by Mary Shelley
1. Timothy Morton, ed., Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Sourcebook (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 80.
2. For a splendid collection of digitized manuscripts of Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, see www.shelleygodwinarchive.org; see also http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/mary-wollstonecraft-shelley for an excellent detailed overview of Mary Shelley’s life and work. For a chronology and resource site, see http://www.rc.umd.edu/reference/chronologies/mschronology. A nice fan-created site, focusing primarily on Frankenstein, is http://www.marywshelley.com/. There are dozens more.
3. See, for example, the recent Harvard University Press publication, The Annotated Frankenstein, edited by Susan J. Wolfson and Ronald L. Levao (2012), which details more than fifty critical works in a section headed only as “Further Reading.” Criticism of Bram Stoker’s Dracula falls into much the same categories as those suggested by Morton for Frankenstein—see Leslie S. Klinger, ed., “Sex, Lies and Blood: Dracula in Academia,” in The New Annotated Dracula (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 537–46.
4. In Marilyn Butler, ed., Frankenstein (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), xv–xxi.
5. Published by Kent State University Press in 2006.
6. Published by William Morrow in 2013.
7. See Preface, note 8, above.
8. See, for example, Tim Marshall, Murdering to Dissect: Graverobbing, Frankenstein, and the Anatomy Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), and note 11, Volume I, Chapter III, above.
9. See note 51, Volume I, Chapter I, above.
10. Elsie B. Michie, “Production Replaces Creation: Market Forces and Frankenstein as Critique of Romanticism,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 12, no. 1 (1988): 27–33.
11. Emphasis in the original. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: Verso, 1983).
12. Godwin did not trust the idea of institutionalized learning: “The most desirable mode of education,” he wrote, “… is that which is careful that all the acquisitions of the pupil shall be preceded and accompanied by desire. … The boy, like the man, studies because he desires it. He proceeds upon a plan of his own invention, or by which, by adopting, he has made his own. Everything bespeaks independence and inequality” (The Enquirer, 1797). In An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, he was even more explicit: “No vice can be more destructive, than that which teaches us to regard any judgement as final, and not open to review. The same principle that applies to individuals, applies to communities. There is no proposition, at present apprehended to be true, so valuable, as to justify the introduction of an establishment for the purpose of inculcating it on mankind. Refer them to reading, to conversation, to meditation; but teach them neither creeds nor catechisms, either moral or political.”
13. Published by Cambridge University Press in 1994. Frankenstein and Rousseau are discussed on pages 203–12.
14. Published in New Literary History 14 (1982): 117–41.
15. In Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), chapter 7.
16. Published by University of Delaware Press in 1995.
17. Published by Doubleday in 1977; see “Female Gothic,” pp. 90–98.
18. In Anne K. Mellors, ed., Romanticism and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 220–32.
19. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2, no. 3 (1995): 237–52.
20. New York: Columbia University Press (1985).
21. In a letter to Sir Walter Scott, written after his review of Frankenstein misattributed the anonymous publication to Percy, Mary confessed that she was the author in order to prevent Scott from “continuing in the mistake of supposing Mr. Shelley guilty of a juvenile attempt of mine; to which—from it being written at an early age, I abstained from putting my name—and from respect to those persons from whom I bear it” (letter dated June 14, 1818).
22. Leader’s essay appears in his Revision and Romantic Authorship (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 167–205.
23. Genre 19, no. 3 (Fall 1986): 299–318.
24. In Michael Eberle-Sinatra, ed., Mary Shelley’s Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 2000).
25. The essay appears in Nicholas Roe, ed., Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 207–23.
26. “Frankenstein’s Fallen Angel,” Critical Inquiry, 10 (1984), 543-54. See numerous notes below tracing the Miltonic influences.
27. “The Monster Within: The Alien Self in Jane Eyre and Frankenstein,” Studies in the Novel 23, no. 3 (1991): 325–38.
28. Studies in the Novel 27, no. 4 (1995): 477–92.
29. The essay appears in Johnson’s A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 144–54.
30. See, for example, note 33, Volume I, Chapter I, and note 3, Volume I, Chapter II, above.
31. “Frankenstein’s Monster and Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Past and Present 139 (1993): 90–130.
32. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a Theory of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 132–40. See also W. Joseph Lew, “The Deceptive Other: Mary Shelley’s Critique of Orientalism in Frankenstein,” Studies in Romanticism 30 (Summer 1991): 255–83, a study of the ways in which Shelley viewed traditional Western uses of the East in literature.
33. “Frankenstein, Racial Science, and the Yellow Peril,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 23, no. 1 (2001): 1–28.
APPENDIX 6
Frankenstein in Popular Culture
BY THE MID-NINETEENTH century, Frankenstein and his creation had entered the vernacular. Fueled partly by the novel and partly by the success of stage productions and the scope of theatrical parodies, the name “Frankenstein” became a shorthand expression for good but misguided intentions, and his creature a symbol of powerful forces unleashed unwittingly. Political cartoons, for example, used the image of a Frankenstein monster in 1832 and 1833 in commentary on the new voting population; John Tenniel also used the “Frankenstein-monster” to represent new political forces in various cartoons in the last third of the nineteenth century. In 1854, John Leech used the image of the monster to depict the forces of the Crimean War let loose by an uninformed Russian government in conflict with Britain and the allied forces. An American cartoonist in 1900 used Frankenstein’s monster to symbolize European imperialism threatening American democracy; others, including politicians, evoked Frankenstein and the creature as images of those who would turn over power to the “people” and the resulting monster that would arise. Later, with the rise of Hitler, the metaphor was again popularized: One political cartoon depicted Mussolini and Stalin confronting a monster-sized Hitler, with the caption “Are WE Frankensteins?”
“The Irish Frankenstein,” by John Tenniel (1882).
“The Russian Frankenstein and His Monster,” by John Leech (1854).
“The Brummagem Frankenstein,” by John Tenniel (1866) “Brummagem” was the working-class pronunciation of “Birmingham,” the center of unrest regarding workers’ suffrage.
War as Frankenstein’s monster, by Bob Satterfield (1915).
“Our Frankenstein, depicts the monster of European imperialism arriving to threaten America” (Life magazine, 1900, artist unknown).
Frankenstein was adapted into the medium of graphic stories, including comic books, magazines, comic strips, and cartoons. Donald Glut’s The Frankenstein Catalog lists more than 650 comic book appearances through 1984,1 and there have been many, many more since. For example, as of 2015, two series, Joe Frankenstein and Frankenstein Underground, are in print with major comic book publishers.
The earliest appearance of Frankenstein in a comic book was Dick Briefer�
��s Frankenstein, issue number 7 of Prize Comics (Feature Publications, December 1940). The story was only loosely based on the novel: Victor Frankenstein creates a giant monster, accidentally released into society. The monster is tormented by humanity and vows revenge against Victor and the human race. Called New Adventures of Frankenstein, with the writer-artist credited as Frank N. Stein, the series ran for sixty-one issues.2 The early stories are full of grisly horror; over time, however, the monster (later referred to as Frankenstein) diminished in size and menace, evolving into a patriotic hero and eventually a figure of humor, with little reference to the early tales. In 1945, the humorous character got his own comic book written and drawn by Briefer, with a different origin story; the series ran for thirty-three issues, from 1945 to 1954.
“The American Frankenstein,” political cartoon by Frank Bellew expressing concern over the power of the railroads (1874).
Political cartoon from the Washington Post (Clifford K. Berryman, 1940).
Although the creature and Victor Frankenstein appeared in dozens of other comic-book stories beginning in 1944 (with the first a Captain America story in U.S.A. Comics, no. 13), Mary Shelley’s novel received serious attention in 1945, when Ruth A. Roche wrote a version for Classic Comics, no. 26, later reprinted under the Classics Illustrated series. A comic-book adaptation of the 1931 film appeared in 1963 under the title Frankenstein, from Dell Publishing, eventually devolving into a routine superhero series with no relation to the novel or film. Then, in 1973, the Marvel Comics Group began a series, initially entitled The Monster of Frankenstein, later changed to The Frankenstein Monster. The first three episodes are based on the novel; the balance are original adventures. The series ran only eighteen issues, but the character has appeared in various other comics in the Marvel universe.
Frankenstein, No. 1 (New York: Prize Comics, 1945). Dick Briefer, writer and artist.
There are other film and television tie-ins. Herman Munster, who is described as the “happy Frankenstein monster,” appeared regularly in a sixteen-issue comic book series called The Munsters from 1964 to 1968, while the television series of the same name was first appearing. A four-issue series, written by Roy Thomas and called Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, appeared from Topps Comics in 1994—a tie-in to the Kenneth Branagh film of the same name. It included trading cards with stills from the film. In 2013, to promote the film I, Frankenstein, Darkstorm Comics created a downloadable graphic novel titled I, Frankenstein: Genesis by Kevin Grevioux.
Just as Frankenstein has been adapted into new stories on stage and in film and graphic media, the novel and its characters have been woven into other books. These are pastiches (stories intended to imitate the style of Mary Shelley), sequels, parodies, and original tales. The tireless Donald Glut lists more than 150 titles in The Frankenstein Catalog through 1984, and many more have appeared since. Noteworthy are the novels by French author Benoît Becker, La Tour de Frankenstein and five others, published in the 1950s, and Robert J. Myers’s novels The Cross of Frankenstein and The Slave of Frankenstein, straightforward sequels published in the 1970s. In 1973, Brian W. Aldiss, one of the deans of science fiction, published a novel called Frankenstein Unbound, in which a twenty-first-century politician is transported to nineteenth-century Switzerland, where he encounters both Victor Frankenstein and Mary Shelley.
Frankenstein, Marvel Classics Comics, No. 20 (New York: Marvel Comics, 1977). John Warner, writer; Dino Castrillo, artist.
Frankenstein by Mary W. Shelley (New York: Gilberton Publications, 1945, as reissued in 1971) (Classics Illustrated, No. 26). Ruth A. Roche, adapter; Robert Hayward Webb and Ann Brewster, artists.
Frankenstein by Mary W. Shelley (New York: Gilberton Publications, 1945) (Classic Comics, No. 26). Ruth A. Roche, adapter; Robert Hayward Webb and Ann Brewster, artists.
Frankenstein, No. 2, September (New York: Dell Comics, 1966).
Dean Koontz created a series of five novels, beginning with Prodigal Son in 2004 and running through 2011 with the appearance of The Dead Town, that are collectively known as Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein. The series, which uses only a limited number of elements from Mary Shelley’s novel, is set in present-day New Orleans and features Victor Frankenstein, now known as Victor Helios. Victor continues to make new creatures for his own purposes. He is opposed in the stories by two contemporary homicide detectives and Deucalion, who is identified as Frankenstein’s original monster. In 2015, Stephen Jones edited a collection of stories about man-made creatures of human and subhuman pedigree, inspired by Frankenstein. Titled The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein, it includes reprints of stories that first appeared in pulp magazines by Robert Bloch and Manly Wade Wellman as well as modern stories from Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, Karl Edward Wagner, David J. Schow, R. Chetwynd-Hayes, David Case, Graham Masterson, Basil Copper, John Brunner, Guy N. Smith, Kim Newman, Paul J. McAuley, Roberta Lannes, Michael Marshall Smith, Daniel Fox, Adrian Cole, Nancy Kilpatrick, Brian Mooney, and Lisa Morton.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, No. 1 (New York: Topps Comics, 1994). Roy Thomas, writer; Rafael Kayanan, penciller (cover art by Timothy Bradstreet). (Based on the screenplay by Steph Lady and Frank Darabont.)
The Monster of Frankenstein, No. 1, January (New York: Marvel Comics Group, 1972). The title of the series was changed in issue no. 6 to The Frankenstein Monster. Gary Friedrich, writer; Mike Ploog, artist.
Herman Munster, as played by Fred Gwynne (from The Munsters, CBS, 1964–1966).
It would be impossible to catalog all images of the creature. There are dozens of licensed images from the 1931 Universal film, including a number of “action figures” and statuettes, in various locations and poses. There are also hundreds of unlicensed products, ranging from ashtrays to breakfast cereals to plush dolls, from rubber and latex masks to hats. A very unscientific survey can be made by searching www.zazzle.com, which sells products (factory-produced to hand-crafted) from a wide variety of sellers: It lists more than forty thousand “Frankenstein gifts,” including stickers, posters, T-shirts, dolls, key rings, and so on. Truly, “It’s alive!”
1. This extensive list excludes cameo appearances, cover illustrations, and characters inspired by or physically resembling the creature (such as the Hulk, or Lurch of the The Addams Family).
2. Issues 7–9, 11–54, and 55–68, the last appearing in February–March 1948.
Bibliography 1
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Godwin, William. The Elopement of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, as Narrated by William Godwin with Commentary by H. Buxton Forman, C.B. Boston: The Bibliophile Society, 1916.
Polidori, John William. Diary of Dr. John William Polidori. 1816. London: Forgotten Books, 2012.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. The Annotated Frankenstein. Edited by Leonard Wolf. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1977.
——— . The Annotated Frankenstein. Edited by Susan J. Wolfson and Ronald Levao. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2012.
——— . The Essential Frankenstein. Edited by Leonard Wolf. New York: iBooks, 2004.
——— . The Essential Frankenstein: The Definitive, Annotated Edition of Mary Shelley’s Classic Novel. Edited by Leonard Wolf. New York: Plume/Penguin Books, 2003.
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