Word Mines 