The Man-Made Monster

By Paul Gray

THE ENDURANCE OF "FRANKENSTEIN" Edited by George Levineand U.C. Knoepflmacher; University of California; 341 pages; $16.95

Of all the imaginary monsters that have lurched forth in the past two centuries, none has frightened more people more often than the one sparked into life by the idealistic scientist Victor Frankenstein. Dracula retains his bite, to be sure, and has flapped into current vogue on stage and screen. But the overtones of the thirsty count's exploits are chiefly sexual, leading to titillation rather than thought. That is not true of Frankenstein's man-made man-monster. He troubles the mind because he is a projection of the mind, a soaring ambition shockingly embodied in flesh. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) appeared well before Freud, well before the technologies of organ transplants and genetic tinkering that make the laboratory creation of life ever more plausible. Yet the young author, only 19 when she began her tale, guessed horrible possibility that increasingly haunts the modern mind. It is not just the sleep of reason that brings forth monsters; reason working at its loftiest pitch can do the same job just as well.

Such speculation may seem lugubrious to those who know the monster only through Boris Karloff 's film impersonations or through such burlesques as the TV sitcom The Munsters and Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein. As this collection of twelve essays suggests, though, Mary Shelley's novel is a surprisingly open-ended source of disturbing, even terrifying implications. Its awkwardness and philo sophical uncertainties mark Frankenstein as the first and most powerful modern myth, not a pure Jungian river flowing through the collective unconscious but a polluted industrial spillway.

Biography alone can never explain leaps of imagination, but the facts of Mary Shelley's life do point toward the direction she took. She was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, an author and pioneering feminist who died of a retained placenta eleven days after little Mary's birth in 1797. Her father was William Godwin, a novelist and Utopian planner. Despite his free-living principles, Godwin acted outraged as any bourgeois papa when Mary, then 16, ran off with Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. In Percy, the impressionable Mary found a dreamer like her father, but several times larger than life. She absorbed much of his apocalyptic optimism and encyclopedic learning. She also took time to ponder the casualties that Shelley's blithe spirit left in its wake. In the year before she began Frankenstein, she bore Shelley a daughter who lived less than two weeks. She confided a heartbreaking vision to her journal: "Dream that my little baby came to life again, that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby. I think about the little thing all day." Not long after Mary started her novel, Shelley's abandoned first wife Harriet committed suicide.

So the motherless child grew up to become, at first, the childless mother. What Mary knew of idealism and birth was darkened by what she had learned, painfully and young, of despair and death. In the clearest, most succinct essay in The Endurance of "Frankenstein, " Critic Ellen Moers points out that Mary was one of the few women authors until recent times who wrote and published successfully during the same years that they were having babies. Mary's pregnancies, Moers notes, "record a horror story of maternity of the kind that literary biography does not provide again until Sylvia Plath."

Small wonder that in her tale Mary projected the ordeal of birth onto a man, who must build a "workshop of filthy creation" to realize his goal.

Yet Frankenstein is not simply a woman's revenge. It is not, in fact, simply any one thing. Beneath its rhetorical, overwritten surface, the novel moves as fitfully as a dream, allowing as many interpretations as there are willing interpreters. The classic Karloff films take only part of the story and twist that as well.

Karloff's monster is stiff-jointed and barely verbal; Mary Shelley's monster is quick on his feet and can speak like a Romantic poet on an off night: "I will glut the maw of death until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends." Similarly, most popular dramatizations of the novel have singled out the Faustian side of Frankenstein's quest: the monster is his punishment for seeking too much power.

Mary's version is less moralistic and straightforward. Frankenstein may err in creating the monster, but he commits a far greater wrong in repudiating the creature once he brings it to life. The catastrophic failing is not too much ambition but too little compassion.

Even so, those who feel that twelve scholarly essays on Frankenstein are eleven too many may be half right. A fascinating subject is nearly buried in sepulchral dithering. True, the essayists are earnest and erudite, and their prose is rarely worse than that required to win the fellowships and respect of academe. But the capital offenses are all here: the preening citations of the obvious: "In the film The Bride of Frankenstein, as Albert LaValley reminds us, Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary Shelley and the monstrous bride . . ."; the fancy notion among professors that authors and characters " articulate" rather than speak; the impossibly pretentious titles ("Vital Artifice: Mary, Percy, and the Psychopolitical Integrity of Frankenstein "). Pity the poor parodist when such things are written seriously. Never mind. Mary Shelley's monster lives through such fussy attention, just as he has survived all the murderous, torchbearing hordes of ignorant villagers in the movies. The Endurance of "Frankenstein " may be a collection of inert parts, but its theme makes it worth the attention of any reader who is ready to provide a spark .

Excerpt

Most of us first became acquainted with Frankenstein and his terrifying creation not through the pages of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel but through our childhood Saturday afternoons at the movies . . . By the time we read the novel the images from various films are so firmly imprinted on our minds that it is almost impossible not to filter the events and images of the book through the more familiar ones of the films. We are apt to distort the novel to fit a familiar mold, miss what is fresh or unfamiliar in it. . .

Even in their worst moments, for example, the classic Frankenstein films were never so rhetorical and loftily mannered as the language of the novel. And familiar settings, characters, and actions are missing. Where is Frankenstein's marvelous laboratory? What has happened to the big creation scene?

. . .Where are Fritz and Ygor and Doctor Praetorius? And Maria, the little girl drowned -- in the lake?

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