Frankenstein: A Cultural History

Susan Tyler Hitchcock has produced a wonderful study on one of horror's greatest icons Frankenstein. Starting with his invention by the young Mary Shelley before her marriage to Percy Shelley when she was just 18, Hitchcock traces the development of the Frankenstein phenom all the way up to its present time. Along the way, Hitchcock thoroughly treats Frankenstein's various incarnations along the way on stage, in the movies, television and later in comic books and pop culture items. With each incarnation it's interesting to see the way then contemporary story tellers retold the tale with an eye towards the issues and science of their times. Like his cousins Dracula, the Mummy and later the Wolf Man Frankenstein was recruited to either assuage or tease out our deepest fears giving us either a good scare or a timeful laugh. We can only hope that were he to actually come to life, he would simply and tersely observe all that's been made of him and say: "Good!"

Hitchcock's book is infectiously readable. I'm a big fan of Frankenstein (novel, movie, mythology) and have to say this book does not disappoint. Hitchcock's book is well-researched and even entertaining. What fascinated me most was all the parallels she was able to find, some obvious, some innovative, to what culture and society has created since Shelley's 1818 publication.

Frankenstein and Dracula were born on the same night -- sort of. The story of how Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Byron's physician, John Polidori, spent an evening in the Villa Diodati, which resulted in the creation of these two seminal horrors has been told often enough, but probably never as well as Ms. Hitchcock does. After that, she goes on to discuss the book, and the frequent reiterations that have helped the Monster adapt to changing social mores and cultural needs. She writes well, and for the most part accurately, making this small cultural icon a fascinating subject. If there is a flaw to the book, and I can't say for certain that there is, it seems as if Ms. Hitchcock has focused narrowly on her subject, and may, perhaps, have accepted general opinions regarding subject that were merely peripheral to the primary theme. A case in point is her dismissal of Lord Byron's treatment of his illegitimate daughter Allegra Biron (Byron chose this spelling as a way of aknowledging parenthood without confering legitimacy.) Ms. Hitchcock seems to accept the conventional wisdom that Byron was unfeelings and uncaring, as tossed the poor child aside to be raised by a group of Italian nuns -- an opinion which is largely trounced in Doris Langley Moore's "Lord Byron -- Accounts Rendered". I have no convenient way of testing other minor details -- and it's hard to say whether this type of thing really matters given the focus of the book. Since most people haven't read the original novel (it's not an easy read) Ms. Hitchcock gives an excellent understanding of Ms. Shelley's inspiration and creation, and her discussion of the subsequent interpretations of the work is lively and interesting. This is a good academic work suitable for casual reading, and probably a must read for fans of horror movies and horror fiction.

The monster lives! Truer than any proclamation on a theater marquee, Frankenstein's monster still walks among us as it has for almost 200 years since it was first created. Susan Tyler Hitchcock, who last traced literary history in _Mad Mary Lamb_, has been on the lookout for the monster for the past twenty years, and now has written _Frankenstein: A Cultural History_ (Norton). "My guiding assumption has been that the monster's story says something important. Otherwise we would not keep telling it." The retellings are not just movies, although these do keep coming long after the archetypal films of Boris Karloff. Hitchcock traces the story in stage plays, television comedies, pulp novels, comics, plastic models, and breakfast cereals. The monster has risked being trivialized ever since its inception, but especially in our scientific age, it keeps scaring us with intimations that we may know too much for our own good. Mary Shelley produced an original story but one not without its antecedents. Shelley subtitled her story, published in 1818, "The Modern Prometheus", drawing on the legend of the god who suffered for giving humans fire. She also drew upon the science of the time that was investigating how bodies twitched when sparked with electricity. Immediately after her novel was published, there were stage productions that introduced business that was not in the novel, like the bumbling laboratory assistant, electrical reanimation machines, a monster mute except for grunts and groans, an angry crowd seeking the monster and its creator, and a cataclysmic ending of them both at the climax. It was in 1931 that "something irreversible happened to Frankenstein", the film from Universal Studios. It "... locked in new and indelible imagery for the Monster. It had so wide and powerful an influence that ever since, renditions of the story have either depended on, ricocheted off, or actively defended against associations with it." The reputation of the Shelley novel had gone into decline (more in the ascendant now with appreciation of the romantic movement and of women authors) and few knew of the original story, but everyone came to know the monster as portrayed by Boris Karloff. Karloff's image (with its sutures, bolts in the neck, and square-topped head, all developed by makeup artist Jack Pierce) is the image even for those who haven't seen the old movies. Frankenstein, along with Dracula, rescued Universal Studios and sparked endless remakes and sequels. They became standards of television in the 1950s, when Universal's horror library was marketed to local television stations, which in turn made programs of them called something like "Thrill Theater" or "Creature Feature", hosted by a local ghoul like Vampira or M. T. Graves. The broadcasts were pitched to adults, but they became a staple of adolescents who were potential audiences for new films like _I Was a Teenage Frankenstein_. When we were making our first voyages into outer

For 191 years, Frankenstein's hulking monstrosity could be found, not only in our nightmares, but also on bookshelves, comic-book racks, theater stages, movie and television screens, as well as toy-store shelves. The monster indeed cast quite a long shadow across our popular culture and literary historian, Ms. Hitchcock (Mad Mary Lamb: Lunacy and Murder in Literary London), does a Herculean effort to enlighten the reader to the many facets and incarnations of the monster- from Shelley's original novel, to Karloff's tragic portrayal, to Dick Briefer's 1950's horror comic The Monster of Frankenstein and beyond. Frankenstein: A Cultural History is a comprehensive and entertaining account of Shelley's infamous literary creation, and serves as a testament to the popularity of that, in Shelley's own words, "hideous phantasm of a man."