August 30 2024 Our Monsters, Ourselves: Mary Shelly, on her birthday "Beware; I am Fearless and therefore Powerful"- Mary Shelly
Our monsters, ourselves; genius, madness, inspiration, the quest to become as gods; who among us has not longed to steal the divine fire, to look beyond ourselves, to defy all limits and laws? To be, even for a moment, the unconquered Victor Frankenstein?
Yet as Prospero said of Caliban, we must also say of Frankenstein's monster; "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine."
Like Milton in Paradise Lost and the magnificent novel of transgression written by Emily Bronte in direct reply to Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Mary Shelly’s references and sources include the myth of Prometheus in Hesiod’s Theogony, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Plato’s Protagoras, poetic versions of his myth by Goethe and Byron, the play by her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the myth of the fallen angels and their monstrous children the Nephilim from the apocryphal Book of Enoch.
As I have written of Vander Meer's retelling of Frankenstein in the novel Borne: Mary Shelly's glorious novel was also about the abandonment of a child who is no longer perfect, among a number of other themes, including the origins of violence.
I believe a major theme of the novel Frankenstein is the monstrosity of God, who like Victor creates and then abandons his child when it is imperfect and no longer a reflection of his, when we become our own free and independent beings. Yes, Victor wants to become a god, which is why the story resonates with everyone, and is an allegory of the failure of reason and science to realize Idealist and Utopian visions of humanity, the novel being both a codification and critique of Romantic Idealism.
I like Victor, and have used variants of this name as aliases because he is a figure of Milton's rebel angel, but also the monster, a figure of the Shadow based on Caliban in The Tempest. The story is about their relationship as parent and abandoned and damaged child. As a reference to both Mary Shelly’s and Emily Bronte’s model in Goethe’s Faust, the roles of Victor and Catherine reprise that of Faust, while the monster and Heathcliff are versions of The Devil.
Frankenstein addresses themes of science and civilization versus nature which echo Rousseau, reason versus passion which prefigure Freud, and both of these within a Promethean rebellion against God, authority, and universal Law as a form of Idealism; this from the perspective of the monster's creator.
From the monster's view, the novel portrays the disfigurement of the soul through abandonment by a parent who also functions as a figure of a creator-god and of Authority, known as the problem of the Deus Absconditus which refers to the god who bound humankind to his laws and then ran away before he was caught, and who drives the child to achievement and supremacy- what the Greeks called Arete or Virtue but also denoting superiority as with Achilles in the Iliad, one of Mary Shelly's sources- in a chosen arena but who like Alberich in Wagner’s Ring cannot love, rendering all victory meaningless and hollow, dehumanizing the child and shaping a vessel of rage and vengeance, with the iron self discipline and will to enact subjugation of others in their turn, terrible and pathetic and with the grandeur of a tortured defiant beast trapped in the same flesh as the innocent who needs to be loved and cannot understand why he seems monstrous to others. It is about birthing monsters, how systems of oppression shape some of us into monsters with which to terrorize the rest of us into consent to be governed and submission to authority, and the chaotic plasticity of identity and relationships.
As written by Octave Mirbeau in The Torture Garden; “Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren't the gods monsters? Isn't a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!”
A story which is at once Greek tragedy and Freudian study of the process and relations between the id, ego, and superego, with a third parallel storyline relating a Romantic reimagination of Biblical Genesis like that of Blake, it is both the apotheosis of Romantic Idealism and its first criticism, exegesis and classical myth, dialectic on responsibility and discourse on Aristotle's categories of being, critique of Rousseau's natural man and of Nietzsche's Superman which it also inspired in a recursive loop of influence across the seas of time. Its author was a Pythian visionary whose insight reached centuries into the future, and whose immense scholarship reimagined some of the greatest works of our historical civilization.
Mary Shelly's influence echoes through time, multiplies, and reshapes the contexts of its polymorphous meanings. One cannot think of Kafka's Gregor Samsa without thinking of his original, the dual-aspected monster-child created to bind our nature with reason, nor read her sources and references in the prophecies of William Blake and Milton's Paradise Lost without reevaluating them in terms of Mary Shelly's novel; her work resonates through past and future, and what touches, it changes.
Who can read the work of Emily Bronte without the meaning of her great novel Wuthering Heights changing with our awareness that its author thought of herself as Victor Frankenstein and as the titan Prometheus cast out of heaven like Milton's rebel angel? That Heathcliff is her monster, a demon to be united with in an exalted Nietzschean rapture of transformative rebirth? And does this not change one's reading of her source Frankenstein?
A nested set of puzzle box themes and contexts, multiple narrative threads which create paradoxes of meaning, role reversals and inversions of identities, and the questioning of the mission of civilization and the morality of progress; Mary Shelly created the modern world with her great book Frankenstein.
The Corpus Frankenstein: essential films and books
Gothic
Frankenstein 1931 film Its Alive scene
Van Helsing creation of the monster
Penny Dreadful Caliban’s Speech; Why would you allow me to feel?
Mary Shelly
Young Frankenstein Puttin on the Ritz
The Frankenstein Chronicles
The Rocky Horror Picture Show - The time warp
(I was in the Berkeley live cast at the UC Theatre, Indecent Exposure)
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein:
Blade Runner trailer
The New Annotated Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Leslie S. Klinger (Goodreads Author) (Editor), Guillermo del Toro (Introduction), Anne K. Mellor (Afterword)
Bernie Wrightson's Frankenstein, Bernie Wrightson (Illustrator), Stephen King
(Introduction), Ron Marz (Foreword)
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Harold Bloom (Editor)
The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein, Andrew Smith (Editor)
In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing,
Chris Baldick
References
Lucifer & Chloe montage from Neil Gaiman’s Netflix series, cover of Wicked Game by Ursine Vulpine & Annanka
Borne Series, by Jeff VanderMeer
https://www.goodreads.com/series/221766-borne
http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/botting.html
Sources of Frankenstein
Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, by John Milton, Christopher Ricks (Annotations)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/336518.Paradise_Lost_and_Paradise_Regained
The Books of Enoch, The Book of Giants, Joseph B. Lumpkin commentary and translations
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35675694-the-books-of-enoch-the-book-of-giants
Tales from Ovid: 24 Passages from the Metamorphoses, by Ted Hughes (Translator), Ovid
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/133951.Tales_from_Ovid
Hesiods Theogony: from Near Eastern Creation Myths to Paradise Lost,
by Stephen Scully
Prometheus Bound & Prometheus Unbound, by Aeschylus, Percy Bysshe Shelley
Leo Strauss on Plato’s "Protagoras", by Leo Strauss, Robert C. Bartlett (Editor)
Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/406373.Faust?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=G8YX7KrdkG&rank=2
Mary Shelly and her monster, a reading list
Frankenstein at 200 – why hasn't Mary Shelley been given the respect she deserves?/ The Guardian
In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein, Fiona Sampson
Mary Shelley: The Strange True Tale of Frankenstein's Creator, Catherine Reef
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37570555-mary-shelley
Hideous Love: The Story of the Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein, Stephanie Hemphill
Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley, Charlotte Gordon
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22294061-romantic-outlaws
The Lady and Her Monsters: A Tale of Dissections, Real-Life Dr. Frankensteins, and the Creation of Mary Shelley's Masterpiece, Roseanne Montillo
Harvester of Hearts: Motherhood under the Sign of Frankenstein, Rachel Feder
The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, Peter Ackroyd
Frankenstein, Based on the Novel by Mary Shelley, adapted for the theatre by Nick Dear
Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years, Christopher Frayling
Frankissstein: A Love Story, Jeanette Winterson
Dean Koontz's Frankenstein Series
https://www.goodreads.com/series/40542-dean-koontz-s-frankenstein
The Frankenstein's monsters of the 21st Century/ BBC
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210303-what-is-the-frankensteins-monster-of-the-21st-century