Notes on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Wednesday 10/2/24

I'm glad that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein (1818) so that we have much of what followed from it--like the James Whale films and the Halloween iconography of Frankenstein's creation--but what a tedious book.

It's a novel whose reputation and legacy has largely been formulated by people who haven't read it, in addition to the contours of its plot--or, I should say, the contours of its concept--which doesn't require the book to actually be read. Everyone knows what they think of as the novel's gist: Scientist brings dead body back to life. Patchwork body. Mayhem and terror ensues.

She couldn't write, though. The prose reads like that of a teenager throwing everything at the page, however illogical, thinking she's so creative and probably being told as much by people--men especially--with other motives. So much of it is laughably illogical. Now, you might say the premise is illogical, but I don't think so. The execution is the issue, because of all the padding, grafting, referencing, pasting in, rambling, and overextending to say something about this, and this, and that, and, oh yeah, this too.

What we get is something that reads like amateur writing, or fan fiction, but language has changed enough in these centuries since that just by Shelley using the language of her times--the way that people use the idiotic lexical forms of our times--the prose reads as "literary" to the average person who encounters it now. It's like a preachy comic book--the super-sized omnibus edition.

The horror component is diluted because the novel is essentially a rambling treatise. On what? Men and women are different. Okay. The Monster's physical ugliness, which is a very teenage theme and going concern.

The responses and motivations of the characters aren't believable. Victor brings his cadaver to life, and his biggest concern after--his leading emotion--is that it's not prepossessing. That doesn't track. But little of what's in this novel does.

You can invent anything. It can be wild. But there has to be an order, a prevailing logic, what gets called rhyme and reason, within whatever that world of the work/book is.

There's so much you have to get right in writing. If someone can put words together, that doesn't mean they understand human behavior and human nature. Rare is the writer who has a single thing they're adept at, when the truly great writer must be adept at all of it.

The novel has a motivating passion at its back, but there's no command, it's childish, there's showoff, "I know this!" and "I read this other book!" type of stuff. It's very high school. Or very high school literary magazine, I should say, but the student didn't write a piece like the other students, but rather a whole book.

We are better for having the Frankenstein monster, creation, call it what you will, but we're better off when the creation/monster is separated from the novel in which he originated. He's an ingredient for others to use, and an entity transformed into a different, more potent one by popular culture and our desire to be scared and for ghosts and monsters.

We say so many things about older books we haven't read because their titles and the names of their authors represent these certain ideas to us that have nothing to do with the text. For instance, someone who has never read Hemingway will say, "Maybe you're the next Hemingway..."

Frankenstein the scientist and his creation were filtered through assorted strains of popular culture and what became the Halloween holiday--with its business aspect--in America, so that the former acquired a new identity as the quintessential mad scientist and the latter rose to new life as lumbering monster.

Ironically, the horror movies that followed over a century after the novel's publication were more artful. We have what people think of as this important literary novel--true literature, which Frankenstein isn't--that's protected by when it was written, the manner of its prose's appearance to modern readers, by mostly not being read by modern readers (or when made to in school, which almost shouldn't count, given that kids are much more focused on all of these other things), the reputation its mostly incongruous legacy fostered, and films that were always seen as popular entertainments for "regular" people; which really meant a lot of kids and simple, average adults. The films were cut from the highbrow cloth. They were the comic book-type simplifications meant as lowest common denominator fare, the low-hanging culture fruit.

If you were an adult in the 1930s who said they went to see Bride of Frankenstein at the local movie theater in Boston or an adult in the 1950s who said the same about taking in The Curse of Frankenstein at the cinema in London, other adults wouldn't have thought you were cultured but often the opposite if they regarded themselves as properly educated or even just mature; you know, an actual grown-up. You could have waxed eloquently on the technique of director James Whale, but eyebrows would raise and you'd have some work to do in winning people over to your side or just so much as getting them to think you weren't wasting your time.

Shelley's novel is no match for Whale's two Frankenstein pictures. The Monster's post-novel second life is much richer than if he'd only been Shelley's literary creation. Her novel was not the thing itself or an end, but rather an introduction of several forms that the popular culture and the public's imagination would make better use of.

I first read Frankenstein in high school. (After having read a storybook version as a child, and watching assorted Frankenstein films--a dozen of them.) Then I read it again in college. Then several times in the years since. If one thinks I'm desecrating holy ground--or unholy ground, as the case may be--have a go, or another go, at the novel this October. It's not not worth reading. I'm saying that. What I am suggesting is that people who think it's one thing are going to find out that it's another.

The work has historical significance largely because of what came after it, but that doesn't mean the work has value in providing an outstanding reading experience. Some value, yes. As I said, I've read it a number of times. But it's useful to revisit things to look at what they really are. Very rarely is any writing an actual great work of writing.