I think there is now some new display there. But as of mid-November, the steps leading out of NYC’s Union Square subway station, onto 14th Street, had quite a literary cast:
I especially noted the name of Mary Wollstonecraft, since I had been reading her Frankenstein at that time. Her full name is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, since she married the famous poet Percy Shelley. I will call her Mary Shelley (or abbreviate it as MS), since that’s what Wikipedia does, and also because it is shorter. 🙂
There seems to be no contemporary portrait of the young MS. Here is Reginald Easton’s “idealized portrait”, made after MS’s death:
You will note that Edgar Allan Poe’s name appears just above Mary Shelley’s. That is appropriate, since Poe, who of course wrote similarly chilling tales, came after MS chronologically. Poe was only 9 years old when Frankenstein came out in 1818. MS, herself, was just 20 years old at the time … having begun the book as a teenager of 18. (How many novels of such significance were written by authors who were that young?)
(Now, in retrospect, I think the name on the steps — since there is no “Shelley” — might well have been that of MS’s mother (confusingly, also Mary Wollstonecraft), an early feminist, who like her daughter was a writer (1759-1787)).
Though I don’t think I made a conscious connection, I happened to pick up Frankenstein a bit before Halloween. It turned out to be a book with rich rewards for me. I happen to think it’s a great novel, in its own right. But it also resonated with a number of literary experiences I’ve had over the years …
To begin with, Frankenstein is (you might be surprised to hear) an epistolary novel … at least in its formal construction (which, to be sure, you might forget about in the midst of the action). The outermost “frame” is a series of letters from Captain Walton (who is exploring northern waters) to his sister. Within that is Dr. Frankenstein’s narrative. And within that is the narrative of the Creature that Frankenstein has made.
Some of the earliest famous English novels, e.g. Richardson’s Clarissa (1749) were in epistolary form. (See my Clarissa review elsewhere on this site, dripping with guilt for my never having truly finished this monstrously long work.) The shell-like technique of narrative-within-narrative was later used by Emily Brontë in her masterpiece Wuthering Heights (1847). (I wonder if she was inspired by the structure of Frankenstein?)
More specifically, MS drew, for her novel, on her European journeys. She travelled on the Rhine River, and obviously heard about the nearby Frankenstein Castle, where the alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel (1673-1734) claimed to have created the “elixir of life”.
She also visited Geneva, Switzerland … this area furnished the setting for much of the book.
On the science front, MS was aware of the discovery by Luigi Galvani, in 1780, that a dead frog’s leg will twich when stimulated by an electrical spark. This “galvanism” was “new and astonishing” to Dr. Frankenstein, and evidently helped him in making his Creature. (But note, movie fans: there are no flying sparks — or even laboratory scenes — in the original book, which, though having much action, is perhaps more a “novel of ideas” than you might imagine.)
What hit home the most to me (probably due to my recent reading) is the influence of literary Romanticism on Frankenstein. The word “Romanticism” perhaps evokes tales of “romance” in the sense of love stories … but I think this really misses the mark. Part of literary Romanticism is “Gothic” horror fiction, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) typically given as the pioneering work.
A very explicit homage to literary Romanticism in Frankenstein comes from its debt to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous narrative poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Early in the novel, in Capt. Walton’s second letter to his sister, he writes:
I am going to unexplored regions, to “the land of mist and snow,” but I shall kill no albatross; therefore do not be alarmed for my safety or if I should come back to you as worn and woeful as the “Ancient Mariner.” You will smile at my allusion, but I will disclose a secret. I have often attributed my attachment to, my passionate enthusiasm for, the dangerous mysteries of ocean to that production of the most imaginative of modern poets.
Here is an appropriately frozen illustration (by Gustave Doré) from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
Mariner was first published in a collection called Lyrical Ballads (1798), which included poems by Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Lyrical Ballads is now considered the real start of the English Romantic movement in literature. (Note that — modestly — the authors’ names are not given on the title page nor anywhere else in the book. Perhaps MS was influenced by this modest gesture, in not including her name on Frankenstein’s title page, of the first edition?)
Also in Lyrical Ballads is Wordsworth’s poem “Tintern Abbey”, of which this excerpt is quoted in Frankenstein:
… The sounding cataract
Haunted him like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to him
An appetite; a feeling, and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrow’d from the eye.
(The “him” was originally “me” in both places above, but Dr. Frankenstein makes this change to honor his friend Clerval, who had met a sad fate …)
We see here the love of nature, unmediated by thought. Lyrical Ballads also celebrates the interest and worth of plain rural folk … a theme echoed in Frankenstein, where the Creature starts his wanderings over the earth by staying at a farmhouse with country people. (Staying, that is, until his physical ugliness horrifies and alienates the family.)
But Frankenstein also has literary roots that go back much farther into the past. In an episode of the novel that seems more symbolic than literally plausible, the Creature, as he walks through the forest, finds a briefcase containing three books: Milton’s Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch’s Lives, and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. Much later on, he (repenting) will compare himself to Milton’s Lucifer:
When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.
And note the Paradise Lost quotation on the title page.
I am not sure of the relevance of the Plutarch (help, anybody?) … but Werther (1774), by the 24-year-old Goethe, is a “Sturm und Drang” novel that was influential for the future Romantic movement.
Going even farther back, there is Dante’s Inferno, where Satan, in the deepest level of Hell, is eternally trapped in ice … here pictured in another Doré illustration:
MS is surely invoking this tradition, by setting the North Pole as the place where the Creature, at the end of the story, is drawn.
Finally, we enter the realm of mythology. The subtitle of Frankenstein is “The Modern Prometheus”. Prometheus, defying the other gods, steals fire from them, to give to humanity. Like Prometheus, Dr. Frankenstein meets a dire fate, for venturing to bring to mankind a tool that it should not have: the means to create life from inanimate material.
Perhaps not too far off, I will visit (or revisit) some of the many adaptations of Frankenstein, notably the cinematic treatments (of which Wikipedia says there are 73, including the famous 1931 Boris Karloff version). I will be surprised if any of these retellings are as thought-provoking, or as resonant with literary history as the original novel. For now, I will leave you with my favorite quotation from Frankenstein — a novel which, bereft of actual lightning bolts as it may be, still crackles aplenty with its own kind of energy:
“You are my creator, but I am your master: obey!”
lessthanamegabyte 