Beginning with the first dramatic version of Frankenstein on the London stage in the 1820's until Hollywood began churning out Frankenstein monster films (42 titles at last count), the general spirit of Mary Shelley's original has significantly shifted. What was once a literary classic about parental abandonment of human creations, or about the character distortions that arise when we deny a relationship to the feminine "Other", soon became a narrowly focused presentation of a mad scientist and a grotesque monster.
The different mediums of the stage and screen of course had its effect. Playwrights and movie directors, in the hope of attracting large audiences who weren't necessarily readers of classics, simplified the original plot. The important "stories within the story" that make up so much of Mary Shelley's framework were quickly excised in favor of the single theme of Dr. Frankenstein creating the Monster. Thus, in the stage and screen versions, Walton in the North is not seen learning about his own troubled heart, and the Monster has no platform in which to articulate his arduous journey into human adulthood.
By focusing on external action scenes rather than inner motivational developments, the story has been changed to make it more popular and stageable. It seems until Mary Shelley's Frankenstein by Kenneth Branagh, all Frankenstein movies were focused on the unthinkable thrill of creating life out of dead body parts. The isolation of Victor Frankenstein within his family and among his university colleagues, which is so important in the original is somehow minimized by de-emphasizing his relational contexts.
Emphasizing the "horror" of the physical creation of the Monster, and its often violent aftermath, has masked some of Mary Shelley's deeper meanings. Perhaps in this Mary Shelley may have been ahead of her time. To appreciate the ambigiuity of the Creature, as a project of Dr. Frankenstein's distorted unconscious, we need to be willing as an audience to see ourselves in the Creature, at some compassionate level. This is difficult psychologically and socially yet the stage and screen versions seem not that helpful to reach this end. Instead, in the movies the Monster, played most notably by the screw-headed Boris Korloff, is intellectually stupid (although somewhat endearing), mute and physically awkward. Yet Mary Shelley would not have made it that easy. Although she suggests that he was born without human memory or character (tabula rasa), the Creature educated himself through observation, trial and error and through reading classical literature. And physically, by being able to travel freely on ice glaciers, mountains and across frozen lakes, he seems more capable physically than the screen monsters. As a result, we probably feel less connected to this grotesque Other because he doesn't seem to be much like us.
The Monster, the focus of the Frankenstein movies, as some critics suggest, reflects not Mary Shelley's intention but the current social fears of the times. In the 1930's the fears of living in an increasingly unintelligible, technological age were much stronger than in 1816. Here in a grotesque Creature, created by the excesses of the scientific endeavor, we can see our fears come to life and watch them die at the end of the movie. Perhaps psychologically we can throw off our cultural anxieties by knowing that only mad scientists create such monstrosities, not ordinary people like us. With largely only external actions to go by, we as an audience don't have to deal with the Monster inside. We can participate with the townspeople, particularly in the 50's remakes, who get to chase after the violent, unthinking Monster who becomes an almost nuclear-like instrument of destruction. Here watching a monster flick (of which Frankenstein was only one of many) we can enjoy the violent urge towards banning the complicated and despicable in our lives. Best of all, we don't have to listen to Mary Shelley's Monster tell a largely sympathetic story of how he wanted to be a compassionate person but learned to hate from his human colleagues, particularly his creator.
Portrayals of the mad scientist with his grotesque zombie creation, however entertaining, seem to prevent us from identifying with the passion of Dr. Frankenstein and the human cry for companionship from the Creature. Mary Shelley, if she was alive today, would probably want us to know that you and I are also Dr. Frankenstein (both sides of him). We individually may not be mad per ce but dangerously irresponsible when we refuse to love that which we create with our imaginations. In any event, contemplating the original mythic tale by Shelley can go a long way in filling in the many holes that have been created by its post-productions
© Copyright 1996 by Arthur Paul Patterson, Winnipeg, Canada