Transcript and Bulletin.
I’m here
to confess that I’ve never read Frankenstein, the classic work of literature
that just celebrated its 200th birthday. I’m guilty of believing some
of the myths about the book.
There are many misconceptions about
Frankenstein. First, author Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s monster was not a
zombie, pieced together and connected by bolts. Nor is he green in color that
films and cartoons have portrayed. This eight-foot tall repulsive creature had
skin in yellow tones that tightly fit a body of veins and muscles. His eyes
glowed, his teeth shone white and emphasized his long black hair and black
lips. Most importantly, Frankenstein is not the monster, but it is the name of
the scientist who created the monster who was never named in the book.
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley
was the daughter of philosophers. Her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, an author
herself, was one of history’s founding feminists, writing and arguing that
women are not inferior to men but women historically lacked the education afforded
their male counterparts. Wollstonecraft died only eleven days after giving
birth to her infant daughter.
Although her father remarried, Mary
felt overshadowed by his two younger children. At the age of 14 she attended a
boarding school for six months, however her father’s debt and failed publishing
business allowed for no more formal schooling.
Mary did have the unique and fortuitous advantage of a homeschool experience
in her father’s library. She also traveled with her father during educational
trips, and spent much time conversing with his many educated and worldly
colleagues. Her father guiltily admitted that while he had not followed the pedagogy
of his intelligent and feminist wife who died after childbirth, her daughter Mary
received a valuable and complete education.
Mary Shelley conceived of the story
of Frankenstein (subtitled The Modern Prometheus) when she was only 18 years
old. During a scandalous affair with one of her father’s followers, Percy
Shelley, she traveled to Europe and gave birth to a Shelley’s child. It was
that rainy summer in Switzerland that their friend and fellow traveler, poet
Lord Byron, proposed that they all spend their time writing ghost stories.
Wrestling with the idea, Mary imagined a corpse being reanimated. What started
as the short story of Frankenstein’s monster was transferred to paper over the
next two years.
Percy
Shelley and Mary married in 1816 after the suicide of Shelley’s wife. Mary gave
birth to two other children but all of her three first children perished soon
after birth. In1818, her book Frankenstein was published anonymously and actually
thought to be written by Mary’s husband. Her fourth child, born in 1919 was a
son named Percy Florence. His birth pulled Mary out of a depression she
suffered since losing her infants in 1815, 1816 and 1817.
Her
husband Percy Shelley died in a boating accident in 1822 and afterwards Mary
devoted her life to writing and raising her surviving son. Although she was
famously known for Frankenstein, she did write other successful novels
including Mathilda, Lodore and Falkner. The second edition of Frankenstein bore
her name as author in 1823.
Reading
about Frankenstein, one discovers that while it began as a ghost story contest,
it can also be considered a gothic horror story, science fiction, or a treatise
of the weaknesses of humans who fool around with science, not understanding the
consequences. Frankenstein is horrified at the monster he created in with body
parts and electricity in his laboratory. It’s a story of an incredible loneliness,
a failed search for companionship, and a terrible knowledge that one can never
fit in.
The public radio show Science
Friday, aired by over 350 NPR stations, offers seasonal book clubs with
conversations, podcasts, and more. This winter’s book club is Frankenstein and
participants are reading a special edition annotated “for scientists,
engineers, and creators of all kinds.”
There are probably hundreds of
editions of Frankenstein that have been published in the past 200 years. The
Science Friday choice is a cooperative publication between the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology Press and Arizona State University. It is available
through the Minuteman Library Network (our library has a copy); however,
Arizona State University and MIT have made it available in open access as a PDF
(portable document format.) It’s available on the MIT Press website.
The Annotated Frankenstein, edited by Susan Wolfson and Ronald Levao in 2012, is a perfect first reading of edition with illustrations and commentary by professors who have taught the novel. The NEW Annotated Frankenstein edited by Leslie Klinger and published in 2017 features over 200 illustrations and nearly 1,000 annotations. The Graphic Revolve: Common Core Editions published a graphic novel version of Frankenstein in 2014. Frankenstein: The Graphic Novel was adapted for younger children.
The Annotated Frankenstein, edited by Susan Wolfson and Ronald Levao in 2012, is a perfect first reading of edition with illustrations and commentary by professors who have taught the novel. The NEW Annotated Frankenstein edited by Leslie Klinger and published in 2017 features over 200 illustrations and nearly 1,000 annotations. The Graphic Revolve: Common Core Editions published a graphic novel version of Frankenstein in 2014. Frankenstein: The Graphic Novel was adapted for younger children.
There
are over 300 items in the Minuteman Library Network attributed to Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein, including DVDs and non-fiction works devoted to Mary
Shelley and her work. The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein
by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler is a biography of Mary that juxtaposes the
tragedies of her life against her success as a writer. A new graphic biography
of Shelley will be on library shelves at the end of January: Mary’s Monster:
Love, Madness and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein by Lita Judge. The book
will be a welcome addition to the others with over three hundred pages of
black-and-white watercolor illustrations.
The power of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein is obvious. Shelley’s passions and griefs were transferred into
her first, and most famous, work much like the electricity that charged Frankenstein’s
corpse to give it life.
