Frankenstein: A Cultural History

Few things would be more profitable than being a concessionaire for the Dracula and Frankenstein labels. One or the other of these industries is steadily represented by product. Currently it is the turn of the latter. Arriving simultaneously on New York stages are the musicals Young Frankenstein on Broadway and Frankenstein off.

Horror stories on page, stage and screen are ever popular, but no chainsaw or Friday the 13th movie can vie with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula in engendering a progeny comparable those of the brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. Monsters come and go, but the man-made creature and the great bloodsucker will occupy us as long as there are laboratories to dabble in and necks to bite into. So, for example, books about Dr. Frankenstein and his creature have proliferated, the latest being Susan Tyler Hitchcock's admirable Frankenstein: A Cultural History.

Though all of its nearly 400 pages are well worth perusing, people too busy or too lazy can get useful initiation from reading the introduction and first chapter. Hitchcock introduces us to the five writers or would-be writers present one June night in 1818 at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva. Here John Milton had once visited and his aura may have lingered, but that summer it gathered Percy Bysshe Shelley, age 23; his mistress, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, age 18, who was to be his second wife; 28-year-old George Gordon, Lord Byron; his persistent but unloved mistress, Claire Clairmont, 19, Mary's stepsister; and John William Polidori, Byron's physician and traveling companion, and a bit of a writer.

One evening, after the group had been reading a collection of German tales of the supernatural, Phantasmagoriana, Byron proposed that each of them could do better than that. Shelley himself never even began to write a ghost story, and Claire only talked about writing. But Byron did write a fragment of one that inspired Polidori to compose his Vampyre, which was to become a source of Stoker's Dracula. Mary Shelley started thinking about Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus. It took nine months to write and a further nine until, after many rejections, it saw print in 1818.

Mary Shelley was to write several other novels, but it was this one by her teenage self—first published anonymously in three volumes—that made her lasting reputation. The writing is uneven, and though an easily available edition in the Penguin English Library manages to squeeze it into 230 pages, it does have its longueurs. Perhaps Joyce Carol Oates was right when, in a 1973 journal entry, she wrote, "Read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Unfortunate style, cluttering up a perfectly irresistible tale." More significantly, thinking of the novel in another context, John Updike observed, "It is curious that our capacity for identification and sympathy goes out least reservedly to non-human characters."

As Hitchcock points out, "Frankenstein the man is both hero and villain, applauded for his courage and genius at the same time that he is punished for his pride and transgression. His monster is to be both feared and pitied; for the humans he encounters, Frankenstein's monster is the ultimate other and at the same time a mirror of the deepest self." That is the ambiguity, the duality, that makes the story immortal; actually, the twofold duality—both in Frankenstein and in his creature.

Thus identification here can go either way. If the reader thinks of himself as some sort of troubled or misunderstood genius, he can feast on Victor Frankenstein; if he sees himself as unattractive and unloved, there is the monster to identify with. No one is left out.

In a new book about books, Classics for Pleasure, Michael Dirda proclaims Frankenstein "the greatest novel of the Romantic movement," though not a masterpiece compared to its contemporary Pride and Prejudice. "What some have dismissed as melodramatic caricature, others may understand as archetypes: the Overreacher, the Good Old Man, the Fragile Beauty, the Shadow Self." Rightly he sees Shelley as the mother of science fiction, and finds the monster's "shadowy presence in works as different as Dickens' Great Expectations, Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," among others.

"More than five hundred editions of the novel are in print today," Hitchcock writes. "Fifty thousand or more copies of the novel, in its various adaptations and editions sell in the United States in a given year," and the work "has been translated into at least thirty languages." Her book traces its permutations in all conceivable media in just the right amount of detail.

I strongly recommend the elegantly written and steadily absorbing Frankenstein: A Cultural History, perhaps especially to anyone who plans to see either or both of the new musicals. If one thinks of these stage shows as two pages in an album, one will find the complementary and completing pages in this eminently worthwhile volume.