by Mary Shelley
James Whale, director of Frankenstein (Universal Pictures, 1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (Universal Pictures, 1935)
LSK: Were you familiar with the book? Or only the old [1931] film?
MB: That’s a good question. I knew the book really well, I’d read it more than once, but I was really enamored of the James Whale films.
LSK: That’s impressive. Unlike most comedies, and there have been dozens of Frankenstein films made, none of them paid much attention to the original material. You paid a great deal of attention to that material. How did you get Gene Hackman involved in the film?
MB: Gene Wilder used to play tennis on weekends in those days with Gene Hackman. Hackman asked him what he was doing, and Wilder said, “We’re doing a kind of strange comedy. Mel wants to do it in black and white to give it some gravitas,” and he explained Young Frankenstein. Hackman said, “Do you think there would be anything in it for me? I’d love to do a comedy!” And Wilder said, “There’s a perfect part for you, but there’s no money. It’s a very low-budget film.” Hackman replied, “I don’t care about the money, I just want to do what I enjoy.” So he came over, and he met with me, and I said, “It would be an honor to work with you. I don’t have to audition you, I know you’re good!” And that’s how it came about.
LSK: I saw also, from doing a little research, that you cast a real Frankenstein. It’s uncredited, but he appeared in the film.
MB: Yeah. He had the name “Frankenstein,” and he was kind of, you know, joyous, and so we put him in. I think he was one of the people who was screaming while the creature was being thrown through the window.
LSK: How did you resist giving him a screen credit?
MB: I think he said he didn’t want credit. Let me give you one more piece of information that might be valuable. In the film that James Whale did in 1931, there is a scene where the doctor brings the monster to life. In that scene, there are a lot of gadgets, and a lot of buzzing and fizzing and all kinds of little machines that constituted the state of the art of electronics in 1931. I loved them and thought they were just fabulous. I did some research, and I found that they were created by a man named Kenneth Strickfaden. I traced him and found that he had all of that stuff in a garage in Santa Monica. We went down and told him we would give him credit and pay him enough money that it would make sense to lease his equipment to us, so we could use it in the movie. He said, “Sure,” and I said he’d have to supervise it so we didn’t make any mistakes. So he did it, and we have in our movie in the original laboratory scene all of that stuff.
LSK: And it works so well, because in the script, Gene Wilder discovers his grandfather’s original laboratory!
MB: This year [2014], 20th Century Fox is doing an incredible celebration of Young Frankenstein—it is indeed the fortieth anniversary of the making of the film. We’re going to go to Grauman’s Chinese Theater [in Hollywood] and put our fingers in the cement and all that.
LSK: Where is that equipment now?
MB: I think it’s in the hands of Strickfaden’s heirs [Strickfaden died in 1984, at the age of eighty-eight].
LSK: What’s your favorite scene in the film?
MB: My favorite scene is the quiet little comedy scene, with Marty Feldman, when the doctor has failed miserably and the creature has not come to life. It lays there as this big, dead hulk, stitched together, and they’re having dinner, and it starts with Gene Wilder, Dr. Frankenstein, saying “Reputation, reputation,” just the way they did in the old movie. And [Inga, played by Teri Garr] says, “Darling, you haven’t touched your food,” and he puts his hands in the mashed potatoes, and he says, “There, I’ve touched it, I’ve touched it!” Then Marty Feldman comes in and he says, “I’ll never forget my old dad. When these things would happen to him—the things he’d say to me …” and then he doesn’t talk! It was the most brilliant and crazy thing he ever did! Everyone just waits and waits, and he doesn’t talk. So finally—I didn’t do any direction at all—finally, after two minutes of silence, Gene picks it up and yells, “What did he say?” And Marty Feldman says, “Get out of the bathroom, give someone else a chance!” And then he sticks a big potato in his mouth. It’s just the most unusual, crazy dinner scene ever done on film.
LSK: There are so many wonderful scenes.
MB: I was so happy to get that on film! One scene we just couldn’t get on film, we just all kept breaking up laughing. That was the one in which Gene Wilder says, “All right, get the bags.” And Marty Feldman says, “OK, you get the blonde, I’ll get the one in the turban.”
LSK: It’s so Marx Brothers! What was your biggest disappointment? What did you not get to do that you wanted to do?
MB: I had no disappointments. I did absolutely everything I wanted to do. Not even in the release of the film—I loved what Fox did. I loved Alan Ladd Jr. for giving us all the money, but it wasn’t that much; we made the whole film for $2.2 million, I think. It was going to be a Columbia picture but they wouldn’t allow me to make it in black and white. But when I got to Fox, Laddie said that it should be in black and white, as a salute to the great James Whale. So Laddie was very important to the film, to the stature of the film and the feelings about it.
LSK: I look forward to showing it in my class!
MB: It was a pleasure talking to you. I’m glad someone is doing a companion to the book!
1. See Foreword, note 41, above.
2. Radu Florescu, Alan G. Barbour, and Matei Cazacu, In Search of Frankenstein (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975), 166.
APPENDIX 5
Frankenstein in Academia
IN THE FINAL quarter of the twentieth century, scholars rediscovered Frankenstein and Mary Shelley. As Timothy Morton writes, “Frankenstein criticism [is] an industry that has been burgeoning since the 1980s.”1 Morton suggests a breakdown into six categories, which he admits are wholly arbitrary: (1) the body, medicine, and science; (2) commodity culture and social structure; (3) gender and queer theories; (4) genre, literary form, and literary history; (5) language and psyche; and (6) race, colonialism, and orientalism. More than fifteen years have elapsed since Morton’s categorization, and the growth of Frankenstein scholarship has continued apace, especially with the proliferation of Shelley websites.2 Without creating an extensive bibliography, it is not possible to give a true picture of the breadth of Frankenstein studies, but Morton’s categories remain useful for an overview of the field.3
The “body, medicine, and science” category looks at science in Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley’s day and at the two writers’ involvement with key figures in the scientific revolution. See, for example, Marilyn Butler’s fine essay “The Shelleys and Radical Science,”4 examining the Shelleys’ reading in science, or Martin Willis’s broader work, Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century.5 The subject has been examined in popular books such as Roseanne Montillo’s The Lady and Her Monsters: A Tale of Dissections, Real-Life Dr. Frankensteins, and the Creation of Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece.6 The Shelleys found themselves in the middle of the debate among scientists (the name itself a neologism of the age) about the nature of the “life-principle”—with friends like John Abernethy and Humphry Davy on the “materialist” side and William Lawrence on the “theological” side of the issue.7 Other historical-scientific issues, such as the need for cadavers for medical study8 and the discoveries of the properties of electricity,9 are woven into the text of Frankenstein.
Under “commodity culture and social structure,” Moore intends to include studies of Marxist thought and cultural studies, as well as literary criticism that focuses on how the novel reflects its specific historical context (“historicism”). Elsie B. Michie, for example, argues that Frankenstein is a story of production of a “commodity,” namely the creature, and that Victor Frankenstein is an alienated producer of commodities. Even the novel itself is viewed as a commodity to be produced by an artist alienated from the marketplace.10 Franco More
tti argues that the creature is a displaced version of the worker, arising from the feudal poor. Viewed as a race apart, he is deeply disturbing to the bourgeoisie. In Moretti’s view, “The literature of terror is born precisely out of the terror of a split society, and out of that desire to heal it.”11
Frankenstein also echoes some of the debates of the French Revolution on the role of government in child rearing, including the glosses of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the other English Jacobins. Scholars have examined in detail how the creature’s education follows the Rousseauian program of schooling, and in particular how the creature mirrors the “natural man” of Rousseau’s Second Discourse. The novel can certainly also be read as a demonstration, and a criticism, of Mary Shelley’s father’s views on education.12 See Alan Richardson’s fine collection Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832.13
A very broad category of criticism may be labeled “gender and queer theories.” Some of the criticism focuses on the historical and cultural contexts of gender images (that is, what it means to be a “man” or a “woman”) in Frankenstein. For example, Mary Jacobus’s important essay “Is There a Woman in This Text?”14 considers whether Frankenstein should be read as criticism of the “oedipal politics” of Milton’s Paradise Lost. She observes that in Mary Shelley’s narrative, the central tragedy of the creature’s life is the inherent impossibility of his ever bonding with a female counterpart; instead he is forced to rely solely on his creator, the flawed Victor.
Other works of criticism focus on Mary Shelley’s status as a woman writer, including biographical studies that emphasize her relationship to her father (and deceased mother), her experiences as a mother herself (with three children dying in childbirth or infancy), and her relationship to Percy Shelley. Key readings include Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s “Horror’s Twin: Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve,”15 a detailed feminist interpretation of the novel; Katherine C. Hill-Miller’s “My Hideous Progeny”: Mary Shelley, William Godwin, and the Father-Daughter Relationship,16 which examines the overlapping figures of the creature, Elizabeth, and Mary Wollstonecraft; Ellen Moers’s classic Literary Women,17 and Anne K. Mellor’s “Possessing Nature: The Feminine in Frankenstein.”18
As a novel that has multiple pairings of women (Elizabeth/Justine, Elizabeth/Caroline, Elizabeth/biological mother, and Safie/Agatha) and multiple pairings of men (Alphonse/Victor, Victor/creature, Victor/Clerval, and Victor/Walton), Frankenstein’s queer relationships have been examined as well. For example, Frann Michel’s “Lesbian Panic and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” considers the novel’s depiction of the infertility of same-sex relationships between women (Justine/Elizabeth and Agatha/Safie in particular) to be the result of the thwarted homosexual relationships that are at the book’s core (Walton/Victor and Victor/creature).19 That is, Michel holds that Mary Shelley’s personal views about lesbianism are expressed indirectly through the failure of male homosexual relationships. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues, in her influential Between Men: English Literature and Homosocial Desire,20 that the male/male relationships in Frankenstein and in other late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century fiction, including Godwin’s Caleb Williams, and the protagonists’ creation, in such cases, of a small, all-male intimate family, express deep-rooted homophobia.
Much Frankenstein criticism has focused on the history of the genre, the growth and demise of gothic literature, Mary Shelley’s literary influences, the source of many of her themes, her method and process as a writer, and problems of determining the “true” or “best” text of the work. Some, however, go beyond the novel itself to look at the relationship between author and text—and in this case, co-authors. Zachary Leader, for example, in “Parenting Frankenstein,” argues that the degree to which Mary Shelley allowed Percy Shelley to collaborate with her reflected not only her likely anxieties about authorship (she was in fact only nineteen, cut off from her family, an unwed mother, and financially dependent on Percy; and, in light of her parentage, a great deal was expected of her), but also an acceptance of the social aspects of creation of a work of art. Percy Shelley (and Godwin) espoused a Promethean view of the creative act—of the importance that the artist break free of the common view and express a unique and personal vision. Anticipating Gertrude Stein, who held that artistic creation does not occur ex nihilo, Mary Shelley saw Frankenstein as more of a communal act, having recounted, in her introduction to the 1831 edition, how it arose from a group discussion; yet she also fiercely insisted that she was solely responsible for the final product, not her husband.21 “None of which is to deny that Mary Shelley is likely to have felt dependent on Percy Shelley or was insecure about her style,” suggests Lender. Rather he suggests, his revisions of Frankenstein “may have posed less of a test or threat” than some feminist critics think. However, Lender fails to note that Mary exercised a similar position of editor with regard to Percy’s poetry, which would have given even more support to his arguments.22
Michael Scrivener’s “Frankenstein’s Ghost Story: The Last Jacobin Novel”23 considers the work as a classic “Jacobin novel”—that is, a novel embodying the ideals of the French Revolution and its emphasis on a society that nurtures its citizens—examining the impact of what he describes as “errant utilitarianism.” By “errant utilitarianism,” Scrivener means the failure of the central characters—Robert Walton, the explorer-narrator of the tale who is seeking the North Pole; Victor Frankenstein; and the creature—to fulfill their goals of the betterment of the condition of humankind through advances in geography and biology and, in the case of the creature, overcoming prejudice with reason and exemplifying justice. Walton abandons his quest; Victor does nothing to improve humanity’s lot, as he had vowed to do; and the creature abandons his quest for justice, settling instead for revenge.
Opinions diverge concerning which text of the novel is “best.” For more on this subject, see “A Note on the Text,” above. Nora Crooks’s “In Defence of the 1831 Frankenstein”24 argues that the 1831 text is not substantively different from the 1818 version. Both depict characters who make choices in furtherance of their lofty goals that become disastrous—Walton, in his thoughtless pursuit of glory, and Victor, in his choice of scientific experimentation over domesticity. The later text, however, reflects Mary Shelley’s evolving views of compulsion or “necessity” with respect to the characters’ actions, allowing the principals to explain how they were compelled to make their choices. That is, the thirty-year-old Mary had more sympathy for the characters than did her nineteen-year-old self.
Beth Lau’s “Frankenstein, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan” examines the numerous allusions to Coleridge’s work in the novel as well as Mary Shelley’s modeling, consciously or unconsciously, of the “passive-aggressive” nature of Victor Frankenstein on the similar character of the Ancient Mariner.25 Joyce Carol Oates calls Frankenstein “in large part a kind of gloss upon or rejoinder to John Milton’s Paradise Lost” and its tale of an angelic creature (Lucifer) exiled from his creator, noting that “the influence of John Milton on Frankenstein is so general as to figure on nearly every page.”26 Frankenstein is viewed as having deeply influenced Charlotte Brontë in her creation of Jane Eyre (1847). Arlene Young points out that both feature doppelgängers, both record protagonists’ flight from their “only home,” and both central characters find themselves voyeurs of idealized households, in the course of which they learn that domestic happiness is possible: The creature spies on the De Laceys (father, daughter Agatha, son Felix, and fiancée Safie), the idealized French family on whom he stumbles, and Jane detachedly observes Moor House, the home of the St. John siblings, where she finds temporary sanctuary in her wanderings.27
Studies that isolate the language of a text, often built around the work of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and his student Jacques Derrida, who developed the deconstructionist school of literary criticism, are of particular use in the context of Frankenst
ein, as the creature struggles to speak and eventually to read. In “Periphrastic Naming in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Bernard Duyfhuizen considers the terminology applied to the creature—“wretch,” “monster,” “dæmon”—and points out how the repetition of these words reveals the relationship of speaker to subject in some cases, as well as self-assessment when the word is applied by the speaker to the speaker.28 Barbara Johnson, in her important essay “My Monster/My Self,”29 examines the idea that Frankenstein can be read as Mary Shelley’s autobiography, both as to the circumstances of her own life, including the death of her mother in childbirth and her own multiple pregnancies, and the travails of authorship. In building her case, Johnson outlines the parallels between Mary’s and Victor Frankenstein’s acts in the “workshop of filthy creation.” Steven Vine’s “Filthy Types: Frankenstein, Figuration, Femininity” analyzes how characters in the novel find themselves embodied in some other figure, seeking to create a likeness of themselves, a display of their being. Other psychological studies, noted in the text above, make more specific observations about incidents such as Victor’s dream and the confusion between the identities of Victor and the creature.30
In Moore’s final category, critics examine the novel in the light of the developments of imperialism and colonialism in Mary Shelley’s era, including the generalized fear of the “Other.” H. L. Malchow, for example, asserts that “Shelley’s portrayal of her monster drew upon contemporary attitudes towards non-whites, in particular on fears and hopes of the abolition of slavery in the West Indies, as well as on middle-class apprehension of a Luddite proletariat.” The creature, Malchow argues, has been “constructed out of a cultural tradition of the threatening ‘Other’—whether troll or giant, gypsy or Negro—from the dark inner recesses of xenophobic fear and loathing.”31 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak sees Victor’s fears about the “race of devils” that he might foster (and the punishment he ultimately receives for acting on such fears) as indicative of Mary Shelley’s anxieties about the European mission of world domination.32 Anne K. Mellor proposes that at the root of Victor’s anxiety is a deep-seated fear of interracial breeding, prevalent in the culture and exemplified by the writings of the Shelleys’ friend William Lawrence, a physician who contended that the Mongol race was disposed toward violence. In Mellor’s view, Mary Shelley contrasts this with the creature’s happiness at the prospect of the marriage of Felix De Lacey and the non-European Safie, whom he treats as his “family.” Mellor argues that Mary is suggesting that if only Victor could have seen the creature as part of the race of Man, rather than as a mere expression of the white man, the creature’s life might have been very different.33