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The Birth of Frankenstein
Hollywood did not give birth to Frankenstein;
Mary Shelley did. More than a century before actor Boris Karloff, helped by
make-up artists, made the monster in his image, came Shelley and her creation.
The
mother of Frankenstein came from the rarefied reaches of the British
artistic and intellectual elite. While Mary Shelley drew her inspiration from a
dream, she drew her story's premises about the nature of life from the work of
some of Europe's premier scientists and thinkers. The sophisticated creature
that billowed up from her imagination read Plutarch and Goethe, spoke
eloquently, and suffered much.
A Dark and Stormy Night
In the summer of 1816, nineteen-year-old
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her lover, the poet Percy Shelley (whom she
married later that year), visited the poet Lord Byron at his villa beside Lake
Geneva in Switzerland. Stormy weather frequently forced them indoors, where they
and Byron's other guests sometimes read from a volume of ghost stories. One
evening, Byron challenged his guests to each write one themselves. Mary's story,
inspired by a dream, became Frankenstein.
A Writer's Life
Mary
Shelley came from a rich literary heritage. She was the daughter of William
Godwin, a political theorist, novelist, and publisher who introduced her to
eminent intellectuals and encouraged her youthful efforts as a writer; and of
Mary Wollstonecraft, a writer and early feminist thinker, who died shortly after
her daughter's birth.
At
fifteen, Mary met the poet Percy Shelley, who was married at the time. Two years
later, she ran off with him to France. They were married in December 1816, two
weeks after Percy Shelley's first wife drowned. By then Mary had already borne
him two children.
Boundary Crossings in 1818
In
her novel, Mary Shelley is silent on just how Victor Frankenstein breathes life
into his creation, saying only that success crowned "days and nights of
incredible labor and fatigue;" Frankenstein offers no monster-making
recipes.
But
Shelley's story did not arise from the void. Scientists and physicians of her
time, tantalized by the elusive boundary between life and death, probed it
through experiments with lower organisms, human anatomical studies, attempts to
resuscitate drowning victims, and experiments using electricity to restore life
to the recently dead.
When
Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet, drowned in London in 1816, rescuers took
her lifeless body to a receiving station of the London Society. There, smelling
salts, vigorous shaking, electricity, and artificial respiration--as with the
resuscitation bellows shown here--had been used since the 1760s to restore
drowning victims to life. Harriet, however, did not survive.
Restored to Life?
In
March 1815, Mary Shelley dreamed of her dead infant daughter held before a fire,
rubbed vigorously, and restored to life. At the time, scientists would not have
wholly dismissed such a possibility. Could the dead be brought back to life?
Could life arise spontaneously from inorganic matter? Physicians of the day
treated such questions seriously--as the treatises they wrote, the methods they
employed, and the contrivances they built all testify.
James Blundell, a London physician
troubled by the many women who died after childbirth from massive bleeding,
introduced blood transfusion between humans, using the simple apparatus shown
here.
Galvanism
During
the 1790s, Italian physician Luigi Galvani demonstrated what we now understand
to be the electrical basis of nerve impulses when he made frog muscles twitch by
jolting them with a spark from an electrostatic machine. When Frankenstein
was published, however, the word galvanism implied the release, through
electricity, of mysterious life forces. "Perhaps," Mary Shelley
recalled of her talks with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, "a corpse would be
reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things."
Body Parts
To
make his creature, Victor Frankenstein "dabbled among the unhallowed damps
of the grave" and frequented dissecting rooms and slaughterhouses. In Mary
Shelley's day, as in our own, the healthy human form delighted and intrigued
artists, physicians, and anatomists. But corpses, decaying tissue, and body
parts stirred almost universal disgust.
The Celluloid Monster
The
reshaping of Mary Shelley's story began almost from the moment it first
appeared. The 1931 Universal Studios production of Frankenstein, starring
Boris Karloff as the monster, capped more than a century of variant tellings of
the original story. Compared to Shelley's sensitive, articulate creature,
Universal's was crude and unformed. But the sheer power of Hollywood
image-making gave him an impact as great or greater than Shelley's, and made him
into an icon of popular culture.
Just
as Shelley's story was shaped by the science of the day, so was Hollywood's
influenced by some of the scientific and pseudo-scientific preoccupations of its
day, including eugenics, robots, and surgical transplants.
Escaping
Shelley's Frame
In
1823 Mary Shelley's father told her of an English Opera House production of a
play entitled Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein. Though inspired
by her novel, the play departed from it freely--as playwrights, filmmakers, and
political cartoonists have done ever since. Shelley's original novel, memorable
for its story and ambitious in the large questions it poses, has invariably been
simplified and distorted, sometimes almost beyond recognition.
The Edison Kinetogram, March 10, 1910
The
first cinematic version of Frankenstein was a silent film produced by
Edison Films; it came two decades before the famous 1931 Universal Studios
picture.
Hollywood Produces Frankenstein
Would
Americans attend "horror films"? The success of a stage version of Dracula,
the story of an aristocratic vampire, helped convince producers at Hollywood's
Universal Studios that they would. In 1930, Universal bought film rights to
Peggy Webling's Frankenstein: An Adventure in the Macabre, which had
premiered in London three years earlier. An obscure English actor, William Henry
Pratt, who went by the stage name of Boris Karloff, played the monster in
Universal's adaptation of the Webling play. Karloff's success in Frankenstein
made him a star. The film itself became an almost instant classic of a new
genre--the horror movie.
Boris Karloff Being Transformed into the Monster
In
posed studio portraits, Boris Karloff looks like many another conventionally
handsome movie actor; make-up artist Jack Pierce made him into the monster.
Pierce's three months of research into anatomy and surgery convinced him that a
surgeon determined to transplant a brain would cut the top of the skull straight
across, hinge it, pop in the new brain, then clamp it shut. Hence, the monster's
flat, squared-off head. Frankenstein
earned rave reviews, was named to top-ten lists, and made lots of money; the
production cost $290,000 in Depression-era dollars, and earned more than $12
million.
Boundary Crossings in 1931
In
the years before Universal Studios released Frankenstein in 1931,
scientists seemed poised to penetrate once-sacrosanct boundaries between life
and death, a prospect that continued both to trouble the intellect and thrill
the imagination. Newspapers and magazines speculated freely about one day
reviving the dead, achieving immortality through the use of artificial organs,
and altering the genetic shape of future generations through eugenics. The
Universal film responded to these themes in popular culture.
1935 Article: "Can Science Raise the Dead?"
In
the 1930s, American chemist Robert E. Cornish killed a dog with nitrogen gas,
then revived it. Emboldened by this success, he vainly sought access to men
executed in the chamber. These efforts to revive the dead got widespread press
coverage during the 1930s.
Perfusion Pump
When his sister-in-law was diagnosed with
heart disease, aviator Charles Lindbergh helped develop this "glass
heart"--a pump, made from Pyrex glass, intended to sustain organs removed
from the body for study or transplantation. He and Nobel Prize-winning French
surgeon Alexis Carrel kept hearts, kidneys, ovaries, and other organs alive for
appreciable lengths of time.
Eugenics
Spurned
by his creator, Mary Shelley's monster kills for revenge. The movie monster, on
the other hand, kills because he's been given the brain of a criminal. Early in
the twentieth century, "biological determinism" was in the air;
heredity, more than environment or education, the idea went, caused social
problems. Proponents of eugenics wanted to improve the human species through
compulsory sterilization of criminals, the mentally retarded, and others deemed
social misfits. Some two-thirds of Americans were said to support such measures.
Feature Creature
It
may be hard to appreciate, but the many Frankenstein toys, masks, comics, and
other objects and images in existence all pay tribute, of sorts, to a
cold-blooded killer. These products of merchandising genius hint at menace, a
creature out of control--yet never too much menace, never too out
of control. Each makes the Frankenstein monster into a more one-dimensional
version of Mary Shelley's creature. Each, in its small way, helps complete his
transformation into a cultural icon.
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