Frankenstein: Novel and Film-A Comparative Analysis

Introduction

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) by Mary Shelley provides the most potent, characteristic, and uniquely modern myth of science gone fatally awry. The common association of the name Frankenstein, thanks to many popular movies, is with the ugly, lumbering, murderous monster whom the book never names. In his many film versions, this lurching omen reflects the eras of his creation, from the dazed, scorned and feared working-class creature played by Boris Karloff in James Whale's depression-era Frankenstein (1931) to the slyly silent and sexually potent creature played by Peter Boyle in the me decade's Young Frankenstein (1974). But while movies have spread the image of Doctor Frankenstein and associated his name with the manlike monster he created, the novel carefully never names his creation which is, in fact, a doppelganger, a dramatic double of the obsessive undergraduate who made him.

Frankenstein: Novel and Film-A Comparative Analysis

Schoene (pp. 67-78) mentions the ancient myth of Prometheus took two forms: Prometheus pyrphoros (fire-bringer) and Prometheus plasticator (shaper). In the first the god steals divine fire, emblematic of the combined good and bad potentials of all technologies, for humans; in the second he shapes humans from clay and breathes life into them. In both Zeus makes Prometheus suffer endlessly for his disobedience. In the modern myth, Frankenstein shapes his creation from charnel matter and reanimates it (rather than creating life) with electricity, an occurrence, as Shelley writes in her preface, "supposed by Dr. [Erasmus] Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence" (Schoene, pp. 67-78). The bounds that Frankenstein transgresses are those of obedience to community. He makes himself a monster in two senses. The price is death not only for himself but for his family and potentially all humanity.

As Gothic novels of the supernatural became stale, authors added a twist, revealing at the end some realistic explanation for the fantastic occurrences. By moving that explanation to the beginning of Frankenstein, Shelley created the genre that has explored human fears of science ever since: science fiction.

On the shores of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, nineteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851), her future husband, Percy Shelley, and their charismatic friend Lord Byron engaged in a ghost-story contest. After seeing a vision of what she called "the hideous phantasm of a man," Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, the gothic novel that would bring her lasting fame. Even before Shelley's name was widely known, theatrical versions of her novel—the tale of Victor Frankenstein and his monster—frightened and appalled audiences all over Europe. The popularity of stage adaptations in the nineteenth century foreshad-owed the emergence of the Frankenstein monster as an icon of film, television, and other forms of popular culture in the twentieth century, including everything from comic books to Halloween costumes (Haining, pp. 34-47).

Indeed, the creature's deformity and pathos have earned it such an indelible position in the popular imagination that the name "Frankenstein" has come to denote not the ...