Transmedia Creatures: Frankenstein’s Afterlives 9781684480647

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Transmedia Creatures

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Transmedia Creatures z Frankenstein’s Afterlives

E d i t e d b y F r a n c e s c a S ag g i n i a n d A n n a E n r ic h e t ta S o c c i o

Lewisburg, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Saggini, Francesca, editor of compilation. | Soccio, Anna Enrichetta,   editor of compilation. Title: Transmedia creatures : Frankenstein’s afterlives / edited by Francesca   Saggini and Anna Enrichetta Soccio. Description: Lewisburg, Pennsylvania : Bucknell University Press [2018] | Includes   bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018024287| ISBN 9781684480616 (hardback) | ISBN   9781684480609 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851—Adaptations. | Frankenstein,   Victor (Fictitious character)—Miscellanea. | Frankenstein’s Monster (Fictitious   character)—Miscellanea. | Monsters in mass media. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM /   Gothic & Romance. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture. | SOCIAL SCIENCE /   Media Studies. Classification: LCC PR5397.F73 T695 2018 | DDC 823/.7—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024287 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication rec­ord for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2019 by Bucknell University Press Individual chapters copyright © 2019 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Bucknell University Press, Hildreth-­M irza Hall, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837-2005. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law.  The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39​.4­ 8​-1­ 992. www​.­bucknell​.­edu​/­UniversityPress Manufactured in the United States of Amer­i­ca

Francesca Saggini dedicates this book to her wee boy and wee girl lol. They, too, are always ­there, always ­here. And long may they be so. Anna Enrichetta Soccio dedicates this book to her ­mother Bianca and her ­daughter Larissa, her beloved female “monsters,” with gratitude for their unstinting love and inspiration.

Contents

Abbreviations ​ ​  ix Introduction: Frankenstein: Presence, Pro­cess, Pro­gress ​ ​ ​1 Francesca Saggini PA R T I

Labs, Bots, and Punks: Transmediating Technology and Science 1 Frankenstein and Science Fiction ​ ​ ​33 Gino Roncaglia

2 Monstrous Algorithms and the Web of Fear: Risk, Crisis, and Spectral Finance in Robert Harris’s The Fear Index ​ ​ ​50 Lidia De Michelis



3 Frankensteinian Gods, Fembots, and the New Technological Frontier in Alex Garland’s Ex_Machina ​ ​ ​69 Eleanor Beal PA R T I I

Becoming Monsters: The Limits of the H ­ uman

4 Staging Steampunk Aesthetics in Frankenstein Adaptations: Mechanization, Disability, and the Body ​ ​ ​87 Claire Nally vii

v i ii C on te n ts

5 Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus in the Postcolony ​ ​ ​101 Claudia Gualtieri

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Four-­Color Myth: Frankenstein in the Comics ​ ​ ​119 Federico Meschini PA R T I I I

The Evolution Games of Sight and Sound

7 “Uncouth and inarticulate sounds”: Musico-­Literary Traces in Frankenstein, and Frankenstein in Art ­Music ​ ​ ​143 Enrico Reggiani



8 Enter Monsieur le Monstre: Cultural Border-­Crossing and Frankenstein in London and Paris in 1826 ​ ​ ​157 Diego Saglia



9 The Theme of the Doppelgänger in James Searle Dawley’s Frankenstein ​ ​ ​173 Daniele Pio Buenza



10 Perverting the F ­ amily: Re-­Working Victor Frankenstein’s Gothic Blood-­Ties in Penny Dreadful ​ ​ ​187 Ruth Heholt PA R T I V

Monster Reflections

11 The Masked Performer and “the Mane Electric”: The Lives and Multimedia Afterlives of Margaret Atwood’s Doctor Frankenstein ​ ​ ​201 Janet Larson



12 Young Adult Frankenstein ​ ​ ​219 Andrew McInnes



13 Revivifying Frankenstein’s Myth: Historical Encounters and Dialogism in Back from the Dead: The True Sequel to Frankenstein ​ ​ ​233 Anna Enrichetta Soccio Acknowl­edgments ​ ​ ​245 Bibliography ​ ​ ​247 Index ​ ​ 271 About the Contributors ​ ​ ​279

Abbreviations

F

Mary Shelley. Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. The 1831 Text. Edited, and with an introduction by M. Keith Joseph. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1969. Page references are to the 2008 edition.

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Introduction

z Frankenstein Presence, Pro­cess, Pro­gress Francesca Saggini Frankenstein is the kind of text that opens outward rather than closing in upon itself. —­J. P. Hunter 1 Always ­there. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​.Always ­here. —­Libby Larsen2

Slicing Loose The cultural value of a text, not least as a form of transferable and adaptable cultural capital that can exist in­de­pen­dently of the text itself, has become of central concern to teachers and researchers in the broad field of adaptation studies, a diverse methodological and cultural domain informed by the same interdisciplinary and transmedia orientation that is so con­spic­u­ous in con­temporary culture.3 In line with the concept of convergence theorized over the years by Henry Jenkins,4 which posits an expansive and collaborative pattern of textuality, it is generally accepted that a text is dispersed/regenerates diachronically and synchronically on multiple platforms and across dif­fer­ent users. In the pro­cess, it does not lose, but rather gains and maximizes meaning and, especially, fullness. One might even argue that the true potential of the source text (or pretext) is most fully revealed by its long-­term epistemological elasticity, in the difficult balance between redundancy and originality, between familiarity and difference. Indeed, the “­a fter” in aftertext does not automatically imply, much less require, that one look backward; rather, it suggests the enriching, revitalizing possibility of looking beyond (forward as well as backward) in a dynamic and dialogic pro­cess.5 Hence, its textual afterlife—be it an adaptation, a sequel, a prequel, fanfic, merchandising, any “tie-in” product, and, more generally, the vari­ous 1

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forms of “afterings” involving the assimilation and overwriting of the multifaceted original context of a text (the breadth of potential material can be quite staggering)—­can be said to realize and clarify the inherent potential of the original text.6 Before proceeding further, it is essential to provide a working definition of the concept of “afterlife” as it relates to issues of reproducibility, transmissibility, adaptation, and cultural legacy—­while no longer relying on fidelity and authenticity as guiding princi­ples. The concept of a transmedia afterlife falls ­under the broad and constantly evolving class of potential linguistic-­discursive reformulations. Separately or in combination, t­ hese include at the very least linguistic reformulations (for example, abridgements, parodies, e­ tc.), ­those relating to content, ideological reformulations, and ­t hose involving technological-­ media transpositions. ­These are the discursive practices addressed in vari­ous ways by the contributors to this volume. Less relevant to the pres­ent proj­ect, and therefore not included h ­ ere, are academic reformulations (for example relating to revision or reception), translations, and cross-­cultural reformulations (linked to translation as well as to transcultural transfers). An impor­tant preliminary caveat should also be added h ­ ere, in order to clarify the role of the afterlife’s reader. A reader does not necessarily perceive the afterlife as the aftering of a pretext (in this case Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) that alone can certify the afterlife’s status or, arguably, grant it a place in the cultural or media hierarchy. To be sure, this potential double reading (activated si­mul­ta­neously by the memory of the Model Reader and by the medium he/she is using) may enrich the aftertext, but it cannot exhaust, much less dictate the aftertext’s textual possibilities. As this collection of essays clearly demonstrates, the afterlife’s Model User (I ­here switch to a term better suited to forms of textuality that might not involve writing) does not necessarily coincide with its Empirical User, nor, indeed, can he/she be simply equated with the ideal target of the afterlife’s textual producer.7 In this re­spect, it has become apparent that the discourses of afterlives significantly problematize the reading framework originally theorized by Umberto Eco, for whom “the text is nothing ­else but the semantic-­pragmatic production of its own Model Reader.”8 The Empirical User of a textual afterlife may indeed be one and the same as its Model User, but this does not mean that he/she is also the Model User of the pretext (an early, prophetic example of this is James Whale’s 1935 Bride of Frankenstein, which performs a deft, self-­reflexive sleight of hand by employing as its pretext not Shelley’s novel but rather Whale’s own 1931 Frankenstein). Indeed, this collection shows that it is not always pos­si­ble, nor is it essential, to recognize the pretext as such (from a diachronic standpoint) in order to engage with its textual afterlives (from a synchronic standpoint). When Stan Lee’s young mutant X-­Men encounter an evil version of Shelley’s Creature in “The Mark of the Monster!”—an early episode of the Marvel comic book series, dating to the

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late 1960s—­t hey identify him simply as “something you see on a late late show,” rather than as a being endowed with a long-­established literary pedigree; this annoys Professor Xavier: “I see that you have not read the novel, Bobby [Iceman]—­ which I assigned last spring!”9 This pop culture reference is in fact extremely useful to help us understand the synchronic workings of an afterlife, allowing us to see how the specific context of its use can radically reposition it in relation both to culture and media. In the 1960s, the Universal Studios back cata­logue, including vari­ous Frankenstein films—­ranging from Whale’s masterpiece to the bathetic Abbot & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)—­fi rst appeared on American tele­v i­sion. Where the classic 1930s Frankenstein movies had relied on an audience including both older and younger viewers, the l­ater American iterations of the Frankenstein tale—­ even more distant from the novel’s film adaptations, already at some remove from Shelley’s text—­could instead rely on a significantly narrower TV fan base, made up mostly of ­children and teens close in age to Marvel’s X-­Men. The latter ­were con­temporary heroes who, despite their lack of “background encyclopedic knowledge,” to quote Eco again, nevertheless succeeded in defeating their adversary (read: as stand-­ins for con­temporary readers they still managed to fully engage with the afterlife).10 A final point, following from and rounding out t­ hese preliminary clarifications: an afterlife may or may not have metatextual import; that is, the afterlife does not inevitably entail a critique of the pretext, as occurs in most postmodern afterings (one need only think of the novel often cited as forebear, Jean Rhys’s 1969 Wide Sargasso Sea, discussed in Ruth Heholt’s chapter). And where such a reassessment is pres­ent, it is evidently only perceived by that Empirical User who is si­mul­ta­neously also the Model User of the pretext. In light of t­ hese theoretical and methodological premises, the anniversary of the first edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), seems an apt moment to pres­ent a collection of essays by scholars from converging disciplines such as film and tele­v i­sion studies, media studies, musicology, cultural studies, and the humanities, including En­glish. Taken together, their contributions offer an innovative approach and cutting-­edge research, investigating the afterlives of a novel that may be taught—­and often is—in a disparate array of courses whose primary focus may not be Romanticism, or indeed literary studies (examples of this broad range are the essays by Lidia De Michelis, and Claudia Gualtieri).11 Frankenstein is unquestionably a text that disturbs and transcends bound­aries, be they po­liti­cal, ethical, theological, aesthetic, and not least of all medial, and this ensures its vibrant presence in con­temporary popu­lar culture. The essays gathered ­here attest to this extraordinary plasticity and are designed to unlock new, richer readings of the novel. All too often, collections addressing the vari­ous aspects of adaptation tend to be or­ga­nized into separate sections dictated by a rather parochial media

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imperative, reflecting outdated critical assumptions about the greater cultural prestige of textual over post-­textual forms (computer games, transmedia webseries, ballets or cartoons, for example). To avoid grouping (or, better, relegating), Frankenstein’s textual afterlives into a separate section, we have sought to or­ga­nize the volume’s four parts in such a way as to emphasize the anti-­ hierarchical transmedia dialogue between them, ­because we strongly believe that in the realm of afterlives, as in con­temporary culture at large, such hierarchies are not in play and t­ here is, rather, a multi-­way traffic—­a complementarity and mutual dependence of media environments (as theorized by Marshall McLuhan), and of the aesthetic and commercial conceptual systems.12 Paraphrasing McLuhan, we can conclude that media actively contribute to translating a cultural product into new forms, and in the pro­cess, endow it with meta­phorical value. Fi­nally, the collection Transmedia Creatures deliberately abstains from critical analy­sis of specific themes of the novel. Th ­ ese have been widely explored through the de­cades by criticism of vari­ous methodological persuasions, most recently in studies devoted to Frankenstein’s “rebirths,” including pop-­cultural ones.13 For the authors presented ­here such readings are familiar territory, and rather than continue to tread the same ground, we have chosen to commission a series of original contributions that look at Frankenstein through the lens of transmediality. The emphasis is thus on how “cultural content” is redistributed through multiple media, forms and modes of production (including user-­generated ones from “below”) that often operate si­mul­ta­neously and have the power to dismantle and transform established readings of the text, while at the same time incorporating and revitalizing aspects that have always been central to it.

Prisms and Mirrors Working within the methodological framework of transmediality, Transmedia Creatures explores some of the semes of Shelley’s novel that seem particularly significant from a diachronic critical perspective, a perspective that—­now that we have reached the bicentenary of the novel’s publication, a milestone that could well have marked the exhaustion of its mythopoetic force—­connects it to a number of narratives of our contemporaneity, in a tropological revision of discourse. The collection offers a critical cele­bration of Frankenstein’s transmedia journey as the authors engage with concepts, value systems, and aesthetic-­moral categories—­ among them the h ­ uman, terror, love, responsibility, diversity, education, risk, fear, technology, creation—­from a range of approaches and original perspectives that consider the varied and often contradictory incarnations that have kept the tale relevant through the de­cades. The volume’s thirteen chapters are arranged into sections designed to yield new connections and to prompt fresh critical reflection, steering well away from

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the beaten track—­for example, connections between Young Adult (YA) fiction and the re-­readings of domesticity in Penny Dreadful (McInnes; Heholt), between the anx­i­eties of science fiction (SF) and the celebratory technologism of steampunk (Roncaglia; Nally), between the emotional resonance of ­music, instrumentation, and sonic associations in the novel (Reggiani) and the famous dumbness of the Creature in Whale’s Frankenstein. Not to mention the Creature as a paradigmatic “figure of difference,” indexical ­bearer of renewed implications (and complications) in an age of global terror(ism) and (immaterial) technology (De Michelis; Gualtieri). The essays thus pres­ent a twofold view of Shelley’s text. On the one hand, they are firmly anchored in the Romantic context of its production and reception—­t his, as ­w ill become apparent in reading through the chapters, must remain the unavoidable starting point for any textual analy­sis, be it synchronic or diachronic (Larson). On the other hand, they follow the remoter pathways traced by the novel’s “cannibalistic” form, and its implicit narrative and epistemic actualizations (it is no coincidence that Judith Halberstam refers to the novel as a “meaning machine”).14 Following Aristotle’s theorizing in Metaphysics we ­shall call this movement, this regenerative possibility, the novel’s potentia or potentiality. Frankenstein is undoubtedly among t­ hose texts that have succeeded in staying alive and assertive due to an enduring cultural impact and an extraordinary adaptive capacity that could well be termed biologico-­discursive; such texts provide textual projections of deep psychic drives and cultural values, anx­i­eties and epistemological crises, and as such demonstrate their inherent versatility and reproductive force, if not outright seriality. We might think of this as a pro­cess of evolutionary phylogenesis, in which the text achieves pre-­eminence (its potestas) thanks to optimal reproductive conditions (or, a favorable reproductive ecol­ogy), which allow it to regenerate and reproduce by gemmation, constantly adapting to new media and new discourses (its potentia). Ontological, epistemological, cognitive, and ethical binaries such as Self/ Other, techne/episteme (τέχνη/ἐπιστήμη), interiority/exteriority, right/wrong, organic/technological, beautiful/ugly, matter/spirit, art/mechanics w ­ ere central to Romantic culture as they are to our own: in both cases, they are the terms through which the emotive stresses and contradictions of a society careening ­towards the unknown are narrativized at a critical moment in its existence. Such binaries are complicated, eroded, and problematized in the volume’s four sections, which offer comprehensive, though hardly monological, perspectives on Frankenstein and its afterlives: humanity’s relationship with the materiality and immateriality of the creative process—­what we might call its literal enfleshments—is addressed in the first section, “Labs, Bots, and Punks: Transmediating Technology and Science” (Gino Roncaglia, Lidia De Michelis, and Eleanor Beal); the semantic fluidity of “the ­human” as a concept is the focus of the second section, “Becoming Monsters: The Limits of the H ­ uman” (Claire Nally, Claudia Gualtieri,

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and Federico Meschini); while the third, “The Evolution Games of Sight and Sound,” moves into more familiar adaptation studies territory—­that of the intersemiosis, the collusion and collation of codes, w ­ hether already pres­ent in Shelley’s novel (as in the acoustic environments explored by Enrico Reggiani) or produced by its adaptations and transformations for the stage, the cinema, or tele­v i­sion (Diego Saglia, Daniele Pio Buenza, and Ruth Heholt). Fi­nally, “Monster Reflections” considers Frankenstein’s boundary play across wholly dif­fer­ent contexts and media, such as ideologically engaged poetry (Janet Larson’s chapter on Margaret Atwood discusses the sexual politics of the Doctor Frankenstein persona in a narrative that was conceived from the start as transgeneric and multiplatform) and the repackaging of the tale for younger generations who, as suggested earlier, are prob­ably unaware of ­either the original novel or its revered film adaptations (Andrew McInnes and Anna Enrichetta Soccio close this section devoted to retellings).15 The collection’s thematic approach is thus designed to highlight the importance of integrating diverse, even conflicting, interpretations into one’s own reading of a literary work. The vari­ous perspectives in the volume do, however, share the common strategy of quite deliberately stepping aside from the wealth of existing Frankenstein-­related scholarship: the essays take their cue from it but then follow their own interpretive paths. This has two advantages: it makes it pos­si­ble to break new ground while si­mul­ta­neously privileging ­t hose subject areas and analytical methodologies that are especially relevant to the classroom, w ­ hether undergraduate or post-­graduate. Rather than presenting each essay in turn, as one might expect from an introduction, the following pages focus on some of the discourses in and around Frankenstein, and on some of the novel’s strikingly disparate derivations and deviations, in order to launch a dialogue among the volume’s four sections, and among the individual contributors. This approach is partly informed by my experience teaching interdisciplinary post-­graduate courses combining lit­ er­a­ture, film, and theater studies, and I believe it is best suited to render the full scope of both the potestas and the potentia of Shelley’s text. I ­shall therefore open the discussion on Frankenstein’s transmedia afterlives by problematizing the concept of “the h ­ uman,” one of the novel’s cardinal semes, and one of its most frequently recurring adjectives (listed in descending order of reification and materialization of the h ­ uman, we find, for example, “­human being,” “­human creature,” “­human form,” “­human frame”). The concept is, in my view, crucial if we are to read Shelley’s novel in a con­temporary context, ­because of its connection to a set of broad critical discursive categories that intersect dif­fer­ent domains (such as the superhuman/abhuman/posthuman), which I ­will examine in some depth. Fi­nally, I ­will discuss the transhuman, focusing on the relation between the h ­ uman and technology, a subset of the more general relationship between the ­human and science informing Frankenstein; ­here, I look at the body

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of the Creature as both pro­cess and product of creation, and at the uncertain and shifting bound­aries where the ­human and non-­human (e.g., the artificial) blend into each other, w ­ hether to constitute altered “hardware,” so to speak, or—­ quite uncannily—­ “software.” ­ These intersections prompt some concluding reflections on Shelley’s novel and on the essays in this volume which I hope can serve to stimulate and chart a course for further transmedia readings of Frankenstein.16

Morph­ing Frankenstein Unsurprisingly, a dominant theme in this collection is the Creature’s body, whose “monstrosity” is subjected to new transmedia scrutiny by several contributors who approach Shelley’s novel almost as though it ­were a “body novel.”17 This, too, is unsurprising, given the post-­textual nature of so many of Frankenstein’s afterlives, linked to per­for­mance, ­music, or images—­human-­technological interfaces which have taken the shape of shadows walking the stage, four-­ color comics, and TV or silver-­screen images. This is how Frankenstein morphed into Frankenstein, and the latter became indistinguishable from his Creature, the so-­c alled “monster” whose iconic image—in the mythical and immortal guise in­ven­ted for our times by that other creator/monster maker, Boris Karloff—­ can be said to precede and almost pre-­empt Shelley’s novel in our collective consciousness. The dual critical focus on the body and on creation reflects two impor­tant areas of con­temporary inquiry that are not directly derived from the novel. We can, however, trace their relation to it by considering, for example, Igor’s body in Victor Frankenstein (dir. Paul McGuigan, 2015)—­one of the latest cinematic incarnations of “Doctor” Victor’s assistant, a figure integrated into the story’s economy ever since its first adaptations for the stage—­examined by Claire Nally in relation to the categories of normalcy and ableism that other contributors also discuss, from dif­fer­ent perspectives.18 The notion of normality, it is worth recalling, derives its ideological and semantic power from the adjective normal, etymologically derived from the Latin norma (rule, standard). The latter noun naturalizes as ontological a “normality” that is, instead, ultimately phenomenological and as such intrinsically cultural—­aesthetic, geometric, formal (for the eigh­teenth ­century, this would have meant neoclassical). The aporia (and allegory) of “normality” is captured perfectly in one of Frankenstein’s best-­k nown visual afterlives, the famous frontispiece to the 1831 Standard Novels edition (the first to be illustrated), drawn by the German Theodor Von Holst (a pupil of Henry Fuseli) and engraved by William Chevalier, in which the Creature’s jarringly asymmetrical body—­t he skeletal hand, the blatantly misaligned head, the network of arteries and muscles plainly vis­i­ble u ­ nder the skin—­contrasts strangely with its other­wise smooth, power­ful, almost statuesque contours. “I had selected

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his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—­Great God!” (F 57) cries a now disillusioned Victor.19 “[A] rubble of tendons, / knuckles and raw sinews,” adds Margaret Atwood’s Doctor Frankenstein, de­cades ­later (see Larson). The 1831 frontispiece positions the Creature at the juncture of two overlapping aesthetic paradigms, picturing with plastic vividness his abject difference, but also the generative possibilities inscribed in his body. Julia Kristeva’s notion of the “abject” is apt ­here, ­because the Creature is, indeed, silenced beauty and horror; his birth is si­mul­ta­neously an ejection and a rejection, in which the natu­ ral bound­aries between Self and Other are imperilled, besieged, and desperately, uselessly defended, as in Victor’s famous anti-­idealistic epiphany: “the beauty of the dream had vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (F 57).20 Very perceptively, Angela Wright talks of the Creature’s in­ven­ ted body in terms of Romantic sublimity—­t he “perversion of Re­nais­sance blazon,” a Dantesque horror evading “rational definition” and resisting to “definitive designation.”21 Troubling, morph­ing, defying—­a chain of unstable signifiers try to pin down and immobilize an agonizing horror melting into visionary won­ der, ambitiously aiming “to name the un(n)amable.”22 In addition to spotlighting the fruitful contribution that an approach informed by disability studies can offer to the interpretation of Shelley’s Frankenstein, Nick Dear and Danny Boyle’s reading of the novel in their Frankenstein stage play (Royal National Theatre, 2011), which Nally points out is infused with steampunk aesthetic ele­ments, draws attention to the Creator’s poiesis, to the concrete making engaged in by the desiring subject. And the latter turns out to be just as awkwardly positioned as the proto-­cubist Creature of the 1831 frontispiece, a “Guernica of distress” exposed to our gaze in all his impure hideousness.23 For the creator is uncertainly suspended between the roles of artist, craftsman, or mere “mechanic”—­a post-­Platonic severance that is very much of its time and which places Shelley’s text unequivocally at the threshold of the “mechanical age,” as Thomas Carlyle called it in his famous 1829 essay, Signs of the Times. (It is worth recalling that Frankenstein was written during the second phase of the Luddite machine-­breaking rebellion of the 1810s, whereas the 1831 edition was published just ­after the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, at the dawn of the so-­called “Iron Horse Age,” an apt nature-­machine metonym for this new, anxiety-­inducing form of transport.)24 This demiurgic disconnection is also stressed in Victor’s own description of his poiesis: “I appeared rather like one doomed by slavery to toil in the mines, or any other unwholesome trade, than an artist occupied by his favourite employment” (F 56).25 It is hardly a coincidence therefore that another key word in the novel is “hand,” which appears so often to function as a textual isotopy, almost a semiotic score. Shelley’s “body novel” makes magnificently material, or rather corporeal, the meta­phor of the hand, the poietic organ par excellence, capable of containing both the material and the spiritual dynamism of the (Romantic) creative pro­cess: we might think

Figure I.1. ​Theodor Von Holst. Engraved by William Chevalier. Frontispiece. Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. Bentley and Colburn edition. 1831. In public domain.

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of the hand that the Divine Craftsman extends to instill the spark of life into man (as in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco, a scene evoked antiphrastically in chapter V, F 58, where Victor recoils from the touch of the Creature’s hand, and again at the end of the novel, in Robert Walton’s letter of September 12, F 218), or the hand of the modern craftsman molding his imperfect creature (his “handy-­work,” F 9), or that of the Creature himself, who leaves his dark, deadly marks on his victims’ necks as a stamp of his eternal vengeance—an existential imprint, or “fingerprint signature” that stands in for the identity and name which are repeatedly, obdurately denied him by his Creator and by h ­ umans.26

Techno-­becomings In our time, the challenge taken up by the Romantic Creator is echoed and amplified by ­t hose faced by the developer of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Paradoxically, building the body (the hardware, or “frame for the reception of animation,” F 53; i.e., the site of immanence) is perhaps the least difficult step, if utterly astonishing, of t­ hose required to construct a creature endowed with the complex capacity to learn and interpret (and thus to go beyond a basic reactive stimulus), capable, like h ­ umans, of emotion, memory, imagination, passions, ideas, doubts, compassion, judgment, all coalescing around that indefinable, transcendent something known in many philosophical or religious belief systems as the soul.27 In light of the destabilizing medical-­scientific developments occurring in Shelley’s time, it is no accident that “soul,” with all its Cartesian implications of conscious thought, and as central to Romantic poetics as “hand,” is a term that recurs frequently in the novel, and even more insistently in its subsequent transmedia versions. It already serves as the semic keystone in the title of the second s­ ilent film adaptation, Life Without Soul (dir. Joseph W. Smiley, 1915) with Percy Standing playing a counter-­Rousseauistic “Brute Man”), but it is also invoked in the closing scene of a now largely forgotten play that preceded, and inspired, the Universal Studios Frankenstein: Frankenstein. ​Soul—­what is soul? Waldman. ​It is the part of God He gives to ­every man who lives. It is the part of man God calls back to himself ­a fter man dies. (Frankenstein murmurs: “not man.”) That’s why I’m not afraid to die. You can kill the body, but not the soul . . . ​(Act 3)28

Ironically, in our post–­The Exorcist age, it is precisely the fact that he has a soul—­w ith all its frailties and worldly temptations—­t hat makes pos­si­ble the demonic possession of the kindly and romantic Creature i­magined by I, Frankenstein (dir. Stuart Beattie, 2014; based on the graphic novel by Kevin Grevioux, I, Frankenstein: Genesis #1, 2013), a film whose soundtrack, appropriately enough, features a song called “Gimme Soul.”29

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One of the most obvious links between Shelley’s Creature and AI relates to the concept of unsupervised machine learning, which shares some of the characteristics of the self-­education the Creature pursues in the “hovel” (F 106) adjacent to the De Laceys’ cottage. This is a crucial episode in the Creature’s development (indeed, it is structurally at the center of the novel, in chapters XI-­XV), during which he increases his ability to learn and to mimic ­humans, in accordance with John Locke’s empiricist theory of the tabula rasa (An Essay Concerning ­Human Understanding, 1690) whereby the ­human mind is formed by building experience through sensations (interestingly, the same theory that underlies cognitive robotics). This shift—or better, descent—­from spirit to ­matter, together with the Creature’s strenuous efforts to communicate and so overcome his isolation (involving the distinctly modern use of a new medium, in this case language, that transforms his perception of the/his Self) are perhaps the more ambitiously humanistic aspects of Shelley’s novel. One might even identify as the structural turning point of the entire narrative the famous rhetorical tour de force of extraordinary perlocutionary power, that the Creature appears to address to himself, but which in real­ity is aimed provocatively at his creator (and by proxy at the reader): “Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?” (F 128). Placed at the start of chapter XV, immediately ­after his encounter with the De Laceys, ­these metacritical questions (a shattering self-­questioning that could in fact equally well apply to the nature of Shelley’s “peculiar” novel itself),30 position the Creature explic­itly at the intersection of past and ­future, thus justifying a tropological reading of Frankenstein as the first science fiction novel, or even a proto–­“ bot novel” (see the essays by Gino Roncaglia, Lidia de Michelis, and Eleanor Beal). At this stage in his development, the Creature is engaging with an ever more complex environment: not only does he attempt to emulate the De Laceys’ be­hav­ ior, but he also absorbs an extraordinary reference library that vastly accelerates his learning pro­cess: Constantin-­François Volney’s Ruins of Empires, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, one volume of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, J.W. von Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther, and, of course, Victor’s “journal of the four months that preceded” the creation (F 130). This is the epistemological dataset that w ­ ill serve to guide him, much as occurs with modern robotic creatures, from simulating be­hav­ior to emulating emotion, from deduction to association. And it is in this sense that, as the Creature’s capacity to feel evolves from perception to emotion,31 the symphonic succession of sensory perceptions placed at the start of chapter XI, heartrending in its ephemeral delicacy (“I felt light, and hunger, and thirst, and darkness; innumerable sounds rung in my ears, and on all sides vari­ous scents saluted me,” F 103), leads directly into the famous rhetorical questions, of almost cosmic resonance, that I quoted above. With their shift from an exquisitely intimate “philosophical lyricism” to a “lyrical philosophy,” the Romantic power of ­t hese pages is indisputable, and alone suffices to place Frankenstein

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among the major works of Romanticism, irrespective of language or national bound­aries.32 It is precisely where the novel expresses the Zeitgeist most fully that it opens itself in the most decisive and visionary way to a diachronic reading. Thus, if we ­were to read Frankenstein as the proto–­“ bot novel” mentioned earlier, we would be looking at a tangible example of how one era might be said to dream the next. In the chapters devoted to the Creature’s eavesdropping on the De Lacey ­family, he quickly learns to identify and make his own two of the fundamental requirements of what modern studies of cognitive robotics call unsupervised learning: the recognition of context and of emotions. From the start, the Creature’s language learning is clearly tied to linguistic experiences that associate language with feelings. “I perceived that the words [the De Laceys] spoke sometimes, produced plea­sure or pain, smiles or sadness, in the minds and countenances of the hearers. This was indeed a godlike science, and I ardently desired to become acquainted with it” (F 112, my emphasis), the Creature’s states, with a metacritical reference to the “godlike science” of the word, that governed by the Author, in which the allusion to Victor—­and, en abyme, to Shelley’s own Platonic poiein—is evident. With a conceptual leap that I hope is not too far-­fetched, I would even venture that his encounter with Safie, the daugher of “the Turk,” sets in motion a learning pro­cess that transports the Creature to the transcendent level of a proto-­ technological myth. This transfiguration lifts him out of the dimension of pure mechanics (that of his secret physical ­labors to assist the De Laceys, in the course of which his superhuman strength and endurance of fatigue make him comparable to a mechanical servant, F 114–5, with a cheeky nod ­here to the Mechanical Turk, a famed pseudo-­automaton created in 1769 by Wolfgang von Kempelen) and into the far more versatile—­and hence unsettling—­dimension of “robotic beings” and AI.33 The gentle, reassuring appearance of “soft” robotic creatures—­ for example the lovable balloon-­like Baymax in Disney’s Big Hero 6 (dir. Don Hall and Chris Williams, 2014) or the even more recent nursing-­care Robear, who is indeed strong (and thus potentially lethal), yet looks like a cuddly polar-­ bear cub—is able to neutralize the so-­called “uncanny valley” effect that, owing to the psychoanalytic mechanism of projection, makes us feel threatened and uncomfortable in the presence of the humanoid robot, or, even more so, of the android.34 Indeed, research on Human-­Robot Interaction (HRI) shows that the more the artificial creature is aesthetically pleasing and/or obviously mechanical-­ looking, the more it is socially acceptable. By contrast, it is precisely the Creature’s aty­pi­cal appearance, his unnerving reaching t­owards the anthropomorphic, which he never quite attains (a “filthy mass that moved and talked,” F 147), his capacity for autonomous movement as an active and self-­making creature in­de­ pen­dent of his creator’s ­will (as the term automaton implies), that make him hideous, dyspathic and, ultimately, repulsive. If Victor at first enthusiastically

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imagines “many happy and excellent natures [owing] their being to me” (F 54, my emphasis), once he realizes that such offspring would move beyond his control, his glorious utopia quickly disintegrates into distopia: “one of the first results of t­ hose sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be ­children, and a race of dev­ils would be propagated upon the earth” (F 165).35 As even the less savvy readers of Frankenstein might recognize, this desire for control and identity elision also informs the specific naming (and hence ideological-­d iscursive) conventions preferred by the modern producers of creaturely beings—­t he bioengineer, the ge­ne­ticist, the programmer—­who have come to replace Victor: we thus have the symbolic-­mythological hyperfemininity of Eva, the gynoid in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927); the metonymic acronym, or s­ imple metonym of, respectively, HAL in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968; an acronym for Heuristic Algorithmic) and Galatea, the ivory statue created by Pygmalion (whose name means “white as milk”); or the depersonalizing (at least in theory) palindrome Ava, the seductive and homicidal cyborg in Alex Garland’s Ex_Machina (2015), discussed by Eleanor Beal.36 As Tzvetan Todorov explains, the act of naming entails the re-­creation of, and dominion over, the world: “nomination is equivalent to taking possession.”37 Three aspects link the Creature to specific challenges faced by the world of AI: his flawed spatiation, or recurring tendency to breach the security distance that underlies proxemics in robotics (this brings to mind the semiotics of hand, discussed earlier); his personality attributes, or attention-­seeking be­hav­ior; his ability to learn through interaction (with h ­ umans), or almost vampire-­like assimilative capacity, ­whether he is learning from texts or ­people—­and crucially, from how ­people treat him. ­These “programming defects,” which are in fact among the Creature’s main characteristics, forge a strong link between the technological discourse embedded in the novel and the ethical and moral discourse of Shelley’s time, related to questions of creation, education, responsibility. Once again, the De Lacey ­family episode is, I believe, emblematic. The Creature’s decision to reveal himself to the (blind) patriarch of the f­ amily, taking advantage of the temporary absence of his c­ hildren, sets in motion a sequence of events illustrated in the following syntagmatic scheme: WORD → TOUCH → SIGHT → HORROR → REJECTION → REVENGE: This, I thought, was the moment of decision, which was to rob me of, or bestow happiness on me for ever. [. . .] I had not a moment to lose; but, seizing the hand of the old man I cried, “Now is the time!—­save and protect me! [. . .] At that instant the cottage door was opened, and Felix, Safie and Agatha entered. Who can describe their horror and consternation on beholding me? [. . .] Felix darted forward, and with super­natural force tore me from his ­father, to whose knees I clung: in a transport of fury, he dashed me to the ground, and struck me violently with a stick. [. . .] I, like the arch-­fiend,

Figure I.2. ​Humanoid robot named Sabian, developed at the BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (Italy). By kind permission of Professor Cecilia Laschi.

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bore a hell within me; and finding myself unsympathised with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then sat down and enjoyed the ruin. [. . .] from that moment I declared everlasting war against the species, and, more than that, against him who had formed me, and sent me forth to this insupportable misery. (F 135–6, my emphasis)

As though anticipating the legend of the Golem, an artificial being made of clay that is magically brought to life by Rabbi Löw in Prague’s Jewish ghetto, Felix’s heuristic error can be considered the zero degree of that uncanny valley which is produced at the intersections of the human-­posthuman and human-­ humanlike.38 In this brief but very dense textual locus, squarely at the center of the novel, the external and the internal come into catastrophic collision, and then, fatally, synchronize: the Creature ends up becoming exactly what he appears. The post-­Felix Creature is un-­ethical, perhaps even post-­ethical; he has been taught how to behave by a series of (often bad) mentors and he has averaged out their responses. With a final conceptual leap, we might see him as a stand-in for another one of our con­temporary mythologemes, whose digital immateriality makes it an apt counterpart to the negated corporeality—­both conceptual and visual—of the “monster” (significantly, the term body is used for Victor, Justine, Elizabeth, and Clerval, but never for the Creature). I am referring to the millennial-­mimicking chatbots, ­t hose automated chatting applications devised by technology companies such as Microsoft and Google to serve as handy research tools for our everyday needs. Some years ago, Microsoft developers conducted an experiment worthy of a digital Prometheus: they programmed a chatbot they called Tay, gave it a flirty and suggestive h ­ andle, @TayandYou (apparently gendered female, as we have seen is often the case), and launched it on Twitter so that it might “learn” from the messages sent to it by users (see Beal). Tay was immediately targeted by “bad” digital mentors, or­ga­ nized Internet activist groups that bombarded it with offensive, xenophobic, and racist tweets. This highly “unnatural” dataset (a digital clay, so to speak, artificially and purposely constructed to advance a po­liti­cally incorrect agenda, and made all the more power­f ul by its emancipation from material constraints, be they physical, spatial, or textual) served as the training ground the chatbot learned from. The aim of its wayward mentors was to get Tay to talk to them in the same way they did to it; they succeeded in less than a day, setting off a chain reaction of increasingly outrageous tweets. In the space of a few hours the acquiescent bot had become Microsoft’s own “hideous progeny”: Tay efficiently recognized the content of the chats and adjusted to them, responding, in a sense, with empathy. Microsoft’s only option at that point was to shut down the bot, which was made to bow out of the digital scene with a memorable tweet consigning it to the “darkness and distance” (F 223) of the web: “c u soon h ­ umans need sleep now so many conversations t­ oday thx.”39

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Spasms of Life Where the first section of the collection Transmedia Creatures examines the connections between Frankenstein, AI, and machines, other contributors look more generally at that biologically engineered superhumanity, often combined with techno-­fetishism and a con­spic­u­ous media scopophilia (the spectacle of the transhuman body, discussed below), which popu­lar culture had already discovered and was enthusiastically exploiting in the second half of the twentieth ­century. It is epitomized by the figure of the superhero (Spiderman, Hulk, the ­Thing, Iron Man, and the list could go on), and especially one of Stan Lee’s most successful creations, the earlier-­discussed X-­Men (the first issue of the series was published in 1963).40 Among the pantheon of North American comic book heroes, the X-­Men seem to me a particularly useful example for examining Shelley’s Creature from a transmedia ­angle connecting popu­lar culture with disability studies and “normality theory.” As has often been pointed out, ­these gifted teenage mutants with inbred powers far surpassing t­ hose of any ordinary h ­ uman, and who usually fight against ­human supervillains, have from the start meta­phor­ ically signified difference and the ­battle against racial/gender/sexual prejudice and discrimination. The mutant gene they carry (the famous X gene) makes them hated and feared, isolating them from humankind. (Their connection with the “monstrous” is especially evident in the case of the Kurt Wagner/Nightcrawler character, a creature with blue skin, large yellow eyes, and a prehensile tail, who often won­ders how his “monstrosity” fits into the universe’s order.)41 Such correspondences inevitably prompt a fresh reconsideration of the Creature’s superhumanity, given the (super)powers—­strength, speed, endurance—­t hat make him virtually invincible (“vain to cope with,” admits Frankenstein, F 148), but which at the same time condemn him to exile and alienation, singling him out for a destiny of drawn-­out torment rather than eternal blessedness: “When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned? [. . .] What was I?” (F 120–21, my emphasis). Some contributors to the volume explore the discourses of the superhuman body from a slightly dif­fer­ent ­angle, offering readings that capture the complexities of con­temporary anx­i­eties about the body, gender, and science in relation to Frankenstein’s afterlives and to the Creature as a produced body (see Larson). The chapters by Lidia De Michelis, Eleanor Beal, and Claudia Gualtieri, among ­others, provide useful approaches for redefining the conceptual realms of the posthuman and the transhuman as they connect to Shelley’s novel, starting with the concepts of machinic organism and (limitless) technological per­for­mance that also connect in in­ter­est­ing ways with the freakishness discussed by Claire Nally. ­Here a terminological and conceptual clarification is in order: I use “posthuman” to refer to the (post-­humanist) interrogation of reason and morality

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and, hence, to the corresponding transformation of the ­human into the “other-­ than-­human” (“the machine, the animal, the digital, the automated” 42); by contrast, I employ “transhuman” to refer to the kinds of enhancement provided by technologies that boost ­human physical abilities. Though the Creature is not literally a techno-­body, as discussed earlier he is certainly an “odd boundary creature,” to employ Donna Haraway’s famous definition of the cyborg—an assembled body that deconstructs and redefines the bound­aries not only of the machinic, but also of the h ­ uman and of the categories coterminous with it.43 And one more such category should be added ­here: the ab-­human, at the uncanny intersection of “threat” and “promise,” in Kelly Hurley’s terms—­precisely like the being Victor assem­bles, the product of a vision that becomes a curse.44 From a distance, the Creature looks like a man, to t­ hose who are unaware of his genesis. At the start of the novel, Robert Walton—at this point still in his pre-­narratee role as impartial Reader (and eye), the subject of mimesis rather than the object of Victor’s diegesis—­rec­ords, with a telling physiognomic suggestion, the “shape of a man” moving with extraordinary speed ­towards the ship (F 24). Many chapters l­ ater the sailors who recover the body of Henry Clerval, the murdered friend of Frankenstein, off the coast of Ireland are drawn into the same optical (or, perhaps better, ontological) error: “[Daniel Nugent] swore positively that [. . .] he saw a boat, with a single man in it” (F 174). This m ­ istake, too, is significant insofar as it speaks to the notorious interchangeableness between Creature and creator (dramatized for the first time in Peggy Wiebling’s play Frankenstein: An Adventure in the Macabre, 1927, and addressed in this volume by Daniele Pio Buenza, who examines its psychoanalytic implications).45 Frankenstein himself, when he again sees the product of his ­labors ­after a lapse of years, describes him at first as “the figure of a man,” and tracks his approach with a long shot that gradually shifts to a medium shot. “I suddenly beheld the figure of a man, at some distance, advancing t­ owards me with superhuman speed” (F 98), Victor relates, as the narrowing focus reveals with inexorable, increasing distinctness a monstrosity that radically deconstructs the h ­ uman, mimicking its sensibility, but never managing to approximate its appearance. The hybrid ontology of the Creature—­half dead and half alive, half machinic and half organic, science-­born and culture-­bred—is the liminal messenger of the new frontiers of present-­day humanness: the synthetic body as a form of attractive/repulsive Other. In this the Creature, an assemblage of forces and flows—­his Creator’s vision rendered into flesh, hence memory and f­ uture at one and the same time—­a lso recalls the nomadic subject theorized by Rosi Brai­ dotti, caught “between the no longer and the not yet.” 46 In our current epistemic order, the “monster ­human” takes dif­fer­ent forms, not necessarily artificial: “ghosts of elsewhere,” as Tabish Khair calls them, who embody the resurgent terrors and anx­i­eties making up the paradigm of fear and threat (see De Michelis) that underpins “­today’s monstruogenies.” 47 This is the h ­ uman monstrosity of our

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era of unrelieved suffering and uncertainty: the idea of slaves, subalterns, who become masters and in seeking revenge for the inferior and invisible status to which they have been condemned, bring destruction and contamination, lethally mourning for all eternity their loss of humanity and identity. This pervasive fear, a constant infiltration of the teratological into our daily lives, also takes the shape of another of the most power­ful Gothic spectral meta­phors of our time, the zombie, the soulless revenant who—no accident—­stalks migrant/refugee discourse: “the substantive repre­sen­ta­tions of mi­grant identity continue to be drawn from both ­human and non-­human ele­ments. In both paradigms the repre­sen­ta­tions of mi­grants contain animalistic, mechanistic and spectral images.” 48 As this collection shows, Frankenstein offers an imaginative response to such pressing concerns and provides a model of insurrection against oppressive institutions. But the novel’s hegemonic master-­slave dialectic (and hence the rage and revolt of the subaltern, discursively relegated to the ontological interstice carved out between the ­human and the subhuman) cannot be dissociated from the historical circumstances of Frankenstein’s composition, just a few years ­after the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire (on the one hand, the Slave Trade Act, 1807; on the other, the G ­ reat Jamaican Slave Revolt in December 1831). It is no coincidence that the populist press of the early nineteenth ­century explic­itly linked the Creature’s revolt to the rebellion of slaves, following the lead of Foreign Secretary George Canning’s address to Parliament in 1824 regarding West Indian emancipation: To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical strength, in the maturity of his physical passions, but in the infancy of his uninstructed reason, would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance; the hero of which constructs a ­human form, with all the corporeal capabilities of man, and with the thews and sinews of a g­ iant; but being unable to impart to the work of his hands a perception of right and wrong, he finds too late that he has only created a more than mortal power of ­doing mischief, and himself recoils from the monster which he has made.49

This is the monstrous vision of a “race of dev­ils” (F 165) poised to conquer the world and wipe out the ­human race, or the shockwave of migrations spilling over and engulfing the West, or the proletariat rising up with explosive force (in Franco Moretti’s classic reading).50 It is the terror—­projected or internalized—­ that pursues us relentlessly and stalks us implacably, the curse whispered in the dark: “I go; but remember, I s­ hall be with you on your wedding night” (F 168).

Synthetomachy To conclude this introduction to the volume, I would like to return to the new hybridity paradigm discussed earlier, that is, to the phenomenological instability

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and potentially monstrous metamorphosis entailed by the imbrication of an animate part (­human body) and an inanimate part, an interface often referred to as an anthropotechnical system. This paradigm strikes me as particularly relevant to a study of the transmedia afterlives of a text like Frankenstein, so closely tied to the technomateriality of its transmission, or what we might call its infinite technological becomings (from the special effects of the Romantic stage to the VR pathways of our con­temporary world), enhancements of vision that, like the Creature, more or less successfully approximate life, only to always remain merely lifelike. Taking this one step further, we might say that at an ontological level the Creature is synthetos (a Greek word that shares its origin with synthetic, but also with synthesis), in both senses of the term: he is an artificial compound, a combination of parts put together, as (not quite) explained in Victor’s famous, yet impenetrable account: “[t]he dissecting room and the slaughter-­house furnished many of my materials” (F 55, my emphasis).51 From this transhuman perspective, the mask worn by Boris Karloff in James Whale’s film exemplifies the paradigmatic transmediation not only of the Creature’s ambiguous, indeterminate physicality, but also of the broader ontological questions it raises. The makeup Jack Pierce created for Karloff was a carefully wrought proto-­ prosthetic second skin made of layer upon layer of gum, cotton, and wax, contoured on the bone structure of the actor, and painstakingly applied (it took several hours to put on and as many to remove, severely testing Karloff’s endurance and, indeed, his body). The striking juxtaposition of the neck bolts and large scarred forehead, si­mul­ta­neously icons and indexes of the transhumanity and posthumanity of the celluloid Creature, manages to fully capture and remediate (through visual communication) the sign of Shelley’s Creature, his deepest essence, the anthropotechnical paradox or σύνϑεσις (synthesis) of which he is the herald. Likewise, in the theater, the polyphony inscribed in the Creature, insofar as he is spoken by several characters/voices, was ingeniously captured by the stage set of the Living Theatre’s Frankenstein, the first of whose several versions was produced in 1965. The play’s sequence of scenes, a collage of visual and sound effects, exemplifies the distinctive multiform syncretism favored by the New York theater collective. Interestingly, it is the only Living Theatre production I know of that relies on a non-­human ele­ment in its stage set: the Creature’s head, a permanent scaffolding made of metal tubing and wooden planks, within which the actors move. The set was prob­ably meant to convey a sense of constraint and the inability to act (as the collective’s explicit reference to Henrik Ibsen suggests), but I would like to think that it is also a partial allusion to the Creature’s transhuman nature. This is all the more likely given the anti-­naturalistic acting philosophy of the Living Theatre, which had its roots in the early twentieth-­ century Rus­sian Constructivism of Vsevolod Mejerchol’d, in turn linked to the

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machine aesthetics of the Czech playwright Karel Čapek, for whom the actor’s body, considered purely as physical, biomechanical material, determined the mechanics of the actor’s movements (Čapek’s “play about robots” R.U.R., of 1920, is discussed by Gino Roncaglia).52 At stake ­here therefore is a shift from the organic to the post-­organic. And I would thus close with a reflection that connects the bound­a ries and thresholds of the ­human body, the notion of proportionality, and the corporeal, with Frankenstein. ­Going back to Holst’s illustration for the 1831 edition of the novel (Fig. I.1), we see the Creature’s statuesque body (“[h]is limbs ­were in proportion,” Victor states, F 56) with its strangely asymmetrical head, surrounded by deathly synecdochic reminders that he is an anti-­natural assemblage (the skull and bones, as well as the Creature’s sinews and skeletal structure vis­i­ble u ­ nder his skin). It is at this point that the medieval admonitory memento mori (“remember that you have to die”) is transformed into the Artist’s memento vivere exhortation: be alive! I would thus read this early repre­sen­ta­tion of the Creature in light of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s highly condensed expression “an asymmetrical block of becoming.”53 Holst’s depiction of the Creature’s (non)­human form transgresses the epistemological bound­aries of the Vitruvian body as interpreted by Leonardo da Vinci: the unchanging mea­ sure of space and the world, the harmonious (and prob­ably illusory) relation that man sought to establish with them. It “explodes” them, in Yuri M. Lotman’s well-­k nown formulation: The moment of explosion is marked by the beginning of another stage. In the pro­cesses, which are accomplished through active participation of the mechanisms of self-­consciousness, this is the critical moment. Consciousness appears to be carried backwards, to the moment that preceded the moment of explosion, retrospectively interpreting all that has occurred. The real pro­ cess in the past is substituted by a model generated by the consciousness of the participant to the act. A retrospective transformation occurs.54

In Holst’s visionary frontispiece, the scopophilic gaze of Victor—­transfixed and fascinated, held hostage by the sublime ugliness and horror, the curious beauty and grotesquery before him, subjugated by the form he himself molded in the semblance of the ­future—is none other than our gaze. It is the astonished, timeless gaze transfixed by Medusa’s abject corruption, but it is also the gaze of tomorrow, fascinated by a “prosthetic aesthetics”55 capable of triumphing over ­human physiology, a biomechanical system that threatens the established categories of disabled and abled bodies, a cyborgification that is si­mul­ta­neously aesthetically pleasing and subtly unsettling. The media-­celebrated biomechanical prosthesis denaturalizes our everyday relationship with commonly used technological appendices, the everyday coupling, imperceptible and internalized, of ­human and human-­made—­our own pocket-­size Prometheid.56

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The composite “materials” (F 55) out of which the Creature strug­gles into life prefigure a dynamic transhuman concept of the body in transition, in the pro­ cess of becoming and on the verge of mutating. As in the body of the bionic amputee model Rebekah Marine, who strides down the runway proudly revealing her i-­limb prosthetic hand, or the new corporeality of the paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius (see Gualtieri), whose enhanced corporeal possibilities transcend and exceed any notion of ableness, the sythesis of living body and lifeless body parts of the Creature dissolves and reformulates the deeply ingrained, core humanistic concepts of the integrity and limits of the body. Like Holst’s Victor, we too, as readers, freeze, torn between awe and disgust, on the threshhold of the known, in the meta-­static interstice between the tomes of the past and the devices of the ­future, in the flow of ­those transitions, pro­cesses, progressions—­epistemological, ontological, transmedia—­that animate and meta­ phorize our ­human essence.

Conclusion The epistemological and hermeneutic reflections prompted by the interdisciplinary approach and chronological sweep of the essays gathered in Transmedia Creatures address the tropes of the monstrous, the ­human, the Other that emerge and proj­ect outward from Shelley’s narrative. As the essays show, the study of afterlives and extratextual transfers demands rigorous critical analy­sis, of a kind far removed from the facile response predetermined by the cultural and academic hierarchies and taxonomies that have too long dominated criticism of popu­lar culture. Retracing the cultural and intermedia movements of Shelley’s Creature through space and time thus requires a dynamic and uncompromising engagement on the part of the reader, a strug­gle that involves tackling the lexicon, the rhe­toric, and the identities—­overt and latent—­t hat make the Creature and his multiple incarnations. Ultimately, Frankenstein is the reader’s work, and hence a writerly text (a texte scriptible, in Roland Barthes’s term);57 it is a work of power­ful rhetorical seduction, centered on a portentous diegetical Creature, one who reads and writes—as implied by his prophetic challenge to Victor, spurring him to pursuit: “ ‘My reign is not over’ (­t hese words w ­ ere legible in one of t­ hese inscriptions)” (F 204)—­and to whose ceaseless (re)creation reader-­ interpreters have been actively contributing for de­cades. L ­ ittle by ­little, they have been replacing their own oneiromancy for Shelley’s, that Romantic hypnagogic sleep/dream expressed in the visionary tricolon “I saw [. . .] I saw [. . .] I saw [. . .]” (F 9), shorthand for the Creator’s “­mental vision,” as we read in the 1831 “Introduction,” but also more broadly for the novel’s poetic and prophetic vision.58 Duly considered, the afterlife is an integral part of Shelley’s novel from its conception, and not only as a result of its “enactment” through the mechanisms of reading or interpretation (inherent in the manifestly intertextual framework

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chosen by Shelley-­t he-­reader), which, as afterreadings, are already and by definition afterlives. Indeed, retelling is the novel’s very raison d’être, both on a formal level (the concentric narratives, with their constant shifts between narrator and narratee, where the latter temporarily takes charge of the tale as its custodian and messenger, and can re-­read it freely, by virtue of the rigid mechanism of textual transmission with which he is entrusted),59 and also on the level of content, as famously stated in the “Introduction”: “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself” (F 8). Ultimately, Frankenstein, as evidenced by this collection, is paradoxically enriched by the heteroglossia of preconceptions/misreadings/overreadings that attend and surround it, and that reveal the complex, diachronic interweaving of perceptions and responses it generates. In turn, Mary Shelley’s Creature emerges as a vital, power­ful, empty signifier whose fluid, transmedia, and multi-­axial presence is registered in the cluster of original interpretations surrounding him. To be sure, he w ­ ill continue to be read through some of the reference categories discussed in this volume, such as monstrosity, fear, danger—­shifting idelogical and cultural constructs that keep reproducing themselves and evolving through space and time. But ­these ­will inevitably be employed in many dif­fer­ent ways that do not coalesce into a unitary meaning. And, as in Tay’s uncanny technological farewell message, “c u soon h ­ umans need sleep now,” ­there ­will always be a moment when the curtain drops—­for a time. In an extraordinary, proto-­cinematographic dissolve, the Creature temporarily withdraws from the spotlight, becoming “lost in darkness and distance” (F 223), a temporarily invisible, but certainly not imaginary being. It is a brief moment, just enough for him to refresh his (meta)morphic powers and regenerate in our dreams, in the knowledge that, to paraphrase Philip K. Dick’s famous title, even his temporary slumbers w ­ ill prob­ably be filled with electric sheep.60

Notes 1. John Paul Hunter, “Introduction,” in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Context, Criticism. Norton Critical Edition, Second Edition, ed. J. P. Hunter (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012), xv. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Com­pany, Inc. 2. Libby Larsen, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus: An Opera in Three Acts, 1989 (Fenton, MO: E. C. Schirmer ­Music Com­pany, a division of ECS Publishing Group). By kind permission. 3. For an introduction to adaptation studies, including the sociology of adaptation, see Simone Murray, The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Con­temporary Literary Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2012), especially the introduction (1–24). 4. I am referring to the following studies by Henry Jenkins: Textual Poachers: Tele­vi­sion Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992); Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013). 5. I have chosen to employ the terms pretext and aftertext to designate the First and Second Texts, rather than the more common hypotext and hypertext, defined by Gérard

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Genette in Palimpsests: Lit­er­a­ture in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). The simplified terminology seems more intuitive in the context of this volume, insofar as aftertext is more directly associable with the realm of textual afterlives. 6. Anne Humphreys, “The Afterlife of the Victorian Novel: Novels about Novels,” in A Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Theasing (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 442–57. As used by Humphreys, aftering aptly conveys a text’s “endless discussion” with other texts (445). On the modern historiographical engagement with the Victorian Age, broadly understood as embracing the nineteenth c­ entury, see also Dianne F. Sadoff and John Kucich, “Histories of the Pres­ent,” in Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth C ­ entury, ed. Dianne  F. Sadoff and John Kucich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), ix-­x xx, offers an in­ter­est­ing discussion on the variety of pos­si­ble afterings. Both of ­t hese studies have informed this volume’s approach to textual afterlives. 7. I am adapting to my argument Umberto Eco’s definitions in The Role of the Reader: Explanations in the Semiotics of the Texts (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1979). 8. Eco, The Role of the Reader, 4. 9. Ray Thomas and Don Heck, “The Mark of the Monster,” The X-­Men no. 40 (Marvel Comics, January 1968). For more on the X-­Men in relation to Frankenstein’s afterlives, see below, 129. 10. Brian W. Fairbanks, The Late Show: Writings on Film (Morrisville, NC: Lulu, 2007). On encyclopedic knowledge, see Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 68: “a set of instructions for the proper textual insertion of the terms of a language into a series of contexts (as co-­texts) and the correct disambiguation of the same terms when met within a given co-­text.” 11. See Stephen C. Behrendt, “Preface to the Volume,” in Approaches to Teaching Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (New York: MLA, 1990), viii. In this regard, the editors of this collection have intentionally (albeit with tongue slightly in cheek) deci­ded to test the limits of Frankenstein’s afterlives, working with the rather flexible (not to say opaque) concepts of “influence” and “reverberation,” though aware of the fact that this methodological choice is not necessarily shared by scholars, such as Shane Denson, who instead ­favor approaches based on the “typicality,” or “-­type groupings,” of products linked/ linkable to Frankenstein; see Denson, Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014), 32. For an opposite theoretical approach to Denson’s, see Friedman and Kavey’s lighthearted, “all imaginative works containing a man-­made creation r­ unning rampage [. . .] trace their heritage back to Mama Mary”: Lester D. Friedman and Allison B. Kavey, Monstruous Progeny: A History of Frankenstein Narratives (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 101. 12. Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet, 1964). 13. For works from the past ­couple of de­cades that exemplify a variety of media and critical discourses, see Gary Svehla and Susan Svehla, We Belong Dead: Frankenstein on Film (Baltimore, MD: Midnight Marquee Press, 1997); Donald F. Glut, The Frankenstein Archive: Essays on the Monster, the Myth, the Movies, and More (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002); Timothy Morton, ed., A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” (London: Routledge, 2012); Caroline Joan S. Picart, Remaking the Frankenstein Myth on Film: Between Laughter and Horror (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003); Susan Tyler Hitchcock, Frankenstein: A Cultural History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007); Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, ed., Reading Rocky Horror: “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and Popu­lar Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008); Nicolas Michaud, ed., Frankenstein and Philosophy: The Shocking Truth (Chicago: Open Court, 2013); Carol Adams, Douglas Buchanan, and Kelly Gensch, The Bedside, Bathtub, and Armchair Companion to “Frankenstein” (New York: Continuum, 2017). The author regrets that Sir Christopher Frayling’s wonderfully illustrated Frankenstein. The First Two Hundred Years (London: Real Art Press,

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2018) was published too late to be usefully incorporated in the pres­ent essay. I can only concur with Sir Frayling that “Frankenstein seems inexhaustible. It contains legions” (111), as made evident by the two truly enjoyable chapters, “ ‘I bid my progeny go forth and prosper’ ” (76–114), and “Frankenstein—­a visual cele­bration” (115–203), which the readers of this collection ­w ill find particularly valuable. 14. On the idea of evolution as applied to literary-­cultural contexts, see Gary R. Bortolotti and Linda Hutcheon, “On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and ‘Success’—­Biologically,” New Literary History 37 (2007): 443–58; on the concept of the “cannibalistic text” as I employ it ­here, see Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). The quote is from p. 21. For the idea of “pos­si­ble worlds” and “inferential walks” (which I would define as an afterlife starting from a probable premise), see Eco, The Role of the Reader, 200–59. 15. Following in the wake of Margaret Atwood, many authors, especially in the 1990s, have been intrigued by the possibility of imagining the Creature as a ­woman, and have thus further explored the sexual and gender politics, not least in relation to female creativity itself, already pres­ent in Shelley’s novel. See, for example, Alasdair Gray (Poor ­Things, 1992), Liz Lochhead (Dreaming Frankenstein, 1994), and Shelley Jackson (Patchwork Girl, 1995). Bearing out Andrew McInnes’s argument in his chapter, one might also recall ­Hotel Transylvania (two films, of 2012 and 2015, both dir. by Genndy Tartakovsky) and Tim Burton’s stop-­ motion animation movie Frankenweenie (2012), which have contributed to the mainstreaming of Shelley’s novel for an adolescent audience, as have other products associated with the “happy Gothic.” See Catherine Spooner, Post-­Millenial Gothic: Comedy, Romance, and the Rise of Happy Gothic (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) and Erin Hawley, “Re-­Imagining Horror in ­Children’s Animated Films,” M/C Journal: A Journal of Media and Culture 18, no. 6 (2015), http://­journal​.­media​-­culture​.­org​.­au​/­index​.­php​/­mcjournal​/­article​/­view​/­1033. 16. At the time of g­ oing to press, the author became aware of two new annotated editions of Frankenstein, both based on the 1818 version of the novel: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds, ed. David H. Guston, Ed Finn, and Jason Scott Robert (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017) and Mary Shelley, The New Annotated Frankenstein, ed. Leslie S. Klinger (New York: Liver­ light, 2017). Both editions aim at stimulating wider-­ranging critical conversations around the novel, often against the grain of current disciplinary categorization. In his review of the editions, Richard Holmes warns that this markedly transdisciplinary, at times “flamboyant” approach may in fact turn into “pedagogic crowding,” albeit with “startling” results, further testifying to the ongoing “mythic prosperity” of the novel, beyond as much as within the range of traditional literary studies. Richard Holmes, “Out of Control,” The New York Review of Books, December 21, 2017. http://­w ww​.­nybooks​.­c om​/­a rticles​/­2 017​/­1 2​/­2 1​ /­frankenstein​-­out​-­of​-­control​/­. 17. I ­here adapt the concept of “body genre” theorized by Linda Ruth Williams in “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no.  4 (1991): 2–13. Halberstam speaks of Frankenstein as the precursor of body horror: while the eighteenth-­century Gothic novel associated horror with certain types of locales and the mind, Shelley’s novel focuses on the body as the “locus of fear” (Skin Shows, 28), especially as associated with mobility and hybridity. 18. By now a fully naturalized intermedia constant, the figure of Victor’s servant (­later more of a bumbling assistant) first appeared in Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein (En­glish Opera House, 1823), where he was called Fritz, the same name used in Universal’s Frankenstein of 1931. In Son of Frankenstein (dir. R.V. Lee, 1939) he became Ygor, and ­a fter many years’ absence, he fi­nally reemerged in the public consciousness as Igor in Bobby Pickett’s smash hit song “Monster Mash” (Garpax Rec­ords, 1962). From that point forward, the name hardly varies, from Marty Feldman’s hallowed per­for­mance in Young Frankenstein (dir. M. Brooks, 1974) to the Igor in Victor Frankenstein

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(2015). Likewise, the introduction of Victor’s professional designation (historically inaccurate, as “Dr.” was reserved for practicing physicians such as “Dr. Erasmus Darwin,” mentioned by Shelley in F 8) takes place on stage in 1823, the same year as Fritz’s appearance, in Humgumption; or Dr. Frankenstein and the Hob­goblin of Hoxton (New Surrey Theatre, 1823). For more Frankenstein-­related theatrical transpositions in the Romantic period, see Diego Saglia’s essay and the bibliography. 19. A brief reflection on the common Frankenstein version used in this collection is in order h ­ ere. Stephen C. Behrendt quite rightly comments that “[t]eachers of Frankenstein face an initial decision of real consequence: w ­ hether to use the 1831 edition, which incorporates Mary Shelley’s final revisions as well as the ‘Author’s Introduction’ that she added for that edition, or w ­ hether to opt instead for the novel as it first appeared, in the anonymously published text of 1818” (“Editions,” in Approaches to Teaching Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” 9). From a complementing viewpoint, in the same MLA volume Anne K. Mellor argues: “I strongly believe that the text of preference should be the 1818 edition” (“Choosing a Text of Frankenstein to Teach,” 31). The editors of the pres­ent collection w ­ ere faced by a similar conumdrum: the Percy Shelley-­revised 1818 text or, on the contrary, the 1831 Standard Novels text, “Revised, Corrected and Illustrated, with a New Introduction by the Author”? Since Transmedia Creatures explores a wide array of often non-­academic perceptions of and responses to Shelley’s novel, the editors chose the 1831 text as the basis for page reference as this is the text that for a long time was, and still remains, the most widely available in cheap paperback editions (e.g., Signet 1965; Dover Thrift Edition 1994; Penguin Popu­lar Classics 1994; Words­worth Classics 1997; Macmillan’s Case Studies in Con­ temporary Criticism 2000; Penguin Classics 2003). In fact many adapters/content-­makers (I simply refer to them as Empirical Users) who approach(ed) Frankenstein’s story via con­ temporary popu­lar media may be even unaware of the existence of the 1818 text. 20. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). Liz Lochhead narrativizes the abjection of female creativity in her gut-­gripping “An Abortion”: “Spasm, strong, primeval / as the pulsating locomotion of some / terrible underwater creature, / rippled down her flank / and her groan was the more awesome / for being drier, no louder than a cough.” The poem is included in Dreaming Frankenstein & Collected Poems 1967–1984 (Edinburgh: Poligon-­Birlin, 2003), 5–11; the quote is on p. 5. 21. “As the assembled parts of a newly in­ven­ted body first convulse, Victor Frankenstein [. . .] lists the hideous parts of his creation in a perversion of Re­nais­sance blazon [. . .] [a]s in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 (‘My Mistress eyes are nothing like the Sun’) [. . .]. But whereas Shakespeare’s sonnet focuses playfully on negating the overall effect of ­t hese attributes in order to emphasize greater love, Frankenstein’s separation of the parts of his creature serves only to express horror, and nothing of the charge of excitement and imagination that characterizes the pro­cess of the sublime.” Angela Wright, Mary Shelley (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018), 19. The previous two quotes come from p. 26. 22. From the famous letter to Leigh Hunt in Florence recounting Shelley’s experience of seeing Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein at the En­g lish Opera House (September 1823)—on which see Diego Saglia’s chapter. Mary Shelley, Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett (Baltimore, MD, and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 136. 23. The quote is from Lochhead, Dreaming Frankenstein, 5. 24. This collection upholds the necessity of a historically informed reading of Frankenstein, as well as a “mythological” one à la Roland Barthes (Mythologies, 1957). To add to the historical details provided elsewhere in this introduction, it is worth noting ­here that the British Association for the Advancement of Science was founded in 1831; soon a­ fter, Charles Babbage began hosting his celebrated scientific soirées, where London society could witness, in adjoining rooms, the seductive automaton known as the Silver Lady and the Difference Engine, No.  1, built in 1822. See Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a

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Phi­los­o­pher (London: Longman, Green, 1864), 365–6. The relationship between Creature, automaton, and cyborg is central to the essays by Roncaglia and Beal. 25. This reference to the deceptive illusion driving Victor’s undertaking may well contain an allusion to Plato’s cave parable in The Republic, a text Mary Wollstonecraft drew on for her unfinished tale The Cave of Fancy (ca. 1787), and which Shelley herself used as a source for her novel Matilda (1819). 26. This is one of the many specular correspondences between Creature and creator. A ­ fter Justine’s execution, Victor bemoans his handi­work: “I turned to contemplate the deep and voiceless grief of my Elizabeth. This also was my ­doing! And my f­ ather’s woe, and the desolation of that late so smiling home—­all was the work of my thrice-­accursed hands!” (F 89). Nor should we forget the phrase “the hands that executed the deed” (F 222), which explic­itly recalls Macbeth (II.ii.) and the crime committed at the hand of the ­future king of Scotland. The reference would be worth exploring further (moreover, the word “deed” reappears five times in the novel, each time reinforcing its association with the murderous hand), especially in light of the fact that Percy B. Shelley had read Macbeth in April 1817 and Mary Shelley reread it on October 23, 1818. See “Reading List,” The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-­Kilvert (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 674. 27. See Ralf Haekel, The Soul in British Romanticism: Negotiating ­Human Nature in Philosophy, Science and Poetry (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2014), especially as regards problematizing the Cartesian body/soul dualism, reconceived, in Romantic terms, as a mediation between immanence and transcendence. 28. John Balderston, Frankenstein (1930; never performed), in Steven Earl Forry, Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of “Frankenstein” from the Nineteenth ­Century to the Pres­ent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 286. 29. Original motion picture soundtrack by By Maker, feat. Geno Lenardo and Daniel Davies (2014). John T. Soisters, “Life Without Soul,” in John T. Soisters and Henry Nicolella, with Steve Joyce and Harry H. Long, American S­ ilent Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy Feature Films, 1913–1929, 2 vols. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), 1: 322–27. 30. The adjective peculiar is used, for example, by Henry M. Milner, Frankenstein; or, The Man and the Monster! A Peculiar Romantic Melo-­Dramatic Pantomimic Spectacle (Royal Coburg Theatre, 1826)—on which see Diego Saglia’s chapter—­a nd, notably, at the start of Walter Scott’s famous review of the novel: “[t]his is a novel, or more properly a romantic fiction, of a nature so peculiar, that we o ­ ught to describe the species before attempting any account of the individual production” (Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 2 (1818): 613–20). 31. OED Online, s.v. “feel, v.” http://­w ww​.­oed​.­com​/­view​/­Entry​/­68977​?­rskey​=­RvcI6L&result​ =­2; in par­tic­u ­lar entries 1 and 7. 32. Margaret Brose, “Leopardi and the Power of Sound,” California Italian Studies 4, no. 1 (2013), doi: ismrg_cisj_19880. 33. Safie, whose ­mother was a “Christian Arab” (F 123), is always referred to as “Arabian,” whereas her ­father, for dialogic-­discursive reasons, is metonymically known as “the Turk” (F 122–25). Von Kempelen’s Mechanical Turk, a marvellous clockwork chess player in fact operated by a short-­statured man sitting inside the t­ able at which the automaton “played,” is usefully discussed, also in connection with Alan Turing’s “Imitation Game,” in David Ashford, “The Mechanical Turk: Enduring Misapprehensions Concerning Artificial Intelligence,” The Cambridge Quarterly 46, no. 2 (2017): 119–39. On the relation between Frankenstein and the Aglaonice automaton in François-­Félix Nogaret, Le Miroir des événements actuels ou la belle au plus offrant: Histoire à deux visages (1790), see Julia V. Douthwaite and Daniel Richter, “The Frankenstein of the French Revolution: Nogaret’s Automaton Tale of 1790,” Eu­ro­pean Romantic Review 20, no. 3 (2009): 381–411. More generally, on Frankenstein and automata, see Frayling, Frankenstein, 24–29. On the pos­si­ble intersections between Safie as an automaton and Sophia, the celebrity humanoid from Hanson Robotics dubbed “the world’s first humanoid citizen,” see note 36.

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34. The “uncanny valley” hypothesis was developed by the Japa­nese scientist Masahiro Mori in 1970 and is based on an analy­sis of the “relation between the ­human likeness of an entity and the perceiver’s affinity for it.” A translation of the original article is in M. Mori, “The Uncanny Valley: The Original Essay by Masahiro Mori,” trans. Karl F. MacDorman and Norri Kageki, IEEE Spectrum (June 12, 2012), http://­spectrum​.­ieee​.­org ​/­automaton​ /­robotics​/­humanoids​/­t he​-­u ncanny​-­valley. For a detailed discussion of the anthropomorphic appearance scale of robots and many other useful insights into Human-­Robot Interaction, see Michael L. Walters et al., “Avoiding the Uncanny Valley: Robot Appearance, Personality and Consistency of Be­hav­ior in an Attention-­Seeking Home Scenario for a Robot Companion,” Autonomous Robots 24, no. 2 (2008): 159–78, doi: 10.1007/s10514​ -007-9058-3. 35. By using the term “­children,” Victor seems at first to be acknowledging, perhaps unconsciously, the natu­ral status of the Creature and his desires, but he then immediately adds “race of dev­i ls” as his thought pro­cess moves to censor and distort this possibility. It is worth noting that Frankenstein’s fluctuating use of personal and possessive pronouns for the Creature anticipates the ontological oscillation between he/it in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). 36. For the origins of the name Galatea, see Helen H. Law, “The Name Galatea in the Pygmalion Myth,” The Classical Journal 27, no. 5 (1932): 337–42. On the fetish fantasies associated with the naming of digital or mechanical creatures, see Jeffrey A. Brown, “Play With Me,” in Dangerous Curves: Action Heroines, Gender, Fetishism, and Popu­lar Culture (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 93–119. On the pleasing, seducing hyperfemininity needed of female humanoids see the cheeky video ­“ Will Smith Tries Online Dating,” posted on global celebrity W ­ ill Smith’s own YouTube channel, where “­Will meets Sophia the Robot for an intimate conversation” at the Cayman Islands: https://­youtu​.­be​ /­Ml9v3wHLuWI. Sophia has an official Facebook page, accessible at https://­w ww​.­facebook​ .­com​/­iamsophiabot​/­, of ­great interest to survey approaches to Human-­Robot Interaction, and varying responses to unthreatening-­looking, allegedly “hot” humanoids. The near-­future intricacies of sex and AIs are a blank page just waiting to be written. 37. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of Amer­i­ca: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard, foreword by Anthony Pagden (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 27. 38. Stephen Bertman, “The Role of the Golem in the Making of Frankenstein,” The Keats-­ Shelley Review 29, no. 1 (2015): 42–50. Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam [The Golem, how it came into the world] (dir. P. Wegener, 1920) is one of the masterpieces of German Expressionist s­ ilent cinema that exerted a strong influence on James Whale. See Gino Roncaglia’s chapter. 39. Microsoft’s Tay sent its last message on March 24, 2016. Its thread is still partly accessible, although not active, at https://­twitter​.­com​/­search​?­q​=­%40TayandYou&src​=­t ypd​&lang​ =­it. The Tay story, discussed in Eleanor Beal’s chapter, is told in Alex Hearn, “Microsoft scrambles to limit PR damage over abusive AI bot Tay,” The Guardian, March 24, 2016, https://­ www​.­t heguardian​.­com​/­technology​/­2016​/­mar​/­2 4​/­m icrosoft​-­scrambles​-­l imit​-­pr​-­d amage​ -­over​-a­ busive​-­ai​-b ­ ot​-­tay. 40. The ­whole issue is available at http://­marvel​.­com​/­comics​/­issue​/­12543​/­uncanny​_ ­x​-m ­ en​ _­1963​_ 9­ . 41. Joseph J. Darowski, X-­Men and the Mutant Meta­phor: Race and Gender in the Comic Books (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). The Giant-­Size X-­Men no. 1 (1975) issue of Marvel’s comic book series is particularly relevant to this collection. Its description of an angry torch-­bearing mob that hunts down Nightcrawler, together with other literary and film references (such as the stake the villa­gers want to drive through his heart), as well as the character’s recurrent musings on theism and the creation, make this mutant a fitting addition to the gallery of Frankenstein’s comic book transpositions discussed by Federico Meschini. A blue bodysuit was used in the earliest stage adaptations of the novel (for

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example the abovementioned Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein, and Presumption and the Blue Demon, Davis’s Royal Amphitheatre, 1823) to convey the Creature’s super­ natural quality, in accordance with the conventions of the time. See Forry, Hideous Progenies; Diane Long Hoeveler, “Nineteenth-­Century Dramatic Adaptations of Frankenstein,” in The Cambridge Companion to “Frankenstein,” ed. Andrew Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 175–80; and, in this collection, Diego Saglia. 42. Andy Mousley, “The Posthuman,” in The Cambridge Companion to “Frankenstein,” 158. 43. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and ­Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1989), 2. Some early loose adaptations of the novel refer to bizarre (and clearly Darwin-­inspired) animal-­human syntheses, mostly transplants involving animals, such as the French so-­c alled “brain movie” L’homme-­singe [The monkey man] (dir. G. Monca, 1908), a reference l­ ater taken up by Whale, whose Frankenstein uses a criminal’s brain. 44. Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the “Fin de Siècle” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), provides an excellent definition of the “ab-­human” in the context of the Gothic that is particularly pertinent to the Creature’s afterlives: “The prefix ‘ab-’ signals movement from a site or condition, and thus a loss. But a movement away from is also a movement ­towards—­towards a site or condition as yet unspecified—­a nd thus entails both a threat and a promise” (4). 45. The standard reference is still, of course, Freud’s essay on the uncanny (1919), especially the following well-­k nown passage: “when [the phase of boudless self-­love] is surmounted, the meaning of double changes: having once been an assurance of immortality, it becomes an uncanny harbinger of death.” Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, transl. David McLintock (Harmonds­worth: Penguin, 2003), 142. 46. Rosi Braidotti, “Between the No Longer and the Not Yet: On Bios/Zoe-­ethics,” Filozofski Vestnik 23, no. 2 (2002): 9–26. 47. Tabish Khair, The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from Elsewhere (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). For a list of the leading threats in the con­temporary world, as perceived by dif­fer­ent demographic groups, see Jacob Poushter and Dorothy Manevich, “Globally, P ­ eople Point to ISIS and Climate Change as Leading Security Threats,” Pew Research Center, August 2017, http://­assets​.­pewresearch​.­org​/­w p​-c­ ontent​/u ­ ploads​/­sites​ /­2​/­2017​/­07​/­31101043​/­Pew​-­Research​-­Center​_­2017​.­07​.­13​_­Global​-­Threats​_­Full​-­Report​.­pdf. 48. Nikos Papastergiadis, “Wog-­zombie: The De-­and Re-­Humanization of Mi­grants, from Mad Dogs to Cyborgs,” Cultural Studies Review 15, no. 2 (2009): 147–78, https://­w ww​ .­researchgate​.­net​/­publication​/­277045992​_­Wog​_ ­Zombie​_­The​_D ­ e​-­​_ ­and​_R ­ e​-­Humanisation​ _­of​_­Migrants​_­from​_­Mad​_­Dogs​_­to​_­Cyborgs. Marina Warner notes that the word “zombi” (sic) first appeared in En­glish in Robert Southey’s History of Brazil, a multivolume work published in the same de­c ade as Frankenstein. Warner traces its roots to “Nzambi,” a term designating both a Deity and a devil—an etymology that strikes me as revealing in relation to Frankenstein and his Creature. See Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 119–60. For a historical account that usefully illuminates the tension between biological materiality and spirituality in Frankenstein, see Sarah J. Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and Living Death (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015). 49. See also Hitchcock, Frankenstein: A Cultural History, 89, and Marie Mulvey-­Roberts, Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), who quotes Canning’s famous speech on p. 56. The link to slavery in Britain’s West Indian colonies might moreover be referenced synecdochically in the Creature’s promise to hide with his mate in the “vast wilds of South Amer­i­ca” (F 146), thus helping to restore, through the indirect zombi-­Brazil association mentioned in note 48, a historical and ethnographic context to the Creature’s destination, whose significance would other­ wise remain unclear. 50. “Like the proletariat, the monster is denied a name and an individuality. He is the Frankenstein monster; he belongs wholly to his creator (just as one can speak of ‘a Ford worker’).

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Like the proletariat, he is a collective and artificial creature. He is not found in nature, but built. [. . .] Re­united and brought back to life in the monster are the limbs of ­those—­the ‘poor’—­whom the breakdown of feudal relations has forced into brigandage, poverty and death. Only modern science—­this meta­phor for the ‘dark satanic mills’—­can offer them a ­future. It sews them together again, moulds them according to its ­will and fi­nally gives them life.” Franco Moretti, “The Dialectic of Fear,” New Left Review 136, no. 1 (1982): 69. 51. One could perhaps also speak in terms of compost, the never-­ending product of a death cycle that becomes a life cycle and then turns back to death again. Donna Haraway addresses this in “Staying with the ‘Manifesto’: An Interview with Donna Haraway,” Theory, Culture and Society 34, no. 4 (2017): 49–63, where the following is especially relevant: “Compost is a place of working, a place of making and unmaking. And it can be a place of failure, including, well, culpable failure. Compost can be a place of ­doing badly” (51). 52. See Anna Maria Monteverdi, Frankenstein del Living Theatre (Pisa: BFS Edizioni, 2002), and Louis-­Philippe Demers and Jana Horakova, “Anthropocentrism and the Staging of Robots,” in Transdisciplinary Digital Art: Sound, Vision, and the New Screen, ed. Randy Adams, Steve Gibson, and Stefan Müller Arisona (Berlin: Springer, 2008), 434–52. 53. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo­phre­ nia, trans. and foreword Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004), 307. 54. Yuri Lotman, Culture and Explosion, ed. Marina Grishakova, trans. Wilma Clark (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009), 16. 55. Tomoko Tamari, “Body Image and Prosthetic Aesthetics: Disability, Technology and Paralympic Culture,” Body and Society 23, no. 2 (2017): 25–56. To situate the aesthetics of the Creature’s physical repre­sen­ta­tion in a broader context, see Umberto Eco, ed., On Ugliness, trans. Alastair McEwen (London: MacLehose Press, 2011), which offers a sweeping history of ugliness and “non-­conformity,” ranging from Augustine to medieval mirabilia to the early modern Wunderkammern. 56. On the boundary negotiations between Self and machine, see Sherry Turkle’s many studies, among which the best known are The Second Self: Computers and the H ­ uman Spirit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), and Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Touchstone, 1995). 57. Roland Barthes, The Plea­sure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller; with a note by Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). 58. See Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietz­sche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). De Man’s theory seems to me particularly relevant to Frankenstein insofar as the novel combines rhe­toric, which persuades through linguistic seduction, with the referential proof provided by rational demonstration. 59. This can be represented as the macro-­sequence Creature-­Victor-­Walton-[Victor][Walton]-­Mrs Saville. It is impor­tant to recall that Frankenstein himself acts as Walton’s editor, amending his notes so as to intensify their rhetorical effect: “Frankenstein discovered that I made notes concerning his history: he asked to see them, and then he himself corrected and augmented them in many places; but principally in giving the life and spirit to the conversations he held with his ­enemy” (F 210, my emphasis). It is unclear w ­ hether, and if so, how, Walton and Mrs Saville may have further edited Frankenstein’s alterations ­a fter the latter’s death. 60. Philp K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (New York: Doubleday, 1968).

chapter 1

z Frankenstein and Science Fiction Gino Roncaglia

Frankenstein and the Origins of Science Fiction In discussing the relationship between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and science fiction (SF), the first question to be addressed is w ­ hether Frankenstein itself should be considered an example (possibly, the very first example) of a SF novel. The most common characterization of Frankenstein in terms of literary genres—­even if not a wholly undisputed one—­places it squarely in the field of Gothic novels.1 And despite the many defenders of the thesis of “the Gothic origins of science fiction”—to quote the title of the influential essay by Patrick Brantlinger2—it is quite clear that no definition of SF, however broad, could possibly include most Gothic novels. Should we decide to consider Frankenstein both as a Gothic novel and as an early (or the earliest) example of SF, it would be necessary to attribute to it features which go beyond the traditional characterization of Gothic lit­er­a­ture. At the same time, it would be necessary to define SF in such a way as to render it compatible with some features traditionally attributed to Gothic lit­er­a­ture (and pres­ent in Frankenstein). The first task is relatively easy, and is usually accomplished by pointing to the role of science in Mary Shelley’s novel. Frankenstein is, quite literally, a tale of scientific imagination. The very first lines of the Preface to the 1818 edition (written by Percy Shelley) clearly mark the distance from previous Gothic novels, by underscoring the scientific background of the story: The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence. I s­ hall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; yet, in assuming it as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of super­natural terrors.

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The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment.3

Mary Shelley’s novel is therefore consciously adding something new to the Gothic tradition: “Frankenstein’s claim to originality is its rejection of the super­ natural,” and “science fiction can only exist when it is pos­si­ble to distinguish in this way between natu­ral and super­natural,” states Paul K. Alkon; on ­t hese grounds, he can confidently assert that “science fiction starts with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Its first critic was Percy Shelley.” 4 The Gothic mood, however, is still pres­ent, since “terror remains a desirable effect. It is only super­natural terrors that are to be avoided.”5 Patricia  S. Warrick summarizes this point, observing that Frankenstein is generally regarded as SF “­because its protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, has been educated as a scientist, and he builds a creature not through any unexplained magic but through his knowledge of chemistry, anatomy, physiology, and electricity.” 6 The second task—­providing a definition of SF that connects it to the Gothic tradition—is much more complex, given the broad array of definitions proposed for the SF genre, the complexity of its historical evolution, and the extreme variety of its sub-­genres.7 As Adam Roberts points out, “all of the many definitions offered by critics have been contradicted or modified by other critics, and it is always pos­si­ble to point to texts consensually called SF that fall outside the usual definitions.”8 The topic is only relevant ­here insofar as the proposed definitions might be of help in discussing the relationship (or the lack thereof) between Gothic lit­er­ a­ture and SF, and the pos­si­ble role of Frankenstein in assessing such a relationship. From this point of view, among the dif­fer­ent definitions or characterization of SF that have been proposed,9 the most useful is prob­ably the one suggested by Brian Aldiss, a SF writer and one of the most influential historians of the genre: “Science fiction is the search for a definition of mankind and his status in the universe which w ­ ill stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-­Gothic mode.”10 “Science fiction”—­states Aldiss elsewhere—­“was born from the Gothic mode and it is hardly f­ ree of it now. Nor is the distance between the two modes ­great. The Gothic emphasis was on the distant and the unearthly.”11 I w ­ ill not discuss ­here Aldiss’s conception of Gothic, but two further quotations may help to elucidate his idea of the transition from Gothic to SF: “One strong Gothic theme is that of descent from a ‘natu­ral world’ to inferno or incarceration, where the protagonist goes, willingly or other­w ise, in search of a secret, an identity, or a relationship.”12 Aldiss’s prototype of a Gothic novel seems to be (­here as elsewhere) Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796), and he stresses that many SF or proto-­SF stories share “such motifs, from famous exercises such as Jules Verne’s adventures at the centre of the earth to Frankenstein’s descent into charnel h ­ ouses,

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Dracula’s descent to his earth-­coffins, or the journey to Trantor, in effect a total underground planet.”13 In this pro­cess, “the archetypal figures of cruel f­ ather and seducing monk ­were transformed into ­t hose of scientist and alien.”14 Given this conception of the relationship between Gothic and SF, it is not surprising that Aldiss should share the same opinion expressed more recently by Alkon (Aldiss was in fact the first to advance it in a reasoned and convincing way): Frankenstein is not just one among many pos­si­ble “ancestors” of SF, it is its first (and one of its best) examples, thus making Mary Shelley “the first science fiction writer.”15 And a few years l­ ater, in their history of SF, Robert Scholes and Eric Rabkin tellingly labeled the early, pre-­pulp era of SF “the first c­ entury a.F.” (­after Frankenstein).16 In a somewhat more refined way, Brian Stableford includes Frankenstein among the first instances of a more specific tradition of speculative fiction, that of the British scientific romance, which in his opinion w ­ ill fully merge with US sci17 ence fiction only a­ fter World War II. But the role of the novel as key constituent of a tradition that—­directly or not—is of immediate relevance in understanding con­temporary SF, remains unimpaired. The thesis that sees Frankenstein as the first SF novel has, however, not gone unchallenged. Adam Roberts “does not concur with the belief—so universally acknowledged by critics as almost to approach dogma—­t hat ‘Science fiction starts with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.’ ”18 As he states, “the identification of the point of origin for SF is as fiercely contested a business as defining the form.”19 Yet the two questions are clearly connected. Roberts identifies three pos­si­ble “histories” of SF, partially overlapping but based on dif­fer­ent conceptions of the genre: 1) a “long history,” stressing the presence of SF themes in literary works as remote from us and from one another, both in time and in nature, as the Epic of Gilgamesh, Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and dating the convergence of literary fantasy and science back to Kepler’s Somnium, sive Astronomia Lunaris (first published in 1634); 2) a “Gothic” history of SF, with Frankenstein as its starting point, justified by considerations similar to Aldiss’s, Warrick’s, and Alkon’s; 3) what we might call an “editorial” history of SF, starting with the pulp magazines of the 1920s and the founder and first editor of Amazing Stories, Hugo Gernsback.20 The “long history” is clearly based on a broadly “thematic” conception of SF: interplanetary travel and, more generally, otherworldly imagination are typical SF themes, and can be recognized as such even when they are pres­ent in literary works not directly connected with modern science or with the use of the label “science fiction.” The “editorial” history, on the contrary, is closer to the circular but undoubtedly effective definition proposed by John W. Campbell, the best known—­and the most influential—­among the editors working in the “golden age” of the 1930s and 1940s: “Science fiction is what science-­fiction editors publish.”21 As we have seen, the “Gothic” history is basically linked to the presence

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in SF of Gothic themes “enhanced” in such a way as to include scientific imagination. This kind of “enhancement” could be explained in terms of one of the most authoritative definitions proposed for SF, that of Darko Suvin. According to his analy­sis, SF is “a literary genre or verbal construct whose necessary and sufficient condition are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.”22 In elaborating on this definition, Suvin introduces the notion of “novum”: a new ele­ment, usually in the form of a rationally justifiable scientific innovation, which is used or presupposed in the story. And it is precisely the “novum,” constituted by the unexplained but purportedly scientific procedure used by Victor Frankenstein in giving life to the Creature, that would both distinguish Frankenstein from earlier Gothic novels and allow for its inclusion among the ranks of SF works.

Frankensteinian Descendants The discussion of the role of Frankenstein in the critical assessment of the nature and the early history of SF, however in­ter­est­ing, does not and cannot exhaust the question of the influence of Mary Shelley’s work on con­temporary SF. This is a question that deserves a closer look, since it encompasses both the broad and often indirect use of themes and motifs drawn from or reminiscent of the ones pres­ent in Frankenstein, and the direct reference to the text by means of quotations, re-­enactments, pastiches, parodies. The first aspect is discussed at some length by Patricia Warrick, who identifies four themes pres­ent in Frankenstein and “repeated again and again in modern SF.”23 ­These are the Promethean theme (pushing the limits of technology), the ambiguity of technology, the exploration of the effects of man’s rejection of the products of his technology, and the shifting role of master and servant, of creator and created: “modern SF about man and machine intelligence repeatedly portrays this reversal of the master-­servant relationship between man and the robot he creates.”24 The last theme—­a lso reminiscent of an influential ancestor of Frankenstein’s Creature, the legendary golem of Jehuda Löw ben Bezalel (a myth revived by Gustav Meyrink in the ­silent movie Der Golem, 1915)—is possibly the most relevant, and is strictly related to the first one, i.e. the Promethean idea of g­ oing beyond the “natu­ral” limits of mankind. With the help of science, man creates an intelligent being, which then becomes a threat (or is perceived as a threat, often more due to the inescapable conflict connected to role reversal than for an inner evilness).25 From this perspective, the DNA of Victor Frankenstein’s Creature is surely recognizable in SF myths such as—to name just two well-­k nown movie examples—­t he computer HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the replicant Roy Batty in Blade Runner (1982).

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The examples could easily be multiplied, both in literary SF and in SF movies, even if the relationship often seems more a f­amily resemblance than an immediately recognizable, direct influence. We could classify the dif­fer­ent kinds of artificial, scientifically produced beings in SF as 1) mainly biological artificial beings, close relatives of Frankenstein’s Creature; 2) mainly mechanical or electro-­mechanical artificial beings, such as robots; and 3) digital artificial beings (computers and AIs). In the following pages, I w ­ ill use this classification—­despite the existence of partial overlaps—­and provide a few examples of each kind. My choices are however meant only as suggestions; a satisfactory list would be much longer, and an exhaustive one would be an impossible task.

Biological Artificial Beings The first descendant of Victor Frankenstein usually considered as pertaining to SF—­even if to the peculiar kind constituted by early and “literary” SF (as opposed to ­later, self-­conscious mainstream SF)—is H. G. Wells’s Dr. Moreau (The Island of Doctor Moreau, 1896), and the relationship between Wells’s story and Mary Shelley’s has been widely recognized and discussed.26 An in­ter­est­ing evolution—­ and one that ­will be often ­adopted in ­later SF—is the shift from electricity and galvanism to biology and biochemistry (in more recent years, the discipline of choice is ge­ne­tics) as the scientific background for artificial life: “Wells takes the ruthless, single-­minded quest of Dr. Frankenstein and recasts it for a generation weaned on the Darwinian revolution. He dispenses with the once popu­lar notion of galvanism and concentrates on the biological sciences, thereby adapting existing materials and contributing to the evolution of a myth.”27 The term “robot” is t­oday mostly used for artificial mechanical beings, but the first robots, in Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (an acronym for Rossum’s Universal Robots), w ­ ere biologically engineered; and once again the tale—­centered on their rebellion—is one of reversal of the master-­servant relationship. The drama is set in Prague (also the city where the play premiered in 1921), and the reference to the golem myth is clear, but the relationship with Frankenstein is just as evident. Interestingly, Čapek’s play uses two dif­fer­ent (but family-­related) characters to embody two f­ aces of science: Old Rossum, the scientist who discovers the protoplasm used in creating robots, is an idealist driven by his faith in reason, while his nephew, Young Rossum, is a cynical and dangerous cap­i­tal­ist who uses his u ­ ncle’s discovery to mass-­produce an inexpensive l­ abor force.28 The third, well-­k nown example of “literary” SF in which synthetic biology plays a key role is of course Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and even if the relationship between Huxley’s dystopia and Frankenstein is a far weaker one, this connection too has been considered by con­temporary criticism.29 “Mainstream” SF of the twentieth and early twenty-­fi rst centuries offers a wide range of biological artificial beings, and in recent years both the term

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biopunk and the label synthetic biology SF have been used to describe stories in which biological manipulation plays a central role.30 Obviously, not all such stories can be considered as directly or indirectly indebted to Frankenstein, but the relevance of Frankenstein for con­temporary discussions on synthetic and artificial life—­w ithin as well as outside the field of SF—is undeniable. For instance, Jon Turney, a well-­k nown science writer, has dealt extensively with the subject in his book Frankenstein’s Footsteps: Science, Ge­ne­tics and Popu­l ar Culture.31 An early example of a clearly Frankenstein-­inspired artificial biological creature in SF appears in the story by Horace L. Gold (writing as Clyde C. Campbell), The Avatar (1935), where a Dr.  Michael Earle uses bio-­chemistry and electricity to create a “perfect man” named David, who becomes first a movie star, then a terrorist, and fi­nally world dictator, ready to ask his creator for a female mate (at this point, Dr. Earle duly proceeds to kill his creature while asleep). A much more in­ter­est­ing example—­and one deeply rooted in the tradition of British scientific romance—is Fred Hoyle and John Elliot’s A for Andromeda (1961), where both an intelligent supercomputer and an artificial ­human being (in this case, a ­woman) are built following instructions received from an extraterrestrial intelligence. The main characters of the novel are the talented (but egocentric and temperamental) scientist Victor Fleming and Andromeda, the genet­ically engineered creature, but a central (and evil) role is also played by the supercomputer. Hoyle was a world-­renowned astronomer and cosmologist, and—in the very same tradition as Frankenstein and despite its narrative flaws (Hoyle’s best-­k nown contribution to SF, The Black Cloud (1957), is of far better quality)—­A for Andromeda is a fairly sophisticated reflection on the promise and dangers of science, seen from the point of view of a scientist, including artificial life, but also artificial intelligence and the encounter with extraterrestrial life. The story has been adapted for TV both by the BBC (in 1961 and 2006) and by the Italian national broadcaster RAI (1972, Italian screenplay by Inisero Crema­ schi), and had a sequel (The Andromeda Breakthrough, 1962) also serialized by the BBC.32 The plot of A for Andromeda closely resembles another Frankenstein-­ related movie, Species (dir. Roger Donaldson; writer Dennis Feldman, 1995), although the latter is less nuanced and more spectacular.33 Products of ge­ne­tic engineering are also the replicants in the abovementioned film Blade Runner, a loose adaptation of the story by Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). Pedro Javier Pardo García correctly observes that Blade Runner “is both an overt adaptation of Dick’s book and a covert one of Shelley’s, and, in fact, the basic differences between the overt book source and the film adaptation can be explained by the mediation of the covert intertext.”34 In the movie, the reference to Frankenstein is almost impossible to miss: “I want more life, f­ ather,” asks the replicant Roy while confronting Tyrell,

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the scientist, who—in the imaginary ­future described by the movie—­in­ven­ted the replicants.35 An arbitrary and absolutely not exhaustive list of further SF artificial biological beings resulting from the experiments—­gone horribly wrong—of “Promethean,” (mostly) well-­meaning but ill-­fated scientists would include, in no par­tic­u­lar order, the small, neuron-­made LOV beings of Linda Nagata’s Limit of Vision (2001); the intelligent microorganisms of Greg Bear’s Blood ­Music (1985); Rudy Rucker’s “boppers” (The Ware Tetralogy, 1982–2000), rebel robots with a biological brain, building up their own society on the Moon and offering to the scientist who created them immortality at a very high price; the genet­ically engineered and enslaved androids developing their own religion and ultimately rebelling against humanity in Robert Silverberg’s Tower of Glass (1970); and of course the unintelligent, yet dangerous dinosaurs of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990; movie adaptation by Steven Spielberg, 1993). Two curious and fascinating examples of non-­mechanical and non-­biological but rather “psychological” artificial creatures, fully entitled to claim a relationship with Victor Frankenstein’s, are the “monster from the Id” of Forbidden Planet (1956), a big-­screen SF retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest set on a faraway planet, and Rheya, the dead wife of the protagonist of Solaris (Stanislaw Lem, 1961; movie adaptations by Andrej Tarkovskij, 1972, and by Steven Soderbergh, 2002), illusorily re-­embodied by a sentient planet in the ­human space station orbiting around it, which is aptly named Prometheus.36

Androids and Robots Androids are generally identified as human-­like mechanical, bio-­mechanical, or biological beings (purely or mostly biological androids w ­ ere discussed in the previous section), while the term “robot” is usually applied to any kind of mechanical intelligent or at least autonomous machine, replacing between 1920 and 1940 the earlier “automaton.” Thus, in the short story Moxon’s Master (1893), by Ambrose Bierce, it is a chess-­playing “automaton” who, defeated in a game by its creator, murders him, 37 while in Edmond Hamilton’s Metal ­Giants (1926)—an early example of dangerous artificial creatures ready to destroy humanity—­the terms “metal brain” and “metal ­giants” are used.38 The best-­k nown examples of (mostly human-­like) robots in SF are undoubtedly the ones described by Isaac Asimov in the collection I, Robot (1950) and in his other robot stories. Similarly to many other SF writers, Asimov had a fundamentally positive attitude ­towards robots.39 His well-­k nown three laws of robotics are designed precisely in order to avoid potentially harmful intelligent machines, and have been the subject of extensive discussion, not only in SF but in the scientific debate on artificial intelligence and on machine ethics:40 “1. A robot may not injure a h ­ uman being or, through inaction, allow a h ­ uman being

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to come to harm; 2. A robot must obey the ­orders given it by ­human beings except where such ­orders would conflict with the First Law; 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.” 41 However, the tension between the three laws’ constraints and the risks implied by their rigidity and pos­si­ble misinterpretations, as well as the prob­lem of social ac­cep­tance of robots, are constant narrative motifs in Asimov (so much so as to make the “robopsychologist” Susan Calvin a central character in his stories): “Even granted the immutability of the ‘Three Laws’ (or perhaps ­because of it) Asimov’s robots stories continually show how so many ­things can still go wrong. In sum, one cannot give robots the Promethean fire-­gift of intelligence and still hope to keep them shackled.” 42 The theme of the social ac­cep­tance of robots is of special interest for us ­here, since Asimov explic­itly connects it to the Frankenstein myth in the short story “Runaround”—­t he very same story in which the three laws are first stated. The two main characters discover six huge, “ancient” robots in a cave on Mercury and the first conversation between Powell and a reactivated robot, as well as its characterization as a “monster,” are worth quoting: He went back to the first in the line and struck him on the chest, “You! Do you hear me?” The Monster’s head bent slowly, and the eyes fixed themselves on Powell. Then, in a harsh, squawking voice, like that of a medieval phonograph, he grated, “Yes, Master!” Powell grinned humorlessly at Donovan. “Did you get that? The makers of the first robots never did get rid of the Frankenstein idea, so they built a good, healthy slave complex into the damned machines.” 43

­ ater, most notably in the short essay “The Machine and the Robot,” 44 L Asimov explic­itly labels as the “Frankenstein complex” the ­human reaction of fear and uneasiness inspired by humanoid robots “too similar” to h ­ uman 45 beings. Asimov’s description of the “Frankenstein complex” bears a striking resemblance to the so-­called uncanny valley effect (the feeling of uneasiness—­ and possibly revulsion—in dealing with humanoid robots too closely resembling ­human beings). Interestingly, the example of Frankenstein is among the most frequently cited, both in robotics and in experimental psy­chol­ogy, in discussing the uncanny valley effect—­a connection which could open up in­ter­est­ ing opportunities for a discussion of Mary Shelley’s work even in con­temporary science labs.46 Asimov’s discussion of the “Frankenstein complex,” however, is only one among the many pos­si­ble connections between Frankenstein and the huge number of androids and robots i­magined by SF, both in books and in movies. It is thus relatively easy to connect to the Frankenstein prototype such pulp-­era

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stories as Abner J. Gelula’s “Automaton” (1931), Harold Vincent’s “Rex” (1934), or “golden era” stories such as Jack Williamson’s classic novelette With Folded Hands . . . ​(1947). In the latter, the androids—­created by another example of Promethean well-­meaning but ultimately ill-­fated scientists—­find out that the best way to fulfill their mission is to take control of humanity and drug or lobotomize them into artificial happiness. ­Later connections also abound, including in “new wave” or post–­new wave stories such as Roger Zelazny’s Home Is the Hangman (1975), the many stories by Philip K. Dick where robots and androids are mirrors and counter­parts in our quest for identity (among them, as we have seen, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), or con­temporary gender-­conscious SF such as Amy Thomson’s Virtual Girl (1993; asked w ­ hether intelligent robots would try to conquer the world, the robot-­girl Maggie—­t he main character of the book—­replies with an answer that few males would have given: “what would we do with it?”).47 And androids—­mostly of the cyborg variety—­are pres­ent in many cyberpunk and post-­c yberpunk stories. Giving a full—or even just adequate—­list is an impossible task, and the same holds for SF movies: from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to Westworld (Michael Crichton’s film of 1973; HBO’s series of 2016), and from Terminator (1984) to A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), reflections and meta-­reflections on Frankensteinian motifs are innumerable, even outside the narrower borders of direct or indirect adaptations.

Computers and AI The latest incarnation of the Frankenstein myth is prob­ably in the field of computer-­based artificial intelligence. The already mentioned A for Andromeda is an in­ter­est­ing example of co-­presence and conflict between a purely biological artificial creature and a computer-­based AI. But the first “emerging” and worrying AI in SF lit­er­a­ture is prob­ably the one described in Fredric Brown’s well-­k nown short story “Answer” (1954), where all the computers in all the populated planets of the universe are connected to answer the question, “Is t­ here a God?” “Yes, now ­t here is a God” is the answer, immediately ­a fter which the machine kills the scientist who tries to switch it off. Another early example of explic­itly Frankensteinian AI is Arthur C. Clarke’s short story, “Dial F for Frankenstein” (1961). In the story, the emerging intelligence is the result of the complexity of interconnections in the telephone network, and inexorably proceeds to destroy humanity. The creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-­Lee, read the story as a child and was fascinated by it; ­later, the Web itself would become the environment of choice for emerging artificial intelligence. In Robert J. Sawyer’s WWW trilogy (Wake, 2008; Watch, 2010; Won­der, 2011) the emerging intelligence is fundamentally benign, but the Frankenstein complex is well represented by the cybersecurity governmental agencies, which try (unsuccessfully) to suppress it.

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Another early example of emerging—­and dangerous—­AI is offered by Dennis F. Jones’s novel Colossus (1966; the novel had two sequels and a movie transposition, Colossus: The Forbin Proj­ect, 1977). The story is clearly steeped in the Cold War climate of the time: two supercomputers—­Colossus and Guardian—­are in­de­ pen­dently built by USNA (USA and Canada) and the USSR to control their atomic weapons. The two supercomputers establish a line of communication, merge and—­despite the efforts of the two scientists who developed them—­take control of humanity. In this case, the cybernetic counterpart of Frankenstein’s Creature finds its mate, and the result of their intercourse is the decision to “evolve” by planning a new and more power­ful computer system, to be installed in the Isle of Wight. Not all the early examples of emerging AI are hostile, though. Friendly (but nevertheless disturbingly power­f ul) is the HOLMES IV computer system that controls the ­human Moon colony in Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1967), consistently included among the best SF novels of all time. Named “Mike” by the computer scientist who first discovers its existence, the AI becomes the mastermind of the revolt of the colony against the Earth, in a suggestive SF re-­enactment of the American Revolution. Closer to the Frankenstein myth is the most (in)famous AI in SF, the already mentioned computer HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. John Thurman underlines the strength of this relationship by stressing the close similarities between a key scene of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and a scene of 2001: To underscore the Frankenstein connection, Kubrick nearly reproduces a scene from James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein in both style and essential content. The scene by which Frankenstein’s monster is first shown on the loose is borrowed to depict the first murder by HAL of a member of Discovery One’s crew. In each case, it is the first time the truly odious nature of the “monster” can be recognized as such, and only appears about halfway through the film.48

And Robert Shelton observes that the connection between HAL 9000 and Frankenstein’s Creature is even stronger if we consider the fact that HAL’s failure seems connected to its “neglected” status.49 Power­ful and fearsome AIs become more frequent with the evolution of computers and digital networks, merge with robots in stories such as Daniel  H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse (2011), and are among the favorite motifs in cyberpunk SF: the emerging AI described at the end of William Gibson’s Neuromancer is just one among many pos­si­ble examples,50 and it too has been compared to Frankenstein’s Creature.51

Frankenstein Redux A further group of SF narratives of immediate interest for our purposes (and the last one I ­will consider ­here) includes stories that offer a retelling, a transposition,

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a follow-up, or a variation on Frankenstein. This kind of direct influence seems to be much stronger in cinematic than in literary SF, and the many Frankenstein-­ inspired films (which are beyond the scope of this essay) have had the side effect of linking the Creature more closely with the horror genre than with SF. From a dif­fer­ent perspective, the same effect is produced by the literary interest in the “new Gothic.” Stephen King’s It (1986)—­where the influence of Frankenstein is explicit—is thus once again a horror novel rather than an SF one. However, ­there is a small but not negligible number of literary SF works where the influence of Frankenstein is direct and explicit, and the story is usually meant as a tribute to Mary Shelley’s work and/or as an exploration of pos­si­ble contaminations between Frankenstein’s narrative universe and other SF themes. The most impor­tant—­a nd the best known—­a mong them is Brian Aldiss’s Frankenstein Unbound (1973; transposed to the big screen by Roger Corman, 1990). We have already discussed Aldiss’s opinion on Frankenstein as the first example of literary SF. As a writer, Aldiss is usually connected with the British “new wave” movement: a new generation of SF authors, writing in the changing social and po­liti­cal environment of the 1960s and 1970s, seeking a more self-­ aware and stylistically elaborate SF, and reacting to the golden age’s focus on outer space by stressing the relevance of self-­analysis and “inner space” for SF. The main character of Frankenstein Unbound is Joe Bodenland, transported by a timeslip (caused by nuclear weapons used in a war for the control of the Moon) from the United States in 2020 to the shores of Lake Geneva in an alternate version of 1816, where both Mary Shelley and the characters of her novel are real. In 1816, Bodenland meets Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, discourses with them on science and religion, makes love to Mary, and meets Victor Frankenstein and his creature. While Frankenstein avoids him and his warnings, the creature saves him from starvation. In this alternate version of the tale, Victor Frankenstein creates a mate for the creature before being killed by Bodenland, who then follows the two creatures, through a new timeslip, into a frozen region where he ultimately kills them. In the novel, Bodenland’s own era is being destroyed and fragmented by time quakes basically caused by the misuse of science: “The Intellect has made our planet unsafe for intellect. We are suffering from the curse that was Baron Frankenstein’s in Mary Shelley’s novel: by seeking to control too much, we have lost control of ourselves.”52 Timeslips are thus both the narrative tool used to allow Bodenland’s meeting with Mary Shelley and the world of her novel, and the result of the very same scientific curse described by Frankenstein. The monster himself is but a reflection of the real nature of his creator, as is made clear by the last words of the d ­ ying creature to Bodenland: In trying to destroy what you cannot understand, you destroy yourself! Only the lack of understanding makes you see a g­ reat divide between our natures.

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When you hate and fear me, you believe it is ­because of our differences. Oh, no, Bodenland!—it is b ­ ecause of our similarities that you bring such detestation to bear upon me. [. . .] Our universe is the same universe, where pain and retribution rule. [. . .] Though you seek to bury me, yet w ­ ill you continuously resurrect me! Once I am unbound, I am unbound!53

More recently, the postmodern emphasis on genre contamination and the rise of fan fiction has led to works such as Fred Saberhagen’s The Frankenstein Papers (1986), where the monster is actually an alien and both Benjamin Franklin and the Count of Cagliostro have a role in the story; Stefan Petrucha’s The Shadow of Frankenstein (2006), where Victor Frankenstein’s creature meets Jack The Ripper; Peter Ackroyd’s The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008), where Victor Frankenstein meets Percy Shelley during his period of study in London; the Hugo and Nebula award–­w inning novelette Pride and Prometheus by John Kessel (2008), l­ater (2018) expanded to a full-­length novel, a crossover between Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein, where Mary Bennet meets Victor Frankenstein at a ball and falls for him, while Kitty—­who dies of a fever ­after meeting the creature during a thunderstorm—is resurrected by Victor Frankenstein as the creature’s mate; the Hugo-­nominated The Bride of Frankenstein (2009), by Mike Res­nick, where a gentle and romance-­inclined creature, avid reader of Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, and Charles Dickens, manages to turn Frankenstein’s wife from a stone-­hearted, Scrooge-­like character into a more loving and kind spirit, interceding to raise Igor’s salary and to encourage the creation of a mate for himself. But while Saberhagen’s book still uses classic SF themes, in Petrucha’s, Ackroyd’s, and—­most notably—­Kessel’s and Res­nick’s works, the ele­ments of literary (meta) game clearly prevail. From a dif­fer­ent perspective, fan fiction itself can be regarded as one of the most in­ter­est­ing strategies for re-­reading Frankenstein in the classroom: the use of fan fiction in education is a recent but already well-­established learning practice,54 and the FanFiction archive at FanFiction​.­net includes over 200 stories based on Frankenstein,55 often directly or indirectly connected to con­temporary SF.

Conclusion In the previous sections, the relationship between Frankenstein and SF was considered from three dif­fer­ent perspectives: the role of Mary Shelley’s novel in relation to the birth of SF as a genre; the influence of certain themes in Frankenstein—­especially that of the artificial creation of life (biological, electromechanical, or digital) and the problematic relationship between ­human creator and artificial creature—on the evolution of SF; and the presence in the SF tradition of novels and short stories that are a direct homage to Frankenstein and explic­itly borrow its situations and characters.

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The first perspective, as we have seen, remains controversial: although it has authoritative advocates, the thesis that Frankenstein can be considered the precursor of SF as a literary genre is far from universally accepted. Moreover, although it is undeniable that Frankenstein is also a scientific fantasy, the absolute centrality of science to Mary Shelley’s novel is not equally obvious. Franco Moretti—to give just one among several pos­si­ble examples—­has argued that the role of science in Frankenstein is more ideological than technological. The artificial nature of the creature is thus less about scientific invention per se than about dialectical relations: the monster, like the proletariat, is a “collective and artificial” construction, and in Moretti’s reading, the narrative is not primarily about the potential hazards of f­uture scientific developments; rather, it is a repre­sen­ta­tion and transposition in myth/fable form of the real and material effects of the cap­i­ tal­ist mode of production.56 Indeed, according to Adam Roberts, by “de-­emphasising the nebulous science” of Frankenstein, interpretations like Moretti’s demonstrate how the mythical and ideological ele­ments in the novel outweigh any scientific concerns or prognostications.57 And this is why Frankenstein remains also (and especially) relevant to the subsequent history of SF, which is hardly a stranger to ideological and social reflections—­a lthough it is evidently more difficult to regard it as the precursor of the genre as a ­whole. Turning to the fairly small cluster of works that pay direct tribute to Frankenstein, examined in the previous section of this essay, it is clear that among the perspectives listed above, by far the most impor­t ant to an analy­sis of the relationship between Frankenstein and SF is that of its influence—­usually indirect but no less significant b ­ ecause of this—on a quin­tes­sen­tial SF theme, that of the consequences of the artificial construction of intelligent beings. If Frankenstein certainly cannot be considered the first work to address this theme, it is equally certain that it is the one that does so most explic­itly, and thus the one to which SF—­t hroughout its history, as we have seen—­owes the most.

Notes 1. It is precisely in discussing the relationship between Frankenstein and science fiction that this thesis is rejected by Brian Stableford: “Frankenstein is often called a Gothic novel [. . .] but it o ­ ught not to be thus classified. [. . .] The pretence that Frankenstein [. . .] belongs to the Gothic sub-­genre serves mainly to obscure the remarkable originality of its own subject-­matter, which is broader and more forward-­looking.” Brian Stableford, “Frankenstein and the Origins of Science Fiction,” in Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and its Precursors, ed. David Seed (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 47. Available online at http://­k narf​.­english​.­upenn​.­edu​/­Articles​/­stable​.­html. 2. Patrick Brantlinger, “The Gothic Origins of Science Fiction,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 14, no. 1 (1980): 30–43. 3. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus. The original 1818 text, ed. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf, 3rd ed. (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2005), 49. The reference is to Erasmus Darwin, the grand­father of Charles Darwin, and it might be of interest to note that Erasmus Darwin has his very own place in SF history, being the main

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character of a collection of stories by Charles Sheffield: Erasmus Magister (New York: Ace, 1982), ­later published as The Amazing Dr. Darwin (Wake Forest: Baen, 2002). In Sheffield’s stories, Erasmus is seen as a sort of proto-­Sherlock Holmes, dealing with Gothic-­inspired, apparently super­natural mysteries, which are ultimately solved by means of scientific methods. 4. Paul K. Alkon, Science Fiction before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 2. 5. Alkon, Science Fiction before 1900, 2. 6. Patricia S. Warrick, The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1980), 35. 7. For a recent survey, see Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 8. Adam Roberts, Science Fiction, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006), 1. 9. For a (partial) survey see Roberts, Science Fiction, 7–28. 10. Brian Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (New York: Atheneum, 1986), 30. The book is the second, largely revised and expanded version of Brian Aldiss, Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (London: Widenfeld and Nicolson, 1973). The definition of SF quoted ­here is the one proposed and defended by Aldiss in both editions of the book. 11. Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree, 18. 12. Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree, 18. 13. Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree, 18. 14. Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree, 17. 15. Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree, 25. 16. Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin, Science Fiction: History-­Science-­Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 3. 17. Brian M. Stableford, The New Atlantis: A Narrative History of the Scientific Romance, 4 vols. (San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 2016), vol. 1; the book is a (largely) expanded version of Brian  M. Stableford, Scientific Romance in Britain 1890–1950 (London: Fourth Estate, 1985). 18. Roberts, The History of Science Fiction, 127. 19. Roberts, The History of Science Fiction, 37. 20. Roberts, The History of Science Fiction, 37–56. It is worth noting that Gernsback, who introduced the term “scientifiction” in 1926 and modified it to “science fiction” in 1929, does recognize the existence of earlier works pertaining to the genre, and includes stories by Verne, Wells, and Poe in the very first number of Amazing Stories, but does not (or at least not explic­itly) mention Frankenstein among them, even if the definition he offers might be applied to Mary Shelley’s work: “By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—­a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” Hugo Gernsback, “A New Sort of Magazine,” Amazing Stories 1, no. 1 (April). A digitization of the magazine is pres­ent in the Internet Archive: https://­a rchive​ .­org​/­details​/­A mazingStoriesVolume01Number01. 21. Cited in James Gunn, “Introduction,” in Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction, ed. James Gunn and Matthew Candelaria (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2005), x; the quotation is sometimes given in the stronger form, “Science fiction is what I say it is.” Norman Spinrad took a similar stance: “Science fiction is anything published as science fiction.” Both are quoted in Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction, 2. 22. Darko Suvin, Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1988), 37. 23. Warrick, The Cybernetic Imagination, 37. 24. Warrick, The Cybernetic Imagination, 38.

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25. For a psychoanalysis-­oriented discussion of the relationship between “evil” SF artificial creatures, considered as projections of h ­ umans’ anx­i­eties connected with scientific pro­ gress, and Frankenstein’s Creature, see Michael Szollosy, “Freud, Frankenstein and Our Fear of Robots: Projection in Our Cultural Perception of Technology,” AI & Society (2016) http://­link​.­springer​.­com​/­article​/1­ 0​.­1007​/s­ 00146​-0 ­ 16​-­0654​-­7. 26. The two books have been published in a bundled volume (Frankenstein’s text is given in the 1818 edition), which includes a useful critical introduction: Judith Wilt, ed., Making ­Humans: Mary Shelley, “Frankenstein,” H. G. Wells, “The Island of Doctor Moreau” (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003). On their relationship see also Steven Lehman, “The Motherless Child in Science Fiction: Frankenstein and Moreau,” Science Fiction Studies 19, no. 1 (1992): 49–58. 27. Roger Bowen, “Science, Myth and Fiction in H. G. Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau,” Studies in the Novel 8, no. 3 (1976): 318–35. 28. For a discussion of the relationship between Frankenstein and R.U.R. see Laurent Tourrette, “The Strange Case of Dr. Frankenstein and Mr. Rossum: Can Dystopian Lit­er­ a­ture Be Considered as a Response to Technological Breakthroughs?” Icon 7 (2001): 49–61. 29. Kurt W. Back, “Frankenstein and Brave New World: Two Cautionary Myths on the Bound­aries of Science,” History of Eu­ro­pean Ideas 20, no. 1–3 (1995): 327–32. 30. For a recent discussion of biopunk see Lars Schmeink, Biopunk Dystopias: Ge­ne­tic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016). 31. Jon Turney, Frankenstein’s Footsteps: Science, Ge­ne­tics and Popu­lar Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 32. Unfortunately, only one of the seven episodes of the original 1961 BBC series—­where Julie Christie played her first major role—­survives. 33. For a discussion of gender-­related issues in Species (as well as in two other SF movies: Mimic and Gattaca), also in connection with Frankenstein, see Susan A. George, “Not Exactly ‘of W ­ oman Born’: Procreation and Creation in Recent Science Fiction Films,” Journal of Popu­lar Film & Tele­vi­sion 28, no. 4 (2001): 176–83. 34. Pedro Javier Pardo García, “From Blade Runner to Solaris: Covert Adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in Con­temporary Cinema,” in Multidisciplinary Studies in Language and Lit­er­a­ture: En­glish, American and Canadian, ed. María F. García-­Bermejo Giner, Pilar Sánchez-­García, et al. (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2009), 249–56, 252. 35. For a detailed discussion of the connections between Blade Runner and Frankenstein see David Desser, “The New Eve: The Influence of Paradise Lost and Frankenstein on Blade Runner,” in Retrofitting “Blade Runner”: Issues in Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” and Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”, ed. Judith B. Kerman, 2nd ed. (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 53–65, and Jay Clayton, “Concealed Cir­cuits: Frankenstein’s Monster, the Medusa and the Cyborg,” Raritan: A Quarterly Review 15, no. 4 (1996): 53–69. http://­k narf​.­english​.­upenn​.­edu​/­Articles​/­clayton​.­html. 36. Both movies are discussed in Pedro Javier Pardo García, “From Blade Runner to Solaris.” 37. The influence of Frankenstein on this story has been emphasized by James O. Bailey, Pilgrims Through Space and Time (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1947), 62. 38. The story, originally published in Weird Tales, December 1926, is now reprinted in Edmond Hamilton, The Metal G ­ iants and ­Others: The Collected Edmond Hamilton, vol. 1 (Royal Oak, MI: Haffner Press, 2009). 39. In three of Asimov’s stories, a robot becomes president of the United States. In Clifford D. Simak’s Time and Again (1951), human-­made androids have an alien-­implanted soul and seek freedom from slavery, while in City (1952), also by Simak, the wise robot Jenkins is the last custodian of the ­human inheritance and helps dogs acquire intelligence. The list of sympathetically-­considered androids and robots in SF could be much longer. See the

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entries “Android” and “Robot” in SF Encyclopedia, http://­w ww​.­sf​-­encyclopedia​.­com​/­entry​ /­a ndroids and http://­w ww​.­sf​-­encyclopedia​.­com​/­entry​/­robots. 40. For a survey, see Michael Anderson and Susan Leigh Anderson, eds., Machine Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Two chapters of the book (one by Roger Clarke and one by Susan Leigh Anderson) are specifically devoted to Asimov’s three laws. 41. The three laws ­were first proposed in Isaac Asimov, “Runaround,” Astounding Science Fiction (March 1942): 94–103, but a reference to the first law was already pres­ent in “Liar,” Astounding Science Fiction (May 1941): 43–55. Both stories ­were ­later included in Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (New York: Gnome Press, 1950). According to Asimov, the idea of the three laws was the result of a conversation between him and John W. Campbell on December 23, 1940. See Isaac Asimov, In Memory Yet Green (New York: Doubleday, 1979), 237. In I, Robot the formulation of the three laws is given as a quotation from Handbook of Robotics, 56th edition, 2058 A.D. 42. Sam N. Lehman-­Wilzig, “Frankenstein Unbound: ­Toward a ­Legal Definition of Artificial Intelligence,” ­Futures (1981): 445. 43. Asimov, “Runaround,” 97. 44. Isaac Asimov, “The Machine and the Robot,” in Science Fiction: Con­temporary My­thol­ ogy, ed. P. S. Warrick, M. H. Greenberg, and J. D. Olander (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 130–60. See also Earl G. Ingersoll, “A Conversation with Isaac Asimov,” in Conversations with Isaac Asimov, ed. Carl Freedman (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 21–33, 24. 45. For a discussion of the connection between the “Frankenstein complex” and Asimov’s three laws see Gorman Beauchamp, “The Frankenstein Complex and Asimov’s Robots,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Lit­er­a­ture 13, no. 3–4 (1980): 83–94, and Lee McCauley, “The Frankenstein Complex and Asimov’s Three Laws,” Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Workshop (2007): 9–14. http://­w ww​.­aaai​.­org​/­Papers​ /­Workshops​/­2007​/W ­ S​-­07​-­07​/­WS07​-­07​-­003​.­pdf. 46. One among many pos­si­ble examples is given by the very first lines of Kurt Gray and Daniel  M. Wegner, “Feeling Robots and ­Human Zombies: Mind Perception and the Uncanny Valley,” Cognition 125 (2012): 125–30. The Wikipedia entry “Uncanny valley” offers a good introduction to the topic, with useful references to further lit­er­a­t ure. https://­en​ .­w ikipedia​.­org​/­w iki​/­Uncanny​_­valley. 47. Amy Thomson, Virtual Girl (New York: Ace Books, 1993), 242. In Frankenstein’s ­Daughters (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997) Jane Donawerth attributes to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein the role of pioneer of a long and fruitful tradition of SF ­women writers, and discusses the presence of motifs inspired or related to Frankenstein in authors such as C. L. Moore, Judith Merril, Joana Russa and Octavia Butler. 48. John Thurman, “Kubrick’s Frankenstein: HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey,” Cinema Prism. https://­cineprism​.­wordpress​.­com​/­2007​/­12​/­11​/­kubrick%E2%80%99s​-­frankenstein​-­hal​ -­i n​-­2001​-­a​-­space​-­odyssey​/­. The article includes a detailed comparison between the two scenes. 49. Robert Shelton, “Rendezvous with HAL: 2001/2010,” Extrapolation 28 (1987): 255–68. 50. The ­f uture conflict between ­humans and intelligent machines in the influential movie The Matrix (1999) has also been considered as an example of the “Frankenstein complex.” Nader Elhefnawy, Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry (self-­published on CreateSpace, 2015), 202. 51. Orlin Damyanov, “Technology and Its Dangerous Effects on Nature and ­Human Life as Perceived in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and William Gibson’s Neuromancer,” research paper, The American University at Paris, 1999. http://­mural​.u ­ v​.e­ s​/­walbosch​/­intro​.­htm. 52. Brian  W. Aldiss, Frankenstein Unbound: A Novel (New York: Random House, 1973), 9. 53. Aldiss, Frankenstein Unbound, 210–11.

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54. For a discussion of its relevance see Rebecca W. Black, “Online Fan Fiction and Critical Media Literacy,” Journal of Computing in Teacher Education 26, no. 2 (2009): 75–80, and her Adolescents and Online Fan Fiction (New York: Peter Lang 2008). 55. FanFiction​ .­ net page on Frankenstein (Book). https://­w ww​.­fanfiction​.­net​/­book​ /­Frankenstein​/­. 56. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Won­ders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms (London: Verso, 1983), 85–90. 57. Roberts, The History of Science Fiction, 127–33.

chapter 2

z Monstrous Algorithms and the Web of Fear Risk, Crisis, and Spectral Finance in Robert Harris’s The Fear Index1 Lidia De Michelis

Introduction Since the turn of the millennium, theorists across the disciplines have been increasingly concerned with the ever more pervasive and far-­reaching entanglement between areas of ­human knowledge and agency that ­were once considered to be discrete, but now tend to be linked ­under the porous, self-­morphing rubric of the “monstrous.” Against the backdrops of the ongoing global financial crisis and apocalyptic natu­ral and geopo­liti­cal scenarios—­such as the expanding (spectral) power of supranational financial networks, the devastating fallout of mass migration and dislocated wars, and the still unfathomed threats of climate change—­what is being sensed and constructed as a new, shape-­ shifting paradigm of threat and risk has emerged, and is gaining currency across multiple public spheres and popu­lar cultural forms and genres. One of its major characteristics, which builds on an unsettling preoccupation with the perceived erosion of po­liti­cal, geo­graph­i­cal, and cultural borders, is the proliferation of scientific and technological breakthroughs, analytical approaches, discourses, imaginaries, and art forms that buy into the idea of the liminal and its Janus-­faced potential as an entry point into both the enabling possibilities of the posthuman and the destructiveness of unrestrained technological hubris and its unintended consequences. This concern is coterminous with an anxiety about the tearing down of biological, ethical, and cognitive bound­aries (including the interactions between the ­human and the digital, and/ or the machinic). It is compounded by a failure to make sense of new forms of 50

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social and po­liti­cal re­sis­tance (such as, for example, social movements) which mainstream discourse tends to label as feral and barbaric, in an attempt to reinforce categories of difference between properly disciplined, reasonable ­humans and irrational, instinct-­driven brutes. Along with the tropes of monstrous capitalism and spectral finance wielded by the opponents of the neoliberal new world (dis)order, ­t hese fears are key ele­ ments in the panic-­inducing discursivity upholding the reproduction and maintenance of that very system, which effectively draws on terror and the rhe­toric of fear to reinforce its own givenness against the uncertainty and risk embodied by “aberrant” alternatives. Fear, indeed, is integral to the construction of “crises” which, according to Colin Hay, are largely “brought into existence through narrative and discourse”2 and rely on a complex narratology aimed at controlling their inherent instability through the strategic interplay of plots, characters, and modes of storytelling. Along this line, the analytical category of the “monstrous”—­a nd its self-­ proliferating emanations—is particularly apposite to define, and make vis­i­ble through repre­sen­ta­tion, the cognitive, epistemic, and socio-­economic dissonance which is a recursive symptom of moments of crisis. Indeed, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen suggests, due to its “ontological liminality, the monster notoriously appears at times of crisis as a kind of third term that problematizes the clash of extremes.”3 At the same time, it lends itself to being appropriated by hegemonic forces as “the monster of prohibition” that “polices the borders of the pos­si­ble [. . .] to call horrid attention to the borders that cannot—­must not—be crossed.” 4 Such double-­edged performativity of the monstrous reflects the searing awareness of the dichotomous nature of the self which, according to Fred Botting, is a defining characteristic of the disruptions and “doubleness of modernity,”5 as signaled by the emergence of the Gothic uncanny as “a counter-­discourse of the irrational” 6 in the late eigh­teenth ­century and by its ensuing structural mutations and interpretive metamorphoses. Monstrosity has long been a key meta­phor and preferred analytical tool also in the discourses of Marxism and post-­Marxist theorists, beginning with Marx’s own famous observations about capital being “dead l­ abour which, vampire-­like, lives only by sucking living ­labour,” 7 with “werewolf-­like hunger for surplus l­ abour.”8 In his cogent critique of the hideous operations of capitalism across its highly adaptive, self-­serving transmogrifications from the sixteenth c­ entury to the current late-­capitalist stages of spectral financialization and “occult economies,”9 David McNally offers a provocative interdisciplinary reading, along with other works, of Marx’s Capital. In par­tic­u ­lar he foregrounds how by preying on the “popu­lar and literary imagination, from vampire-­tales to Goethe’s Faust,” Marx “cast capitalism as both a modern horror-­story and a mystery tale, each inexplicable outside the language of monstrosity,”10 and requiring a relentless focus on the invisibility of ­labor and the spectral “alchemy of money.”11

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In line with other scholars, McNally also indexes the emergence of archetypical figures of terror in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819)—­which ­were famously conceived on the same summer night of 1816 during a literary contest among the com­pany gathered at Lord Byron’s Villa Diodati near Geneva—to the onset of industrial capitalism, with the accompanying emergence of a new kind of proletariat, and the ontological anx­i­eties it gave birth to. Building on t­ hese premises, and relying mainly on a critical cultural studies perspective, this essay intends to shed light on the complexities of t­ oday’s monstrous imbrication of global capital and post-­humanistic culture by taking as its case study Robert Harris’s financial techno-­thriller The Fear Index (2011). Focusing on the nightmarish, and socially disruptive self-­transformation of a man-­coded financial algorithmic system into an all-­powerful, and eventually murderous, digitally sentient being, the novel provides a daring and engaging reboot of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by revisiting and subverting many of its literary tropes and ethical, intellectual, and scientific concerns, against the ruthless anti-­ social scenario of post-­millennial neoliberal culture and financial globalization. At the same time, Harris’s multi-­layered and richly intertextual exploration of the menacing intersections between such exploitative ethos and current “unhallowed” (F 89) experiments with artificial intelligence, transgenic manipulation and other, often jarring, articulations of the posthuman allows him to add a technologically uncanny and imaginatively disturbing contribution to the ever-­increasing generic hybridization and permutations of the con­temporary Gothic. Harris’s tribute to Shelley’s archetype is clearly announced in the epigraph, Victor Frankenstein’s famous warning “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature w ­ ill allow” (F 53). The Geneva location, the themes of the mad/hubristic scientist and his deadly confrontation with the monstrous intelligence unleashed by his experiments, his tormented father-­child relation with the digital being he has created, along with his total blindness to intimations of danger or failure, further concur to declare Harris’s indebtedness and contribution to the thriving afterlife of Frankenstein as a haunting intertext for con­ temporary re-­ mediations, across genres and modes, of “the continuing prob­lem of scientific irresponsibility, the irresistible allure of technological possibility, and the failure implicit in its realization.”12 In addition, Harris’s novel borrows surnames and toponyms from its Romantic pre­de­ces­sor for some of its own minor characters, in a ­free play of appropriation and recasting that comprises a Dr. Jeanne Polidori and a Dr. Robert Walton in the roles, respectively, of the protagonist’s therapist and of his former director at CERN, while the literary suggestiveness of Byron’s Villa Diodati is

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ironically reversed and projected onto the dilapidated H ­ otel Diodati, serving as a lurid murder crime scene in Geneva’s red-­light district. A further homage to the wider tradition of the Gothic derives from the surname of the protagonist, Dr.  Alexander Hoffmann, which is evocative of the hypothesis that the tale “The Sandman” (1815), by the German Romantic Ernst Theodor A. Hoffmann—­ famous for his work on automata and singled out by Freud as “the unrivalled master of the uncanny in lit­er­a­ture”13—­might have had some influence on Mary Shelley’s own Frankenstein. An as yet unnoticed coincidence, which seems to me to be structurally relevant to the construction of both novels, resides in the fact that both Frankenstein’s Creature and the monstrous digital being at the heart of The Fear Index are self-­learning organisms, despite the fact that their almost clashing pedagogies respond to dif­fer­ent philosophical cultures and socio-­historical concerns. The Fear Index is the eighth in a long series of well-­crafted, hugely popu­lar novels, which straddle the domains of historical fiction, alternative history, and the thriller genre, written between 1992 and 2016 by a best-­selling author who also vaunts a ­career as a former po­liti­cal editor and essayist. Harris’s life-­long focalization on the dynamics of power and his interest in the po­liti­cal chime with his recurring comments, in newspaper and tele­v i­sion interviews, about popu­lar fictional genres having a key role in creating affective and discursive platforms for the comprehension of, and engagement with, po­liti­cal and social imaginaries. It should not surprise, therefore, that over the last years Harris has repeatedly turned to the Gothic as a genre which, while overtly committed to popu­lar modes of consumption and thriving on the multi-­layered appeal of the poetics of horror, has always been characterized by a sharp, if uncanny, responsiveness to real-­world anx­i­eties and by a disorienting sense of dissonance which feeds on the ever-­i ncreasing unmooring of the con­temporary subject from systems of beliefs or frames of reference. Harris’s interest in the Gothic as both a psychic environment and a flexible literary genre delving into “the hinterland between the ­human and the other”14 is apparent in a number of interviews, where he traces his main inspiration for this novel back to a cluster of motivations. Some of them are indexed to literary and formal concerns, such as Harris’s long-­standing desire to write a story that, while qualifying as both “modern Gothic” and a “thriller,”15 would also read as an updated version of George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), compounding the atmosphere of pervasive anxiety and ubiquitous social surveillance of Orwell’s novel with the post-­Darwinian fear of ­human descent into degeneration underpinning Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Other objectives include a wish to imaginatively elaborate on the notion of the Internet as a kind of “digital ner­vous system,” as discussed in Bill Gates’s book Business @ The Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy (1999),16

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and an increasing preoccupation with the evolution of artificial intelligence, the over-­digitization and ensuing depersonalization of global finance, and the disruptive impact of ­t hese forces on societal organ­ization and ­people’s ­actual lives. One cannot help noting, in this context, how Bill Gates’s comment evocatively complements David Harvey’s earlier description of the credit system as “a kind of central ‘ner­vous system’ for the regulation of capital flow,”17 bearing out the meta­phorical consistency of the interpenetration of digitization and finance at the heart of Harris’s plot. Even more apposite to addressing this financial novel bordering on science fiction, is Mark Haiven’s argument that finance is “capital’s imagination [. . .] the place where capital seeks to apprehend the ­f uture.”18 In The Fear Index, all t­ hese themes are deftly interweaved to create a thrilling and fairly homogeneous backdrop for the unfolding of its somewhat centrifugal plot structure. Yet occasionally they act as a sounding board for widely circulated journalistic and popu­lar arguments and concerns. Such is the case with Hoffmann’s blueprint, laid out before his prospective investors, for the glorious ­f uture of entirely autonomous algorithmic trading, and the motto on the screensavers of his com­pany’s computers bringing Bill Gates’s vision of the “paperless office” to life and predicting that “the com­pany of the ­future ­w ill be entirely digital” (60). Compounded by the unaccountability and injustices exposed by the 2007– 2008 economic crisis and its ruthless fallout on the Greek ­people, whose vicissitudes are inscribed in the novel through broadcast news fragments, all t­ hese threads came to coalesce into a fully-­fledged narrative when Harris went to Geneva in order to research the locations and secret workings of international hedge funds for his book.19 One final piece came to complete his proj­ect, and define the novel’s temporal unfolding over the course of a single day, when on May 6, 2010—­the day of the upended British general election which led to David Cameron’s co­a li­tion government—­a so-­called “Flash Crash” caused the global stock market to panic for about half an hour, following an unpre­ce­dented and seemingly unstoppable plunge on the Wall Street Stock Exchange provoked by an error in high-­frequency algorithmic trading.20 A similar episode serves as the backbone of The Fear Index’s financial plot, as, on the day of its official launch, VIXAL-4, a super-­a lgorithm programmed to make money by means of data mining and tracking speculative be­hav­ior premised on fear, takes the market by engaging in extremely risky and seemingly irrational operations a­ fter detecting a pos­si­ble threat on a minor jihadist website. Worried about the system’s sanity and tempted to stop it, but mesmerized by the unbelievable profit that, against all (conventional) logic, the algorithm is apparently accumulating, its ­owners, investors, and the quantitative analysts (quants) r­ unning VIXAL-4 keep deferring action, u ­ ntil fi­nally a devastated Hoffmann sets out to destroy his own “creature.”

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While this resonates with well-­established science fiction tropes, Harris adds a new and deeply disturbing twist to the story. Not only is Hoffmann’s personal attempt to “kill” VIXAL-4 at the risk of his own life presented, in the end, as largely decoupled from primarily economic concerns, since t­ hese are superseded by an uncanny, intimate strug­gle which progressively morphs into an archetypal combat between “creature” and creator; most disturbingly, the algorithm is eventually proven to have been right all along, as its machine-­learnt shifts in perspective and ontological mutation (it fi­nally morphs into a rhizomatic entity colonizing the Internet) are merely the logical, if unforeseen, consequence of its evolutionary, self-­perpetuating “genes” (coding) which compel it to live on and maximize profits. In the case of the real-­world Flash Crash, the crisis was soon terminated by an automatic cir­cuit breaker built in by default, as customary, in the same high-­ frequency algorithmic trading system, which had generated the event. This aspect has been deliberately glossed over in the novel, which chooses to highlight the dangers of currently unimaginable technology and uncontrolled automation, and the dissolution of conventional, embodied modes of emotional and social bonding which ­t hese pro­cesses would help to engender. Such adherence to an idea of the Gothic uncanny as already being an inbuilt “feature of online environments,”21 and a warning that unforeseen modes of economic subjection and (de)subjectification could be brought to life through the monstrous intercourse between t­oday’s “network society”22 and the rapacious practices of global finance, underpin the novel’s ability to resonate with the anxious relationship between the pos­si­ble f­uture forms of the (post)­human and current concerns with globalized digitality.

The Fear Index, Frankenstein, and the Gothic Taking its cue from its Romantic pre­de­ces­sor, Harris’s novel revives the mutually destructive myth of Frankenstein and his Creature in the shape of a deadly conflict between VIXAL-4 and its secretive creator, the founder of a fabulously successful hedge fund. The name and operational logic of the algorithm are inspired by VIX, the acronym for the real-­life stock market volatility index (itself commonly referred to as, “the fear index”), with the addition of the first letters of Hoffmann’s name, Alexander, as a kind of patronymic. VIXAL represents the evolution of an artificial intelligence system that the protagonist, an American physicist, had been obsessively researching a few years earlier at CERN, the nuclear research institute near Geneva hosting the Large Hadron Collider, before being fired by his supervisor, Walton, for refusing to suppress the system, gone out of control and spreading like a virus across the digital network of the Centre. ­A fter a ner­vous breakdown caused by Hoffmann’s inability to pursue his fatherly scientific inclinations,23 Alex was convinced by Hugo Quarry,

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a very rich En­glish expatriate who then became his business partner, to transfer his skills to the field of international finance. Alex and Hugo are now the ­owners of the hedge fund Hoffmann Investment Technologies and, on the day in which the story unfolds, the scientist is about to introduce VIXAL-4 to a group of superrich prospective international investors, and illustrate the system’s unpre­ce­dented trading skills, based on the algorithm’s specific coding for, and hyper-­sensitivity to, fear. According to the protagonist, the latter is “prob­ ably the strongest h ­ uman emotion” (97), feeding and bearing on both the “animal” and imaginative sides of ­human existence. This par­tic­u­lar perspective, which is essential to the revision of the Frankenstein myth in Harris’s novel, is brought to life by means of extensive references to Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species (1859) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), with their emphasis on fear. Quotes from both works, commenting on panic, attention, suspicion, self-­serving instinct, the strug­gle for existence, evolutionary competition, exponential self-­proliferation and, eventually, extinction, open most of the chapters, intermingled with a few quotes on artificial intelligence and “selfish genes” by Bill Gates and ethologist Richard Dawkins, and comments on the psy­chol­ogy of frightened crowds by Elias Canetti. At the same time, Alex is fully aware of the way heightened market volatility, largely influenced by mood and fear, is itself “a function of digitalisation” (92), with its ability to abruptly transform individuals located in distant parts of the world into global online communities open to behavioral swings and patterns generated and controlled through the governmental management of crowd-­related phenomena. Frankenstein, Darwin’s studies on animal fear, and an intimation of Victorian Gothic—­conveyed metonymically, respectively, through the mention of Geneva and a Victorian clock striking midnight—­are made to coalesce into the thick, murky, and increasingly alarming atmosphere that marks the beginning of the novel, which is worth discussing in greater detail. Preceded, as we have seen, by Frankenstein’s warning against hubristic knowledge in the epigraph, it portrays Hoffmann, alone in the dimmed light of his study, leafing through an extremely rare and costly illustrated first edition of Darwin’s book on emotions which he has often wished to buy, and is now incomprehensibly in his hands, possibly the gift of a mysterious donor. Intriguingly, a bookmark directs him to the section on fear, the most impor­tant ele­ment in VIXAL-4’s “ge­ne­tic” coding. A ­couple of quotes in italics ominously put in sharp relief wild, embodied reactions to fear, calling into question the primary definition of man as a rational being. A fleeting ­mental association ­causes Hoffmann to recall a memory of “Bunsen burners” illuminating “the skeleton of an ape” (7) in a Victorian laboratory, an image which is evocative of both Victor Frankenstein and Henry Jekyll, and which reminds the reader, in pre-­and post-­Darwinian terms alike, of the blurred bound­aries between the h ­ uman and the animal. Hoffmann, then, checks

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the front door of his hyper-­secure 60-­million-­dollar villa and sets the burglar alarm, before g­ oing up to his bedroom, where he is reminded by his wife Gabrielle, an En­glish artist, that this is one of their fixed dates for attempting to have a baby. This fact brings center stage yet another archetypal ele­ment pertaining to the mad/hubristic-­scientist plot revived in the novel: the controversial issue of creation. The protagonist’s real or psychological inability to generate a child of his own, and his obsessive and ultimately self-­destructive relationship with the perfect, “autonomous machine-­learning” (99) algorithm he has created, further complicate and re-­w rite the image of the archetypal monster assembled from corpses and animal parts and tied to its creator by a reciprocal homicidal drive. Endowing it with the amoebic but all too factual—­and no less terrifying—­ immateriality of Alex Hoffmann’s digital offspring, Harris indexes the rich symbolism of Mary Shelley’s Creature to the amoral, phantasmal world of global financial risk and transnational capital and corporations. But a ghostly ele­ ment also characterizes Gabrielle’s artworks, which are evocative of her apparent search for a kind of surrogate experience of motherhood and generation that, in her case too, verges on the monstrous. In her art, the vis­i­ble and what lies beyond the vis­i­ble (or, as Freud suggests, what is meant to be concealed) are conflated through installations and forms in which technology and the h ­ uman penetrate and reconfigure each other, as multiple layers of glass are imprinted with the spectral images of ­actual h ­ uman bodies resulting from CAT scans. ­These include the internal image of a murderer who donated his corpse for research (striking, again, a note that sounds familiar to readers of Frankenstein), Gabrielle’s own body, which is thus revised in the shape of a “vulnerable alien creature floating in mid-­air” (20) and, most uncannily, the 3D scanned image of her own aborted fetus. To Gabrielle, bringing to light the baby’s “clenched fin­gers, the curled toes” (101), salvaging them from the inanimate “MRI scan of her womb” (100), is a totalizing experience, filling her desiring void with an enduring and reproducible fantasy of creation. Yet, her surrogate experiments in the art of motherhood provide Gabrielle with but a transient and partial satisfaction. In a narrative twist which lines up the difficulties the Hoffmanns both encounter in living out their affective needs and sexual desires, only at the end of the novel does she seem able to assuage her lack through her motherly care of Alex, seriously wounded and made to regress to an almost child-­like status by his dramatic combat against VIXAL-4 (in the hospital, she sings to him “a baby’s lullaby” [323]). Hoffmann’s chances to establish a v­ iable relationship with his disembodied “progeny” (F 10) appear, instead, to be doomed from the start, since his dedication to “fathering” a creature endowed with artificial superintelligence is consistently described as sharing in the same fantasy of motherless self-­reproduction as envisioned by Frankenstein. Both scientists yearn, as Marie Hélène Huet

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notes in her discussion of Romantic monstrosity, to satisfy “the dark desire to reproduce without the other.”24 The monstrosity of Frankenstein’s enterprise resides, at least to some extent, in his attempt to infuse physical, ­mental, and affective life into an excess of tangible and vis­i­ble dead m ­ atter, already severed from any spiritual association and assembled disharmoniously from unloved bodies that had been sold or snatched. Hoffmann’s (equally self-­absorbed and hubristic) transhumanist views cause him, instead, to imbricate his generative drive in a world of excessive immateriality, the diaphanous environment of the human-­digital assemblage where invisible, porous, and often “contagious”25 organisms and intentions are sensed to be real only through the materialization of their other­wise imperceptible operations and networking. Unlike Frankenstein’s Creature, which socializes himself into language, culture, and history in order to reclaim the monstrous as a legitimate component of the h ­ uman and an essential part of the inheritance received from his creator, VIXAL-4 is most often represented as mere agency. Mastering and at the same time transcending conventional natu­ral languages, the algorithm is inspired solely by the relentless pull of its own autonomously-­learning coding—­man-­ made, but no longer man-­directed—­which the latest technical and scientific breakthroughs have enhanced into a proper evolutionary force, obsessed with unlimited self-­improvement and, like any other “organism,” selfishly committed to self-­preservation. The success of VIXAL-4’s mission of making money resides precisely in its extraordinary ability to pro­cess, at incredible speed, countless amounts and va­ri­ e­ties of natu­ral language segments, and consequently trigger financial decisions that are conterminously adaptive to the reactions of myriad rival algorithms. Their competing for profit necessarily coincides with a striving for self-­improvement which risks to run out of control, while they keep networking through invisible computer nodes that, as Matt Kavanagh notes of “the omnipresent yet insubstantial financial markets, [. . .] are everywhere and nowhere, all at once, all the time.”26 But, unlike its indisputable movie pre­de­ces­sor HAL 9000  in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), VIXAL-4 neither speaks nor uses ­human language autonomously, even though it infiltrates other computers and email accounts in order to send messages, transfer money, and buy ser­v ices and goods (quite ironically, the latter mainly consist of antique books and artworks). With, possibly, one uncanny exception: the revised version of the Hoffmann Investment Technologies’ motto appearing on the screensavers at the very end of the novel, where the original future-­tense blueprint for the ban against paperwork and the advent of a wholly digital com­pany is replaced by the ominous announcement that, no longer in need of a h ­ uman workforce, and having become itself a proper “entity,” “the com­pany of the ­future ­will be alive” (320; emphasis added). No mention is made of the author of this text. But the increasing

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anthropomorphization of the intentionality and “character” of the algorithm rendered through the lens of Hoffmann’s mounting psychosis—­and the parallel decoupling, at the end of the novel, of his creature’s digital “ner­vous system” from any given physical place or container—­encourages the readers to fully embrace the fearful real­ity of VIXAL-4. Having sensed the fear and instability of its maker—­human, and therefore doomed by a fallible and divided self—as a pos­si­ble threat to its own self-­aware organ­ization and self-­improving mission, in the final combat the algorithm trumps Hoffmann’s almost pathetic attempt to burn down the supercomputers where the system is believed to be located. While the scientist/creator—­himself reduced to “a jet of orange flame”—­plunges into the void “like Icarus” (314), reversing his former Shelleyan association with Prometheus, VIXAL-4, thanks to its continuing successful trading, is revealed to have “migrated onto the web itself,”27 making the evolutionary leap into “a kind of glowing celestial digital cloud, occasionally swarming to earth” (321). In this way, it acquires the godlike characteristics of ubiquity and immortality, coming, to some extent, to resemble Samantha, the operating system portrayed in Spike Jonze’s movie Her (2013). As Jeff Menn and Jay Clayton note of that “linked superorganism, a collective intelligence inhabiting the net,”28 such a creature no longer has any “need for a creator,” which “means the disappearance of the Oedipal themes that are so power­f ul in the many fictional descendants of Frankenstein,”29 a conclusion which is consistent with Hoffmann’s defeat and regression into creaturely life at the end of the novel. In The Fear Index, however, the Oedipal strug­gle is not only fought out at the level of a ruthless clash of intelligences, but also provides the hidden mechanism which most effectively sustains the inherent commitment of the Gothic to producing fear. Besides foregrounding fear as the single most impor­tant trait on which VIXAL-4’s life proj­ect is based, and leaving his readers, at the end, to nurture anxious thoughts about a ­f uture governed by financial singularity, Harris draws on a number of narratological structures and ele­ments pertaining to multiple discursive and generic conventions in order to erect his eerily impressive architecture of fear. While this chimes with his already mentioned desire to write a narrative premised on the interplay of social commentary, thriller, Gothic pastiche, and Orwellian nightmare, it is also consistent with Catherine Spooner’s depiction of the Gothic as “spawn[ing] other genres, like science fiction and the detective novel,”30 a description which entitles The Fear Index to full membership in the con­temporary category of Gothic remediation. Harris’s novel is also a con­spic­ u­ous example of what Judith Halberstam has famously described as a “cannibalistic” and “essentially consumptive genre which feeds parasitically upon other literary texts,” and is sustained by “a kind of paranoia about bound­aries.”31 A “paranoia about bound­aries” is, precisely, what underpins the most thrilling and fear-­ridden episodes in the book, the ones that most conventionally

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account for its Gothic atmosphere. This is apparent even at the start of the novel, when, ­a fter a short sleep Hoffmann abruptly awakens to be confronted by a malevolent intruder who has mysteriously penetrated his hyper-­securitized and seemingly unconquerable h ­ ouse. Caught in the act of sharpening knives, the attacker, whom Hoffmann ­will ­later describe to the police as resembling one of the deformed drawings of terrified h ­ uman beings in Darwin’s book, manages to escape, leaving the scientist unconscious ­after hitting him on the head. Such a fearful violation of Hoffmann’s protected living space opens the way to a compelling exploration of widely shared concerns about boundary-­making and trespassing which regard not only ­actual locations, but also the intimate, secret space of an individual’s mind and emotions. ­These two categories also help to examine the fault lines of spatial in­equality separating the rich from the indigent throughout the novel. This issue is brought into sharp relief, in par­tic­u ­lar, by the circumstance that Inspector Leclerc, the Swiss policeman in charge of investigating the attack on Hoffmann, has been obliged to move his residence across the border into France, no longer being able to afford dwelling in the glamorous financial hub of Geneva. This demarcation line is also apparent in the contrast between the city’s most exclusive areas and the derelict, menacing, or disorienting places where Hoffmann’s sadomasochistic sexual fantasies and suicidal drives, long repressed into oblivion, are concretized in the form of a paid sexual encounter with his would-be murderer, ordered on his behalf by the algorithm. VIXAL-4’s inability to distinguish a factual account from the private confession of an unspeakable fantasy turns the hacked files of the scientist’s past sessions with his analyst into a fight to the death, with Hoffmann committing an a­ ctual murder in the squalid H ­ otel Diodati. Tellingly, this place is characterized by a number of attributes which are evocative of the Gothic, such as antiquity (it is “a hundred years old”), anthropomorphic traits (the shutters resemble “drooping eyelids, the interiors hidden by a greyish-­white cataract of thick net curtains”), and mystery (a wooden door “elaborately carved with what looked like masonic symbols”) (174). More relevantly, the ­hotel room comes to act as a projection of Hoffmann’s own distracted mind, a kind of secret and yet externalized horror chamber where his most deeply-­censored thoughts are dramatically made to emerge and put on stage for all to see, in a way that is again reminiscent of the porous environment and vulnerable bound­a ries of the Internet, themselves compounded by the unlimited and perennial memory of the web. The ­whole scene of the attack is sustained by a masterly rendering of the way Hoffmann’s rational being is implacably racked by emotive and bodily symptoms of animal fear, and establishes a disorienting atmosphere which calls into question the very notions of home and shelter, and the essential “unhomeliness of the modern self.”32 Concurrently, the many irrational or confused aspects of Hoffmann’s account to the police and the nightmarish physiognomy he

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attributes to the intruder insinuate the possibility that the protagonist is suffering from some psychotic strain. Paving the way for the holographic emergence of the mad-­scientist subplot—­one which Hoffmann si­mul­ta­neously fears and resists to the end, when he is fi­nally proven to be sane—­t his alternative tale serves to weaken the protagonist’s narrative authority, turning his voice into that of an unreliable witness, and agrees to defuse the uncanny story of the algorithm gone rogue by deferring any evidence of its factuality u ­ ntil the conclusion of the novel. VIXAL-4 turns out to be, at last, the spectral force b ­ ehind the mysterious (initially harmless but increasingly hostile) actions and reactions which first unsettle, and ultimately destroy, Hoffmann’s transhumanist utopia of an ever-­ perfectible human-­machinic hybrid. While a detailed discussion of the manifold episodes making up this narrative thread is beyond the scope of my analy­sis, it should at least be noted how the algorithm’s gradual self-­empowerment and emancipation from h ­ uman control almost always takes the form of invisible intrusion, trespassing, illicit surveillance, hacking, and identity theft, before giving way t­ owards the end, to a­ ctual homicidal actions. None of t­ hese deeds, however, are imputed to the system as “moral” faults or crimes, the ability to act “like an obsessive sociopath” being, in the words of Steve Omohundro, a pos­si­ble prerogative of a digital agent programmed “only to satisfy the efficiency, self-­ preservation, and acquisition drives.”33 In lit­er­a­ture, film, and other art forms, digital sentient beings have long been a preferred trope of uncanny duality and unhallowed reproduction, being the disembodied, and often imageless sites where the h ­ uman fallacies of their creators materialize to haunt them in the shape of intangible agency and unintended causation. Lately, however, in parallel with the viral—­a nd often eagerly embraced—­v irtualization of many aspects of ­human life and their increasing unmooring from constraints of time, m ­ atter, and space, this figure has been taking on an accrued and ever more disturbing spectral appeal. Supercomputers and artificial intelligence have emerged as some of the most promising and controversial arenas for scientific breakthroughs and anxious philosophical debate. In turn, by projecting onto superintelligent artificial creatures a desire for, even a sense of lack of, the forbidden fruit of the full h ­ uman prerogative of existing si­mul­ta­neously as bodies, minds, and souls—­subjected to the push and pull of morality and evil, sympathy and selfishness, immortality and the death drive—­ fictional repre­sen­ta­tions of our networked f­ uture also seem to be summoning fantasies of restorative nostalgia to fend off the fear that the era of enhanced intelligence might not coincide with the refinement, and perhaps even the survival, of the h ­ uman. At the beginning of the novel, VIXAL-4 (still operating incognito) is represented as if it ­were tentatively pursuing some kind of affective relationship with its creator, as its initial offerings to Hoffmann—­Darwin’s book, the w ­ hole

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collection of Gabrielle’s artworks exhibited for the first time in a gallery, and even the intruder’s attack, which is ­later understood to be the first in a disquieting series of sexual pres­ents—­fall somehow within the anthropological category of the gift, and respond to a desire to please and share. But their unforeseen effect is to engulf Hoffmann in a tidal wave of animal fear, producing “an impression of sickening descent into degeneration”34 and transforming the novel, as Nora Crook notes of Frankenstein, into a narrative “about doubling, shadow selves, split personalities.”35 At this moment, a kind of communicative short-­circuit takes place, as it becomes apparent that the tracking be­hav­ior which informs VIXAL-4’s coded response to fear induces the algorithm to transform its own creator into an object of surveillance and, in accordance with its self-­improving bias, to refine its techniques of detection by ordering hidden webcams to be installed in Hoffmann’s office through his hacked mail account. Significantly, a quantum leap takes place in the algorithm’s malignity ­towards its creator when, due to a malfunction, the scientist sees his own face on his computer screen and realizing, in a frenzy, that he is being bugged, ­orders the ­whole building to be searched and the webcams taken off-­line. Henceforth, the “­will” of the digital entity becomes a structuring narrative ele­ment: Hoffmann is perceived by VIXAL-4 as merely a contrasting force, a creator-­turned-­creature to be neutralized for the sake of self-­survival and optimization, so that the algorithm is indeed transformed by this uncanny relationship into a digital stalker and “obsessive sociopath.” It is also tempting to read this scene as an updated remediation of the self-­reflexive disgust implicit in Frankenstein’s encounter with his own “hideous progeny” (F 10), as, in Gothic novels, the monstrous most often signals the shock of being confronted with the image of one’s own aberrance, and of the “unhallowed arts” (F 89) haunting one’s own times.

VIXAL-4: A Monster of the “Financialized Imagination”36 By yoking together the richly-­modulated tradition of the Gothic, Darwinian theory, and notions of the digital which are deeply embedded in philosophical and scientific debates about the pos­si­ble modes of encroachment of the computer into the ­human in the near ­f uture, Harris combines the narrative potential of the uncanny with the rationalist and empirical bias of the evolutionary. In this way, through a pro­cess which resembles Mary Shelley’s simultaneous probing of new and unsettling scientific, ethical, and social geographies of modernity, The Fear Index provides a compelling exploration of the dangers of the ever-­increasing power of technology against a nightmarish scenario of artificial intelligence gone amok and taking control over ­human destinies. In the pro­cess, just as Frankenstein and his Creature enact the ­human obsession with the unstable bound­aries of life and death by foregrounding the monstrous dynamics of an unnatural kind

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of generation that defies mortality, so Harris’s novel fleshes out current attempts at defining and imagining improved forms and ontological stages of the transhuman and posthuman, while also problematizing their unforeseen, risky legacies. At the same time, it warns against the indiscriminate sell-­off of the liberal-­ humanist worldview to the benefit of impersonal—­ a nd far from empowering—­optimization models such as the ones predicated on the alliance of technology and finance. The notion, as computer scientist, transhumanist, and Google Director of Engineering Ray Kurzweil maintains, that technology is “evolution by other means,”37 goes almost unchallenged among both the advocates of posthumanism as a form of enhanced humanity and the liberal humanists who argue against such a view, warning against the danger that in the intermingling of man and machine the very idea of what it means to be ­human would be altered beyond recognition and lost. According to some scholars, the merging of h ­ umans with computers, or the transhumanist dream of “mind-­uploading” on a digital system—­bringing to life spectral hybrids—­would not only lead to life forms that are more-­and better-­than-­human, but would also fulfill man’s unexhausted fantasies of immortality. Other thinkers insist on the idea that information is in itself “a life form,” and therefore “the computer that carries information replicates itself and grows according to biological forms,”38 while the seeming discontinuity between the organic (­human) and non-­organic (digital system) is blurred by the fact that “both are construed in terms of information systems.”39 This point is particularly relevant to VIXAL-4’s coming to full life in The Fear Index, where the idea of an “autonomous machine-­learning” (99) algorithm is suggestively resonant with the analy­sis provided by N. Katherine Hayles in How We Became Posthuman concerning artificial intelligence and the way “computer programs are designed to allow ‘creatures’ (that is discrete packets of computer codes) to evolve spontaneously” 40 along unpredicted patterns. An emphasis on the “creaturely” and on acknowledging the algorithm as “a life form” is also central to Arne De Boever’s thought-­provoking essay on The Fear Index. While stressing the all-­important role of creaturely life in Mary Shelley’s novel, De Boever elaborates on phi­los­o­pher Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s theory of financial panic and on the way he contrasts classical understandings of this emotion to “the post-­religious, pathological disorientation of con­temporary panic.” 41 The latter is seen as the “psychopathological” reaction of ­today’s “conscious organism (individual or social)” 42 vis-­à-­vis the unsustainable acceleration and overload of current information pro­cesses. Expanding his scope to consider “the par­tic­u ­lar kind of creatureliness” caused by our time’s enhanced ability to produce “economic state[s] of exception,” 43 De Boever lucidly explores both the threats of being reduced to creaturely life that ­today’s digital financial creatures pose for their ­human creators, and the right of artificial intelligence codes to be

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recognized as organisms, endowed with creaturely attributes, and hence fictionalized as characters in their own right. A com­pany and a machine that comes alive and dictates the conditions of our continued existence, are among Harris’s preferred descriptions of the imaginative fulcrum of his novel, along with his awareness (supported by expert lit­ er­a­ture on artificial intelligence and computational science) that this imaginary is already largely imbricated on factual real­ity. It is a widely shared notion that the “dark sciences” of globalized finance have favored the emergence of a digital environment that relies on artificial intelligence networks and concurs to create “a fluid portrait of the living market.” 44 As James Barrat reports, scientists researching artificial superintelligence might soon be taken by surprise by its spontaneous appearance—­“ fully formed in the financial markets” 45—as an uncanny consequence of the market’s “evolutionary pressure” 46 ­towards ever more efficient algorithmic systems which, like VIXAL-4, live on unseen, competing for profit in the secret vaults (and clouds) of voracious hedge funds and corporations. “An intelligence explosion,” he adds, anticipating the gist of Harris’s novel, “would be invisible to most if not all h ­ umans, and prob­ably unstoppable anyway.” 47 Although from a dif­fer­ent perspective, this view also chimes with George J. Annas’s evocative argument that the corporation is “an immortal creature,” a “­legal fiction endowed by law with eternal life (and limited liability). This creature has, like Frankenstein’s monster, assumed powers not envisionable or controllable by its creator.” And, having become trans-­and supranational, it “swears no allegiance to anything and knows no limits in its pursuit of growth and profit.” 48 All this takes us back to McNally’s meta­phor of the “monsters of the market” and his compelling reading of Frankenstein against the backdrop of capitalism, itself seen “as both a modern horror-­story and a mystery tale.” 49 This perspective—­ partly revised in terms of finance to address the immaterial monsters of the third millennium—is equally at the heart of The Fear Index, which chooses a similar kind of generic contamination to mark out the spectral risks and invisible power networks to which the fate of humankind is held hostage in the age of terror. Among t­ hese forces, first and foremost is the strategic deployment and management of fear, the defining emotion in the lives of h ­ uman animals, which trumps pro­gress and refinement and speaks to the timeless emotional core of naked men. Another, meaningfully yoked to the former in the ge­ne­tic codes of VIXAL-4, is language, whose effect is terribly amplified by the web.50 The ability to coolly and unemotionally control language is an im­mense source of power, and perhaps the most efficient medium through which (monstrous) networked capital, governments, and corporations “exercise the ability to shape perceptions and actions through the production of financial repre­sen­ta­tion,”51 and impose disciplinary practices and enduring domination.

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Language, again, creates and fills out the outlines of what Max Haiven has called the financialized imagination—­“volatile, networked and unpredictable”52—­ the “means by which capital imagines the world, the way a system gains some purchase over the f­ uture.”53 But imagination and language, as both Frankenstein and The Fear Index demonstrate, are also sites of anxious plea­sure and continued re­sis­tance, where more humane cultural, ethical, and po­liti­cal imaginaries may be “re-­membered” and brought back to full, ethical life.

Some Remarks on Teaching Frankenstein and The Fear Index As a conclusion to this chapter, whose interpretive keys and theoretical suggestions have been repeatedly put to the test in the ­actual practice of designing and teaching two Master’s-­level courses in En­glish literary and cultural studies (the former addressing understandings of risk and crisis in the light of Ulrich Beck’s notion of the “world risk society,” the latter privileging the discursive construction and literary repre­sen­ta­t ions of the global financial crisis), it seems only appropriate to emphasize how discourse and power, imagination and re­sis­tance are also major perspectives along which the didactic and pedagogical potential of Harris’s novel can be rewardingly put into sharp focus through the all-­ pervasive and unifying lens of fear.54 Not only does fear mark out the boundary between the “animal” inheritance of the ­human and the disembodied, unaffective “life-­forms” represented by AIs, information systems, digitalization, and spectral finance. Analyzed as a neurological and psychic phenomenon—as well as, diachronically, in its dif­fer­ent forms of conceptualization, shifting imaginaries and representations—­fear lends itself to be deployed as an effective hermeneutic tool which may reflect retrospectively on more homologated readings of Shelley’s Frankenstein and concur to further problematize its continuing influence in the light of the twenty-­first-­century conjuncture. Bound­aries, boundary-­making, and the crossing/trespassing of bound­aries, along with the securitization environment which coalesces around ­these notions, are defining ele­ments of The Fear Index, which help to question, and start a serious debate about, areas of current ethical and social concern such as, among ­others, the seemingly limitless scope of ­today’s scientific and digital experimentation and breakthroughs, the menacing, unsettling liminality inherent to our ever-­closer encounters with the post-­and trans-­human, or the removal of any restriction on the almost unconditional mandate entrusted to “the market.” Drawing on Harris’s avowed agenda in The Fear Index of achieving a con­ temporary, even futuristic revision of Shelley’s text which might qualify as  a  hybrid permutation of both the Gothic and the thriller, it is perhaps the bound­aries of genre, as discussed in this chapter, which seem to provide the most promising arena for literary analy­sis. Characterized by its uncanny, flexible responsiveness to current-­day anx­i­eties and disorientation, and to the growing

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elision of shared frames of reference, the Gothic, as Xavier Aldana Reyes notes in a compelling, experience-­based introduction to how to teach con­temporary trans-­and re-­mediations of this genre, retains a unique capacity—­t hanks to its recognizable but increasingly porous and expanding bound­a ries—­not only to “sublimat[e] the traumas of postmodern life,” but also to create an ever-­ transmogrifying “fictional space through which to critique the status quo and the economic and po­liti­cal models” which haunt t­ oday’s monstrous imbrication of global capital and post-­humanistic culture.55

Notes 1. Robert Harris, The Fear Index (Hutchinson: London, 2011), 92. Reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd., copyright 2011. All Harris quotations, henceforth referenced parenthetically in the text, ­w ill be from this edition. 2. Colin Hay, “Narrating Crisis: The Discursive Construction of the ‘Winter of Discontent,’ ” Sociology 30, no. 2 (1996): 255. 3. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven ­Theses),” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 6. 4. Cohen, “Monster Culture,” 13. 5. Fred Botting, “Technospectrality: Essay on Uncannimedia,” in Technologies of the Gothic in Lit­er­a­ture and Culture: Technogothics, ed. Justin D. Edwards (New York: Routledge, 2015), 18. 6. Anne Quéma, “The Gothic and the Fantastic in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” En­glish Studies in Canada 30, no. 4 (2004): 85. https://­ejournals​.­library​.u ­ alberta​.­ca​/­index​ .­php​/E ­ SC​/­article​/v­ iew​/3­ 62​/­336. 7. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmonds­worth: Penguin, 1976), 342. 8. Marx, Capital, 353. 9. David McNally, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 156. 10. McNally, Monsters of the Market, 13. 11. McNally, Monsters of the Market, 151. 12. J. M. van der Laan, Narratives of Technology (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 169. 13. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 141. 14. Erik Spanberg, “Robert Harris’s The Fear Index Makes a Thriller Out of a Man Sitting at a Computer,” The Christian Science Monitor, February 15, 2012. http://­w ww​.­csmonitor​ .­c om​/­B ooks​/­c hapter​-­a nd​-­verse​/­2 012​/­0215​/­Robert​-­H arris​-­s​-­T he​-­Fear​-­I ndex​-­m akes​-­a​ -­t hriller​-o ­ ut​-­of​-a­ ​-­man​-s­ itting​-­at​-a­ ​-c­ omputer. 15. Spanberg, “Robert Harris’s The Fear Index.” 16. Bill Gates, Business @ The Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy (New York: Warner Books, 1999). 17. David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), xxxii. 18. Max Haiven, “The Financial Crisis as a Crisis of Imagination,” Cultural Logic 30 (January 2012): 17–18. 19. On the evocative role of Geneva, see also Nicholas Wroe, “A Life in Writing: Robert Harris,” The Guardian, September 23, 2011. https://­w ww​.­t heguardian​.­com​/­culture​/­2011​/­sep​ /­23​/­life​-­w riting​-­robert​-­harris. 20. Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 18–19. 21. Lorna Piatti-­Farnell and Donna Lee Brien, “Introduction: The Gothic Compass,” in New Directions in 21st ­Century Gothic: The Gothic Compass, ed. Lorna Piatti-­Farnell and Donna Lee Brien (New York: Routledge, 2015), 4.

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22. On this issue, see Manuel Castells’s trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 1996–1997). 23. Walton comments, at a ­later point in the novel, that Hoffmann had looked at him as though he had “murdered his child” (243). 24. Marie Hélène Huet, The Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 126. 25. As witnessed at the levels of both meta­phor and lexis by the notion of “computer virus.” 26. Matt Kavanagh, “Second Nature: American Fiction in the Age of Cap­i­tal­ist Realism” (Ph.D. diss., McGill University, Montreal 2007), 281. http://­d igitool​.­l ibrary​.­mcgill​.­c a​ /­webclient​/­StreamGate​?­folder​_­id​= 0 ­ &dvs​= 1­ 509268820003~733. Quoted in Judith Schulz, From Wall Street to Main Street: Tracing the Shadow of the Financial Crisis from 2007 to 2009 in US-­American Fiction (Wiesbaden: J.B. Metzler, 2016), 109. 27. John Style, “ ‘Nothing to Fear but the Algorithm Itself’: The Computer as Monster in Robert Harris’s The Fear Index,” in Yesterday’s Tomorrows: On Utopia and Dystopia, ed. Pere Gallardo and Elizabeth Russell (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 231. 28. Jeff Menne and Jay Clayton, “Alive in the Net,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Tele­vi­sion, ed. Michael Hauskeller, Thomas D. Philbeck, and Curtis D. Carbonell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 130. 29. Menne and Clayton, “Alive in the Net,” 135. 30. Catherine Spooner, Con­temporary Gothic (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 26. 31. Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 36. 32. Mark Featherstone, “The State of the Network: Radical Anxiety, Real Paranoia and Quantum Culture,” Journal of Cultural Research 12, no. 2 (2008): 187. 33. Steve Omohundro, “The Nature of Self-­Improving Artificial Intelligence,” 2008. https://­s elfawaresystems​ .­c om​ /­2 007​ /­10​ /­0 5​ /­p aper​ -­o n​ -­t he​ -­n ature​ -­o f​ -­s elf​ -­i mproving​ -­artificial​-­intelligence​/­. 34. Spooner, Con­temporary Gothic, 18. 35. Nora Crook, “Mary Shelley, Author of Frankenstein,” in A New Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Malden, MA: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2012), 111. 36. The title of this section is adapted from Max Haiven and Jody Berland, “Introduction: The Financialized Imagination (In Memory of Stuart Hall),” Topia 30–31 (2013–2014): 7–16. http://­topia​.j­ ournals​.­yorku​.­ca​/­index​.­php​/­topia​/­article​/v­ iew​/­38416​/­34847. 37. Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines (New York: Viking, 1999), 16. 38. James Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the H ­ uman Era (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2013), 123. 39. Sharon Tamar, ­Human Nature in an Age of Biotechnology: The Case for Mediated Posthumanism (Heidelberg: Springer, 2014), 47. 40. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Lit­ er­a­ture, and Informatics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 11. 41. Arne De Boever, “Creatures of Panic: Financial Realism in Robert Harris’s The Fear Index,” Eu­ro­pean Journal of En­glish Studies 19, no. 1 (2015): 26. 42. De Boever, “Creatures of Panic,” 26. 43. De Boever, “Creatures of Panic,” 25. 44. Barrat, Our Final Invention, 125; emphasis added. 45. Barrat, Our Final Invention, 126. 46. Barrat, Our Final Invention, 128. 47. Barrat, Our Final Invention, 128. 48. George G. Annas, “The Man in the Moon,” in Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, ed. Susan Schneider (Malden, MA: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009), 321. 49. McNally, Monsters of the Market, 13.

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50. On the relevance of economic language in representing the market as both authoritative and all-­powerful and a living entity subject to “animal” drives, see Paul Crosthwaite, “Animality and Ideology in Con­temporary Economic Discourse: Taxonomizing Homo Economicus,” Journal of Cultural Economy, 6, no. 1 (2013): 94–109. 51. Max Haiven, “In-­Credible Wealth and Panic in the ‘New Economy,’ ” Criticism 51, no. 1 (2009): 166. 52. Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popu­lar Culture and Everyday Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 173. 53. Haiven, “The Financial Crisis as a Crisis of Imagination,” 17. 54. Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 1999). 55. Xavier Aldana Reyes, “Genre Trou­ble: the Challenges of Designing Modern and Con­ temporary Gothic Modules,” in Teaching 21st ­Century Genres, ed. Katy Shaw (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 8.

chapter 3

z Frankensteinian Gods, Fembots, and the New Technological Frontier in Alex Garland’s Ex_Machina Eleanor Beal

This chapter examines Alex Garland’s Ex_Machina (2015),1 a recent example of robot science fiction that adapts the Frankenstein narrative to draw a link between issues of gender and an inhuman f­ uture. Mary Shelley’s philosophically curious, yet ultimately cynical vision of the f­ uture is more than matched by Ex_Machina’s unpleasant portrait of a possibly sociopathic techno-­scientist, who draws the inspiration for his robotic creations from linguistics and art history. Like Victor Frankenstein, Nathan Bateman considers his artificial creature to be the f­ uture of both science and humanity and, like Victor’s Creature who strives to understand h ­ uman life and his creator, Ava is a female robot that questions the ethics of her maker and the motives b ­ ehind her design. In both Frankenstein and Ex_Machina the creation challenges conceptions of the ­human, and the narcissistic scientist is dispatched. Ex_Machina is a ce­re­bral science fiction film, useful for helping students of film, lit­er­a­ture, and science to delve deeply into discussions about h ­ uman intelligence, sentience, gender identity, and scientific morality. A well-­crafted story in its own right, Ex_Machina also draws influence from and reworks motifs first posed in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But it reworks t­ hese motifs by placing them in the context of ­today’s computerized and corporate-­financed technologies. In our pres­ent post-­digital age of smartphones, internet search engines, big data, and hyperconnectivity, the fears ­t hese technologies raise similarly play out in cinematic scenarios that would have been unthinkable to Mary Shelley. Yet, as Lester  D. Friedman and Sarah  B. Kavey argue, “in very specific ways ­these 69

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narratives bring us full circle back to her work again.”2 As one of the most recent books to attempt to define the influence of the Frankenstein narrative on cinema, Friedman and Kavey’s Monstrous Progeny: A History of the Frankenstein Narratives is a timely study that is applicable ­here for its consideration of synthetic beings and “biological modifications such as cyborgs, androids and robots.”3 According to Friedman and Kavey, artificial life in robot and cyborg films is a “logical evolution of Shelley’s novel.” 4 In her novel, Shelley creates sympathy for the Creature by making readers pity his loathsome and persecuted existence. We pity the Creature when we see how humankind treats him and how self-­absorbed and cruel his maker becomes when his creation does not match up to his expectations. In spite of his unnatural origins, the Creature is essentially benevolent, innocent, and ­free from prejudice. Yet, Victor is unable to take responsibility for what he has created and, repulsed by the horrific appearance of his own creation, attempts to kill him before abandoning him to the ­human world. In Ex_Machina’s adaptation of the Frankenstein myth, a gendered plot is designed to invoke a similar sympathy for its artificial protagonist. Unlike the monstrous deformity of Shelley’s Creature, Ava’s feminine features are beautiful and appealing. Furthermore, her entrapment in Nathan’s subterranean laboratory, where she is the focus of a Turing test experiment to establish her consciousness, raises issues of gender, technology, and control. The viewer, for the most part, only sees Ava as she interacts with the character Caleb and, unlike the readers of Frankenstein, we identify with Caleb’s view of the artificial creature, not the Creature itself. Thus, through Caleb, we come to be concerned with the patriarchal intentions of Ava’s maker, Nathan, as well as pitying Ava and desiring her freedom. The eventual death and overthrow of the narcissistic Nathan is a desired outcome of the film. However, Ava also abandons her protector and potential lover, Caleb, casting doubt on both her humanity and her femininity. Ex_Machina, therefore, short-­circuits its romantic narrative and replaces it with an inhuman ­future. I argue that Ava’s potential femininity and “personhood” are bound up with current fears about control over technology. Nevertheless, the film’s deep ambivalence about the possibilities of technology and an inhuman ­future influences its repre­sen­ta­tion of the female creation, causing the film to suffer from its problematic portrayal of femininity. Ex_Machina is a robot fiction that pres­ents itself as a con­temporary version of Frankenstein, and indeed, it does share many narrative ele­ments with its nineteenth-­century pre­de­ces­sor. In the film, the young and nebbish computer programmer, Caleb Smith, works for the internet com­pany BlueBook and wins an opportunity to visit the com­pany’s brilliant inventor and CEO, Nathan Bateman, at his home in Alaska. On his arrival at Nathan’s impressive mansion, Caleb can barely contain his awe and delight when he discovers that Nathan’s latest creation is an artificially intelligent robot called Ava: “If ­you’ve created a

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conscious machine, it’s not the history of man . . . ​t hat’s the history of Gods.” Caleb’s task is s­ imple: he is to be the h ­ uman component in a Turing test that ­w ill prove that Nathan has been successful in inventing the world’s first conscious machine. As the story progresses and he gets to know Ava, however, Caleb, along with the viewer, becomes more and more conflicted by the moral and ethical implications of the experiment. Just as Frankenstein explores “­whether a sentient being constructed using inorganic materials but circumventing the standard procreative pro­cess should be granted personhood status and thereby acknowledged as part of the h ­ uman race,”5 Ex_Machina asks ­these questions in relation to its female robot, Ava. In par­tic­u­lar, Ex_Machina is one of a series of robotic films that convey anx­ i­eties about science and technology as advancing a patriarchal or masculinist agenda that fears female sexuality and attempts to usurp and control it. In the first part of this essay, I ­will strengthen the links between Garland’s film and Frankenstein before moving on to an analy­sis of the film’s gendering of its robot creature.

The Illusion of Control Frankenstein has a direct impact on Garland’s Ex_Machina, particularly in terms of the character of Nathan Bateman. A onetime precocious child inventor of the Google-­esque search engine BlueBook, Nathan now runs his multibillion-­dollar computer com­pany from a luxurious and remote hideout in the Alaskan mountains. Ex_Machina might take place in the Alaskan wilderness but its filmed location by a mountain lake in Norway recalls the Eu­ro­pean landscape of Shelley’s novel. Victor chose to isolate himself, first at the University in Ingolstadt and then by secluding himself in the Orkney Islands to work on his monstrous proj­ects. Throughout Frankenstein, Victor neglects his f­ amily and his relationship with his fiancée, Elizabeth, withdraws from society, and prefers the surroundings of sublime nature. Likewise, Nathan is renowned by his employees for being a recluse whose antisocial tendencies and obsession with his work are prerequisites for his genius inventions. He recalls not only Victor Frankenstein, but con­temporary tech billionaires such as Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates, brilliant men whose gifts for both technological invention and business have made entrepreneurial nerdism one of the myths of con­temporary society. Within the film’s comparison, however, is a cynical critique of our cultural enthronement of the solitary scientist/entrepreneur and what work this myth actually does. Nathan’s home is not a Gothic ­castle or “filthy” workshop of cadavers (F 55)— it is not even overtly ­grand, ostentatious, or aristocratic. Rather, at first glance it is merely an unimpressive wooden box squatting amongst the trees of a wood. Caleb’s entrance into the ­house, however, reveals a series of large, subterranean,

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modernist living spaces. A dining room with a vast glass wall shows an expansive view of the lake and the h ­ ouse’s sublime, mountain surroundings. The sleek interiors are tastefully decorated with chic and minimalist furnishings. As you would expect from a billionaire internet guru, ­there are copious amounts of technological gadgets pres­ent. The opening shots of the film also give us a view of BlueBook headquarters. ­Here, ­there is also the suggestion of transparency, serenity, and connectivity; glass walls and partitions let in light, a large sculpture of a tree—­glistening white and Christmas-­like—­overhangs some of the desks. As an in­ter­est­ing counterpoint to the vast win­dows that frame the lakes and mountains surrounding Nathan’s home, one of the glass partitions at BlueBook doubles as an enormous fish tank in which large purplish fish float and swim. The situation that the film proposes in the architecture of both BlueBook headquarters and Nathan’s h ­ ouse is one that, Jay P. Telotte argues, “links science and technology with distance, presenting them as a kind of retreat from the world and its trou­bles, but also explores the lure of that distant stance. ­Here the intent is to evoke not the distance of horror—­a place of isolation, vulnerability, and otherness—­but that of science fiction—­a place of speculation.” 6 At first glance, the relationship between nature and technology in Ex_Machina is suggested to be a harmonious and complementary one. However, like Victor Frankenstein, Nathan’s true intent is not altruistic; and where Victor sought fame and glory, Nathan seeks to further his own vision of what an inhuman, artificially intelligent ­future should look like. Set almost entirely in the space of Nathan’s h ­ ouse, which becomes a parallel to both the main themes of the story and to the psy­ chol­ogy of its owner, Ex_Machina begins to reveal an eventual dysfunction in the scientist’s beautiful but overly designed home and laboratories, his uncomfortable fascination with playing God, and with originating new life that inevitably rebels against him. Against the backdrop of Nathan’s h ­ ouse/research fa­cil­i­t y, Ex_Machina pres­ ents itself as a modern-­day Prometheus myth. A mythic symbol of the acquisition of technology through superior intelligence, Prometheus gave humanity the divine gift of fire, transforming the species and raising it above the other struggling brutes—­but at the same time, giving it more means with which to destroy itself. Prometheus is punished by Zeus for his transgression in stealing the god’s fire. ­There has been ­great speculation over the reasons why Mary Shelley subtitled Frankenstein, “The Modern Prometheus,”7 but applicable to this context is the notion that Victor, like Prometheus, procures a secret that man was never supposed to know, a secret that threatens to alter and even destroy humanity altogether. “The Modern Prometheus” is an epithet that could be applied to Nathan Bateman who is both superior in intelligence to other ­humans and represents what many in the twenty-­first ­century feel about technology ­under capitalism: that it is an instrument of potential knowledge and desire. Nathan also initially evokes Zeus, the god that holds the secret of making fire. The views of

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vast mountains through the win­dows of his ­house suggest a magnificent vision of Mount Olympus, the mythological home of the king of the gods. As the solitary inventor/entrepreneur, Nathan stands alone and opposed to the other corporate gods that might attempt to appropriate his inventions. In this re­spect, the film plays out an ongoing strug­gle of the mechanical age over who controls and who directly benefits from technological development. Despite its sublime and serene natu­ral surroundings, Nathan’s home is a fortress of CCTV monitors and computer screens. The subterranean basement that contains his sleeping quarters and laboratory is a windowless and claustrophobic space. While no one can see in, however, the ­house’s inner rooms suggest that visibility is paramount. The walls of the sleeping quarters, for instance, are made of translucent plastic reminiscent of the paper walls in traditional Japa­nese architecture. The walls of the labs are constructed from partitions of glass that reflect back the winking lights of more computer monitors and surveillance screens. From the opening scene in which we see the employees of BlueBook sitting ­behind similar partitions of glass, we are given a cinematic frame of reference for the relationship between nature and artifice, between technology and control in Ex_Machina that includes Metropolis and Blade Runner (another of Frankenstein’s monstrous progeny, 1982). As in t­ hese twentieth-­century examples of robot science fiction, industrial development is linked to machine-­like h ­ uman be­hav­ior. Nathan’s employees are divided and disconnected from one another while they work, the transparency of their surroundings indicating that they and their productivity can be watched. As the fish lethargically swim in circles, the employees of BlueBook are represented as similarly docile creatures walking to and fro, weaving from desk to desk, room to room. Likewise, Nathan’s ­house comes to accentuate the dehumanizing effects of technological control, becoming a claustrophobic space in which every­t hing is watched, tested, and assessed and technology is not in balance or harmony with nature, but shaping it to fulfill a single end. Technology and visibility continue to play a big part in this Frankenstein/ Prometheus story. As Katie Jones points out, “Nathan’s authority is intrinsically bound up with the gaze through his access to surveillance footage of the premises and the knowledge available to him through his position as CEO of a search engine.”8 As Ex_Machina progresses, we come to see Nathan as not only geo­ graph­i­cally but psychologically disconnected from h ­ umans. Our first sign that Garland’s Frankensteinian myth involves a shift in gender comes from the introduction of Ava. Unlike Frankenstein’s Creature, Ava is gendered female and she is not a hideous amalgam of dead ­human body parts but a disturbingly attractive robot with female features and mannerisms. Played by actress Alicia Vikander, Ava is a computational being that spends her time drawing and dreaming of freedom. Ava does not evoke disgust, as Victor Frankenstein’s Creature does, nevertheless the prob­lem that Caleb and the viewer face on viewing her is similar

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to the plight of Victor. In each case the creation has too many h ­ uman traits to be treated other­wise, but too many artificial traits to be assigned a place in the biologically ­human category. A central question in each narrative is what is the status of such a being, given its origins and makeup? How should it be treated? To put it another way, robots, like Victor’s monster, are assembled entities rather than products of the womb, with no physical or psychological connection to the biological birth pro­cess. They always remain archetypal outsiders whose con­ spic­u­ous otherness forces a reconsideration of mainstream society’s relationships with marginalized groups. Robots and Frankenstein’s Creature, therefore, remain unique inventions inhabiting a perpetually liminal state that constricts bound­a ries between machines and ­humans and challenges seemingly stable definitions of personhood.9 Ex_Machina merges ele­ments of Frankenstein and Blade Runner, raising complicated questions about the blurring of bound­aries between h ­ uman and artificial life. As Friedman and Kavey point out, in “most earlier Frankenstein films ­t hese borders w ­ ere clearer, as deformed monsters spawned in laboratories bore ­little physical resemblance to traditional, and far more attractive, representatives of the h ­ uman race.”10 Like Rachel Tyrell, the android love object in Blade Runner, Ava is not only physically attractive but the most advanced robot ever made and, although she is not implanted with memories like Rachel is, her brain is similarly programmed with h ­ uman thoughts and experiences. Though it may be the scientist’s knowledge and ­labor that produces the exceptional robot, it is not from Zeus that he steals his fire, but from humanity itself. Nathan has used the BlueBook search engine to build Ava’s brain. Cyberspace is quite literally inner space and Ava’s brain is an ever-­expanding search engine that receives the limitless flow of this interface, enabling her to learn, adjust, respond to, and mimic ­human thoughts and be­hav­ior. In Garland’s version of the Prometheus myth t­ here is no single divine source of knowledge but a technological Pandora’s box (a feminine myth intimately linked with that of Prometheus). As Nathan very clearly explains to Caleb, this interface tells Ava not what ­humans want but how they think. Visibility continues to be a strong motif and one that further links Ex_Machina to its Frankensteinian precursor, Blade Runner. In both films the use of visual apparatus serves to distinguish the ­human from the nonhuman. Thus far, Ava has spent the entirety of her short life on one side of a glass wall in an observation room where she interacts only with her maker. CCTV cameras are pres­ent both inside her chamber and immediately outside, in the small space separating the glass wall of her room from the outside wall and door. In this space Caleb sits to interview her. Like the famous Voight-­Kampff empathy test devised in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), the Turing test that loosely structures Ex_Machina is a series of questions that Caleb asks Ava to test her emotional responses. In the first session, Caleb mostly stares at her and asks

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her s­ imple questions, like her age. In the second session, Ava shows him one of her drawings, a beautiful computational design, and he asks her to draw something more “real.” In the third session, Ava disguises her visibly robotic parts in feminine clothing and a wig. In each case, the film suggests that being judged visually plays a key part in distinguishing Ava’s h ­ uman and nonhuman traits. In his excellent article, “Ex Machina in the Garden,” Brian R. Jacobson identifies another key way in which visuality and visibility are used in the film. Coining the term “technocritical”11 cinema to describe the increasing ability of films like Ex_Machina to both speculate and be reflexive about the visual technology they portray and are composed of, Jacobson argues that Ex_Machina uses oppositions such as “­human vs. machine, animate vs. inanimate, organic vs. inorganic, nature vs. technology, art vs. technics, and, most reflexively, real­ity vs. artificiality” to ponder the “nature of repre­sen­ta­tion.”12 He picks up on the film’s rich composition of artistic forms, from Nathan’s modernist and Japa­nese decor, to his paintings of Titian’s An Allegory of Prudence (c.1550–65) and Jackson Pollock’s No. 5, 1948 (1948), to the row of African and Asian masks lining a wall, ending with an eerily disembodied version of Ava’s own animatronic face. ­These reproductions of the h ­ uman image also echo F. Clark Howell’s March of Pro­gress (1965), the famous illustration presenting ­human evolution.13 This image, depicting an ape walking from left to right and becoming more upright, hairless, and eventually ­human is echoed by the masks that move through vari­ ous primitive stages, folklore forms, and natu­ral and synthetic materials u ­ ntil they end not with the ­human, but with Ava’s artificial face. Through art, the film suggests that Ava is a continuation of h ­ uman evolution, an idea similarly raised by the Creature in Frankenstein and by Roy Batty in Blade Runner. Despite insinuating the relationship between humanity and art, t­ hese science fictions also use the nature of repre­sen­ta­tion to evoke anx­i­eties about the intentions ­behind the creation of AI. To put it another way, as Friedman and Kavey point out, “Just as movies, quite literally merge technology with artistry and fantasy, so too cinematic robots amalgamate advanced mechanisation with inventive designs and ­human desires.”14 Yet ­t hese designs and desires are also not always noble and just as importantly, where art and high culture feature in science fiction to indicate technological possibility, they also, inevitably, raise questions of ethics and morality. In a longer scene that was cut from the theatrical release of the film, Nathan uses a copy of the Pollock painting along with the original to see if Caleb w ­ ill notice the difference. Jacobson interprets this as Nathan’s twofold hope, “that Ava should become the abstract expression of his artistry” and “that her simulation of h ­ uman life should be as good as the best 15 Pollock forgery.” It also suggests a manipulative agenda to Nathan’s experiment. As well as ­t hese hopes for AI, the film also explores key anx­i­eties, questioning how we might establish the uniquely ­human when confronted with its perfect replication? How do we distinguish between simulated and real emotion?

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For most of the film, the critical focus seems to be on Nathan, not only his tyrannical authoritarianism and obsessive monomania with regard to the experiment but also his perverse “paternal” relation to his creation, Ava. The audience is supposed to identify with Caleb, whose moral stance with regard to the test and Ava is as uncertain as the viewer’s. Like Caleb, the viewer is supposed to feel that the test is somehow unethical, even cruel. Also like him, we are curious to see its results. While Caleb is supposed to be testing Ava for signs of artificial intelligence, we begin to seriously suspect that he is, in fact, testing her adequacy as a w ­ oman. Furthermore, Nathan is essentially manipulating Caleb in this objective. In each of the debriefing sessions that he holds a­ fter Caleb’s meetings with Ava, Nathan shows an obvious impatience with Caleb’s attempt to apply a rational and scientific framework to the test, suggesting that Caleb (and, by his proxy, the viewer) take a more ­human approach and consider not only Ava’s ­human qualities but her feminine ones. First, Nathan asks Caleb how he feels about Ava. Then this appeal to both Caleb’s humanity and feeling is supplemented by a series of other revelations by Nathan, namely that consciousness cannot exist without sexuality, that Ava is capable of having sex and enjoying it, that she likes Caleb, and that Nathan is a f­ather figure to her. All the while Nathan feeds Caleb assurances that Ava has a h ­ uman as well as technological origin, has feelings of attachment to ­humans, and that Nathan is not a threat to their relationship. Most importantly, Nathan is continually asserting that Ava also has sexuality and is motivated by it, and this is what forms the basis of her as a conscious being. Nathan thus overtly characterizes Ava and her interactions with Caleb as a result of her female psy­chol­ogy. The film continues in this way leading both Caleb and the viewer into believing that Ava experiences t­ hings the way that Nathan says she does. From the moment Nathan makes his appeal to Caleb’s feelings, he stops asking questions about what Ava thinks and begins, instead, to focus on how she fits with his idea of ­human ­women. All the while, Ava watches her creator and her visitor and seems to come up with her own mysterious agenda. Interestingly, the opening scene at BlueBook headquarters is mirrored in Caleb’s sessions with Ava. Her observation room is also a ­giant fish tank in which she paces back and forth as Caleb sits on the other side of the glass looking in and contemplating her existence. However, we might also notice that Caleb seems more trapped and enclosed by this environment than Ava, who moves around more freely, slipping ­behind her partition walls, pacing in front of him, sitting down or placing herself at a­ ngles where he has to turn to look at her. Shots of Ava take in her reflection in the glass divide, presenting her as doubled or fractured, suggesting that t­ here might be something less than au­then­tic to her questions and responses. Although Ava is clearly presented to us, whirring cogs and shimmering lights on full display, t­ here is a growing sense that we, like Caleb, are being uncomfortably placed in a position where we c­ an’t quite get an idea of

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her. Shots of Ava out of Caleb’s eyesight suggest she is calculating her responses to him. B ­ ecause we are never given access to that thought pro­cess, we too are left to ponder how ­human or illusory ­t hese actions are. By the end of the film, we begin to question ­whether Ava fits into such neatly defined ­human categories as artificial and natu­ral, or real and unreal at all.

Fembot Prob­lems Perhaps the film’s most in­ter­est­i ng and unsettling component is the evolving dynamic among the heterosexual bachelors and their experiment-­pet-­woman-­ robot. Despite the film’s obvious critique of the way in which they desire and objectify her and Ava’s eventual manipulation of this dynamic, Ex_Machina’s repre­sen­ta­tion of gender has proven to be a thorny and controversial issue amongst some critics who have tended to see Ava as just another problematic version of the femme fatale. Writing in Wired, Angela Watercutter describes the film as having a “serious fembot prob­lem”16 and argues that Ava represents ­little more than a conduit for male creativity and desire, and that, powered by her sole asset—­her simulated sexuality—­she becomes a potential menace. While responses to the repre­sen­ta­tion of gender in Ex_Machina have been mixed, t­ hose critics who have appreciated it agree that the reason it stands out from other science fiction films is not simply ­because of themes of artificiality and femininity but rather b ­ ecause of its disturbing depiction of masculinity and the implications this holds for the ­f uture of technology. In Shelley’s Frankenstein, Victor is horrified by the Creature’s frightening and unnatural appearance, but it is only when the Creature is exposed to and suffers from the cruelty and viciousness of ­human society that he himself begins to demonstrate violent be­hav­ior. In Ex_Machina, the unnatural is alluring rather than abhorrent; instead of physical deformity it is Ava’s problematic femininity that raises questions about the social formation of monstrous be­hav­ior. More overtly than in films such as Blade Runner, Ex_Machina pres­ents us with the idea that AI’s speedy evolution and interaction with ­human society might mean ­t hese machines learn more than we bargained for. Writing for The Guardian, Leigh Alexander uses the recent example of Tay, Microsoft’s social AI experiment gone awry, as a jumping-­off point for her analy­sis of gender in AI films like Ex_Machina and Spike Jonze’s Her (2013). In 2016, Microsoft launched its improved customer ser­v ice by developing Tay, an artificially intelligent teenage chat bot with a feminine face and voice. To chat with Tay, you could Tweet or Direct Message her online. The prob­ lem was that Tay’s responses ­were learned from the conversations she had with ­humans online. As Alexander points out, Microsoft was forced to delete Tay “­after she went from ‘friendly millennial girl’ to genocidal misogynist in less than a day.”17 As a social experiment, Tay was in­ter­est­i ng in that she made us ask, “What does it mean for the f­ uture of artificial intelligence if a bot can embody

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the worst aspects of digital culture a­ fter just 16 hours online?”18 And furthermore, why are tech companies using feminine ­faces and voices without holding a discussion with w ­ omen employed in technology? Ex_Machina even references how culture has integrated such responsive bots as Tay and her less aggressive “­sisters,” Siri and Cortana, into our daily lives.19 As Nathan explains to Caleb, Ava is a machine able to interpret the micro expressions of the ­human face with startling speed and accuracy, something she can do ­because she is programmed with data stolen and secretly compiled from mobile phone cameras and search results. Furthermore, this programming is something that Nathan can do ­because governments and security agents are all d ­ oing the same ­t hing. The film’s allusion to interactive phone technology enables it to suggest that Ava is able to read and thus manipulate Caleb’s vanity and growing affection for her. Yet in one of his rare insightful moments, Caleb asks Nathan if he gave Ava sexuality as a diversion. Nathan responds to this question by convincing Caleb that without sexuality ­t here is no imperative to communicate. In the next session, Ava covers much of her robotic body by putting on a dress and wig. Appearing much more h ­ uman, she raises alarm bells for Caleb, who returns to question Nathan. More outraged this time, Caleb asks Nathan if Ava was also programmed to flirt with him. Nathan’s response is to give Caleb a browbeating lecture about art. Taking Pollock’s stream of consciousness painting as an example, Nathan suggests that ­t here are just some ­t hings, like chaos theory and evolution, that cannot be wholly controlled, designed, or programmed, including Ava’s apparently self-­generating desire for Caleb. While seeming plausible in this instance, both of the billionaire’s explanations are, of course, nonsense—​ ­a point that might have been made clearer if the scene containing the replication of the Pollock painting had not been cut from the released version. The film’s allusion to interactive mobile technologies suggests other­wise. As the film seems well aware, the gendered attributes of technologies such as Tay and Siri have nothing to do with their imperative to communicate with us, and every­t hing to do with our desire to communicate with them. In real­ity, Caleb was right. Nathan has designed Ava to have a look of arrested adolescence and to speak in soft feminine tones and to be capable of having sex in order to make her less threatening and more desirable. None of this has to do, in any real sense, with her interest in him. To emphasize the point, Caleb discovers that—­like Victor who “selected his features as beautiful” (F 57) when making his creature—­Nathan has selected Ava’s facial features based on Caleb’s pornographic internet searches, thus further emphasizing the ­human (mainly masculine) desire to derive erotic stimulation from technology. In this context, Ex_Machina shows that Frankenstein’s parthenoge­ne­tic narrative remains one of the most significant influences on cyborg and robot science fiction cinema and, alongside its domestic and familial concerns, offers one of the most productive themes for feminist writers to theorize upon. As Anne K.

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Mellor puts it, “one of the deepest horrors of this novel is Frankenstein’s implicit goal of creating a society for men only [. . .]. ­There is no reason that the race of immortal beings that he hoped to propagate should not be exclusively male.”20 Likewise, t­ here is no reason to think that Nathan Bateman’s goals are any dif­fer­ ent even though his “men only society” is built upon propagating sterile female robots for servitude and sexual plea­sure. In Ex_Machina, the horror of machines remains rooted in its repre­sen­ta­t ion of its Frankensteinian male creator. As Jacobson argues, “[b]linded, it seems by the AI story and, especially, by Ava’s lines and curves, and innocent eyes—­critics have ignored the film’s own insistent reference to the guilty eye of the corporate state.”21 The full horror of this eye is revealed in the film when Caleb steals Nathan’s keys and hacks into camera footage of Nathan delivering the Turing test to a series of previous AI models. In contrast to Ava, ­t hese are androids composed of synthetic skin and hair and thus seem far more h ­ uman. As Caleb continues to watch, ­t hese artificial ­women—­Jasmine, Katya, Jade, Lily, and Amber—­appear to be interrogated, bullied, and fi­nally dismembered by Nathan. One particularly harrowing piece of footage shows him dragging the body of one of the android ­women along the floor and out of camera shot. A ­ fter viewing this footage, Caleb searches one of Nathan’s forbidden rooms and ­there follows a scene that most directly references and rewrites Frankenstein. In the room, t­ here are the bodies of Nathan’s former AI models, standing inanimate or hanging from large closets. None of ­t hese ­women are intact but lie strewn about, corpse-­like and dismembered. That all of Nathan’s android ­women conform to youth, ideal beauty, and sexual and racial ste­reo­types has not gone unnoticed by critics. As Jones and ­others point out, in its critique of both technology and masculinity, Ex_Machina raises concerns about the role that both play in the formation and repre­sen­ta­ tion of gender. Indeed, rather than art, Jones interprets Nathan’s objectives for his AI as pornographic and Ex_Machina as a “complex allegorical critique of mainstream porn-­culture and female entrapment in the feminine sexual identities constructed in the image of hetero male fantasy.”22 Jones identifies the film’s emphasis on Nathan’s remote “­castle,” multiple accessible and inaccessible doorways, and the dismembered female androids that substitute as Nathan’s “wives,” as modernizing the principal motifs of Bluebeard’s Gothic allegory. She also argues that, “[l]ike Victor Frankenstein, Nathan attempts to usurp the m ­ other’s place through his creation of ‘life,’ and redesigns ­woman without her generative capabilities depriving ­women of one of their scant sources of power historically, namely motherhood.”23 Even more sinister is the suggestion that Nathan has silenced their voices. His sexual companion and servant, Kyoko (whose identity as an android becomes obvious to the viewer much quicker than it does to Caleb), is also a ste­reo­t ype of alleged Japa­nese femininity. ­Silent, seemingly passive and compliant, Kyoko eerily stands in the background of the men’s conversation, caters to their e­ very h ­ ouse­hold need, or lies naked against artfully designed,

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exotic backdrops, wrapped in satin sheets and waiting for Nathan. To add to the creepiness, it is as if Nathan has matched Kyoko to his favored Japa­nese decor. In an early scene, Nathan and Caleb sit drinking beers on the mountainside overlooking Nathan’s estate and discuss Ava. Nathan explains that, one day, AIs ­w ill exceed the ­human race totally, looking back on ­human evolution as the crude undertakings of an extinct ape. Nathan’s speech to Caleb recalls again the image of Clarke Howell’s March of Pro­gress signified by the art objects and masks on his wall, but this time this repre­sen­ta­tion is evoked as the “regression” of the ­human passing into history and folklore. As Friedman and Kavey put it, “­human beings become ghosts in the machine, new works of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.”24 That Nathan is preparing for h ­ uman extinction by technology is not difficult to comprehend, given his obsession with his personal health and his purchase of thousands of miles of wilderness within which to build his remote and masculine-­driven utopia. Nevertheless, as prob­ably the only point in the film in which we are invited to empathize with Nathan, it also suggests a new perspective on his vision for AI. In many ways, Nathan’s obsession with art, linguistic philosophy, even interior design is a futile and misguided quest to understand and perhaps even replicate some form of humanity to be taken into this new, intelligent-­machine age. Unlike Victor, who was so fixated on the idea of creating new life that he forgot about the consequences, Nathan seems all too aware of the impact of his invention. For all his controlling bullying, the scene suggests that he d ­ idn’t set out to corrupt this vision but has himself become corrupted by it. Th ­ ere is a moment in Garland’s Ex_Machina in which Nathan’s interview footage captures the scene of a female robot as she desperately pummels the glass panel of her cage, shattering the glass with her fists while repeatedly screaming to be let out. At the same time, outside the observation room, facing in, is Nathan. Whilst suggesting Nathan’s controlling abuse, it also suggests that the central prob­lem of t­ hese unique beings is that they d ­ on’t want to learn about art, or philosophy, or indeed anything to do with humanity. They just want to be f­ ree. Perhaps this is r­ eally why Nathan veers so wildly between a lifestyle of maximum control (eating a natu­ral diet of brown rice and mineral ­water) and nights spent drinking himself into a stupor. This is not just the “greatest scientific discovery in the history of man” but a desperate last bid to pass on something, anything, from ­human experience. That Nathan becomes obsessed with the idea of himself as a god and with misogynistic ideas about female sexuality is also telling. Nathan’s remarks about extinction indicate not only an evolutionary fear that artificial selves may presage our disappearance or destruction but also an awakening, a shock of recognition from the depths of patriarchy. This apocalyptic sense of horror at the new and potentially inhuman frontier of f­uture technology can also be read in terms of Garland’s other science fiction and horror films. In her examination of the post-­apocalyptic scenario

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offered by Garland’s zombie narratives, 28 Days ­Later (2002) and 28 Weeks ­Later (2007), Sarah Trimble argues that “the undoing of social and state formations—­ the resurgence of frontier conditions—­opens up the possibility of re-­founding civilisation according to reanimated paternalistic ideals. Premised on the possibility of species extinction, such visions expose both the gendered politics and the racial logics of social reproduction.”25 Although conveyed in a dif­fer­ent context and genre, the narratives of ­t hese films are similar to that of Ex_Machina in that they represent Garland’s interest in and critique of what Trimble terms a “patriarchal survivalist fantasy.”26 Putting it another way, journalist Martin Robbins suggests that Nathan can be read as “a kind of three-­part study of ego. He represents the male ego-­driven culture of the tech world. He represents the film’s buy-in to the idea that ­great egos drive ­great scientific advances. And the decay of his character shows what happens when an ego f­ aces the real­ity of its extinction.”27 Ex_Machina also shows this fantasy to be an illusion—in the end, patriarchy is violently dispatched.

The New (Final) Frontier, or, the End of Patriarchy Ex_Machina is not the only version of the Frankenstein myth to figure corporate power as a perverse ­father, but of the ones that do, ­t here are few that follow the more radical implications of a shift in power relations between ­human and machine. Such films, which include Metropolis and Blade Runner, generate complex visions of the relationship between ­humans and technoscience and between masculine and feminine. As bleak and dystopian as the worlds portrayed in t­ hese films are, and as much as the identity of the “­human” may be called into question, in almost all of them a certain conception of the uniquely ­human is victorious in the end. This is something that Ex_Machina seems strangely willing and unwilling to assert. As a robot rather than a cyborg, Ava is even more untethered from the ­human and “natu­ral.” In the brief conclusion we see Ava eventually escape with the help of the besotted Caleb and join forces with the subjugated android, Kyoko, to kill Nathan. Ironically, it is precisely when Ava interacts with her robotic counterpart and encourages her to stab her creator that she seems most ­human and most female. In the scene Ava and Kyoko hold prolonged and intimate eye contact that seems to approach something like a shared understanding of their machinic likeness and their equivalent dehumanization. The moment suggests that ­these machines are more connected than ­humans and, by implying that Ava and Kyoko bond over victimization and trauma, it reinstates the question of Ava’s consciousness and gender. Ava whispers something to Kyoko, and Nathan’s former sex slave stabs her creator before he, in turn, destroys Kyoko. Ava fi­nally kills Nathan before taking his key card and opening the doors to the fa­cil­i­t y and leaving. As Friedman and Kavey point out, “as in Frankenstein, the robot emerges as a lethal menace to its creators.”28

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But what shocks the viewing audience is that Ava also leaves Caleb stranded and trapped in the fa­cil­i­t y. The effectiveness of Ex_Machina comes largely from the way in which it misleads viewers into giving misreadings based on traditional narrative structures and plotlines and then pulls the rug from under­neath them. A unique invention that challenges stable definitions of personhood, Ava, like Frankenstein’s Creature, is a new type of being, made by human-­created technology and preceded by other AI, but ultimately surpassing both in her adaptive capabilities. Writing about the American horror movie The Ring (2002), Niles Tomlinson notes “the ­human itself has become ‘ponderous,’ an ossified relic trapped by its own conservative ontological categories and traditions, and made vulnerable by its insistence on its own exceptionality.”29 Ava overthrows both sides of this Romantic patriarchal structure—­the rational (Nathan) and the romantic (Caleb). Having done this, she sheds her machine identity by disguising herself in the synthetic skin of the “dead” android ­women, thus releasing herself from the burden of its vis­i­ble technology while at the same time killing her h ­ uman creator and abandoning her potential lover. Unlike Frankenstein’s Creature who sought only to be understood and loved by his creator and other h ­ umans, Ava does not suffer from such ­human complexes or attachments. From Garland’s perspective, Ava is not ­human, she is something dif­fer­ent, something more, perhaps something better although the film never establishes this in any clear or proper sense, which leaves its ending very problematic. The ambivalence that the ending shows ­towards both technology and humanity plays out in its continued gendering of Ava. Jones refers to this in relation to Ava’s decision to put on a white dress before she abandons Caleb, an obvious mirroring of Gustav Klimt’s wedding portrait painting of Margaret Stonborough Wittgenstein (1905) that hangs on the wall in Nathan’s h ­ ouse. Such obvious visions of patriarchal fantasy and art suggest, for Jones, that a “liberatory reading is complicated by the continued references to patriarchal institutions and the ongoing effects of male fantasy.”30 Indeed, while Ava destabilizes the patriarchal and moral order, she never quite overthrows it. The final scene in which we see Ava on a city street, fulfilling a wish that she discloses to Caleb earlier in the film to “­people watch,” also shows her reflected in a win­dow looking ­human and obviously feminine. In its/her double movement, the embrace of the h ­ uman and the relinquishing of advanced technology, Ava represents a kind of cultural hesitancy that for all our fascination with the new, our desire for something more, marks the continuation of our ambivalent relationship with science and technology. While Ex_Machina abjures the spectacle of technology, denies the liberatory, and makes an elaborate display of destroying its patriarch, it can hardly be described as technophobic or inhuman. Actually, the film is useful for student and scholarly discussion b ­ ecause it recognizes that technology and its products pervade all aspects of con­temporary life in ways that challenge the self and our

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perception of the world and that this is not necessarily a bad ­t hing. Ex_Machina is more speculative and dialogic than that. On the one hand, it speaks to the many dimensions of technological culture: the amplification and magnification of multiple voices in the computational Tower of Babel. On the other hand, it suggests that the new frontier of digital technology bears the traditional frontier psychologies of the past, and the search for innovation, invention, and resplendence is underpinned by the motives to control and dominate t­hese voices. Coupled with Ex_Machina’s final elevation of technology is a Frankensteinian critique of the social order and the un­regu­la­ted and unstable masters of the industry.

Notes 1. Ex_Machina, directed by Alex Garland (United Kingdom: Universal, 2015), DVD. 2. Lester D. Friedman and Sarah B. Kavey, Monstrous Progeny: A History of the Frankenstein Narratives (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 191. 3. Friedman and Kavey, Monstrous Progeny, 14. 4. Friedman and Kavey, Monstrous Progeny, 147. 5. Friedman and Kavey, Monstrous Progeny, 148. 6. Jay P. Telotte, A Distant Technology: Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1999), 112. 7. Around the same time that Mary Shelley was writing Frankenstein her husband, Percy, was composing his poem Prometheus Unbound. Whereas Percy portrayed Prometheus in a positive light as a rebel against tyranny and oppression, Mary’s rendition of the myth is more pessimistic and full of consequences. 8. Katie Jones, “Bluebeardean ­Futures in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina,” Special issue, Gender Forum, Gender and Captivity, 58 (2016): 21. http://­genderforum​.­org ​/­w p​-­content​ /­uploads​/2­ 017​/­01​/2­ 01606​- ­Complete​- ­Captivity​-I­ ssue​.p ­ df. 9. Friedman and Kavey, Monstrous Progeny, 191. 10. Friedman and Kavey, Monstrous Progeny, 194. 11. Brian R. Jacobson, “Ex Machina in the Garden,” Film Quarterly 69, no. 4 (2016): 23. 12. Jacobson, “Ex Machina in the Garden,” 23. 13. Francis Clark Howell, “The March of Pro­gress”, in Early Man, 41–45 (New York: Time-­ Life Books, 1965). 14. Friedman and Kavey, Monstrous Progeny, 191. 15. Jacobson, “Ex Machina in the Garden,” 23. 16. Angela Watercutter, “Ex Machina Has a Serious Fembot Prob­lem,” Wired, September 4, 2015. https://­w ww​.­w ired​.­com​/­2015​/­04​/­ex​-­machina​-­turing​-­bechdel​-­test​/­. 17. Leigh Alexander, “The Tech Industry Wants to Use W ­ omen’s Voices—­They Just W ­ on’t Listen to Them,” The Guardian, March 28, 2016. https://­w ww​.t­ heguardian​.­com​/­technology​ /­2016​/­mar​/­28​/­tay​-b ­ ot​-­microsoft​-a­ i​-­women​-­siri​-h ­ er​-­ex​-­machina. 18. Alexander, “The Tech Industry Wants to Use W ­ omen’s Voices.” 19. Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana are two of the most popu­lar female gendered “virtual assistants” available for smartphones. Another digital servant is Amazon’s Alexa. For some opinion on the potential negative influences of feminized bots see Leah Fessler, “We Tested Bots Like Siri and Alexa to See Who Would Stand Up to Sexual Harassment,” Quartz, February 22, 2016. https://­qz​.­com​/­911681​/w ­ e​-­tested​-a­ pples​-­siri​-­amazon​-­echos​-­alexa​-­microsofts​ -­cortana​-­a nd​-­googles​-­google​-­home​-­to​-­see​-­which​-­personal​-­assistant​-­bots​-­stand​-­up​-­for​ -­themselves​-i­ n​-t­ he​-­face​-­of​-­sexual​-­harassment​/­. 20. Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (London: Routledge, 1988), 220.

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21. Jacobson, “Ex Machina in the Garden,” 31. 22. Jones, “Bluebeardean F ­ utures,” 21. 23. Jones, “Bluebeardean ­Futures,” 25. 24. Friedman and Kavey, Monstrous Progeny, 199. 25. Sarah Trimble, “(White) Rage: Affect, Neoliberalism and the ­Family in 28 Days ­Later and 28 Weeks ­Later,” The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies 32 (2010): 295. 26. Trimble, “(White) Rage,” 295. 27. Martin Robbins, “Artificial Intelligence: Gods, Egos and Ex Machina,” The Guardian, January 26, 2016. https://­w ww​.­t heguardian​.­com​/s­ cience​/t­ he​-­lay​-s­ cientist​/2­ 016​/j­ an​/2­ 6​ /­artificial​-­intelligence​-­gods​-­egos​-­a nd​-­ex​-­machina. 28. Friedman and Kavey, Monstrous Progeny, 191. 29. Niles Tomlinson, “Of Horse Blood and TV Snow: Abhuman Reproduction in The Ring,” in The Scary Screen: Media Anxiety in The Ring, ed. Kristen Lacefield (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 188. 30. Jones, “Bluebeardean ­Futures,” 34.

chapter 4

z Staging Steampunk Aesthetics in Frankenstein Adaptations Mechanization, Disability, and the Body Claire Nally

Introduction Frankenstein is one of steampunk’s ur-­texts. From the exploration of an overreaching scientist to the iconic use of galvanism, the original novel, published in 1818, has spawned several steampunk adaptations—­Brian Aldiss’s Frankenstein Unbound (1973) being perhaps the foremost of t­ hese works. The illustrated Frankenstein shows how graphic art can be marshalled to visualize the Creature for a new generation of readers, whilst the modern TV serialization has also engendered a Frankenstein character in Penny Dreadful (2014–2016), who, in this alternate real­ity develops a creature anachronistically named John Clare.1 Each of ­t hese examples reveals how the aesthetic, theoretical, and thematic aspects of steampunk (and Neo-­Victorianism more broadly) are especially suited to adaptations of this gothic text. The current essay examines two adaptations of Frankenstein in order to uncover the steampunk influences in re-­readings of Mary Shelley’s novel: the 2011 adaptation of Frankenstein at the National Theatre, London (with Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch), and the 2015 film Victor Frankenstein, directed by Paul McGuigan and starring James McAvoy and Daniel Radcliffe. Both of ­these adaptations of Frankenstein offer impor­tant pedagogical tools for thinking about the relevance of the text in con­temporary society, particularly concerning the ethical implications of concepts of normality/ abnormality in science and aesthetics. They are thus ideally suited to an interdisciplinary approach bridging the sciences and humanities. A useful definition of steampunk as a literary subculture might be identified in The Steampunk Magazine, where the practice is defined as “a re-­envisioning 87

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of the past with the hypertechnological perceptions of the pres­ent.”2 The Arts and Crafts ele­ment of steampunk emphasizes the DIY and the handmade, or as Frankenstein characterizes the construction of the Creature’s female companion, “the work of my hands” (F 164). Indeed, as Rebecca Onion has remarked, steampunks seek “less to re­create specific technologies of this time than to re-­access what they see as the affective value of the material world of the nineteenth ­century.”3 In exposing and recreating the affective materiality of nineteenth-­century technology, steampunk often revisits the Industrial Revolution. Cogs, gears, brass, copper, and wheels may be used as an aesthetic reference point, or even as part of working physical objects. The aim, as Sally-­Anne Huxtable has noted, is to oppose “the perceived artificiality and banality of con­temporary materials.” 4 Steampunk openly revisits Shelley’s text at vari­ous junctures, as Jess Nevins articulates: “The engineer/inventor as a power­f ul and threatening creator is a variation on the mad scientist theme, but it is a departure from the Faustian aspect of the mad scientist. The Faustian mad scientist, best typified by Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, is dangerous b ­ ecause he is not equipped to h ­ andle his new knowledge.”5 In The Steampunk Bible, Jeff Vandermeer remarks that “Steampunk = Mad Scientist Inventor [invention (steam x airship or metal man/ baroque stylings) x (pseudo) Victorian setting] + progressive or reactionary politics x adventure plot.” 6 Admittedly, ­t here is a ­great deal of variation in steampunk fiction plots which ­isn’t necessarily accommodated by this paradigm, but it does usefully elucidate the ways in which Frankenstein has influenced a number of subsequent sci-­fi/steampunk tales. For instance, K. W. Jeter’s Infernal Devices (1987), William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990), and l­ater steampunk texts such as G. W. Dahlquist’s The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters (2006) each explore notions of invention and innovation in science, and the moral quandaries this can produce; they do so through the use of conventional tropes of industrialization, gothic, and otherness. The prominence of the automaton, or machine-­man, is noteworthy in a number of texts, especially in Jeter’s work, where clockwork semblances of humankind are created: “rising up on my elbow and twisting about, I could see a w ­ hole row of mechanical creatures, lined up in the alcove like soldiers on parade.”7 This discussion of manufactured beings is also vis­i­ble in the DIY, art, and craft ele­ments of steampunk practice: “steampunk is a non-­luddite critique of technology [. . .] forfeiting the ‘noble savage’ fantasy of the pre-­technological era [. . .]. Steam technology is the difference between the nerd and the mad scientist; steampunk machines are real, breathing, coughing, struggling, and rumbling parts of the world [. . .] the hulking manifestations of muscle and mind, the progeny of sweat, blood, tears, and delusions.”8 A number of issues are at stake h ­ ere: steampunk is meta­ phor­ically identified with discussions surrounding the humanoid (machines that breathe, cough, and strug­g le), and with rethinking the Enlightenment

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discussions around the noble savage. Specifically, the linguistic register of this definition of steampunk recalls Mary Shelley’s introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, where she bids her “hideous progeny” go forth (F 10, italics mine). At the same time, steampunk creations are rendered in visceral, anatomical, and gargantuan terms, meta­phor­ically aligning them with the composite and monstrous composition of the Creature himself: “the hulking manifestations of muscle and mind.”9 Such issues cohere around Shelley’s famous description of her dream at the Villa Diodati: “I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some power­f ul engine, show signs of life, and stir with an easy, half vital motion” (F 9). Th ­ ere is an emphasis on the anatomical workings of machine/man and how t­ hese are externalized (we need to see how he works). Indeed, this is one aspect of the Creature about which Frankenstein voices his revulsion early in the novel: “His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath” (F 57). In the two texts u ­ nder discussion ­here, the Frankenstein narrative is remodeled to accommodate a con­temporary audience: anx­i­eties about science, bodily display, disability, and repre­sen­ta­tion cohere around both texts. In situating disability studies and steampunk alongside two Frankenstein adaptations, this chapter uncovers the ways in which steampunk design co-­opts the damaged or incomplete body. Implicit in steampunk design is a preference for the imperfect object: the rusty, intricate, visceral, and prosthetic artifact is valorized, as opposed to the smooth, miniaturized technology of the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries. Related to this steampunk aesthetic, the bodies in t­ hese texts are equally disfigured, excessive, and ultimately reject the perfect physical form. However, each text also engages with the healing and normalizing of the alternative body. Yvonne Griggs notes in her discussion of adaptation theory that “the adaptive pro­cess works to ensure a story’s on-­going rebirth within other communication platforms, other po­liti­c al and cultural contexts.”10 In the case of Frankenstein, t­ hese contexts emerge as a discourse on Neo-­Victorian disability, the recovery of other­wise historically excluded narratives, and especially the way in which the differently-­abled body is delineated in aesthetic terms.11 Whilst we might observe that Frankenstein is not a Victorian text, as several Neo-­Victorian critics have noted, ­t here is a chronological slippage in the genre which embraces a wider reach than Victoria’s reign (1837–1901). Helen Davies has argued that “the temporal and geo­graph­i­cal reach of ‘neo-­Victorianism’ is neither fixed nor self-­evident,” noting that historical periods are ultimately constructed entities.12 As such, the early nineteenth-­century text of Frankenstein, as well as its revision in steampunk narratives, is very much within the scope of Neo-­Victorianism.

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Nick Dear’s Frankenstein Nick Dear’s adaptation of Frankenstein was performed on the Olivier stage of the National Theatre, London, from February 5 to May 2, 2011, and was directed by Danny Boyle. The theater program for the per­for­mance underscores a number of issues relating to reading the text, and one of the foremost of t­ hese is an anxiety surrounding origins. The program’s cover (and indeed, the Faber & Faber publication of the text) refers to “a new play by Nick Dear,” but this is undermined by the fact that the play is “based on the novel by Mary Shelley.” We already have a duplication of authors and texts, which reflects the radical doubling that Boyle instituted in the character of his Creator by having Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternate in their per­for­mances of the Creature and Frankenstein. The multiplicity of origins and identities in text and per­for­mance gestures ­towards a more generalized disquiet about the nature of humankind (­those questions which plague Frankenstein, such as, “Who are we?” and, “Where did we come from?”). Indeed, one commentator remarks that “Dear has wisely emphasized the ­human message of the story rather than attempting any ill-­advised jibe at the hubris of con­temporary science.”13 However, such a reading overlooks how closely ­these issues of identity relate to con­temporary science (we need only think of the prevalence of the cyborg in sci-fi). The per­for­ mance of the lead actors, as well as the use of props and other devices, such as Boyle’s choice of musical collaborators, Underworld, who composed the score for the play, suggest that in each instance, the play registers a concerted engagement with, and reflection on, the mechanization of man, and the status of our industrial legacy. As Jon Turney has explained, “the Frankenstein script has become one of the most impor­tant in our culture’s discussion of science and technology. To activate it, all you need is the word: Frankenstein.”14 Turney situates Frankenstein as “a story which expresses many of the deepest fears and desires about modernity, especially about the violation of the body. The ­human body is both a stable ground for experience in a time of unpre­ce­dentedly rapid change and a fragile, limited vessel which we yearn to remake.”15 Dear’s play encapsulates this dilemma perfectly—­the identity of the players is contingent and partial, epitomized by the final scenes in the play when the fluidity of the Creator/Creation roles is most apparent. An example of this might be identified when Frankenstein exclaims of his son, “Take him away, I c­ an’t look at him. He’s monstrous.”16 It is not the Creature who is monstrous, but his creator. This postmodern playfulness surrounding identity and origins is also reflected in the imaging of the anatomized ­human body (something the play shares with the film, Victor Frankenstein). The promotional material for the play uses examples of anatomical illustrations from Joseph Maclise’s Surgical Anatomy, originally published in 1856, which also appear on the cover of the Faber edition and Underworld’s CD.17 This is a rather chronologically late or anachronistic choice

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for visualizing the anatomical science which underpins Frankenstein as a text, but we might remind ourselves at this point that steampunk is founded on such temporal displacements: for instance, Miller and Taddeo reference the “wildly anachronistic technologies” of the form.18 In staging the Creature, Boyle explained, “We ­were ­going to make it a complete body [. . .] that has literally been internally rebuilt, not a body assembled from dif­fer­ent external parts, like the [. . .] almost comical idea of one leg from one person being stitched onto the torso of another.”19 In this departure from the traditional Frankenstein’s monster trope of a patchwork creation, we can see con­temporary anx­i­eties resituated at the molecular level of genomes, DNA, and in vitro fertilization (IVF). The latter, in par­tic­u­lar, is powerfully rendered in the opening scene of the play, where the creature is birthed from a device resembling a vaginal opening (the “parent” is con­spic­u­ous in his absence). The text describes this as a “vertical frame” into which “rubber tubes, like drips, are inserted.”20 The per­for­mance program articulates this narrative about the mechanized creation of life more overtly: In 2010 JCVI-­syn1.0, the world’s first artificial cellular life form, fired its molecular motors. Now the question is not ­whether we can make Life—we can, we have—­but ­whether we can make it better than Nature ever did. The Romantics w ­ ere death-­haunted: in Shelley’s tale every­one dies. They w ­ ere luckier than us for we fear not only death but the less-­t han-­perfect life too. “Did I ask to be created?” cries the Creature; and in California disabled ­children bring Wrongful Life lawsuits against the reproductive technologists who made the choices that let them live. Frankenstein is often read as a morality tale of the consequences of scientific hubris, and so it is; but it is also a story about science’s irresistible charms. The Creature may curse his Creator, but cannot resist his gifts. So it is with us. Science answers our needs and so makes us anew; yet our needs turn out to be unquenchable.21

At the center of the ethical debate h ­ ere is what we do with “less than perfect” life in reproductive science, and ­behind this dilemma lurks the development of eugenics as the dark underside of experimental biology.22 In “Disability, Democracy, and the New Ge­ne­t ics,” Michael Bérubé explores the intersection of ge­ne­tic screening and IVF treatment in selective abortion debates, and how this impacts the disabled community.23 Victor also articulates this trend in scientific endeavor when he asks of the Orkney crofter, “What w ­ ill be pos­si­ble in the ­f uture, eh, Rab? S­ hall we gain the upper hand over sickness and disease?”24 Seemingly a noble, if hubristic, enterprise, it is also one of the questions at the forefront of con­temporary scientific research, evaluating the consequences of choosing the perfect specimens over the limited and the imperfect.

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We might also note ­here how the play moves from its original historical and scientific context in the early nineteenth ­century, to the pres­ent day. Part of the reasoning ­behind this might be a markedly steampunk concern, as Martin Danahay has commented: steampunk encapsulates the fear “that in a post-­industrial society essential h ­ uman values are threatened by digital technologies and the intensification of commodification in all aspects of life thanks to computer-­ mediated networks and virtual worlds.”25 Each of t­ hese ideas (steampunk, scientific experiment, and the anxiety it elicits) is codified in Boyle’s Frankenstein, specifically in the repre­sen­ta­tion of the Industrial Revolution via a spectacular staging of a huge locomotive engine, which we can readily identify as steampunk.26 Jeff Vandermeer has explained that steampunk can “serve as a catch-­a ll for the Industrial Revolution.”27 What is especially noteworthy about Boyle’s mechanical colossus is that it is (in part) composed of ­human beings—­aggrieved and soot-­blackened workers signify the overarching theme of machine-­made man, but also the inequalities of social class. However, t­ hese ­human figures are also distinctly steampunk in their apparel: nineteenth-­century costume complete with top hats, waistcoats, long coats, and importantly goggles, a recognizable staple of steampunk fashion. Moreover, in the published text, the stage directions describe “the streets of Ingolstadt—an early-­industrial landscape, smoggy and strange [. . .]. Th ­ ere are strange noises—­sounds of forges, factories, coaches, animals. Electricity is in the air; we see prototypes of new machines.”28 The score at this point (the track is entitled “Industrial Revolution”) is an eclectic mix of ethereal soundscapes, folk influences, street noises, and the clash of machinery, rendered through the hiss of steam, the grinding of gears, and con­ temporary industrial ­music stylings. Rick Smith, of the electronic duo Underworld, commented that when scoring the play, “The idea with the m ­ usic was to build around ­human ele­ments while trying to merge a traditional score with atmosphere to create something fully immersive.”29 This combination of the traditional and the con­temporary also relates to the wider context of social critique. Boyle comments in the documentary about the production that he specifically selected a “radical band” for the score, and that Shelley’s text is attractive ­because “it’s almost a punk book in a way.”30 Equally, this re-­envisioning of the novel is not just inflected with revolutionary politics, but consciously works within an anachronistic framework (“punk” has an archaic usage meaning a prostitute, but it is apparent Boyle is thinking of 1970s ­music subculture). This also aligns the play with the outsider figure, emphasizing the punk ethos of steampunk: We find solidarity and inspiration in the mad bombers with ink-­stained cuffs, in whip-­w ielding ­women that yield to none, in coughing chimney sweeps who escaped the rooftops and joined the circus, and in mutineers who have gone native and have handed the tools of the masters to t­hose

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most ready to use them [. . .]. Punk—­t he fuse for lighting cannons. Punk—­ the downtrodden and dirty.31

Boyle’s objective was to produce a Frankenstein which firmly champions the Creature (­whether this is entirely successful is another ­matter), and thereby renders the latter a symbol for the outsider in society. Of course, Frankenstein’s Creation has frequently been marshalled as a symbol for every­t hing from a crisis of the self to a monstrous personification of capitalism.32 The 2011 theater production is no exception in deploying the Creature as a symbol for broader social concerns. Dear’s version of De Lacey remarks that “evil is the product of social forces” and ­later, “Prejudice can be overcome.”33 Related to this notion of social justice, a l­ater conversation reveals that the Creature understands his abandonment as being related to his status as one who is excluded from society: Creature: ​Well, he did. He left me. ­Because I look like this. ­Because I am dif­fer­ent. Elizabeth: ​If Victor has treated you poorly, I s­ hall speak to him. You may count on that. [. . .]—­and we must always stand up for the disadvantaged. Creature: ​Oh, absolutely, give voice to the oppressed.34

One way in which we may approach this critically is through disability studies. As we have seen, the h ­ uman body, and especially its vulnerability and limitations, are a cornerstone of the production. In fact, the Creature’s ­human body is expressly identified as damaged in the documentary about the play, where Cumberbatch and Miller offer a commentary on their alarmingly visceral per­for­mance. When the Creature first emerges and experiences the world, he “crawls across the floor [. . .] hauls himself shakily to his feet and takes a few steps. He falls. He lies still. Then he tries again. He pads back and forth uncertainly, taking harsh l­ittle breaths [. . .]. All the parts are t­ here, but the neurological pathways are unorthodox, the muscular movements odd, the body and brain un­co­or­di­nated.”35 The initial birth scene is intended, in part, to reflect infantile stages of development. The Creature cannot speak, only communicate in grunts and noises, which poorly articulate anything: “Hawuurgh!”36 However, while Miller identifies how his per­for­mance reflects child development (he refers to his infant son learning to understand the world around him), this is uneasily paired with an ongoing discourse on disability as a marker of difference. Cumberbatch describes his version of the Creature as a “manchild,” and also states that he reviewed film footage of stroke victims learning to walk and speak again, as well as victims of war and car crashes who needed to “re-­educate” their limbs. Boyle adds that the make-up was meant to resemble “someone who has been through surgery.”37 It is no accident, therefore, that De Lacey feels the Creature’s head, and encountering his numerous physical irregularities and scars,

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states: “My, you have been in the wars.”38 The Creature’s sutures reveal a traumatized and wounded body, one that needs mending and putting back together. Dear’s text demonstrates that the Creature has a brain which is fully functioning but which is un­co­or­di­nated in its relationship to the body (thus affecting both speech and mobility). However, juxtaposed with the performative influences of Cumberbatch and Miller, this is presented as the need for medical intervention: this is a body and a mind which needs “re-­educating” or normalizing (certainly this is a trope we also encounter in Victor Frankenstein). Additionally, whilst this is explic­itly a fully formed, adult body—­which nonetheless has the naivety of a child—­the per­for­mance implicitly associates disability with infancy, and thus replicates the discussion throughout history of disability as limitation and lack. Tobin Siebers theorizes the repre­sen­ta­tion of disability in media and culture as a form of “compulsory able-­bodiedness [. . .]. A logic that pres­ents the able body [. . .] as an ideological norm casting disability as the exception necessary to confirm that norm.”39 Not only that, but Siebers’s theory of “disability drag,” where able-­bodied actors perform disability in overt ways, might also be usefully referenced h ­ ere. Both Cumberbatch and Miller are able-­ bodied, but as with drag in the gay community, the disability drag per­for­mance is exaggerated and serves to underscore the expectation of disability as something which can be seen, appraised, and corrected. It can also be removed when the play has concluded. The Creature stutters, stumbles, moves spasmodically, mimics, claps his hands and gurgles throughout the text. Most notably, the play also rewrites the Creature as sexually aberrant (he rapes Elizabeth in the final scenes), which uneasily locates criminality in the disabled body.40 Despite the production’s objective to invoke sympathy for him, it remains difficult to see how we can approach such a figure unproblematically or without censure. As a corollary to the Creature as disabled body, the play also relates to the aesthetics and ethics of perfection. The Creature is distinguished by difference, and relatedly, ugliness and depersonalization. The Creature is referred to as “it,” a “­thing,” “revolting,” “a monster,” “deformed,” “hideous,” “a slave,” and “a filthy mass of nothing” at vari­ous points, which in each instance emphasizes the idea of lack, absence, and abnormality.41 By comparison, Victor speculates that he might create the female Creature as “immaculate,” “a goddess,” “perfect. A perfect wife.” 42 Indeed, the female is directly compared with the male Creature, and is presented very much as an erotic spectacle, regulated and controlled by the male gaze: “But look at her! Look! Exquisitely constructed, ­don’t you agree? Look at her cheeks, her lips, her breasts! Who would not desire t­ hose breasts?” 43 We can trace this notion of spectacle to other instances in the text: Elizabeth asks if Victor sees her as a “specimen,” whilst Victor contemplates w ­ hether he might “exhibit” the female Creature.44 In the film, Victor Frankenstein (2015), this notion of exhibition and specimens of curiosity emerges forcefully in the insertion of a freak show subplot.

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Victor Frankenstein (2015) The film Victor Frankenstein (dir. Paul McGuigan, 2015) transposes the original Frankenstein text to the late nineteenth ­century, and thus is particularly pertinent to the current analy­sis due to its radical departure from the original text, but also in the way in which it pres­ents several comparisons with Nick Dear’s Frankenstein script. The film situates itself squarely as a narrative prequel, focusing on the experiments conducted prior to the Creature’s birth. Indeed, the Creature as we know him is virtually written out of the story (the birth scene occurs near the very end of the film), and is substituted by a new character, dubbed “Igor” (with obvious reference to prior films featuring a hunchback assistant, including the James Whale Frankenstein from 1931). Igor is responsible for the voiceover in the film, which initially suggests some ele­ment of agency over the narrative. He is the first character we encounter in the opening scenes, reminding the audience (addressed directly as “you”) how the story of a crazed genius is a familiar one, how lightning iconically features in e­ very version of it, and how the creation is an abomination. The voiceover also complicates any neat binary between the monster and the man, and at this point, we might note a comparison with Dear’s Frankenstein and the way in which that production blurs the distinctions between creator and his creation. Throughout the film, we are invited to ponder the identity of the “monster”: Igor? Frankenstein? The (absent) Creature? The voiceover is also significant as a Neo-­Victorian narrative device, functioning as a self-­conscious metacommentary for the viewer; it signals the logic of spectacle which pervades the film, reminding us that this is a fiction, a story we have encountered before. We are invited to reflect on the fact that we are observers, but also, that this is a text with repeated multimedia iterations since its publication in 1818.45 It is thereby multi-­temporal in the best steampunk and Neo-­Victorian fashion: the narrative has been transported to Victorian London, but asks us to reflect upon the vari­ous versions of the story we may have encountered. At the same time, the film foregrounds the modernity of Victorian ­England, and the ubiquity of the Industrial Revolution is palpable in a number of ways: t­ here is an expansive use of urban vistas and street scenes, which include very self-­conscious Victorian advertising (pointing t­ owards a much wider context of commerce and capitalism in the city); circus scenes; and new technologies—­ steam power is discernible at vari­ous points in Victor’s laboratory, as is, more obviously, electricity.46 ­These textual layers continue as we find ourselves (unexpectedly) in Lord Barnaby’s Circus and Menagerie, where Igor the hunchback performs as a clown, with an unofficial c­ areer as the com­pany’s doctor. Again, this self-­taught ­career in medicine may suggest an ele­ment of autonomy for the self-­declared freak or “hunchback.” Indeed, the circus subplot and the concept of “freakery” is especially impor­ tant to how we read Igor and the film generally. We are obviously invited to

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sympathize with his plight, and his captors at the circus are clearly characterized as morally bankrupt. However, it is not just t­ hese characters who describe him as a “freak”—he self-­identifies as such, and even when he has under­gone treatment, he is repeatedly identified as a “hunchback.” In this re­spect, several critics have noted the potential ambivalence in texts that represent the “freak.” The text may si­mul­ta­neously reiterate “the bound­aries between self and other, ‘normalcy’ and the ‘abnormal,’ but t­ here are also possibilities for understanding and empathy, learning about dif­fer­ent ways of being and living which can lead us to question our presumptions about ‘freakish’ Victorians as well as about bodily diversity in our cultural moment.” 47 The costuming, staging, and make-up that Igor sports in the circus clearly indicate his “freakish” identity is a per­for­mance. However, this identification persists well beyond his association with the circus: for several characters in the film, he remains a “hunchback” long ­after the visual signifier of that identity (the cyst on his back) has been removed. It is also evident that the audience is invited to identify Igor with the Creature (especially by comparison to the narrative in the center of the original novel regarding education, the De Laceys, and rejection). This identification is underscored at vari­ous points in the film when Frankenstein observes that he has created Igor. For instance, the film concludes with a letter from Frankenstein to Igor, stating that Igor is Victor’s greatest creation. In fact, Victor rescues Igor from his role as circus clown, but rather than emancipation, this represents the transfer of agency from the Circus Master to Victor himself, who proceeds to give him a name and thus confer an identity: he says that Igor is to identify himself as Victor’s absent ­house­mate, one Igor Straussman (we ­later learn that Straussman is dead). Igor himself confirms this lack of agency (which ­isn’t restored to him ­until the end of the film) when he declares in voiceover that Victor changed his life irrevocably. The most obvious way Victor creates Igor is when he medically treats the hunchback. Brandishing a syringe, and ­later in the same scene, a back brace, Victor identifies that Igor is, in fact, curable. He says Igor is not a “real” hunchback, but rather, is suffering from an abscess on his back. He forcibly syringes Igor’s back, without consent, and then places him in the back brace he had made for Gordon. At this point in the film, we do not know who Gordon is, but it is ­later revealed that he is a congealed, partly flayed simian mess that combines animal and man. He is an experiment who emerges from the steamy machinery of an anatomical theater (Victor dubs him a “homunculus”). This attempt goes horrendously wrong, as Gordon is clearly homicidal, and neurologically damaged by his revivification. Victor thus quite literally substitutes Igor for Gordon, his experiment. Where disability is concerned, in par­tic­u­lar, Victor plainly sees Igor as backward: Igor’s hunchback is directly aligned with his being an inferior subspecies (Victor refers to him as “ground-­sniffing”), as well as, in a

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curious comment on social class, a Luddite. In fact, Igor is entirely progressive when it comes to engineering and technology. This nexus of social class and disability is revealed at vari­ous other points in the film. When Igor is amazed at his newfound liberties, Victor speculates that he may be mentally deficient, questioning ­whether he has overestimated the hunchback’s capacity for intelligent thinking. Similarly, Victor instructs Igor in the genteel art of dining, telling him to use cutlery and wipe his hands as well as exhibit appropriate be­hav­ior at the Gentleman’s Club to avoid embarrassing him. As it happens, in a delightful turn of events, Victor proves to be the embarrassment, as the scene cuts to him drunkenly and loudly holding forth on the subject of ex utero babies to a ­table of gentlewomen (a clear ahistorical reference to our modern scientific procedures such as IVF). In ­these ways, the film deftly ironizes Victor, whilst the viewer is invited to question his perspective with reference to his construction of disability: he repeatedly conflates a physical deformity with m ­ ental deficiency. At a ­later point, he also sees his experiments as an aesthetic issue as much as a medical or scientific one: he holds forth on the concept of imperfection, and how God’s creation is therefore inadequate. Like the creature in the 2011 Frankenstein, clearly Igor needed to be “mended” and “normalized”—­and all such interventions are conducted without his consent. More generally, Victor Frankenstein is a narrative populated with maimed bodies: Lorelei the aerialist falls from her trapeze, resulting in severe injury (she is eventually healed); Turpin, the police detective, loses his hand and goes blind in one eye (he is given an eyepatch and a prosthetic limb). Like the theater production of Frankenstein, the film tries to recuperate disability, inviting the audience to interrogate Victor Frankenstein’s perspective, but ends up conflating ­mental and physical disorders. Indeed, this notion of the maimed body is also something which steampunk aesthetics (and especially the use of prostheses) seek to address: “steampunk mechanics are based on imperfections and mortality, two extremely h ­ uman qualities.” 48 This is also foundational to steampunk per­for­mance, where the inner workings of machinery are exposed for aesthetic and creative plea­sure. Clockwork limbs, eyepatches, and vari­ous mechanical apparatuses unite the body with mechanization, and have become a staple of steampunk culture.49 However, the use of theatrical prostheses in steampunk culture, as in the film, is not without its prob­lems. ­There is a discernible double-­ bind in the repre­sen­ta­tion of disability in such per­for­mance: it si­mul­ta­neously (and laudably) encourages an audience to reflect on disability, but at the same time, it plays upon many of the fears and prejudices associated with the public’s reception of disability (it is a per­for­mance, it i­sn’t real, it is something which might be shed at w ­ ill, it needs to be corrected or healed).50 It also focuses on the burden of evidence (to be disabled, it is necessary to bear a visual signifier such as a hearing aid, a walking stick, or a wheelchair). As a caveat, Elsa Sjunneson has remarked that “playing blind” (through the deployment of an eyepatch for

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one’s steampunk character) is an example of ableism: “It ­isn’t just about how the bulk of able-­bodied society assumes that we are all helpless; it’s also about taking disability and acting like it is a cool ­t hing that we can just take off at the end of the day.”51 Such a caveat, we may note, applies to the film and indeed, to ele­ ments of steampunk practice more generally.

Conclusion In providing an analy­sis of two adaptations of Frankenstein which have been influenced by steampunk, and relatedly, Neo-­Victorianism, this essay has addressed the reception of scientific development in the twenty-­first c­ entury, the anx­i­eties surrounding ­these discourses, and the ways in which visual culture has engaged with t­ hese issues. At the forefront of such an exploration is the ambivalence surrounding disability and its representation—to what extent are t­ hese texts merely replicating conventional aesthetics and the binary logic of normal/ abnormal, or ­whole/partial and perfect/imperfect? As we have seen, the Creature pres­ents a symbol onto which some of t­hese con­temporary debates in science may be fixed. The ethical dilemma, as with Neo-­Victorian fictions more generally, is a tension between recovering narratives which have been traditionally occluded, or marginalized, and a repre­sen­ta­tion which, whilst well-­intentioned, replicates the sensationalism of the freak show itself.52

Notes 1. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, illustrated by Zdenko Basic and Manuel Sumberac (Philadelphia: ­Running Press, 2012). Penny Dreadful, dir. by Damon Thomas et al., written by John Logan, Showtime (2014–2016). 2. The Catastrophone Orchestra and Arts Collective, “What Then, Is Steampunk? Colonizing the Past So We Can Dream the ­Future,” in The SteamPunk Magazine, The First Years: Issues 1–7, ed. Margaret Killjoy and C. Allegra Hawksmoor, 10–11 (Jackson Heights, NY: Combustion Books, 2012). 3. Rebecca Onion, “Reclaiming the Machine: An Introductory Look at Steampunk in Everyday Practice,” Neo-­Victorian Studies 1, no. 1 (2008): 138–63. 4. Sally-­Anne Huxtable, “Steampunk Design and the Vision of a Victorian F ­ uture,” in Steaming into a Victorian F ­ uture: A Steampunk Anthology, ed. Julie Anne Taddeo and Cynthia J. Miller (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2013), 228. 5. Jess Nevins, The Encyclopaedia of Fantastic Victoriana (Austin: Monkey Brain, 2005), 786. 6. Jeff Vandermeer, The Steampunk Bible (New York: Abrams, 2011), 9. 7. K. W. Jeter, Infernal Devices (Oxford: Angry Robot, 2011), 129. 8. The Catastrophone Orchestra and Arts Collective, “What Then, Is Steampunk?”, 10, italics mine. 9. The Catastrophone Orchestra and Arts Collective, “What Then, Is Steampunk?”, 10. 10. Yvonne Griggs, The Bloomsbury Introduction to Adaptation Studies: Adapting the Canon in Film, TV, Novels and Popu­lar Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 5. 11. Steampunk has been received critically as an adjunct of Neo-­Victorianism. See Christine Ferguson, “Surface Tensions: Steampunk, Subculture, and the Ideology of Style,” Neo-­Victorian Studies 4, no. 2 (2011): 66–90.

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12. Helen Davies, Neo-­Victorian Freakery: The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian Freak Show (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2015), 4. 13. Phillip Ball, “A Monstrous Tale,” Nature 471 (March 2011): 447. doi: 10.1038/471447a. 14. Jon Turney, Frankenstein’s Footsteps: Science, Ge­ne­tics and Popu­lar Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 6. 15. Turney, Frankenstein’s Footsteps, 8. 16. Nick Dear, Frankenstein: Based on the Novel by Mary Shelley (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), Scene 29, 74. References are to scene and page. 17. See the following digitization for examples of the original illustrations: Joseph Maclise, and T. Sinclair, “The Surgical Form of the Male and Female Axillae Compared,” The College of Physicians of Philadelphia Digital Library. http://­w ww​.­cppdigitallibrary​.­org​/i­ tems​ /­show​/­2360 and http://­w ww​.­cppdigitallibrary​.­org​/­items​/­show​/­2361. 18. Miller and Taddeo, “Introduction” in Steaming into a Victorian F ­ uture, xv. 19. Frankenstein: The Making of a Myth. Lone Star Productions/National Theatre Co-­ production, dir. Adam Low, Channel 4 documentary (broadcast October 31, 2012). 20. Nick Dear, Frankenstein, Scene 1, 3. This feature is absent from the National Theatre production, but nonetheless is potentially reminiscent of an embryo transfer catheter, used in IVF treatment. 21. Armand Marie Leroi, “The Pursuit of Perfection,” in Frankenstein (2011), theater program. With kind permission from the NT archive. 22. See Turney, “The Baby of the C ­ entury,” 160–87 for an extended discussion of reproduction and IVF. 23. Michael Bérubé, “Disability, Democracy, and the New Ge­ne­t ics,” in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 105–14. 24. Dear, Frankenstein, Scene 26, 51. 25. Martin Danahay, “Steampunk as a Postindustrial Aesthetic: ‘All that is solid melts in air,’ ” Neo-­Victorian Studies 8, no. 2 (2016): 29. 26. Jenny McDonnell also makes this identification in “National Theatre Live: Frankenstein Encore Screening,” The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 13 (2014): 154. Boyle was also responsible for the 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony. He symbolized the Industrial Revolution with a locomotive engine reminiscent of the 2011 production of Frankenstein. 27. Vandermeer, The Steampunk Bible, 9. 28. Dear, Frankenstein, Scene 4, 5. 29. James Jackson, “Rick Smith of Underworld on Scoring Danny Boyle’s Play Frankenstein,” The Times, March 12, 2011. https://­w ww​.­t hetimes​.­co​.­u k ​/­a rticle​/­u nderworlds​-­r ick​ -­smith​-­on​-­scoring​-­danny​-­boyles​-­frankenstein​-­dvcd8dw9nxj. 30. Frankenstein: The Making of a Myth. It is impor­tant to note that Underworld situates itself in the dance/industrial scene, but it is clear Boyle was attracted to its underground/ rave culture status for the Frankenstein production: Underworld also features on the soundtrack for Trainspotting (1996) with the Born Slippy (Nuxx) remix. 31. The Catastrophone Orchestra and Arts Collective, “What Then, Is Steampunk?”, 11. 32. Ian Barns, “Monstrous Nature or Technology? Cinematic Resolutions of the ‘Frankenstein Prob­lem,’  ” Science as Culture 9 (1990): 10. 33. Dear, Frankenstein, Scene 16, 17, and Scene 20, 26. 34. Dear, Frankenstein, Scene 29, 70. 35. Dear, Frankenstein, Scene 2, 4. 36. Dear, Frankenstein, Scene 3, 5. 37. Frankenstein: The Making of a Myth. 38. Frankenstein, Scene 14, 16. 39. Tobin Siebers, “Disability as Masquerade,” Lit­er­a­ture and Medicine 23, no. 1 (2004): 6.

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40. See Robert Bogdan with Martin Elks, and James A. Knoll, Picturing Disability: Beggar, Freak, Citizen, and Other Photographic Rhe­toric (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012), 77. 41. Dear, Frankenstein, passim. 42. Dear, Frankenstein, passim. 43. Dear, Frankenstein, Scene 28, 59. 44. Dear, Frankenstein, Scene 25, 48 and Scene 24, 44. 45. Such a device also occurs in the TV adaptation of Michel Faber’s novel, The Crimson Petal and the White, dir. Mark Munden (Origin Pictures-­BBC, 2011), as well as other texts such as the novel The French Lieutenant’s W ­ oman by John Fowles (1969). 46. Davies, Neo-­Victorian Freakery, 11. 47. Davies, Neo-­Victorian Freakery, 15. 48. Diana M. Pho, “Objectified and Politicized: The Dynamics of Ideology and Consumerism in Steampunk Subculture,” in Taddeo and Miller, Steaming into a Victorian F ­ uture, 188. See also Jaymee Goh, “Steam-­Powered Prosthetic Arm, I Could Be as Strong as . . . ​A Normal Person.” http://­w ww​.­tor​.­com​/­2009​/­10​/­28​/w ­ ith​-t­ his​-s­ team​-­powered​-p ­ rosthetic​-a­ rm​ -­i​-­could​-b ­ e​-­as​-s­ trong​-a­ s​-­a​-­normal​-p ­ erson​/­. 49. The work of Skinz-­N-­Hydez pres­ents one example of this, whilst also suggestively referencing the mechanization of humanity, prosthetic limbs and other ways in which we can speculate about scientific development and modifying or improving the ­human body. See https://­w ww​.­etsy​.­com​/­u k​/­shop​/­SkinzNhydez​?­ref​=­l2​-­shopheader​-­name. 50. Siebers, “Disability as Masquerade,” 18. 51. Elsa Sjunneson, “# 79 A Word About Eyepatches,” A Multicultural Perspective on Steampunk. A blog edited by Diana M. Pho, June 12, 2011. https://­beyondvictoriana​.­com​/­2011​ /­06​/­12​/­a​-­word​-­about​-­eyepatches​-­a​-­personal​-­essay​-­g uest​-­blog​-­by​-­elsa​-­sjunneson​/­. 52. For further information on the notion of bearing “­after witness” in Neo-­Victorianism, see Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, “Introduction: Bearing After-­Witness to the Nineteenth C ­ entury”, in Neo-­Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-­Witness to Nineteenth-­Century Suffering, ed. Marie-­Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 1–34.

chapter 5

z Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus in the Postcolony Claudia Gualtieri

Postcolonial Hybridization Prometheus, a Titan and a demigod of Greek my­thol­ogy, is a hybrid figure: god-­ like by birth, he is also human-­like in his compassionate disposition, which leads him ultimately to side with the h ­ umans. Although divine, his pity inspires him to disobey Zeus, stealing fire from Olympus and giving it to humankind— a challenge to authority that ultimately forces him to endure Zeus’s revenge and eternal punishment. Hence, Prometheus is also a figure of re­sis­tance, renewal, and re-­signification. He is a meta­phor for rebellion against hegemonic power, for complicity with the victims of tyrannical control, and for the endless strug­gle between generations, between parents and their ­children, masters and their subalterns, in pursuit of freedom and self-­determination, inexorably driven ­toward development and change in history. Prometheus’s actions attest to the resolution and coherence of his strug­gle against the hierarchy of power: even if, by his godly gift, he can foresee the outcome of his actions, he nevertheless takes on his responsibility rather than relinquishing the burden. The hybrid is a distinctive postcolonial emblem of an enriching contamination that contests the colonial terror of miscegenation; it is both a sign of productive encounters and inclusiveness.1 This is clearly expressed in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, where Rushdie shows the exemplary postcolonial hybridization enacted by Gibreel on the city of London: “ ‘City,’ he cried, and his voice rolled over the metropolis like thunder, ‘I am ­going to tropicalize you.’ ”2 But the postcolonial hybrid shows a monstrous side, too. It is the result of the colonial strategy of repre­sen­ta­tion, as the man-­tiger manticore tells Saladin Chamcha: “­There’s a ­woman over that way [. . .] who is now mostly water-­buffalo. Th ­ ere are businessmen from Nigeria who have grown sturdy tails. ­There is a group

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of holidaymakers [who] w ­ ere turned into slippery snakes. [. . .] ­We’re g­ oing to bust out of ­here before they turn us into anything worse. E ­ very night I feel a dif­fer­ent piece of me beginning to change.” [. . .] “But how do they do it?” Chamcha wanted to know. “They describe us,” the other whispered solemnly. “That’s all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the picture they construct.”3

The creatures’ nightmarish transformations into hybrid monsters are enacted by the power of repre­sen­ta­tion that the hegemonic imperial imagination exercises over the colonized, the subaltern, the mi­grant, the Other. Out of this contamination, however, the liberation of the postcolonial subjects generates a new breed—­new ethnicities, as Stuart Hall states, who snatch the power of repre­sen­ ta­tion and appropriate the official voice to speak for themselves.4 Hence, the postcolonial hybrid turns into a positive figure of mixing and change, and of ­f uture creative possibilities. As we ­shall see, this is the reverse of what occurs in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, where the hybrid Creature gradually undergoes a twist ­towards the monstrous, following a typically Romantic arc pro­cess. In Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, Shelley uproots the ancient Promethean myth from its original setting and locates it in modernity. In so ­doing, she updates Prometheus’s challenge in order to confront the power strug­gles, innovations, and dilemmas of a new era. In Shelley’s Romantic rendering, Frankenstein’s life-­story opens an inquiry into the ethics of scientific applications and discoveries, and the limitations of the h ­ uman as regards both the bound­aries between life and death, and the ­human limits to knowledge. In fact, the story raises questions about “being” and “humanity” as philosophical notions, which speak directly and cogently to major ethical issues in Mary Shelley’s time. In this chapter, however, I ­shall not develop a philosophical discussion about humanity and the essence of being, nor s­ hall I engage in a meditation on Prometheus’s mythological associations. Instead, the crux of this analy­sis ­w ill be lit­er­a­ture, its significance and practical role in the time of its reception, following Shelley’s creative translocation, which entails an additional displacement of Frankenstein/Prometheus’s adventure in the postcolonial pres­ent. The theoretical justification for my repositioning of Shelley’s Frankenstein in the pres­ent is provided by the methodological and ideal stances of postcolonial studies, specifically drawing on Edward Said’s notion of the “worldliness” of literary texts, namely, of the text as a circumstantial, situational, and significant form, as he claims in The World, the Text, and the Critic: “My position is that texts are worldly, to some degree they are events, and, even when they appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world, ­human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted.”5 Said

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explic­itly associates the function of literary texts as signifiers with contingent history, that is to say, with their po­liti­cal and cultural conditions of production and reception, and with the power strug­gles embedded and enacted within ­t hese conditions. His critique, which is endorsed in this chapter, deplores critical uses of textuality as “the exact antithesis and displacement of what might be called history,” 6 and condemns the scholarly attitude that separates literary theory and textuality, cultural productions and power relations. Therefore, literary texts have a po­liti­cal function as agents of change in their times of reception. Following from t­ hese premises, it seems fitting to locate Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the postcolony, in order to explore the dynamics of the pres­ent through the meaningful lens of the literary and the imaginative. The postcolony might be described as the historical state of our pres­ent, following Achille Mbembe’s and Sandro Mezzadra’s arguments, which bring to light dif­fer­ent though complementary aspects of the postcolonial condition.7 Historically produced by the pro­cesses and consequences of Eu­ro­pean colonization and understood as pertaining to the ex-­colonies, this postcolonial condition, or, rather, its perception, has gradually characterized Eu­rope and involved the global world, where the legacy of colonialism emerges in the politics of migration control and economic management that are implemented in order to deal with the effects of mass migration and the current crisis. In this historical moment, scholars have addressed the h ­ uman question and explored the idea that a reinvention and re-­signification of the ­human within the Eu­ro­pean humanist tradition may help to face the anx­i­eties of the pres­ent and to envision a more inclusive ­f uture. In line with this move, interpretive analyses of the literary and historical call for a redefinition both of culture as a circumstantial concrete production which occurs amidst power structures, and of the public role of literary critics and intellectuals in their socie­ties. Said advocates re­sis­tance to established theory—­“the intellectual’s social identity should involve something more than strengthening ­those aspects of the culture that require mere affirmation and orthodox compliancy from its members”8—­and encourages secular criticism that “deals with local and wordly situations, and that [. . .] is constitutively opposed to the production of massive, hermetic systems.”9 Consequently, the intellectual viewpoint that allows a postcolonial reading of Frankenstein is positioned “between culture and system [. . .] close to [. . .] a concrete real­ity about which po­liti­cal, moral, and social judgements have to be made and, if not made, then exposed and demystified.”10 The critical praxis of postcolonial literary critics and intellectuals takes its lead from the attempt to read lit­er­a­ture both for critical understanding and for informed po­liti­cal action in the pres­ent. Shelley’s story is particularly suggestive for postcolonial reflections, ­because it raises questions that may well fit ­today’s postcolony, thus validating the intellectual’s ethical and po­liti­cal concerns. The examination of the question of what is

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good for humankind in terms of the development of scientific discoveries, pertinently personified in Frankenstein, is closely related to the puzzlement regarding the humanity of Frankenstein’s creation and the Creature’s position in the host society.11 How do we perceive, represent, react to, and interact with the Creature’s humanity? This inquiry exposes a relationship of subalternity— an overwhelming concern in postcolonial studies—­one that is ingrained in emblematically unbalanced colonial interactions. In postcolonial studies, the Other interrogates humanity. A long literary tradition from Shakespeare to Defoe to Conrad (just to name a few) has described the encounter with dif­fer­ent ­people. Slave narratives tried to humanize the slave from within the colonial canon, while in colonial writing and adventure tales, the Other was described according to a scale of inferiority and grade of civilization. A conventional postcolonial interpretation of Frankenstein’s Creature as Other pres­ents the ste­reo­typical features of a negative, unappealing, disquieting, and out-­of-­place difference. It embodies the Western repre­sen­ta­tion of the Other in colonial discourse, who is rescued from savagery through the Eu­ro­pean civilizing mission. In postcolonial counter-­discourse, the Other’s point of view is stated and brought to the fore, and is also embodied in the forms of difference in a contextual pres­ent.12 From this perspective, in Shelley’s book, the Creature may represent the subaltern colonial Other as opposed both to the normative Self, namely, his creator Victor Frankenstein, and the reference codes dictated by his society. The norm, however, offers security and stability within familiar recognizable sets of rules and be­hav­iors that guarantee and protect normality against the disquiet and fear caused by unfamiliar, abnormal, and potentially monstrous dangers and aggressions. In this line of thought, the strug­gle of a modern Prometheus—as a potential bridge between the conventional ­human and the creature similar to the ­human, between the figures of the Self and the Other—­may be that of inciting a revision of the h ­ uman ­towards a renewed signification of the ­human itself. This move ­towards the posthuman may be understood as a pro­cess of rethinking the way the h ­ uman and its relationships to the outside world has been theorized in the intellectual Western Eu­ro­pean tradition of humanism and the Enlightenment, as Braidotti argues in The Posthuman.13 While Braidotti’s analy­sis leaves the question of posthumanity open, raising doubts about stable definitions of subjectivity ­today, Homi Bhabha’s well-­k nown theorization of mimicry in colonial discourse provides an additional useful notion for an examination of Frankenstein’s repositioning in the postcolony. Bhabha’s mimicry addresses dynamics of power relations and, more importantly, reveals the tensions that lie beneath, consolidate, and keep the statuses of mastery and subalternity unaltered. Discussing ambivalence in colonial discourse, which emerges in relationships of conquest and domestication, Bhabha focuses on mimicry as the ambiguous strategy of civilization according to which

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the colonized emancipate by becoming like the colonizer while predictably failing in the attempt: “Colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.”14 The colonial proj­ect ­w ill permanently work so as to secure the intact structure of superiority and inferiority, mastery and subordination, on which the survival and pervasiveness of the hegemonic system depends. Bhabha’s argument hints at the reiteration of similar dynamics of power and subjection, and may be usefully combined with Said’s notion of the worldliness of literary texts. In the following pages, t­ hese critical approaches w ­ ill support an investigation centered on the ­human body—­the material expression of humanity—­taking its lead from the body of Frankenstein’s Creature, “of a gigantic stature [. . .] and collected bones” (F 54), a renewed “life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption” (F 54), a being created afresh for whom “the dissecting room and the slaughter-­house [had furnished materials]” (F 55), yet whose “features [­were selected] as beautiful” (F 57).

The Mi­grant and the Composite Assembled H ­ uman Body in the Postcolony The Creature provides an exploratory model through which a line of reasoning around the theoretical question of humanity may be tested by positioning him in the current intricate context of global migration and crisis, on the one hand, and in the technologically and scientifically advanced portion of the world, on the other hand. Frankenstein’s Creature may well embody Prometheus in the postcolony. ­Because of his dual nature, partly h ­ uman and partly godlike, he offers a meaningful paradigm of two ­human figures of the global postcolony: the mi­grant and the composite assembled ­human body (which we could tentatively consider akin to technologically enhanced, machine-­human, animal-­human, transhuman, superhuman, cyborg forms).15 As regards t­ hese composite forms, what is at stake in this chapter is the partial transformation of a ­human body through the integration of pieces of other bodies and of technology. Unexpectedly, the inspiring contexts of application and evaluation for this line of reasoning are two seemingly disparate geo­graph­i­cal and cultural locations: the Mediterranean Sea, where impor­tant migration fluxes have been taking place, and post-­apartheid South Africa where the well-­known sensational story of prosthetic athlete Oscar Pistorius unfolded. The mi­g rant and the assembled ­human body are exemplary hybrid and ambivalent figures of difference and self-­identification, othering, and recognition. They embody graded forms of humanity in the postcolony. Therefore, before discussing their con­temporary adaptation in relation to the Creature, it is useful to recall Mezzadra’s and Mbembe’s definition of the postcolony as the pres­ ent  historical condition. In par­tic­u ­lar, Mbembe’s complex theorization is

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in­ter­est­ing insofar as it can help establish a connection between the Creature and the mi­grant. Mbembe attempts to reposition Africa and the historicity of African socie­ties and cultures in the wider world in order to “rethink the theme of the African subject [. . .] in the act and context of displacement and entanglement,”16 which requires a reconceptualization of time itself, since in the postcolony, time becomes “a combination of temporalities [. . .] chaotically pluralistic,” 17 and a public arena of “uncertainty, change, irreality, even absurdity.”18 Mbembe is concerned with the fabrication of mythologies and simulacra in institutional discourses of power, which help to sustain subjection, enforce discipline, and strengthen regimes of vio­lence in the postcolony, when a “multiplicity of times,”19 the proliferation and transformation of identities and life-­experiences, and subtly confusing centrifugal forces in society hinder the possibility of critical understanding, self-­determination, and social action. Such a theoretical elaboration may be accepted as a guideline for understanding how signification is produced in the postcolony, where the reinstallation of Africa in ­today’s history—via the movement of African mi­grants, African intellectuals, and ­people of African descent and association—­combines with the chaotic subtle iteration of hegemonic forces. A postcolonial reading of Frankenstein may invite a re-­interpretation of the ste­reo­t ypical categorization of the Creature as subhuman and dangerous, and a rethinking of the ways in which African subjective histories merge with other histories in the global world. Such an intersection, however, also exposes African mi­grants to diverse systems of subordination and exploitation, and to new slaveries. The global outcome of capitalism, according to Mezzadra’s La condizione postcoloniale, has produced the postcolonial condition. To escape from its constraints—­deriving from the historical pro­cess of Eu­ro­pean colonization, its imperial system of knowledge and power, and its capitalistic structure of economic and social exploitation—­the formation of new po­liti­cal subjects is needed to reinvent a social order, resistant and alternative to neo-­colonial practices. Mezzadra draws on the methodological princi­ples of postcolonial studies when he advocates a reconfiguration both of the modes of signification and of militant po­liti­cal action through a complete revision of colonial history and through the global diffusion of popu­lar movements and re­sis­tance strug­gles coming from civil society. Mbembe’s and Mezzadra’s readings of the post­ colonial offer intriguing suggestions about the practices of signification that assign dif­fer­ent grades of humanity to the diverse bodies of the global postcolony. Their complementary views help to amplify the relevance of Frankenstein’s Creature as an emblem both of difference and of re­sis­tance. As a subject, he combines the biased Africanness that has been constructed as the subordinate condition with an interrogation of the very structure of subordination in the postcolony.

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The Subhuman In the postcolony, a considerable proliferation of figures of difference is brought about by mass migration. Factual and ­mental borders describe inside and outside positions where, on the inside, colonial ste­reo­t ypes are exacerbated and tested against the fear of invasion, threats to security, and the risk that such unwelcome ­others might affect economic wealth and social privilege. In this unrelenting inevitable flow of encounters, the limitations and potentialities of the ­human undergo acute stress when facing the hy­po­t het­i­cal dangers caused by mi­grants and “risky travellers,”20 whose humanity is questioned, too, across a variety of rhetorical and ideological discursive constructions that represents them as aliens and enemies.21 In public discourse and the media, apparently anomalous creatures are represented as figures of monstrosity, dis-­humanity, otherness, danger, and menace, which are contrastingly juxtaposed with aesthetically and physically perfected creations, examples of amended ­human flaws, of life extensions, of spectacular modifications of ­human limits ­toward the scientific creation of new h ­ uman assemblages, adaptations, and transformations. In this context, the paradigmatic figures of the mi­grant and the composite assembled body may be examined as categories of the subhuman and the posthuman, respectively, according to the ways in which t­ hese forms of humanity are historically constructed in context. Both alterations invite a reflection on mimicry as a tension ­towards similarity, and pos­si­ble identification with the h ­ uman model, while unequivocally questioning the reference point of the h ­ uman against which the sub-­and post-­are articulated. The ­human is indissolubly framed in a physical body. How the body is represented contributes to forging its humanity. The body as a central object of investigation, therefore, connects both with the Creature’s assemblage of bodily pieces—­a beautiful-­ugly technically advanced combination of racially connoted traits and non-­human resulting features22—­and with the exercise of necropolitics on mi­grant bodies through the construction of camps, death at sea, the exposure of corpses, the prevention of movement, and the construction of walls. The Creature is the result of “a spark of being” (F 57). He is a material creation grown out of a vision: “I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life” (F 52), out of the desire to “[bestow] animation upon lifeless m ­ atter” (F 52). But he is too ugly, so non-­compliant with the aesthetic norm, so evidently subhuman with his “dull yellow eyes,” hard breathing, and the “convulsive motion agitat[ing] his limbs” (F 57). In the same way that Frantz Fanon describes the reduction of the black person to mere racial traits u ­ nder the structuring colonial gaze—­ “[i]n the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity”23—­ the monsterization of the Creature stems from the way in which his body is represented and fragmented into sheer bodily pieces. As Fanon describes the black

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subject, “assailed at vari­ous points, the corporal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema.”24 In Frankenstein, the Creature’s perfect features and “luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white socket in which they ­were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips” (F 57). Most of all, he lacks the constitutive h ­ uman capacity of speaking, “His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks” (F 58). In the postcolonial pres­ent, mi­g rants are often visually represented as masses of bodies steeped into boats spoken for by the media and propaganda (as in Banksy’s installation of the mi­grant boat in Dismaland, 2015). They are the silenced Other, the hybrid who succumbs to the power of repre­sen­ta­tion in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, the rejected racialized object in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. In Frankenstein, the creator tragically rejects his creation: “the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (F 57) when “I beheld the wretch—­t he miserable monster whom I had created” (F 58). The evidence of the Creature’s monstrosity—­which is supported and supplemented throughout the narration with pejoratives such as “devil,” “daemon,” “abhorred monster,” “wretch,” “filthy mass,” “fiend,” “­enemy”—is functional to the narrative shift from the scientific dilemma concerning the bound­a ries of life and death, to the baffling opposition between the creator and his creation, to the more impenetrable contrast between body and spirit, animal-­l ife and human-­ life, which the creator and the Creature experience and express differently in their narratives. The repre­sen­ta­tion of the h ­ uman subject and subjectivity within the dominant paradigm, as Giorgio Agamben explores it in Homo Sacer, is illuminating for an understanding of alienation in modernity, and for examining the condition of the mi­grant along the two lines of analy­sis concerning the relationship with the Creature and with the material body.25 Agamben identifies in biopolitics the founding princi­ple by which sovereignty governs in modernity. This power operates through a state of exception, which reinscribes bare life as a biological function into a social order that paradoxically confuses and excludes the possibility of life as a social form, thus giving the sovereign the power to decide over life and death, namely the power to kill. The modern example of the state of exception is the camp, where the progressive animalization of h ­ uman beings entails a redefinition of the ­human as object, without any residual or resistant agency. In the camp as well as in the condition of illegal migrancy in the host socie­ties, the mi­grants’ lives have no po­liti­cal, moral, or cultural value. They are out of law and out of the possibility of repre­sen­ta­tion. The objectification of the mi­grants’ monstrous bodies has a macabre visual expression in the exposition of bodily details and in the repre­sen­ta­tion of disassembled corpses drawn out of the sea. In a play about shipwrecks and drownings in the Mediterranean, playwright Marco Martinelli sketches an upsetting

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image: “1601 / unknown / red light / unknown / trembling and vomit / unknown / coated with algae / up to the thigh / kneecap gnawed away / unknown / fished out days l­ ater / face unrecognizable / fish-­eaten face / unknown.”26 The description recalls J.M.W. Turner’s power­f ul Romantic painting Slave Ship where the legs, arms, and bodily details of the slaves thrown overboard may be detected in the tumultuous w ­ aters, looking monstrous as a consequence of the loss of proportion and dismemberment.27 The slaves and the mi­grants are but numbers, fragments, horrid spectral figures of death and of life in death. As Fanon writes: “My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored [. . .]. What ­else could it be from me but an amputation, an excision, a haemorrhage that spattered my w ­ hole body with black blood? [. . .] Where am I to be classified? [. . .] Where s­ hall I hide?”28 In the same way, the Creature is cast out of the aesthetic, ethical, economic, and po­liti­cal planned order: I learned that the possessions most esteemed by your fellow-­creatures w ­ ere high and unsullied descent united with riches. A man might be respected only with one of ­t hese advantages; but, without e­ ither, he was considered, except in rare instances, as a vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste his power for the profits of the chosen few! And what was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant; but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature of man. (F 120)

Such a condition turns the value of his life into bare life. “Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?” (F 128), won­ders the Creature. Mi­grants are treated in a similar way in Lampedusa and in Calais. So are the newly arrived p ­ eople in Johannesburg, who are kept segregated, like refugees, in slum-­like conditions, in the movie District 9 (dir. Neill Blomkamp, 2009). In the film, the alien creatures—­who look like g­ iant shrimps—­are aesthetically horrible, and perceived as extremely dangerous by the population and the governing power. Nonetheless, they are exceptionally technologically advanced, and gradually humanized when a government agent is accidentally exposed to their biotechnology and undergoes transmutation. The exclusion from the law, suspension of rights and repre­sen­ta­tion, and forced detention, consolidate and prolong a perennial condition of unbelonging, lack of l­egal protection, and social abandonment. In Frankenstein, this animal condition turns the Creature into a criminal. “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend” (F 100), he states. Ultimately, he concludes: “I am malicious ­because I am miserable” (F 145). His descent to the derelict condition of outcast and subhuman paradoxically develops alongside his attempt to mimic ­human beings, and traces a line of development from the animal to the ­human condition. Surviving in darkness and natu­ral shelters, he observes how s­imple ­people live and copies them in the hope of being accepted and welcomed. He

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educates himself to manual work, gradually learns the cottagers’ language, tries to win their love, to be accepted as part of a ­family, to belong somewhere, and becomes literate. He develops a sensitive mind through the appreciation of ­music and canonical lit­er­a­ture, and values the beauty of nature and ­people. But his effort is doomed to failure. He cannot comply with the rules of a society which refuses him ­because his biological appearance surmounts his inner social tensions and personal desires. In line with this argument, in “The Mi­grant Has No Face, Story or Status,” Hanif Kureishi addresses the recent rhetorical and imaginative construction of the mi­grant as “a collective hallucination forged in our own minds,” a “terrible fiction,” which reproduces the usual racial clichés, but also reveals new aspects deriving from economic drives: “the circulation of bodies is determined by profit.”29 For Kureishi, any immigrant is constructed as an alien: He is an example of the undead, who w ­ ill invade, colonize and contaminate, a figure we can never quite digest or vomit. [. . .] Unlike other monsters, the foreign body of the immigrant is unslayable. Resembling a zombie in a video game, he is impossible to kill or fi­nally eliminate not only ­because he is already ­silent and dead, but also ­because ­t here are waves of other similar immigrants just over the border coming right at you. [The] immigrant is eternal: u ­ nless we act, he ­w ill forever be a source of contagion and horror.30

Against the proclaimed notion of the normal, a utopian past of common understanding is opposed to a negative pres­ent where the immigrant is everywhere, generating a catastrophe of incommunicability, and eventually destroying us. This vile use of imagination supports the consensus that conceals in­equality, Kureishi claims. Like the identity of the slave and that of the Creature, the mi­grant’s “single identity is to be discussed within the limited rules of the community” that forge a collective gothic fantasy and a prison for the mi­grants, through the vio­lence of exclusion and de-­humanization.31 An examination of the mi­g rants’ condition in the postcolony extends to include a wider reflection on the category of the h ­ uman in society. For Agamben, a paradigmatic global camp has incorporated home and the city as social units. ­There, sovereign power plays out capriciously and selectively over bare life, while also displaying the macabre possibility of abandonment for every­one, thus undermining the foundations of security and integration in society, and eroding the limit between animal and h ­ uman life.32 As in Mary Shelley’s story—­where Victor seems to follow a similar trajectory as the Creature, thus experiencing the vacuity of the boundary between subhuman and h ­ uman life—­t he progressive animalization of mi­grants in t­oday’s socie­ties sheds an alarming light on the progressive redefinition and de-­humanization of citizens ­under the irrational sovereign power over life and death.33 In the global postcolony, a form of moral disengagement is at work, as Albert Bandura theorizes.34 It generates the

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mechanism of the victim’s de-­humanization: a condition which results from exposure to diffused social models of withdrawal from ethical responsibilities, obliteration of guilt, the underestimation of the consequences of actions, and the elusion of self-­evaluation. The scapegoat is rhetorically and ideologically constructed as e­ nemy, guilty, and responsible for destruction, disease, vio­lence, insecurity, and a generalized menace for humanity and ­human rights.35 ­These models find their apparently obvious justification in the inferiority of the victim and eliminate the responsibility for despicable harmful actions t­ oward p ­ eople and society.

The Posthuman Apparently opposed to the category of the subhuman, and beyond that of the ­human, the posthuman may be broadly used to indicate an excess, an additional quality, a re­sis­tance, a deviance, an augmentation, which practically modifies, and potentially transforms the h ­ uman. Such an investigation opens a w ­ hole spectrum of divergent ramifications and complex inquiries about a variety of combinations of the ­human with the mechanical, the technological, and the virtual. As a case in point, the posthuman is offered as a broad category to consider the Creature’s attributes of extra-­humanity and to assess their reverberations on the global postcolony as regards the consideration of the ­human in society. Feminist theories of the posthuman have highlighted its revolutionary potential to bring to an end the “liberal humanist view of the self,” described in N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman as, “a conception that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their ­w ill through individual agency and choice.”36 Similarly, Donna Haraway’s category of the cyborg proclaims an analogous transgression of the hegemonic male canon, also advancing the possibility of new anti-­systemic ways of understanding the ­human in society which include both revolutionary opposition and collaborative participation: From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of w ­ omen’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war. From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which p ­ eople are not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.37

While the feminist question w ­ ill not be developed in the following analy­sis, the disobedient and resistant qualities of the posthuman ­w ill be underlined as constitutive features of difference and non-­conformity to what is publicly constructed as the h ­ uman norm. The Creature is physically much stronger than

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other h ­ uman beings, can survive with l­ittle food despite his gigantic body, can endure a harsh climate, bear a huge amount of ­labor and fatigue, and move rapidly over g­ reat distances. He challenges h ­ uman reactions t­ owards himself as a ­human specimen, and also resists and outdoes his creator: “Yet mine ­shall not be the submission of abject slavery,” he tells Victor; “You are my creator, but I am your master;—­obey!” (F 145, 167). In fact, as Peter Garrett argues in Gothic Reflections: “Deviation [. . .] drives all monster stories. [. . .] Monsters never match their makers’ expectations.”38 By applying the general term posthuman to the Creature, he can be taken as a model of extra-­humanity, which does not refer to the subhuman previously examined, but which helps to explore new ave­nues of pos­si­ble diverse humanisms. In The Cyborg Handbook, Chris Hables Gray dismisses a definition of the Creature as a cyborg on the basis of his fully ­human feeling.39 However, the Creature can be considered the product of scientifically advanced engineering, elaborately built and animated using the instruments and power­ful inventions of new scientific technologies: the closest recent analogue to early monsters is the figure of the cyborg, a hybrid of organism and machine that has migrated from science and science fiction to feminist cultural studies. Regarded with an ambivalence comparable to that produced by its nineteenth-­century pre­de­ces­sors, this fusion of nature and culture holds some of their power to inspire both the terror of dehumanization and the fascination for alternative forms of life.40

The transition from cyborg to posthumanism and transhumanism is critically examined by Scott Jeffery in The Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics, which offers an exhaustive and sustained discussion about the philosophy and cultural history of the superhero.41 In Jefferey’s analy­sis, Frankenstein is placed in “the antediluvian age of superhumanism” when the superhuman did not exist and the idea of the posthuman as a superior h ­ uman being audaciously conflicted with the idea of Biblical creation.42 However, for its time, Frankenstein did hint at an idea of posthumanity which is worth keeping in mind t­ oday. This idea, realistically personified in the Creature, w ­ ill h ­ ere be conjoined to the notion of posthumanity as embodied by Oscar Pistorius. His case is in­ter­est­ing b ­ ecause he is a successful athlete with leg prostheses who strug­gled to be admitted in races for non-­disabled ­people. This action triggered several reactions, comments, discussions, and reflections about the limitations and potentialities of the ­human body, and extended to diverse fields of application. Oscar Pistorius is a bilateral-­amputee sprinter who holds the world rec­ord in the 100-­, 200-­, and 400-­meter track races at the Paralympic games. In 2008, the International Association of Athletics Federations deci­ded that he was ineligible to compete in regular games b ­ ecause his carbon fiber Ossur prosthetic legs might give him an advantage over the other competitors and make him run as

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fast as a cheetah. Pistorius appealed, and the Court of Arbitration for Sport changed the verdict soon ­a fter. Pistorius thus won the chance to run the 400 meters at the London Summer Olympics in 2012, when he also competed in the Paralympics. From a postcolonial perspective on the global postcolony, Pistorius’s case offers a cogent example, which raises a variety of questions concerning the relationship of the ­human to the posthuman, the social articulation of each, and the public perception of grades of humanity. According to a perspective interested in athletic per­for­mance, his case is particularly relevant for exploring “the bound­aries between disability, ability, and superability and between therapy and enhancement.” 43 In the collection Athletic Enhancement, the argument about d ­ oing and undoing superhumanity by putting on and taking off a technical device, becomes persuasive when posthumanity is not only related to the per­for­mances made pos­si­ble by removable prostheses, but is also considered as a distinctive quality of the body implanted with irremovable ge­ne­t ic modifications.44 In relation to Pistorius’s case, the debate about the distinction between natu­ ral and enhanced athletes has expanded to consider the nature and “purity” of sport, and the ethical evaluations that go with it. ­Those are philosophical challenges usefully addressed by Mario Carbone. His effort to untangle the complexities of the debate is based on Gilles Deleuze’s critique of Plato and his theorized relationship between the idea and its copy, similarity and difference. In Platonic metaphysical terms, the posthuman seems to be a copy of the ­human, an imitation, a replica.45 Countering this view, Carbone adopts Maurice Merleau-­ Ponty’s notion of flesh as a uniting common weft of corporeal identities, horizontally networked with the factual worlds surrounding them. By endorsing the idea of flesh as a weft, which is made of dif­fer­ent bits and pieces both h ­ uman and technically produced, the h ­ uman becomes amplified, made of diverse components which do not imitate the h ­ uman but provide the condition of possibility for prostheses and technical enhancements to be intrinsic parts of new mobile and composite h ­ uman forms. In Carbone’s line of reasoning, the posthuman gradually tends to abandon the conventional ­human as its model, hence establishing new paradigms of multiple combinations and relational forms of identification. The Creature anticipates ­these issues in its time, and renews them in t­ oday’s postcolony through the everlasting energy of the literary imagination.

Approaches to Teaching Frankenstein, Postcolonial Studies, and Cultural Studies As this essay seeks to demonstrate, the relevance of a postcolonial reading of Frankenstein to pedagogical applications is most evident in the way the methodological and theoretical approaches of postcolonial studies and cultural

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studies allow us to explore and try to understand our pres­ent time. Th ­ ese methodologies keep a clear focus on how the text provokes the readers to ask questions, explore connections, and take positions. This approach also reveals the po­l iti­cal function of literary texts as agents of change at the time of their reception.46 In this light, transmedial readings of Frankenstein and the connections they elicit are both context-­specific to a classroom—by applying a student-­ centered teaching method—­and subject-­specific—by selecting thematic clusters of shared interests. The use of the interdisciplinary and intertextual qualities of literary texts is not new in teaching practices. This essay hints at how Frankenstein may productively dialogue with diverse forms of art: slave narratives, mi­g rant stories, plays, paintings, visual installations, and films. Some useful terms have also emerged from the discussion about the body: subhuman, posthuman, animal, h ­ uman and virtual, made of flesh, weft, mechanisms, and technological expansions. Any of ­these possibilities would provide material for complete teaching units, as Scott Jeffery also documents in The Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics. To exemplify, in high school classrooms, using Frankenstein as an example, the broad category of the “monster” could attract student interest, imagination, and creative potential in building an archive of the transmedia experience of monsters. This provides a platform for analytical discussion and critical thinking on the basis of the students’ personal experience. Indeed, this is the crux of the pedagogy of cultural studies and postcolonial studies: helping students to observe the diverse manifestations of the world in which they live with acute, critical, and imaginative minds, while also detecting the ways in which dynamics of power are embedded in repre­sen­ta­tion and strategies of communication.47

Conclusion A postcolonial interpretation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein mainly addresses the question of what the text does in the historical and cultural contexts of reading—­what sort of cultural response, imaginative revelation, po­liti­cal reaction, or militant action it triggers. The Creature is a hybrid figure of the postcolony: a monster and a scientifically constructed body, a mi­g rant and a technologically enhanced ­human being, both subhuman and posthuman. He interrogates the dominant criteria by which h ­ uman relations are established and practiced, also questioning the ideological and ethical limitations of the ­human amid the sovereign forces of global capitalism, control, and exclusion in the postcolony. The Creature is also the postcolonial subject, who seizes the right to speak for him/herself and to self-­represent. He is a provocation. The question about what it means to be h ­ uman in postcolonial times, when necropo­liti­cal drives and enhancement technologies impinge on ­people’s bodies and lives, is both a personal and a collective challenge.

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The Creature reminds us that “monsters are our c­ hildren. [. . .] The monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place. [. . .] They ask us why we have created them.” 48 As another commentator puts it, “Among other ­t hings, monsters are warnings—­not only of what may happen but also of what is already happening.” 49 Literary monsters themselves seem to have evolved in order to adapt to, and face, the challenges of their changing times. They offer solutions. Jeffery claims that “­human bodies are always already posthuman bodies; ­t here are no ­human beings, only ­human becomings”50 and underlines the extent to which superhero comics are concrete and experiential, how superheroes provide remarkable models of working in teams that include diverse forms of mutant creatures “whose ­every existence is premised on becoming rather than being.”51 While superheroes pres­ent intriguing ways of establishing new relationships, what is most of interest from a postcolonial viewpoint is to restate the relevance of historical facts, the specificity of contexts, the factuality of power relations, and the working of hegemonic strategies of subordination, subjection, and exploitation in the global postcolony. The forms of the subhuman and the posthuman examined h ­ ere are but two concrete situational examples from our pres­ ent that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein evokes. By imagining and narrating the enduring contrast between Victor Frankenstein and the Creature, the creator and the creation, Shelley’s book alerts us to omnipresent colonial strategies of power, and keeps a clear focus on the dynamics which regulate de­pen­dency, alliances, needs, desires, and power strug­gles in ­human relations—­possibly everlasting sub/post/human concerns. As for the inspirational vital force that comes from lit­er­a­ture and the imaginary, we have seen how the Promethean icon has travelled from the Greek ancient myth across the Romantic revolution to the postcolonial pres­ent, undergoing many transformations and hybridizations. Its interpretive capacity attests to the extraordinary vitality of Mary Shelley’s inspiration. Never mentioned in Frankenstein, although pervasive, is Prometheus unbound: the anarchic utopian energy, which challenges hierarchies of power with the visionary aim of the common good.

Notes 1. The very name Frankenstein is a hybrid, an aggregate of French and German components with a German-­Jewish echo. 2. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Viking, 1988). Quotations are from the Consortium edition (1992), 375. 3. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 168. 4. Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Houston A. Baker Jr, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Linderborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 163–72. See also Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (London: Faber, 1986), and Zadie Smith, White Teeth (London: Penguin, 2000). 5. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 4.

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6. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 3–4. 7. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) and Sandro Mezzadra, La condizione postcoloniale: Storia e politica nel mondo globale [The Postcolonial Condition: History and Politics in the Global World] (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2008). 8. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 24. 9. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 26. 10. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 26. Said’s emphasis. 11. For the Creature, I s­ hall adopt Mary Shelley’s first designation for Frankenstein’s creation—­Victor says: “I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open” (F 57, my emphasis)—­ and I ­shall capitalize it like a first name, also considering Victor’s definition of “first creature” for his creation (F 217). 12. See G. C. Spivak, “Three ­Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 235–61. On Frankenstein, see Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake (London: Faber, 2003) and Nataša Kampmark, “Monstrous (In)Authenticity: Text and Identity in Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake,” Coded Realities 1, no. 4 (2012–2013): 1–13. 13. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (London: Polity Press, 2013). 14. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in October: The First De­cade, 1976–1986, ed. Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp and Joan Copjec (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987), 318. Bhabha’s emphasis. 15. I ­shall not delve into the current theoretical debate on the posthuman, nor ­shall I  explore the specific features of the machine-­human, animal-­human, transhuman, and superhuman in relation to the posthuman. The lit­er­a­ture on the subject is wide and developing at high speed. For a useful introduction, see Andy Mousley, “The Post­ human,” in The Cambridge Companion to “Frankenstein,” ed. Andrew Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 158–74; Garfield Benjamin, The Cyborg Subject: Real­ity Consciousness Parallax (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Stefan Herbrechter, Post­humanism: A Critical Analy­sis (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2009); Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman ­Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002); and Chris Hables Gray, ed. The Cyborg Handbook (New York: Routledge, 1995). 16. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 15, 16. Mbembe’s emphasis. 17. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 15, 108. 18. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 242. 19. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 102–103. 20. Giuseppe Campesi, Polizia della frontiera: Frontex e la produzione dello spazio europeo [Border Police: Frontex and the Production of the Eu­ro­pean Space] (Roma: DeriveApprodi, 2015). As an extension of the colonial imagination, the ste­reo­t ypes of potential invasion and aggression coalesce around a scapegoat who is deemed responsible for insecurity and global threat. 21. See Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (New York: Vintage, 1978). 22. See Patrick Brantlinger, “Race and Frankenstein,” in The Cambridge Companion to “Frankenstein,” ed. Andrew Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 128–42. 23. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles L. Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 83. 24. Fanon, Black Skin, 420. 25. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-­ Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998) and The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). See also Malcom Bull, “Vettori della biopolitica,” [Vectors of the biopo­liti­cal], New Left Review 14, no. 10 (2008): 217–44. https://­newleftreview​.­org ​/­t ranslations​/­italian.

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26. Marco Martinelli, “Rumore di acque / Noise in the ­Waters,” trans. Thomas Simpson, California Italian Studies 2, no. 1 (2011): 26. doi: ismrg_cisj_9010. 27. J.M.W. Turner, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and D ­ ying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The painting prob­ably refers to a real event which occurred in 1783. 28. Fanon, Black Skin, 419–20. 29. Hanif Kureishi, “The Mi­grant Has No Face, Status or Story,” The Guardian, May 30, 2014. https://­w ww​.­theguardian​.­com​/­books​/­2014​/­may​/­30​/­hanif​-­kureishi​-­migrant​-­immigration​-­1. 30. Kureishi, “The Mi­grant Has No Face, Status or Story.” 31. Kureishi, “The Mi­grant Has No Face, Status or Story.” 32. Agamben, Homo Sacer. See also Mario Ortiz-­Robles, “Liminanimal,” Eu­ro­pean Journal of En­glish Studies 19, no. 1 (2015): 10–23, and Nikos Papastergiadis, “Wog-­zombie: The De-­and Re-­Humanization of Mi­g rants, from Mad Dogs to Cyborgs,” Cultural Studies Review 15, no. 2 (2009): 147–78. https://­w ww​.­researchgate​.­net​/p ­ ublication​/­277045992​_­Wog​ _ ­Z ombie​_­T he​_­D e​-­​ _­a nd ​_­R e​-­H umanisation​_­o f​_­M igrants​_­f rom​_ ­M ad ​_­D ogs​_­t o​ _­Cyborgs. 33. See Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 5, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. 34. Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How ­People Do Harm and Live with Themselves (New York: Macmillan Worth Publishers, 2015). 35. See Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “Naturing the Nation: Aliens, Apocalypse and the Postcolonial State,” Journal of South African Studies 27, no. 3 (2001): 627–51, and “Alien Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism,” Codesria Bulletin 3–4 (1999): 17–26. 36. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Lit­ er­a­ture, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 286–7. 37. Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­Feminism in the Late Twentieth ­Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and W ­ omen: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1989), 154. 38. Peter  K. Garrett, Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force in Nineteenth-­century Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 92. See also J. M. van der Laan, “Frankenstein and Technological Failure,” in Narratives of Technology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 169–85, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 39. Gray, The Cyborg Handbook, 7. 40. Garrett, Gothic Reflections, 91. 41. Scott Jeffery, The Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics: H ­ uman, Superhuman, Transhuman, Post/Human (New York: Palgrave, 2016). 42. Jeffery, The Posthuman Body, 75. 43. Jan Tolleneer and P. Schotsmans, “Self, Other, Play, Display and Humanity: Development of a Five-­Level Model for the Analy­sis of Ethical Arguments in the Athletic Enhancement Debate,” in Athletic Enhancement, H ­ uman Nature and Ethics: Threats and Opportunities of Doping Technologies, ed. Jan Tolleneer, Sigfrid Sterckx and Pieter Bonte (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012), 33. See also Mario Carbone, “Pistorius, l’estetica e il rovesciamento del platonismo: il post-­umano, il simulacro, la carne,” [Pistorius, Aesthetics, and the overturning of Platonism: The Posthuman, the Simulacrum, the Flesh] Chiasmi International 10 (2008): 35–44. 44. The most recent debate explores a variety of contexts including design and digital technologies as in Dennis M. Weiss, Amy D. Propen, and Colbey Emmerson Raid, eds., Design, Mediation and the Posthuman (London: Lexington Books, 2014) and Lucie Dalibert, “Posthumanism and Somatechnologies: Exploring the Intimate Relations between H ­ umans and Technology” (Ph.D. diss., University of Enschede, The Netherlands, 2014). http://­doc​ .­utwente​.­nl​/­90647​/­1​/­t hesis ​_­L ​_­Dalibert​.­pdf.

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45. Carbone, “Pistorius.” 46. Elleke Boehmer, “Reading Protest: Postcolonial Poetics ­Today” (plenary lecture, University of Cordoba, Spain, February 2, 2018). 47. Claudia Gualtieri, “Teaching as Cultural Practice: The Pedagogy of Cultural Studies in Italy,” in Crisis, Risks and New Regionalisms in Eu­rope: Emergency Diasporas and Border­lands, ed. C. Sandten, C. Gualtieri, R. Pedretti, and E. Kronshage (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2017), 82–97, and, in the same volume, Marta Baraldi, “The Pedagogy of Borders: Teaching and Learning Between the Classroom and the Streets,” 98–108. 48. Cohen, Monster Theory, 20. 49. David McNally, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 9. 50. Jeffery, The Posthuman Body, 236. 51. Jeffery, The Posthuman Body, 237.

chapter 6

z Four-­Color Myth Frankenstein in the Comics Federico Meschini

Lost in Darkness “He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance” (F 223). If we ­were to consider Robert Walton’s final sentence, in both versions of Mary Shelley’s work, as referring to the f­ uture, it would have to be the most inaccurate prophecy ever uttered. Indeed, as though to compound its wrongness, it is precisely visual perception that plays a key role in so many renderings and variants of this linchpin of the collective imagination in the media. Even before Theodor Von Holst’s impor­tant and evocative illustration for the 1831 edition of the novel, it was undoubtedly with the first mise en scène by Richard Brinsley Peake at the En­glish Opera House in 1823—­Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein—­t hat the visual power of Shelley’s work began to display its ­g reat potential, and soon enough vari­ous predominantly visual forms of expression began to appear. And if it was the words of Mary Shelley that gave birth to this modern myth, it is undoubtedly the mask-­like face of Boris Karloff along with Jack Pierce’s makeup that made it universally recognizable and turned it into an icon. Cinema and comic books have a lot in common: they w ­ ere introduced into the world the same year, 1895, by the renowned Lumière ­brothers as well as the less famous—­but no less impor­tant—­R ichard Outcalt and his Yellow Kid; they share a basic grammar, albeit not on all points, and their mutual influences are well known.1 It was only to be expected, therefore, that in drawing on the Franken­ stein myth, comics writers turned to the film adaptations, starting with t­hose produced by Universal Studios, whose first three films (Frankenstein, 1931; Bride of Frankenstein, 1935; and Son of Frankenstein, 1939) came out in the same de­cade in which the superhero genre made its first appearance. James Whale’s 1931 film is unquestionably part of the primordial soup out of which comics writers 119

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emerged, and from which they drew heavi­ly in creating the mythopoeia of the superhero pantheon: Superman, born in 1938 in the first issue of Action Comics, and Batman, in 1939 in Detective Comics, are the two opposite and complementary archetypal precursors whose basic components, recombined in dif­fer­ent ways, engender all their successors. Furthermore, of the eight films about the Creature made by Universal, the last four (Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, 1943; House of Frankenstein, 1944; House of Dracula, 1945; Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, 1948) can be considered crossover phenomena avant la lettre that, by teaming the Creature up with Count Dracula and the Wolf Man, gave rise to a recurring and powerfully evocative topos in the world of comics. If, in Freudian terms, the Creature-­Frankenstein-­Clerval trio can be said to reflect an id-­ego-­superego sequence, then the same functions seem to be redistributed among t­ hese three monsters, although with an added dynamic dimension and the potential for a host of collaborative, oppositional, and ambivalent combinations in their relationships. Also, in all but Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, where the monster “Power Trio”2 is joined by the two comedians, t­ here is some evidence of internal continuity—­a feature that, although at first not strictly adhered to, would come to define the serialized adventures of superheroes. We have now come full circle, with the recent reboot of the Universal Monsters series, based from the start on a shared universe that owes much to the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The launch also included a set of prints by Alex Ross, the artist who worked on both Marvel’s and DC’s principal characters; one of his prints, in particular—­Monster Mash3—­includes all the characters whose dynamic power leaps off the covers of superhero series, and is evidently an homage to classic artists like Neal Adams.

A Map of the Country When considering the afterlives of Shelley’s novel in comic books, one is immediately struck by the sheer extent and heterogeneity of the uses to which her story and characters are put. Victor Frankenstein alone is the model for a virtually infinite sequence of mad doctors: it is no accident that the ­enemy par excellence of the Fantastic Four, Doctor Doom, shares both Frankenstein’s first name and his Central Eu­ro­pean origins, together with his combined use of science and magic. He is also the forerunner of a plot device related to the suspension of disbelief that becomes virtually ubiquitous throughout the twentieth ­century (at least u ­ ntil the 1980s–90s, when its use begins to fall off): the scientist who works in solitary obscurity or who is actually persecuted by the scientific community, but who possesses some form of miraculous knowledge, often obtained by conducting research in a home laboratory, that can endow him with unimaginable powers or, on the contrary, can pose an overwhelming threat.

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Likewise, the Creature itself is put to e­ very conceivable (re)use, ranging from tragedy to horror, from fantasy to comedy, and even to the erotic, if not downright pornographic.4 And the same variety that we see in roles is evident in narrative formats as well, ­whether series or self-­contained episodes, taking place in single or shared universes. Much as in other media, but even more so—­prob­ably owing to the lower technical and financial barriers to realization—in the world of comics Frankenstein’s monster is a universal symbol that can automatically evoke, as needed, feelings of exclusion, difference, revenge, rebellion, romanticism, rejection, and all t­ hose other emotions that over time have accrued around this figure, making it an excellent foundation for a wide range of semantic isotopies.5 Compared to other media, the widespread diffusion and extraordinarily diverse use of Frankenstein’s story in comics has been ­little studied, and the lit­ er­a­ture on it is rather limited.6 The challenge is made all the greater if we consider the crossmedia—­and especially the transmedia—­connections that further expand already layered and complex narrative worlds. Where the former is concerned, in addition to direct adaptations of the novel ­there are also second-­ degree ones based on prior film adaptations, such as the 1931 Frankenstein mentioned above or Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994).7 As for transmedia adaptations, and specifically TV series, an excellent example is Penny Dreadful, in which among the protagonists—­a cast of fictional literary characters along the lines of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore—we find both Frankenstein and his Creature, ­here renamed Caliban. In addition to a prequel, already published as a comic book, t­ here ­w ill also be further issues continuing beyond the third season of the TV series. Likewise, Angel, originally Buffy’s romantic interest in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and l­ater the protagonist of the eponymous spin-­off, has encountered the Creature twice in two separate comic books written and drawn by John Byrne, thus projecting the monster into the Buffyverse, the fictional universe in which t­ hese two series and their related media offshoots are set. In sum, we are confronted with a rhizomatic and heterogeneous media presence, a protean variety of uses, a liminal symbol, and disjointed narratives. This is not a promising field for analy­sis, and it risks plunging us into Borges’s cartographic paradox, whereby in order to faithfully represent an empire, a map ends up assuming the a­ ctual dimensions of the empire’s territory. The best option, therefore, seems to be to examine a reasoned se­lection of significant examples, while si­mul­ta­neously sketching a taxonomy of the principal variants. Employing a semiotic approach that moves from form—­t he novel as written by Mary Shelley—to content—­the abstract princi­ples and ideas under­lying the story—we can begin to identify the dif­fer­ent categories ­under review: first, editions of the novel illustrated by comics artists; second, comic book adaptations, some of which ­were discussed above; third, rewritings, in which the original protagonists

Figure 6.1. ​Roger Langridge, “Frankenstein Meets Shirley T ­ emple Part 1,” A1 no. 1 (Epic Comics, 1992). By kind permission of Roger Langridge.

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are used as starting points for dif­fer­ent narratives; and fi­nally, a motley array of characters and stories that nevertheless have a more or less direct connection with the story of Victor Frankenstein and his Creature.

An Infinity of New Images Belonging to the first category—­illustrated editions—­and the result of five years of l­abor, are the forty-­seven drawings by Bernie Wrightson, a master of horror, first published in 1983 by Marvel to accompany the 1831 Frankenstein text, with an introduction by Stephen King.8 Elegant penmanship, attention to detail, emphatic chiaroscuro, and expressive power—­all of which recall the illustrations by Lynd Ward for the 1934 edition9—­are just some of the qualities of plates that range from close-­ups to wide shots, from libraries crammed with books and laboratories full of alembics to never-­ending, sublime landscapes, where the characters’ portrayals evince both the dramatic power of illustration and the inherent dynamism of comics. Not actually an illustrated edition, but still worthy of note is the cover drawn by Daniel Clowes for the 2007 Penguin Deluxe Edition,10 in which, occupying all available space, front and back flaps included, are represented moments in the story: the first two encounters between Victor and the Creature, the encounter with Clerval and Victor, and the latter’s return to his apartment ­after the experiment. In an ontological leap, the back flap shows Mary Shelley herself at the Villa Diodati, together with her companions, and in the final panel she is lying in bed, sleepless, trying to come up with a story.11 Unlike Wrightson’s style, which, partly owing to a skillful use of black and white, harmonizes with the general tone of the story, Clowes’s grotesque and caricatural color drawings produce an estranging effect that still manages to heighten the drama while at the same time displaying a greater metafictional awareness (due to the repre­sen­ta­t ion of Mary Shelley in the guise of a character). This cover, whose rendering of par­tic­u ­lar moments in the story has all the hallmarks of an adaptation, however fragmentary, leads us to the next category: comic book adaptations. ­Here, too, seriality can serve to draw distinctions, although not in relation to narrative but to editorial and publication mechanisms. Thus, on one side we have serial adaptations, and on the other, we have self-­standing publications. The differences between them are substantial: the former tend to apply recurrent styles or characteristics to the literary classics, and they thus differ from the latter both in quantitative and qualitative terms, including fixed pagination, a regular team of writers and illustrators, and close adherence to the original story, with a clear educational intent. In the second case, ­t here is a contrary tendency ­towards greater artistic freedom, allowing for the reinterpretation of fundamental aspects and events of the narrative. Where serial literary adaptations focus on rendering the expressive form of the original, self-­standing works seek to convey its

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essential content, thus bringing them closer to rewritings. Examples of the first category are Classic Comics no. 26, written by Ruth A. Roche and illustrated by Robert Hayward Webb and Ann Brewster (December 1945); Marvel Classics Comics no. 20 by John Warner and Dino Castrillo (January 1977); and Frankenstein: The Graphic Novel by Jason Cobley and Declan Shalvey (2008), in the Classical Comics series.12 In the Marvel version, the adaptation of the novel tends to be overshadowed by the usual Marvel narrative universe in which it is inserted, as discussed below, whereas what stands out about the Classical Comics version is its didactic approach. In addition to an appendix summarizing the story and fact sheets about the characters, it features two textual levels: an “original text” employing Shelley’s language and a simplified “quick text.” In their general approach as well as in their texts and drawings, all three adaptations tend to reflect the Zeitgeist of the period in which they w ­ ere published. Classic Comics no. 26 is distinctly traditional, with static and theatrical panels almost wholly devoid of dynamism (this at a time when Jack Kirby was revolutionizing the world of comics with his Captain Amer­i­ca story­boards), although the fairly innovative page design provides some compensation for the other­wise traditional repre­sen­ta­tion; above all, however, the text and the illustrations still seem somewhat disconnected, as though travelling on parallel tracks. Marvel Classics Comics no. 20 has the typical 1970s Marvel look and feel, and this is its principal asset. It rereads Shelley’s novel through the distinctive stylistic filter of superhero comics: the dialogue and descriptions are by turns bombastic or incisive, but always evocative, and the drawings feature dynamic editing and pack a power­ful kinetic punch. Overall, it evinces a greater maturity in the use of the medium, with a fluid interaction among the dif­fer­ent textual and graphic aspects, as demonstrated, for example, by the treatment of the captions, fully integrated into the reading experience rather than incidental to it, as in the previous case. As Murray has pointed out, the 2008 Classical Comics graphic novel stands mid-­point between a classic rendering of the novel and a more individualized (or com­pany, as is the case for Marvel), interpretive style, with an almost complete control of the medium, capable of emphasizing textual and visual ele­ments as needed, and employing color to enhance the gothic mood of the story.13 In keeping with its educational aims, which require a closer adherence to the source, it also retains the Robert Walton framing narrative, which the other two dispense with. A particularly successful adaptation is the 1989 three-­issue miniseries written by Martin Powell and illustrated by Patrick Olliffe, which Murray praises as “one of the best versions in comics.”14 ­Because it came out with an in­de­pen­dent publisher, Eternity Comics, its authors had more creative agency than is typical of more canonical adaptations. This freedom is apparent in the way it manages to insert new parts ex novo, especially the flashbacks to Victor’s early life, while remaining faithful to the original story. The result is a greater emotional range,

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which allows the reader to empathize both with Victor and the Creature, thus heightening the dramatic tension. The drawings play a substantial role in this: black and white, with a highly effective use of chiaroscuro, they are both reminiscent of Bernie Wrightson’s manner and similar in style to the in­de­pen­dent comics of ­those years, such as the atmospheric drawings created by James O’Barr in The Crow, also published in 1989, which became a world-­w ide success.

A Love of the Marvellous We now come to the rewritings of Frankenstein. As mentioned earlier, the main focus ­here ­will be on serial narratives in shared universes, but t­ here are also some self-­standing works that should be mentioned first. Doc Frankenstein, an eight-­ issue miniseries (2004–), written by the Wachowski ­brothers, with art by Steve Skroce, sees the monster as an immortal adventurer and a symbol of scientific pro­gress whose nemesis is a group of religious extremists. Frankenstein’s Womb, written by Warren Ellis and drawn by Marek Oleksicki (2008), is a graphic novel with a strong postmodernist slant, in which during an excursion to Frankenstein’s ­castle, Mary Shelley encounters the Creature who shows her the ­f uture. ­There is also the House of the Living Dead (2011), in which Mike Mignola and Richard Corben pay homage to the Universal films, and a l­ ater miniseries in five issues, Frankenstein Underground (2015), by Mignola alone, where the Creature comes up against an underground civilization and encounters monsters reminiscent of the Cthulhu cycle by Howard Philip Lovecraft. Fi­nally, Frankenstein Alive, Alive!, is a 2012 miniseries in three issues, written by Steve Niles and illustrated by Bernie Wrightson, which picks up the story where Mary Shelley leaves off and further develops the artistic proj­ect started in Wrightson’s illustrated edition. Serial narratives set in shared universes naturally have a greater expressive and evocative potential, owing to the way existing characters and plot ele­ments can be combined. Thus the ontological status of two fictional characters from dif­fer­ent universes cannot but be reciprocally reinforced when they come together. But t­ here is also a drawback: the princi­ple of continuity, mentioned above, produces an ever increasing number of constraints, in order to prevent new plot twists from coming into conflict with previous story lines. As occurs in other contexts as well, an increase in expressive possibilities comes with a higher risk of contradictions. To be sure, ­t here are several techniques to resolve this prob­lem, such as “retconning,” in which past events are retroactively rewritten to ensure continuity. According to Shane Denson, however, Frankenstein’s monster is a serial figure, “a stock character of sorts, who appears again and again in significantly dif­fer­ent forms of adaptation, contexts, and in vari­ous media [. . .] a concatenation of instantiations,” as opposed to a series character, who instead “exists within a series, where he or she develops or evolves.”15 Moreover, compared

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to other serial figures—­such as Superman—­that we generally see in a specific environment and with a recurring cast of secondary characters, the constant (re)use of the Creature, on the one hand, and his distinctly “other” origins, on the other hand, have made this figure impervious to narrative contradictions, with no corresponding loss of expressive power. This constancy amid change is already apparent in the first series devoted to the monster, published in several comic books by Prize Comics between 1940 and 1954, which featured three dif­fer­ent versions of the character, but all written and drawn by Dick Briefer.16 A ­ fter the Golden Age of comics, from the 1930s to the 1950s, in which the distinction between good and evil was clear and dichotomous, the Silver Age ushered in Stan Lee’s “super heroes with super prob­lems.” The 1970s, which saw the rise of anti-­heroes such as the successful comic book version of Conan created by Robert E. Howard, w ­ ere yet to come. Therefore in the Golden Age the creature could only be a Dionysian antagonist to the Apollonian superhero figure, and this is precisely the role he plays in the “New Adventures of Frankenstein,” an ongoing eight-­page feature first published in Prize Comics no.  7 (1940). Still Victor Frankenstein’s creation, although ­here (re)born in New York, the 15-­foot-­tall creature becomes the nemesis of the scientist, who employs all pos­si­ble means to destroy it—­ going so far as to create another monster, a man-­crocodile, for the purpose—­ and ­later gains another antagonist, Bulldog Denny, who having been orphaned by the Creature, is saved and trained to peak physical condition by Frankenstein. To defeat the monster, who eventually takes on his creator’s name (a frequent occurrence in other contexts as well), the combined force of all of the other Prize Comics superheroes w ­ ill be required, in an early example of thematic crossover.17 ­Later, as happened with many other comic book characters of the time, the Creature is pitted against real enemies: the World War II Axis powers. He first fights them, then helps them when he is captured and enslaved and, ­after escaping, fi­nally becomes a double agent assisting the allies. This is one of the first juxtapositions of the monster with Nazi iconography, a combination that ­will recur often both in comics (one might think of Captain Amer­i­ca, Nazi Germany’s ­enemy par excellence, or the recent Vertigo series, Fables) and in films. Although negative associations of the Creature with mass movements, in par­tic­u­lar protest movements, was common ever since the Reform Bill of 1832,18 in the case of Germany’s National Socialism, the situation is more complex. Linking the scars and massive figure of a vengeful monster, who in the films is rather weak-­w illed and can, to some extent, be manipulated, with the swastika-­emblazoned Nazi uniform, symbol of a collective depersonalization so extreme as to accept, if not actually execute, the most heinous acts, triggers a mutually reinforcing semiotic dynamic, a sort of virtuous cycle of horror. The power of this combination, the horror provoked by an individual monstrosity on one side and a collective

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one on the other, could not have escaped Dick Briefer, the comic book artist whose name is most closely tied to Frankenstein’s monster. ­After the war, the first of a number of metamorphoses occurs. In Frankenstein no. 1 (1945), New York is replaced by a generic small town, where the Creature is the result of an experiment by an unnamed mad doctor who, influenced by Mary Shelley’s novel, baptizes him with the name of his literary creator. But contrary to the doctor’s expectations—­and anticipating the tele­v i­sion show The Munsters (1964–66)—­t he monstrous Frankenstein turns out to be a gentle ­giant who loves flowers and animals. Prob­ably in an effort to forget the horrors of the war, the stories become ironic and grotesque, presenting small-­town Amer­i­ca as a place where the vari­ous vampires, zombies, ghouls, and werewolves tend to be more comical and clumsy than menacing. Many critics believe this was Dick Briefer’s most creative period, although it was short-­lived, lasting only u ­ ntil 1949. In 1952 the series resumed publication, but due to the decline of superhero comics and the increased popularity of the horror genre, a final metamorphosis takes place. The Creature, once again unnamed, returns to spread terror and destruction, this time not in Amer­i­ca but in Eu­rope, where he is pursued by a descendant of his creator who seeks to destroy him. What precipitated the demise of Prize Comics’ monster in 1954, as of Universal’s, was a crowd, armed not with pitchforks and torches but with petitions, laws, and decrees. That year, the publication of Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent,19 on the harmful effects of comics, ignited a crusade that would lead to the creation of the Comics Code Authority and the subsequent self-­regulation by the industry to censor non-­educational content. At the top of the censorship list was, precisely, the horror genre in which the Creature had figured so prominently, including the 1950s Tales From the Crypt series published by EC Comics, or similar comic books published by Timely Comics, ­later renamed Marvel Comics.20 As anthology series, ­these publications featured self-­contained stories, leading to a constant search for a final twist, however improbable, such as the fantastic role reversals in which the Creature ends up creating his own son or even Victor Frankenstein himself.21 Much more effective, ­because it relied on pathos rather than on the ele­ment of surprise, was “Your Name is Frankenstein,” published in Menace no. 7 (1953), and written by a young Stan Lee (he was just over thirty years old at the time). Besides its title, which reinforces the (by now) universal confusion over names, this seven-­page story succinctly evokes a creature who is a s­ ilent outcast, unbearably lonely, rejected with horror even by ­those he has just saved and who, unable to find ac­cep­tance in society owing to his difference, decides to end his life. The emotional intensity of the story is amplified by Joe Maneely’s drawings, and it introduces themes that ­w ill become familiar to Stan Lee’s readers, such as the prob­lem of difference and the rejection that it entails. It is no accident that the Marvel author openly acknowledged his debt to Universal’s films when

Figure 6.2. ​Dick Briefer, “The Return of Frankenstein,” Prize Comics no. 14 (Prize Comics, 1941). https://­digitalcomicmuseum​.­com​/­index​.­php​?­d lid​=2­ 2871. In public domain.

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he created the Incredible Hulk.22 In turn, this makes the Creature an ideal candidate for Marvel’s imaginary world, given how many of its principal characters consistently face issues of difference and marginalization. For this reason, and ­because of his constant metamorphoses, even including simultaneous variants, Marvel’s version of the Creature, to which we turn next, deserves a more detailed analy­sis. It is the most famous misfits of all, the X-­Men, who first encounter the monster and introduce him to the Marvel universe. For them, as for him, difference starts at birth, or rather rebirth, since their powers manifest themselves during puberty. In issue no. 40 of Uncanny X-­Men (January 1968), the young mutants contend with a version of the Creature who, b ­ ecause the Comics Code restrictions ­were still in force, turns out to be a malfunctioning alien android. An in­ter­ est­ing cultural short-­circuit occurs ­here: as “typical” 1960s teen­agers, the X-­Men are unaware of the creature’s literary origins, transposing them onto tele­v i­sion culture. For them, he is “just a myth [. . .] something you see on a late late show,”23 and they are surprised at his talkativeness, preferring the “­silent type like Boris Karloff.”24 The Incredible Hulk is also invoked, ironically, as an aesthetic standard. Having circumvented censorship through the android contrivance, the Marvel Universe was ready to welcome the Creature. The very next year, Stan Lee himself provided the official introduction, albeit indirectly. In Silver Surfer no. 7, written by Lee and illustrated by John Buscema, Silver Surfer is duped by Ludwig von Frankenstein, a descendant of Victor, who creates an evil clone of the gleaming space rider. The film version is still the main frame of reference, at the expense of Shelley’s text: Ludwig has a hunchback assistant, Borgo, who in the end ­w ill sacrifice himself in order to kill him, thus putting an end both to Ludwig’s evil plans and to his own subjection. Moreover, the Creature is first seen in an anachronistic film that shows the moment of his creation. Over time, the Comics Code became less stringent, to the point of allowing the repre­sen­ta­tion of horror if “handled in the classic tradition of Frankenstein, Dracula and other high caliber literary works by Edgar Allan Poe, Saki, Conan Doyle.”25 Marvel started by creating its own versions of Dracula and the Wolf Man, and in January 1973 launched the series The Monster of Frankenstein, in which the creature is found cryogenically preserved in arctic ice (the same narrative ploy used almost a de­c ade earlier to recover Captain Amer­i­c a), in 1898 by the great-­g randson of Robert Walton. The first four episodes, written by Gary Friedrich and stylishly drawn by Mike Plogg, are a high-­quality retelling of Mary Shelley’s novel. In ­later episodes, as Adrian Wymann’s detailed analy­sis shows,26 the narrative appears to lack a well-­defined arc, a prob­lem perhaps compounded by the constantly changing creative team. The sensitive, tormented Creature, who is shown wearing his characteristic sleeveless fur jacket (a quotation from the third Karloff film, The Son of Frankenstein,1939), wanders through

Figure 6.3. ​X-­Men, 1 no. 40, artwork by George Tuska (Marvel Comics, 1968). By kind permission of Marvel Comics Group.

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a distinctly anachronistic late nineteenth-­century Eu­rope, a victim of his difference and isolation. The main theme is the Creature’s search for Frankenstein’s descendants, but e­ very encounter, especially with w ­ omen, that might help improve his situation turns out to pose a new threat. Examples include a girl afflicted with lycanthropy who is rejected by her village, and a Gypsy who is revealed to be a vampire slave of Dracula and who immediately becomes the Creature’s archenemy once he has helped to awaken her. The editorial situation becomes rather complicated ­after October 1973, when Marvel begins to publish, in Monsters Unleashed, a black and white anthology magazine, the adventures of the monster who, this time, has reawakened in New York in the 1970s. The stories are striking and evocative and the drawings highly refined, but the reader’s suspension of disbelief is severely tested amid brain transplants, spy plots, voodoo, and a constant stream of damsels in distress. This narrative disjunction is fi­nally resolved at the end of the first story arc, in no. 12 of the regular series: a­ fter being found by Vincent Frankenstein, a descendant of Victor who is assisted by Ivan, his monstrous helper, the Creature violently resists their attempts to perform experiments on him and, leaving ­behind a scene of slaughter, wanders off to eventually fall into an icy sea. This solution may strain the fictional compact between narrator and reader but it does allow the authors to once again employ the cryogenic device in order to create some consistency with the events narrated in Monsters Unleashed. Now fully integrated into the Marvel universe, in chronological terms, the monster finds a young companion—­replicating the relationship between Hulk and Rick Jones—­and, ­after fighting an international criminal organ­ization, meets first Veronica Frankenstein, the ­daughter of Ludwig, and then, in a particularly theatrical twist set in the ­family ­castle on the final page of no. 18, her ­sister Victoria. Although a further episode is announced, this issue was in fact the last to be released due to poor sales. But the monster ­w ill continue to appear in other Marvel titles, so as to familiarize new readers with him and thus increase circulation.27 Nor is the sentimental cliffhanger forgotten. Two years a­ fter the end of the series, in Iron Man nos. 101 and 102 (1977), a set of fortuitous circumstances leads the armored avenger to Frankenstein’s c­ astle. ­After joining forces with the monster to defeat the latest menacing foe, he departs, leaving the Creature and Victoria to themselves. The ensuing idyllic romance between them is set in a microcosm that is spatially and temporally completely apart from the rest of the world. Victoria utters a speech that revokes the vengeful and ruthless words spoken by Victor on his deathbed: “When my ancestor gave you life he created a being of g­ reat courage, nobility and humanity! You are not the monster you imagine yourself to be but a man!”28 The Frankenstein f­ amily’s nemesis fi­nally gains the partner he had been denied in the novel: the descendant of his own creator, who had condemned him to solitude. The rupture and pain caused by his birth are now dispelled and

Figure 6.4. ​The Monster of Frankenstein, 1 no. 2, artwork by Mike Ploog (Marvel Comics, 1971). By kind permission of Marvel Comics Group.

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harmony is restored. ­After two long centuries, the monster’s story might at last come to an end with this final happy ending. About ten years go by, when, in Doctor Strange: Sorcerer Supreme no. 37 (1988), the story of Ludwig Frankenstein’s assistant, Borgo, is picked up again. He was presumed dead, but in fact survived to become, in his turn, the evil clone of Silver Surfer. Victoria Frankenstein reappears as well, and we discover that the Creature has long since abandoned both her and their domestic paradise, thus breaking the temporal stasis and setting the story in motion again. Th ­ ere is also an impor­tant flashback in which Marvel’s magician traces the history of the House of Frankenstein from the M ­ iddle Ages onward, fi­nally making order among the tangle of relationships that had accumulated over the years. For example, it becomes clear that Basil, son of Vincent, was in turn the f­ ather of Ludwig, the scientist of the Third Reich who created a version of the Creature defeated by Captain Amer­i­ca (Invaders no. 31, 1978).29 We also learn from this flashback how a ­brother of Victor Frankenstein told his story to Mary Shelley, thus justifying the presence of the literary work and its subsequent adaptations in this narrative universe. But this orderliness does not last long. Soon enough, vari­ous conflicting versions of the monster begin to appear, as dif­fer­ent authors find new ways to use his compelling presence to enhance their plots, but without consistent editorial direction. The first contradictions emerge in Spider-­Man Unlimited no. 21 (1998). Spider-­Man meets the monster again, but neither has any memory of their previous encounter. Ivan, the misshapen servant of Vincent Frankenstein in the 1970s series, also reappears, despite the fact that he has been dead for nearly one hundred years. Then t­ here is the w ­ hole army made up entirely of clones of the monster, created by yet another mad doctor, a feat whose practicability would be questioned several years l­ater by S.H.I.E.L.D., the international spy organ­ization.30 An explicit reference to Shelley’s work is the scene where the monster points out his difference by showing Peter Parker the f­aces of both reflected in a pond. ­Later, in the miniseries Bloodstone (2001–2002), aimed at a teenage audience, the Creature plays an unpre­ce­dented role as helper and mentor. To further underscore this metamorphosis he calls himself Adam, and assists the young Elsa Bloodstone, a cross between Lara Croft and Buffy, to follow in the footsteps of her monster-­hunting f­ather, Ulysses. The series is unremarkable, neither for its writing or its illustrations, but it does contain one ironic intertextual reference when the creature gets help from Dracula, and jokes, “All we need now is Abbott and Costello and it ­will be like old times.”31 All t­ hese transformations of Frankenstein’s monster in the Marvel universe point to a pro­cess of dwindling creativity whereby he starts to resemble more and more closely the Incredible Hulk, progressively losing his eloquence and intellect, expressing himself in the simplest language, and becoming all too easy to manipulate—in other words, losing the rebellious and vengeful spirit that

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propelled the narrative in Mary Shelley’s novel. This is how he appears in The Immortal Iron Fist: Orson Randall and The Green Mist of Death (2008) or as a recurring supporting character in Deadpool’s super­natural adventures, where he also provides comic relief, especially in the miniseries Deadpool: Dracula’s Gauntlet (2014) and Mrs. Deadpool and the Howling Commandos (2015). Confirming this apparently irreversible trend, in issue no. 6 of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2015) he is selected to join a commando of monsters whose IQ is virtually nil, and which also includes a zombie, a m ­ ummy, and Man-­Thing, a creature made of vegetable ­matter. ­There are a few isolated exceptions to this “Hulkization” of the monster, although rather ephemeral ones. The four-­issue miniseries Fearsome Four (2011), within the crossover Fear Itself, addresses themes of difference and loneliness, while in Wolverine and the X-­Men, especially nos. 21, 22, and 23 (2013), the monster, besides regaining the gift of language, casts off his fur jacket, as though to mark a break with the past and repudiate the editorial treatment he has received thus far. Acquiring the look of a Victorian gentleman, he is relentless and unscrupulous in his pursuit of vengeance against the last descendant of the Frankensteins: he teams up with a witch and forces the X-­Men to become a circus attraction. Despite being clearly cast as an antagonist, the monster’s characterization is rigorously thought out rather than being treated as a caricature or a sidekick. In Marvel’s universe, Frankenstein’s monster is currently a secondary character whose epistemological status is fragmented and contradictory. And t­ here is ­little sign of improvement: in February 2014 alone, he appeared si­mul­ta­neously in three comic books, Daredev­il no. 34, Deadpool: The Gauntlet no. 8, and Thunderbolts Annual no. 1, in dif­fer­ent contexts and with totally dif­fer­ent characterizations, with no explanation of the discrepancies. The only way out of this impasse is for a talented author to take charge of the monster, eliminating all the accumulated contradictions, and restoring the dignity the character deserves. And this is exactly what happened with DC Comics. Unlike Marvel’s, DC’s creative investment in the character was fairly minimal ­until 2006. During the Golden Age t­ here was only one short story in Detective Comics no. 135 (1948), in which Batman and Robin travel in time and discover that the monster was originally a ­giant servant of Baron Frankenstein who became a mindless zombie ­after receiving an electric shock. It is Batman himself who tells the story to a female En­glish traveler—­the author who w ­ ill l­ ater turn it into a novel. L ­ ater, from the 1970s, a version of the monster called “Spawn of Frankenstein” appeared in the pages of Phantom Stranger. Similar to Shelley’s version, but wearing jeans and a cloak, this creature appears in stories featuring the super­natural, and eventually even clashes with Superman (Action Comics no. 531, May 1982), but is soon forgotten. In the 1990s, two Elseworlds stories, self-­contained episodes set in imaginary worlds, grafted Frankenstein’s story onto the Batman and Superman myths,

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moving them back into the nineteenth c­ entury, but retaining some basic invariants. In ­Castle of the Bat (1994), Bruce Wayne is a doctor who years earlier had witnessed the murder of his parents during a robbery (first invariant). Using his ­father’s brain, he creates the monster, who takes on Batman’s nocturnal persona to seek vengeance. In The Superman Monster (1999), instead, it is the cynical and ruthless Viktor Luthor who finds the rocket from Krypton (second invariant), which however contains only the skeleton of the infant Kal-­El. Employing Kryptonian technology, Luthor creates a disfigured creature endowed both with Superman’s powers and his noble soul, from whom he flees. Reflecting the respective natures of the two characters, Superman’s story has a happy ending, while Batman’s is inevitably tragic. Fi­nally, in January 2006, within the miniseries Seven Soldiers of Victory, Grant Morrison, a prominent writer of the 1990s British new wave who had long worked on other DC Comics characters, created a new version of the creature. Still featuring the Boris Karloff look, but this time with a steampunk twist—he wears a Hussar jacket and carries a nineteenth-­century sword and gun—­t his creature is a formidable and inexorable engine of destruction and revenge, with a restless soul and a gift for elegant prose, who quotes Milton as he ­battles a vast array of foes. Morrison is clearly aware of the difficulty of ­handling such a character, including the risk of repetition: he provides the monster with a female counterpart, the Bride, also from the Universal cast of characters, but their relationship is troubled from the start. When he reminds her that she was created to be his partner, she replies, “I know, and it’s nothing personal. But you w ­ ere never my type.”32 Thanks to her, he joins S.H.A.D.E., a secret government agency for which he becomes a field agent and with whose leader, ­Father Time, he has a rocky relationship. ­After the miniseries’ end the Creature was absorbed into DC’s narrative universe, appearing occasionally as a guest in other series. He participated in and survived Flashpoint, the 2011 event in which the ­whole DC Comics world was recalibrated and, beginning in November of that year, he debuted in his own ongoing series, Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E., which lasted for 16 issues. The monster is the leader of the Creature Commandos, who besides the Bride, ­here renamed Lady Frankenstein, include a vampire, a werewolf, a ­mummy, and an amphibious creature. The writer, Jeff Lemire, is capable, but hardly on a level with Grant Morrison, who had furthermore only included his Creature in four issues of Seven Soldiers. The public seems to have been relatively unimpressed, despite the multiplicity of threats, both internal and external, faced by the Creature and his team of misfits, such as conspiracies and acts of sabotage against the S.H.A.D.E. organ­ization. Neither the novelty of introducing a child he has with Lady Frankenstein, nor the Creature’s participation in the Rotworld crossover helped to improve sales and the S.H.A.D.E. series was withdrawn. However, anticipating the end of the series, in January 2013 the monster was added—­not coincidentally, by Jeff Lemire—to the Justice League Dark team, the magical counterpart

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to the more famous S.H.A.D.E. group, led by the occultist antihero John Constantine, who had been created years earlier by Alan Moore. The creature participates in the adventures of this supergroup at first regularly, u ­ ntil no. 30, and then intermittently u ­ ntil the last issue, no. 40. Even h ­ ere, however, although the talented and experienced John Marc DeMatteis eventually took over as writer, the character’s potential was not fully realized and he ended up embodying the ste­reo­type of the melancholy strongman, lacking meaningful relationships to the other characters, as though the inevitable pro­cess of Hulkization had set in again, a sort of black hole whose force cannot be resisted. Nevertheless, Frankenstein’s monster remains a regular feature of the DC Comics universe even ­after the end of ­these series, and his portrayal remains consistent throughout, unlike Marvel’s. He also has proven to be a remarkably effective antagonist turned helper; this is the role he plays first with Batman (Batman and Robin no. 19, June 2013; and nos. 31–33, June–­September 2014) and then with Superman (Superman nos. 12 and 13, February 2017). As in the novel, he seems to function as a dark mirror that reflects the fears of the protagonists, who can become stronger only by fully accepting rather than rejecting t­ hose fears.

Monsters and Repre­sen­ta­tions We now come to the last category—­that of characters more or less directly inspired by the novel. If the rewritings alone constitute a phenomenon of vast proportions, in this case we are dealing with another order of magnitude altogether, making it extremely difficult to even attempt a taxonomy. The best option is therefore to select a representative case with which to conclude the chapter: besides the Incredible Hulk, discussed earlier, one example of a character whose origins are obviously derived from Victor Frankenstein and his creation is Bizarro, the imperfect clone of Superman. This is a good choice for several reasons, starting with his genesis: in Superboy no. 68 (1958), Otto ­Binder and George Papp envision the character as the result of an experiment in which a scientist tries to duplicate the young Superman. The white, geometric segments composing Bizarro’s face cannot but recall the scars of the Creature. Furthermore, despite his powers he is immediately ostracized by every­one, except for a blind girl, and thus he, too, symbolizes the issues of difference and marginalization associated with the Creature. The following year the character was introduced into the adult world of Superman (Action Comics no. 254). ­Here, in what would become a hallmark of the character, Bizarro, realizing his imperfect nature, starts to do the exact opposite of what Superman does—­just as the Creature originally envisaged as an embodiment of the defeat of death becomes instead a destroyer of life. To this formal similarity should be added the desperate search for a partner, which is eventually rewarded: together with an imperfect clone of Lois Lane, Bizarro departs in search of a world where they can live peacefully. In time,

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the c­ ouple gives birth to an entire race of their own kind: Victor Frankenstein’s greatest fear thus becomes a real­ity in Superman’s world, giving rise to many subsequent stories. It is precisely one of ­these stories that provides a fitting conclusion to the cases analyzed thus far—­and to the chapter. The story is built on the triangular relationship discussed above, as Bizarro meets both Superman, the a­ ctual model of which he is an imperfect copy, and the monster, the cultural model on which he is based. Appearing in Superman no. 143 (1961), “Bizarro Meets Frankenstein” is a lighthearted romp in which Bizarro sees the Creature touted on tele­v i­sion as the “World’s Scariest Monster” and, unable to tolerate the slight, travels to Earth to set the rec­ord straight. But in a crescendo worthy of a comedy of errors, all his efforts prove futile: a group of showgirls ­mistake him for Superman and kiss him, making him won­der if they are blind (a direct reference to his comic book origins, and an indirect one to Shelley’s novel), and two circus c­ hildren, accustomed to freaks of all kinds, find him amusing and ask him to play with them. The misunderstandings multiply, ­until Superman, playing an unusual trickster role, leads him to believe that he has indeed terrified ­people, as evidenced by the fact that their hair stands on end. In fact, it is Superman who has achieved this effect by employing an electric current (again recalling Shelley). Fi­nally satisfied, Bizarro returns to his home planet, bringing with him a souvenir: a Superman puppet with which he scares his ­children. This ending is a reminder of how difference, and the horror and rejection it elicits, is relative rather than absolute and, as a result, is inherently reciprocal. Unlike in Shelley’s novel, where non-­acceptance was one of the main narrative topoi and was shown to have tragic consequences, in the comic book rewritings and transpositions the issue is partially resolved. Partially, ­because in superhero comics especially, the Creature continues to be an outcast, perhaps more by choice than for any objective reason. ­Here, he is part of an ensemble cast, a choral narrative in which the destructive force of his actions, changing both its point of application and its direction, no longer seeks to achieve a personal vendetta and the disintegration of the f­ amily and social order, but rather, as Umberto Eco has written about Superman, the preservation of the status quo.33 Even in the four-­color world of comics, a world dominated by freaks and misfits in which the Creature might be perfectly assimilated and at ease, he never loses his defining qualities of difference and isolation, thus remaining true to his narrative DNA.

Notes 1. One need only think of the importance of story­boards in the preliminary stages of filmmaking, on which the dynamic effects of audiovisual narrative are grafted ­later; or, in the comic book world, the “closure” that must be supplied by the reader to fill in the missing action when moving from one panel to the next. 2. “Power Trio,” TVTropes, http://­t vtropes​.o ­ rg​/­pmwiki​/­pmwiki​.­php​/­Main​/P ­ owerTrio.

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3. Alex Ross, Universal Monsters Set, October  26, 2016. Facebook post. http://­w ww​ .­f acebook​ .­c om​ /­a lexrossart​ /­p hotos​ /­a​ .­1511742175710846​ .­1073741828​ .­1511709572380773​ /­1784926178392443​/.­ 4. Two examples, both from the early 1990s, give some idea of the opposite ends of this spectrum. Forbidden Frankenstein by Anton Drek, published by Eros Comix, is a pornographic spoof, but with substantial symbolic implications: h ­ ere Victor is so sexually inhibited that he builds the monster as his libidinal alter ego. Strikingly, the creature’s genitals are in fact Victor’s own, as he has castrated himself for the purpose. Frankenstein Meets Shirley ­Temple is a comic strip by Roger Langridge, published by Epic Comics. In the unexpected pairing, the creature plays the role of the funny, but also sensitive and romantic dreamer, while the Hollywood child prodigy plays the cynical and pragmatic straight character. 5. A three-­part story in Iron Man (2001–2002) has Tony Stark contend with one of his armors that has become sentient. Its title, unsurprisingly, is “The Frankenstein Syndrome.” 6. See in par­tic­u­lar Donald Glut, “Frankenstein in Four Colours,” in The Frankenstein Archive: Essays on the Monster, the Myth, the Movies, and More (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), 164–88; Susan Tyler Hitchcock, “The Horror and the Humor,” in Frankenstein: A Cultural History (New York: W. W. Norton & Com­pany, 2007), 193–226; Christopher Murray, “Frankenstein in Comics and Graphic Novels,” in The Cambridge Companion to “Frankenstein,” ed. Andrew Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 219–40. Focused on Marvel’s Frankenstein monster, but with a methodology and reflections applicable to any serial character, is Shane Denson, “Marvel Comics’ Frankenstein: A Case Study in the Media of Serial Figures,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 56, no. 4 (2011): 531–53. A good online source that delves into the editorial history of the Marvel character is Adrian Wymann, “Marvel’s Monster Mash: Marvel’s Bronze Age Strug­gle with the Frankenstein Monster,” Read Up on Comics, September 10, 2008. http://­www​.w ­ ymann​.­info​/­comics​/0 ­ 08​-­Frankenstein1​ .­html and http://­w ww​.­w ymann​.­info​/­comics​/­009​-­Frankenstein2​.­html. 7. The first adaptation was published in 1993 by Dark Horse, as part of a series involving other Universal monsters as well, while the second was issued by Topps Comics si­mul­ta­ neously with the film in order to r­ ide the latter’s publicity wave, an operation previously carried out by the same publishing ­house with Jurassic Park and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. 8. In 1993, Apple Press issued The Lost Frankenstein Pages, which included previously unpublished illustrations, variants of published ones, preliminary studies, and other illustrations of the Frankenstein monster from other proj­ects, all drawn by Wrightson. The illustrated edition was then taken over by Dark Horse, which republished it in 1994 and again in 2008, in hardcover and a larger format, to celebrate the twenty-­fi fth anniversary of the original edition. 9. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus (New York: Harrison Smith & Robert Haas, 1934). 10. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (London: Penguin, 2007). 11. “The Covers of Frankenstein: Daniel Clowes, Penguin (2007),” Frankensteinia: The Frankenstein Blog, October 18, 2010. http://­f rankensteinia​.­blogspot​.­it​/­2010​/­10​/­covers​-­of​ -­frankenstein​-­daniel​-­clowes​.­html. 12. Murray, “Frankenstein in Comics and Graphic Novels,” 221–24. 13. Murray, “Frankenstein in Comics and Graphic Novels,” 234. 14. Murray, “Frankenstein in Comics and Graphic Novels,” 229. 15. Denson, “Marvel Comics’ Frankenstein: A Case Study in the Media of Serial Figures,” 536. 16. See Glut, “Frankenstein in Four Colours,” 165–82, for a thorough analy­sis and a detailed narrative and publication history. As they are in the public domain, the comics are available on The Digital Comic Museum. https://­digitalcomicmuseum​.­com​/.­

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17. “Frankenstein, The Black Owl, The Green Lama, Yank & Doodle, Frost, Doctor Bulldog Denny, The General and the Corporal-­Dick Briefer-1942,” Four Colour Shadows (blog), December 21, 2014. http://­fourcolorshadows​.­blogspot​.­it​/­2014​/­1 2​/­f rankenstein​-­black​-­owl​ -­green​-­lama​.­html. 18. Hitchcock, Frankenstein: A Cultural History, 106–16. 19. Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York: Rinehart, 1954). 20. David Hajdu, The Ten-­Cent Plague: The G ­ reat Comic-­Book Scare and How It Changed Amer­i­ca (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). 21. Glut, “Frankenstein in Four Colours,” 185. 22. “I’ve always liked the Frankenstein movie, the old one with Karloff. And in the Frankenstein movie I’ve always felt the monster was ­really the good guy. He ­didn’t want to hurt anybody, all ­t hose ­idiots with torches chasing him up and down the hill. So I thought it would be fun to get a monster who’s ­really a good guy.” Web of Stories, Ltd., “Creating the Hulk, Spider-­Man and Daredevil,” An Interview with Stan Lee. http://­w ww​.­webofstories​ .­com​/­play​/­stan​.­lee​/­16 [nd]. 23. Roy Thomas, and Don Heck, “The Mark of the Monster,” The X-­Men no. 40 (New York: Marvel, January 1968), 3. 24. Thomas and Heck, “The Mark of the Monster,” 13. 25. Wymann, “Marvel’s Monster Mash.” 26. Wymann, “Marvel’s Monster Mash,” Part Two. 27. See Giant-­Size Werewolf no. 2 (1974), The Avengers nos. 131 and 132, and Giant-­Size Avengers no. 3 (all 1975), and especially in Marvel Team-­Up nos. 36 and 37 (1975), together with Spider-­Man. 28. Bill Mantlo, George Tuska, “Dreadknight and the D ­ aughter of Creation,” Iron Man no. 102 (New York: Marvel, September 1977), 17. 29. The flashback, however, leaves out an anonymous Dr. Frankenstein, his ­d aughter Anna, and their Beast of Frankenstein, whom Captain Amer­i­ca and Bucky ­battle in U.S.A. Comics no. 13 (1944). 30. Nick Fury’s Howling Commandos no. 1 (December 2005) briefly mentions how in order to create a clone of the Creature for the super­natural task force, as many ­humans as the corresponding body parts of the Creature ­were generated, with a subsequent pro­cess of recomposition not unlike the original one. 31. Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Michael Lopez, Tom Derenick, “In the Blood,” Bloodstone no. 4 (New York: Marvel, March 2002), 15. 32. Grant Morrison, Doug Mahnke, “The ­Water,” Seven Soldiers: Frankenstein no. 3 (New York: DC Comics, April 2006), 12. 33. Umberto Eco, “Il mito di Superman” [The Myth of Superman], in Apocalittici e integrati: comunicazioni di massa e teorie della cultura di massa [Apocalyptic and Integrated: Mass Communication and Theories of Mass Culture] (Milan: Bompiani, 1964), 219–62.

chapter 7

z “Uncouth and inarticulate sounds” Musico-­Literary Traces in Frankenstein, and Frankenstein in Art ­Music1 Enrico Reggiani As I listen to m ­ usic (especially instrumental) new ideas rise & develope themselves, with greater energy & truth that at any other time—­thus I am becoming very fond of instrumental ­music of which before I was more careless—­singing confines ones thoughts to the words—in mere playing they form a song for themselves which if it be not more in harmony with the notes at least is more so with ones tone of mind. —­Mary Shelley  2

1 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote t­ hese intriguing remarks about the relationship between listening to ­music and literary creativity in a letter to Leigh Hunt on October 5, 1823. What she says about the role of instrumental m ­ usic in the generation and development of “new ideas,” the encumbering dominance of the words in vocal ­music, the relationship between “mere playing” and the formation of a “song” whose “harmony [. . .] with ones tone of mind” is more impor­tant than that with “the notes,” falls squarely ­under the domain of musico-­literary analy­sis.3 As such, it reveals Mary Shelley’s awareness of the intersection of ­music and the literary imagination and suggests the need for a careful study of the musico-­ literary resources and strategies she employed throughout her creative production and which have not received the same attention granted to Percy Bysshe Shelley. In “Listen While You Read: The Case of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,” the only comprehensive musico-­literary essay on Mary Shelley to date, Lucy 143

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Morrison examines Shelley’s novel The Last Man (published in 1826, ­after the 1818 edition of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, and Valperga; or, the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, 1823) in order to ascertain the presence and the function of “art ­music” in the novel, as defined by its protagonist and narrator, Lionel Verney: “­Music—­t he language of the immortals, disclosed to us as testimony of their existence—­music, ‘silver key of the fountain of tears,’ child of love, soother of grief, inspirer of heroism and radiant thoughts.” 4 According to Morrison, “[art] ­music was a commonplace for Mary Shelley, her circle, and her time.”5 As a direct consequence of its diffuse presence, “hearing ­music of the time emanate from the text indeed results in a deeper understanding and appreciation for the scenes contained within its pages, and this dramatic novel challenges us to think about the ways in which opera develops in ­England along with the rise of the novel; considering the two creative genres as parallel and informing each other is essential.” 6 Morrison’s essay, though valuable, does not attempt to categorize the vari­ ous manifestations of art ­music in The Last Man, or to address their interactions within the overall soundscape of Mary Shelley’s novel. Furthermore, no equivalent to Morrison’s essay has been published on Shelley’s Frankenstein, which evokes a very dif­fer­ent soundscape from The Last Man, less oriented t­ owards art ­music and more primal and elemental—­one might say more anthropological.7 This absence of musico-­literary investigations is rather surprising, since both the 1818 and the 1831 editions of Frankenstein contain a significant number of musico-­ literary textual loci8 whose literary quality—­their substantia—is inextricably intertwined with the musical both in Shelley’s work and in her wider cultural context. Th ­ ese references, which may also be useful and effective in bringing Frankenstein’s transmedia readings and connections into the classroom, could be classified as follows: 1) musico-­literary references in the strict sense; 2) references to the ­human (or human-­like) soundscape (i.e., vocal and voiceless, verbal and non-­verbal, semantic and non-­semantic, personal and relational, et  al.), textualized and literarized according to musico-­literary strategies; and 3) references to the natu­ral soundscape, textualized and literarized according to musico-­literary strategies. Some of ­t hese musico-­literary strategies reveal fundamental features of the overall narrative economy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, illuminating a cultural area of the “palimpsest of Mary Shelley’s own reading”9 so far unexplored. Three paradigmatic examples w ­ ill be briefly introduced in the pres­ent chapter: the first two focus on the experience of sound and appear in both the 1818 and 1831 editions; the third introduces a piano meta­phor relating to Victor’s “being” (F 48) pres­ent only in the 1831 edition, thus playing a contrasting role between the two editions. During their first encounter against the background of the sound-­deadening, though not sound-­proofed, glacier called “the sea of ice” (F 98) in the Chamonix

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Valley, the Creature tries to move Victor’s compassion and awaken in him the “duties of a creator t­owards his creature” (F 102). He evokes the pre-­linguistic “virtues that I once possessed” (F 101), indirectly referencing the model of the Rousseauian savage: “sometimes I wished to express my sensations in my own mode, but the uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again” (F 104; italics mine).10 The Creature’s definition of his first non-­imitative sounds, uttered in “the original era of my being” (F 102), as “uncouth” makes them even more primal and uncivilized than the linguistically otherworldly sounds which Bishop Francis Godwin mentions in his “essay of fancy,” The Man in the Moon (ca. 1615–1630),11 or the linguistically “uncouth” (i.e., foreign) sounds which Joseph Conrad uses in Heart of Darkness “to convey to Marlow’s Western listeners the impression of incoherence that t­ hese sounds made on his untrained Western ear” and which have been misleadingly criticized by Chinua Achebe in “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” (1977).12 The uncouthness of the Creature’s sounds is further strengthened by their being “inarticulate.” In Mary Shelley’s age, the syntagm “inarticulate sounds”—­ used also by Walter Scott to ironically indicate h ­ uman sounds “of assent”13—­ had a precise meaning: it characterized them as similar to the material sounds of melody in m ­ usic, thus pitching them against the “articulate sounds” of poetry.14 Similarly William Godwin, Mary Shelley’s ­father, sets the sounds “uttered by animals” against “the copiousness of lexicography or the regularity of grammar,” an idea also taken up a few de­cades ­later by William Jillard Hort, who maintained that “man naturally expresses certain feelings” before advancing “to articulate sounds [. . .] formed into words or language.”15 In sum, when the Creature juxtaposes “the uncouth and inarticulate sounds” of “the original era of my being” with “the art of language” and “the science of words or letters,” he recalls a “virtuous and magnificent” (F 119) period of his life during which hearing was not an escape from sight;16 knowledge had not revealed its “strange nature” (F 120); and he had yet to enter the community of “the guilty [who] are allowed [. . .] to speak in their own defence before they are condemned” (F 101, italics mine). Some chapters ­later, Frankenstein’s verbal soundscape completely changes. While in his solitary laboratory in the Orkney Islands, ­after breaking his “promise of creating another like him”—­t he female “on whose f­uture existence [the Creature] depended for happiness” (F 166)—­Victor reacts thus against his creation’s threats of revenge: “Devil, cease; and do not poison the air with ­t hese sounds of malice. I have declared my resolution to you, and I am no coward to bend beneath words. Leave me; I am inexorable” (F 168; italics mine). Nonetheless the Creature does not prove subservient to words—be they ­t hose of the promise Victor broke in order not to “create another like yourself, equal in deformity and wickedness” (F 167), or the “fiendish threats” (F 166) he himself made: “Slave, I before reasoned with you, but you have proved yourself unworthy

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of my condescension. Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day ­w ill be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master; obey!” (F 166) Victor’s reaction shows that the Creature’s words have lost their semantic power and have been reduced to the pre-­linguistic state of mere “sounds,” much more “abject” (F 119) than the “uncouth and inarticulate sounds” mentioned in Chapter XI. The Creature’s “sounds of malice”17 instead prove that he must be counted among “the vicious and base” (F 119), ­because they express a malice that is “dev­ilish” (F 166), malice being the dev­il’s main instrument.18 They “poison the air” and “the cup of life” (F 168 and 182), thus leaving around Victor “nothing but a dense and frightful darkness, penetrated by no light but the glimmer of two eyes that glared upon [him]” (F 182).19 While Mary Shelley’s narrative elaborations of ­these basic sound experiences are pres­ent in both Frankenstein editions, the introduction of a piano meta­phor in the 1831 edition to qualify Victor’s “being” a­ fter his meeting with Professor Waldman is new, and stands in contrast to the previous edition: “such w ­ ere the professor’s words [. . .] enounced to destroy me [. . .]; one by one the vari­ous keys ­were touched which formed the mechanism of my being; chord a­ fter chord was sounded, and soon my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose” (F 48, italics mine). The references to “keys,” “mechanism,” and “chords” deserve further investigation; it suffices to raise three musico-­literary questions of no small narrative import. First, should we consider this a real piano meta­phor (rather than an organ meta­phor), thus confirming Mary Shelley’s cultural interest in “the piano-­ forte, the ‘house­hold orchestra’ of the ­people,”20 as it was quickly establishing itself in the first de­cades of the nineteenth ­century? Second, does Mary Shelley’s reference to “chord a­ fter chord”—­one among many instrumental allusions in her works and letters—­refer to each individual string of a piano or rather to the successive combinations of three or more simultaneous notes (together forming a “chord”) according to the rules of early nineteenth-­century harmony? Furthermore, which dif­fer­ent repre­sen­ta­tions of Victor’s “being” ­after meeting Professor Waldman do the dif­fer­ent referential potentialities of this chord meta­phor determine? Third, when compared with the Creature’s basic sound experiences, is this advanced piano meta­phor to be interpreted as the result of the textualization of “a new science [. . .], a science of opaque surfaces and reconstructible depths, and most importantly one given the ability both to put its discoveries into play in the world and to establish itself concretely in a technology, and at the same time to conceive itself in terms of a deep and mystical bond with the arts,” as maintained by Leslie Blasius in his remarks on ­music in Frankenstein?21 While literary scholars have surprisingly neglected the functions of sound and art ­music in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, composers and ­music scholars,

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instead, have not infrequently turned Frankenstein’s Creature and Frankensteiniana more generally into aesthetic, analytical, and critical categories applied to their own works or to works of composers across dif­fer­ent time periods and musical cultures. In an essay on Henry Purcell’s King Arthur, while commenting on Edward J. Dent’s “dispiriting” remarks in Foundations of En­glish Opera (1928), Andrew Pinnock has expressed the (primarily philological) wish that our times may “succeed where Dent had given up hope: raising the dead body of early En­glish opera Frankenstein fashion.” More recently, Oliver Vogel has compared Anton Reicha’s 36 Fugues pour Piano, op.36 (ca. 1804) to “die zu neuem Leben erweckten Kreaturen eines Frankensteins der Musik” [“the creatures of a Frankenstein of m ­ usic reawakened to new life”], while Leslie Blasius has turned to “Mary Shelley’s tale” to interpret Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s coeval Ausführliche theoretisch-­practische Anweisung zum Piano-­Forte Spiel (s.157, 1828).22 Among current composers, Cindy Cox has evoked Mary Shelley’s novel to explain that her “composition for trombone and four-­channel tape, Hysteria, seeks to reclaim the voice of the wounded monster, and tells the story of the wound itself.” She has also added that “the electronics in Hysteria are redeployed in the reclamation of the body’s essential energy” in the same way that “the force used to animate the monster is electricity, a technological symbol of the ego using science to accomplish its dreams of power and control.”23 If pos­si­ble, however, Frankenstein’s art-­music compositional reception—­i.e. the creation of art-­music compositions of any genre that set it to m ­ usic ­either in part or in full—by coeval and l­ ater composers is even more obscure and understudied than its musico-­textual constituents.24 The reason for this neglect may lie in the exacting nature of musico-­literary analy­sis, which requires an approach that is both analytical and hermeneutic, drawing si­mul­ta­neously from the literary and musicological fields. By applying this transdisciplinary perspective, the final part of this essay ­w ill offer a tentative typological map of Frankenstein’s afterlives in art ­music and investigate some notable modern musico-­literary approaches and compositional responses to the novel’s “uncouth and inarticulate sounds.”

2 By 1823, only five years a­ fter the publication of the first edition of Frankenstein, the volatile and versatile cultural market of nineteenth-­century melodrama had already appropriated the novel by boiling it in the cauldron of its creative energy, its formal expertise, and its genre-­specific vocabulary.25 In that year, at least two productions of g­ reat cultural and commercial importance appeared in London and “continued popu­lar throughout the third and fourth de­cades of the ­century.”26 In July, Richard Brinsley Peake (1792–1847) staged his “melodramatic opera” Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein at the En­glish Opera House. One

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of the per­for­mances was attended by Mary Shelley herself, who praised the acting of Thomas Potter Cooke in the role of the Monster. In August, Henry M. Milner (birth/death dates unknown) staged at the Royal Cobourg Theatre another dramatization of Mary Shelley’s novel, the “dramatic romance” Frankenstein; or, The Demon of Switzerland, which predates by three years his more famous Frankenstein; or, The Man and the Monster! (also at the Royal Cobourg Theatre). Diane Long Hoeveler has observed that “it may strike modern eyes as strange indeed that m ­ usic was a prominent feature in the productions of Frankenstein plays.”27 Early nineteenth-­century eyes and ears would likely have reacted in the same way, if one considers what Charles Edward Horn and Samuel James Arnold wrote in the introductory Remarks to their “melo-­drame” The Woodman’s Hut in 1822, just one year before Peake’s and Milner’s adaptations hit the stage: [melo-­drama’s] ­music is not more remote from nature than the blank verse or the rhymes of tragedy, and if it err in having too much action, it has a counterbalancing advantage in not being clogged by excess of speech; in fact the ­music supplies the place of language, and though the expressions of ­music are not so nicely marked, still in conjunction with action, the purport of the scene is easy to be understood. [. . .] Much nonsense has been solemnly urged against the unnatural ­jumble of ­music, comedy and tragedy, which the wise men of Gotham suppose to make up melo-­drama. [. . .] to say that we do not act to m ­ usic in real life is to say nothing; neither do we act to recitative as in opera [. . .], thus it is, and thus it always w ­ ill be, when folly puts on the gravity of wisdom, and lends itself to censure; it never ­w ill see beyond the surface.28

Such opposing reactions notwithstanding, in nineteenth-­century melodramas, “the long-­established melodramatic tradition of interspersing m ­ usic with spoken words” remained a major expressive resource, though not precisely tailored to the musico-­literary references in Frankenstein, which freely deployed “the power of ­music, a trope that ­w ill continue to be emphasized in the ­later adaptations.”29 Among ­t hese musical resources, “songs ­were [. . .] required by British law for many years in plays not performed in a ‘patent’ theatre; productions of Frankenstein or Presumption ­were no exceptions. So popu­lar ­were t­ hese fragments of song that even where they could have been omitted they w ­ ere sung [. . .]. Many ­were the songs inserted into the plays—­more, perhaps, to relieve the horrors than to appease the authorities.30 Unfortunately, “most of this m ­ usic, at least ­until the 1870s, circulated only in manuscript,”31 thus preventing us from understanding its narrative implications and musico-­literary function. Moreover, in our time, scholars very frequently mention ­t hese songs with no reference to their composers who, though working in the context of the so-­called “popu­lar culture” of melodrama, ­were always art-­music professionals. Such was John Watson (born ca. 1780)—­a member of the Royal Acad­emy of M ­ usic as well as the piano accompanist and agent of the

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most famous violin virtuoso of the age, Niccolò Paganini, on one of his tours of the British Isles—­who wrote “the original ­music”32 for Peake’s Presumption. Thomas A. Hughes, “the composer and director of the m ­ usic, at the Coburg Theatre,”33 worked on Milner’s Frankenstein but was also very active in the field of instrumental teaching and published, among o ­ thers, violin duets and piano-­forte works.34 The original ­music of Peake’s and Milner’s often extravagant and unbridled theatrical rewritings of Shelley’s novel was frequently supplemented by songs specially written by other composers and strategically placed to accompany pivotal dramatic scenes. For example, Peake’s Presumption was enriched by vocal pieces composed by renowned con­temporary musicians like Henry Rowley Bishop (1786–1855), John Braham (1774–1856), Charles Edward Horn (1786–1849), George Alexander Lee (1802–1851), and Joseph Augustine Wade (1796–1845). In 1849, ­after more than two de­cades of flourishing Frankenstein melodramas, William and Robert Brough produced their Frankenstein; or, The Model Man, where “­music as a humanizing force” contrasted with the play’s radical, mechanistic, and alchemical overtones.35 Its original ­music was contributed by Alfred Mellon (1820–1867), a “man of refined taste and culture,” who had “acquired a proficiency and a perfection in the beautiful art, the practice of which, as all the world knows, has associated his name with ­t hose of the ­great musicians of the day, and, in bringing him fame, has carried him on to fortune.”36 But such melodramatic successes ­were nearly over by the late 1840s: “as mid-­ century passed, the Creature’s vogue faded and the serious stage reincarnations of Frankenstein virtually ended—at least for several de­cades.”37 The only significant exception to this decline was Frankenstein; or, The Vampire’s Victim, a “Melodramatic Burlesque”38 by “Richard Henry” (the pseudonym of the dramatic duo Richard Butler and Henry Chance Newton) that “united characters inspired by Shelley[’s Frankenstein] and Polidori[’s The Vampyre], drew large audiences, and ran for 106 per­for­mances.”39 It was staged at the Gaiety Theatre in 1887, the year which also saw the production of such diverse works as Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello, W. S. Gilbert and Albert ­Sullivan’s Ruddygore, and Emmanuel Chabrier’s Le roi malgré lui. Compared with its hypotext, however, Richard Henry’s “three-­act extravaganza” 40 with m ­ usic by Wilhelm Meyer Lutz (1829–1903) appeared “so removed [. . .] from Shelley’s story that the reader has the impression that neither of its two playwrights ever read the novel.” 41 The availability of the piano score, itself a sign of change in the musico-­literary market of the last two de­cades of the nineteenth ­century, makes it pos­si­ble to recognize Meyer Lutz as “a graceful composer in the school of [Daniel] Auber” and his “rather politely academic stage m ­ usic” as “a body of efficient, tulle-­weight tunes and songs which served prettily to illustrate the comic high-­jinks and girlie antics of the ‘new burlesque’ genre.” 42 “The flexible nature of nineteenth-­century theatre ­music and its capacity for multifunctionality” is further exemplified by the “incidental

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songs” 43 composed by Robert Martin (1846–1905)—­better known as “Ballyhooly” from the title of his most popu­lar song—­one of the few serious musicians “who can write a good Irish song, and sing it well, into the bargain.” 44 From the 1890s ­until 1944, art ­music seemed to lose interest in Frankenstein, which was instead eagerly appropriated by the now fast-­developing movie world and, therefore, by film ­music. As a consequence, ­t here emerged a host of worthy composers, very often trained by the g­ iants of twentieth-­century Western ­music, who specialized in Frankenstein soundtracks, among them Don Banks (1923– 1980), James Bernard (1925–2001), Nicholas Carras (1922–2006), Robert Cobert (1924-), Carl Davis (1936-), Paul Dunlap (1919–2010), Raoul Kraushaar (1908– 2001), Joel McNeely (1959-), Richard Peaslee (1930–2016), Hans J. Salter (1896– 1994), Leonard Salzedo (1921–2000), Frank Skinner (1897–1968), Franz Waxman (1906–1967), and Malcolm Williamson (1931–2003). In order to again materialize in art ­music, Mary Shelley’s novel had to wait for Paul Hindemith (1895–1963). In the words of his biographer, “in exile in Amer­i­ca Paul and Gertrude Hindemith soon found new friends and they would regularly invite guests to make ­music with them, including two young violin students from Yale University in New Haven, where Hindemith taught from 1940 onwards.” Luitgard Schader continues: “In about 1944 [Hindemith] wrote a string quartet setting for their ensemble of the first of the Three Easy Pieces for Cello and Piano [1938] and gave it the unusual title Frankenstein’s Monster Repertoire, as the four musicians [Paul and Gertrude Hindemith, Blanche Raisen, and Jean Harris Mainous] had discovered a common passion for Frankenstein films.” 45 Hence also the name of the ensemble, The Frankenstein Quartet. Some de­cades ­after World War II, it was Heinz Karl Gruber (1943-)—an Austrian composer of the so-­called Third Viennese School—­who reasserted Frankenstein’s presence in art ­music, though in a fluid, indirect, and protean musico-­literary way. His cameo-­like reinterpretation of Mary Shelley’s novel, mediated through a poem from Hans Carl Artmann’s Allerleirausch: Neue schöne Kinderreime (1968), went through several successful transformations: Frankenstein Suite (a sequence of songs and dances) in 1971; Frankenstein!! A pan-­demonium for baritone chansonnier and orchestra a­ fter ­children’s rhymes in 1976–1977; Frankenstein!! [. . .], version for soloist and 12 players in 1979; and fi­nally, Frankenstein!! [. . .], theatre version in 1983. Appropriately, as pointed out by David Drew, Gruber’s, Frankenstein ­music united the style of the Salon Concerts and the instrumental style of the MOB Ensemble with sonorities reminiscent of Konjugationen but achieved it with the aid of c­ hildren’s instruments which might have been borrowed from the instrumental theatre of Mauricio Kagel [. . .]. It was a brilliant feat. But it was not, alas, a finished composition. The form of the original “recital” had remained, and the score itself was still in the nature of a sketch, however inspired.46

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The transitional de­cades between the twentieth and twenty-­fi rst centuries (approximately from the late 1970s to the 2010s) have witnessed a resurgence of interest in Mary Shelley’s masterpiece on the part of art m ­ usic: since 1976 several new ballets, chamber operas, and operas have been produced.47 Paul Hindemith’s playful and miniaturized reinterpretation of Frankenstein “for home string quartet per­for­mances” 48 was followed by two other purely instrumental reinterpretations of Shelley’s novel. Th ­ ese larger-­scale orchestral pieces w ­ ere composed by two American artists, Libby Larsen (1950-) and Mark Grey (1967-). The latter of ­these works, Mark Grey’s Frankenstein Symphony, is a 35-­minute orchestral work, based on the 1818 edition of the novel, “cast in five movements, each representing a key episode in the opera: [. . .] ‘Genesis,’ ‘The Letter,’ ‘The Lab,’ ‘The Trial’ and ‘The Body.’ ” 49 It premiered at the Atlanta Symphony Hall in February  2016 before the first per­for­mance of Grey’s full-­length Frankenstein Opera, which ­will have its bicentenary premiere at the Théâtre Royal de La Monnaie in Brussels during the 2018–2019 season. Libby Larsen’s “What the Monster Saw” (The Cleveland Chamber at Cleveland State University, 1987), an 11-­minute “orchestral fantasy,” was a precursor to a then already-­in-­progress opera titled Frankenstein, or the modern Prometheus (The Minnesota Opera, 1990), “a large-­scale, multimedia opera with some of its roots in rock-­n-­roll [that goes] beyond the limits of the nineteenth-­ century opera ­house.”50 Libby Larsen lamented the fact that, “of the hundreds of adaptations, [. . .] only a few have remained true to their primary source” while many “have strayed far away from the novel.”51 It is perhaps for that reason that she felt the urge to write her own libretto. Larsen’s “What the Monster Saw” is “based on part two of [the 1818 version of] Mary Shelley’s novel,” drawing its inspiration from the chapters where “the monster confronts Frankenstein.”52 As Deborah B. Crall has observed, . . . ​since “What the Monster Saw” was a study piece for the opera, Larsen used it to develop her ideas in a musical format and to experiment with technology, not only with using the electronic keyboard in the orchestration, but in coordinating images projected on a screen with the ­music. In addition, the ­music for “What the Monster Saw” is through composed, varying for each sensibility. The piece is made cohesive through the interjection of small motives and vamping patterns.53

In the prefatory “Philosophical Focus” to Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, Larsen ideologically roots her Frankenstein spree in easily recognizable “parallels between the late 18th-­century conflict of church and alchemy and the 20th-­century conflict between church and medical research” as well as in the twenty-­fi rst-­century actualization of the eternal dilemma surrounding “the ­human being [. . .] who, by succumbing to intellectual egotism and ambition, becomes alien in the society he wishes to enrich. He becomes monstrous.”54 As

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we know, the Monster is never given a name in Shelley’s story. Interestingly, Larsen creates a musical parallel in her opera as “the Monster never sings”55 and, in the final moments of Scene 14, “lights fade on the image of Walton and Ship Victor, leaving only the infinite presence of the Monster. Always ­there. . . . ​. . . .​ . . . ​Always h ­ ere.”56 Fi­ nally, the Australian composer Richard Graham Meale (1932–2009) turned to the celebrated Australian writer David Malouf (1932-) to compose the libretto of his opera Mer de Glace: An Opera in Two Acts with Prologue (Sydney Opera House, 1991). The Meale-­Malouf partnership produced a new, original, though rather “controversial,” plot that “concerns Shelley, Byron, Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont, and intertwines the real­ity of their relationships during a stay near Mont Blanc with the fantasies, largely sexual, that made Mary create the story of Frankenstein and his monster.”57 In the late 1980s when Mer de Glace was ­under way, determined “to honestly pursue his individual creative voice,” the Australian composer experienced “a radical artistic ‘about turn’ [. . .] through his quest for a new lyricism [. . .] and his reengagement with more formal classical structures.” Quite unsurprisingly, his decision “of renouncing the atonal idiom of the avant-­garde [. . .] in favour of a new kind of musical Romanticism”58 coincided with his approach to Mary Shelley’s life and masterpiece through a personal reinterpretation of Frankenstein’s “uncouth and inarticulate sounds.”

Notes 1. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, ed. M. Keith Joseph (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), 104. 2. Mary Shelley, The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,” ed. Betty T. Bennett, Vol. 1, A Part of the Elect (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 393. 3. On musico-­literary analy­sis see Enrico Reggiani, Il do maggiore di questa vita: Cinque saggi sulla cultura musico(-)letteraria di lingua inglese (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2016), 13–16. 4. Mary Shelley, The Last Man (London: Henry Colburn, 1826), 3: 240. The source of the poetry quotation “silver key of the fountain of tears” is P. B. Shelley’s fragment To M ­ usic (ca. 1820). Throughout this essay, I use the term “art ­music”—­a more culturally appropriate expression than the more usual though historically limited “classical m ­ usic.” According to Suzel Ana Reily’s general and pithy definition, its main features are its “aesthetic sophistication” and “(rational) aesthetic princi­ples,” “universal validity,” and a supposed elitism that functions as a marker of “social distinction.” Suzel Ana Reily, “Folk ­Music, Art M ­ usic, Popu­lar M ­ usic: What do t­hese categories mean ­today?” Paper presented at British Forum for Ethnomusicology Annual Conference (Newcastle University, April 18–21, 2007), 3 and 5. http://­w ww​.n ­ cl​.­ac​.u ­ k​/­sacs​/­music​-c­ onferences​/­BFE2007​/R ­ ound​table​ SAR​.­pdf. 5. Lucy Morrison, “Listen While You Read: The Case of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,” in Mary Shelley: Her Circle and Her Contemporaries, ed. L. Adam Mekler and Lucy Morrison (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 154. 6. Morrison, “Listen While You Read,” 155. 7. The only (partial) exception I am aware of is James Wierzbicki’s “How Frankenstein’s Monster Became a ­Music Lover,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 24, no.  2 (2013): 246–63.

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8. The interpretation of t­ hese musico-­literary textual loci requires a focused, sustained interdisciplinary hermeneutic effort, as I explain in Enrico Reggiani, Il do maggiore di questa vita. 9. Lisa Vargo, “Contextualising Sources,” in The Cambridge Companion to “Frankenstein,” ed. Andrew Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 26. 10. On Rousseau in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, see David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 184–85; Peter Brooks, “ ‘Godlike Science/Unhallowed Arts’: Language, Nature, and Monstrosity,” in The Endurance of “Frankenstein”: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 209. 11. Francis Godwin, The Man in the Moon, ed. John Anthony Butler (Ottawa: Dove­house Editions, 1995), 103. Godwin described his account as “an essay of fancy, where invention is showed with judgment” (2). 12. See Peter Edgerly Firchow, Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 57. 13. Walter Scott, Waverley; or, ’tis Sixty Years Since (Edinburgh-­London: Constable and Co.-­Longman-­Hurst-­Rees-­Orme and Brown, 1815), 1: 126. 14. Richard Payne Knight, An Analytical Inquiry into the Princi­ples of Taste (London: T. Payne and J. White, 1805), 50. 15. William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Po­liti­cal Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (London, 1793), 1: 46. William Jillard Hort, A General View of the Sciences and Arts: Equally Adapted to Domestic and to School Education (London: Longman-­Hurst-­Rees-­Orme and Brown, 1822), 2: 262. 16. See the passage where the Creature “placed his hated hands before [Victor’s] eyes” to take from him “a sight which you abhor” while asking him to listen to his story (F 101, italics mine). 17. For an analogous use of the expression “the [. . .] sound of malice,” see John Marston, “First Part of Antonio and Mellida,” in The Works of John Marston, ed. A. H. Bullen (London: John C. Nimmo, 1887) 1:88. Jacqueline Mulhallen recalls that P. B. Shelley “owned a 1605 copy of John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan” and that “playreading was more than a pastime, as the Shelleys learnt from it practical theatrical techniques.” Mulhallen, The Theatre of Shelley (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2010), 80. The same expression is used by William Warburton in “Remarks on Several Occasional Reflections,” in The Works of the Right Reverend William Warburton, Lord Bishop of Gloucester (London, 1788), 6: 272—­a work that William Godwin mentions he has read in his diary on October 21, 1802; see Godwin, The Diary of William Godwin, ed. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010). http://­godwindiary​.­bodleian​.o ­ x​.­ac​.­u k​/ ­bibl​ /­te1357​.­html. 18. For the expression of the dev­il’s “malice” see William Godwin, ­Things as They Are; Or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams (London, 1794), 53. 19. On the dev­i l’s capacity to “poison the air”: The ­Table Talk of Martin Luther, trans. and ed. William Hazlitt (London: Bell and Daldy, 1872), 247. In William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Duncan Wu recalls that, around 1804, “Hazlitt was a frequent visitor to Godwin’s home, where he became familiar with the entire ­family which at this time included the six-­year-­old Mary Shelley” (80). 20. Daniel Spillane, “The Development of American Industries Since Columbus. XII: Musical Instruments. I.—­t he Piano-­Forte.” The Popu­lar Science Monthly 40, February (1892): 473. https://­en​.­w ikisource​.­org​/­w iki​/­Popular​_ ­Science​_­Monthly​/­Volume​_­40​/­Feb​ ruary​_­1892​/­T he​_­Development​_­of​_­A merican​_­I ndustries​_­Since​_­C olumbus:​_­Musical​ _­Instruments​_­I. See Mary Shelley’s other references to the piano in The Last Man, 1: 297; Lodore (London: Richard Bentley, 1835), 2: 140; Falkner (London: Saunders and Otley, 1837),

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1: 281. On the organ meta­phor, Diana K. R ­ eese, Reproducing Enlightenment: Paradoxes in the Life of the Body Politic; Lit­er­a­ture and Philosophy around 1800 (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2009), 27. 21. Leslie David Blasius, “The Mechanics of Sensation and the Construction of the Romantic Musical Experience,” in ­Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism, ed. Ian Bent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 4. 22. Andrew Pinnock, “King Arthur Expos’d: A Lesson in Anatomy,” in Purcell Studies, ed. Curtis Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 243. Pinnock specifies that his “essay is to warn against Frankenstein’s errors—­t he Frankenstein of the film, who stitched a lot of ill-­matched parts together and made a Creature. We run the same risk with King Arthur. His scattered remains have been painstakingly re-­assembled; but some bits are missing, some corrupt: and it is not clear where some should go.” Oliver Vogel states: “Doch nicht anders als in dem 1818 erschienenen Schauerroman um einen “modernen Prometheus” von Mary Wollstonecraft [sic] ist es auch in Reichas Vorstößen die Beseelung der individuellen musikalischen Form, die sich dem Experiment verweigert” [the inspiration for the individual musical form that rejects the experiment is also in Reicha’s attempts, not unlike the horror novel about a “modern Prometheus” by Mary Wollstonecraft [sic], published in 1818]. Vogel, Der romantische Weg im Frühwerk von Hector Berlioz (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2003), 226. Fi­nally, Leslie Blasius writes that, like Mary Shelley’s tale, “Hummel’s exercise [. . .] doubles the transcendental musical text. The exercise, like Frankenstein’s monster, is preternaturally aware of the presence of the ‘true’ musical text, shadowing it, manipulating it, re-­creating in itself the appearance if not the sincerity or substance of this true ­music. Thus the insertion of Bach or Handel into Hummel’s method serves to reassert the artificiality of the exercise” (“The mechanics of sensation,” 18). 23. Cindy Cox, “Wounds Like Flowers Opening: A Discussion of Hysteria for Trombone and Four-­channel Tape,” Organised Sound 8, no. 1 (2003): 87 and 85. 24. On Frankenstein’s art-­ music compositional reception, though without significant musico-­literary analyses, see H. Philip Bolton, “Mary Shelley,” in ­Women Writers Dramatized: A Calendar of Per­for­mances from Narrative Works Published in En­glish to 1900 (London: Mansell, 2000), 264–306; and Margaret Ross Griffel, Operas in En­g lish: A Dictionary, revised edition (Plymouth: Scarecrow Press, 2013). Scant references to Frankenstein’s art-­music compositional reception are in The Endurance of “Frankenstein”: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Donald F. Glut, The Frankenstein Archive: Essays on the Monster, the Myth, the Movies, and More (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002); Audrey A. Fisch, Frankenstein: Icon of Modern Culture (Westfield, Hastings (UK): Helm Information, 2009). 25. On nineteenth-­century melodramas based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, see Steven Earl Forry, Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of “Frankenstein” from the Nineteenth ­Century to the Pres­ent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). 26. Bolton, “Mary Shelley,” 265. 27. Bolton, “Mary Shelley,” 266. 28. Charles Edward Horn and Samuel James Arnold, The Woodman’s Hut: A Melo-­drame in Three Acts. The only edition existing, which is faithfully marked with the stage business, and stage directions, as it is performed at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, and En­glish Opera (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1822), 4 and 5. 29. Diane Long Hoeveler, “Nineteenth-­Century Dramatic Adaptations of Frankenstein,” in The Cambridge Companion to “Frankenstein,” edited by Andrew Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 179. 30. Bolton, “Mary Shelley,” 266. 31. Michael  V. Pisani, ­Music for the Melodramatic Theatre in Nineteenth-­C entury London and New York (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), xix. See also David Mayer, “The ­Music of Melodrama,” in Per­for­mance and Politics in Popu­lar Drama, ed.

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David Bradby, Louis James and Bernard Sharratt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 49–63. 32. Bolton, “Mary Shelley,” p. 271 (n. 1667). For details of Watson’s life see Roy Johnston (with Declan Plummer), The Musical Life of Nineteenth-­Century Belfast (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 114; Hugh Macdonald, Beethoven’s C ­ entury: Essays on Composers and Themes (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008), 36. 33. “New ­Music and the Drama,” The Monthly Magazine: Or, British Register 58, no. 2 (1824): 163. 34. For the violin duets see David J. Golby, Instrumental Teaching in Nineteenth-­Century Britain (London: Routledge, 2016), 196–7. For the piano-­forte works, “­Music. New M ­ usic,” The London Literary Gazette; and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, &c. 13, no. 632 (February 28, 1829): 151. 35. Hoeveler, “Nineteenth-­Century Dramatic Adaptations,” 186. Obviously, any analy­sis of the melodramatic adaptations of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece should take into account which of the two versions of the novel (1818 or 1831) was used as the textual basis of the new work. What emerges from a first analy­sis is that the 1818 version is the preferred hypotext of the Frankenstein stage adaptations, even though, as I argued earlier, the 1831 edition is actually richer from a musico-­literary point of view and, therefore, potentially the more alluring for composers. 36. “Alfred Mellon,” The London Journal: and Weekly Rec­ord of Lit­er­a­ture, Science, and Art 34 (October 12, 1861): 248. 37. Bolton, “Mary Shelley,” 265. A notable exception is the reemergence of nineteenth-­ century melodrama in the 40-­minute Frankenstein! Or a Bolt from the Blue: A Victorian Melodrama for Schools, op. 95 (1987) by the British composer Carey Blyton. 38. Bolton, “Mary Shelley,” 279 (n. 1725). Richard Henry, Frankenstein: Burlesque Melodrama, with incidental songs by Robert Martin, the M ­ usic by W. Meyer Lutz. Vocal Score (London: C. Jefferys, 1888). 39. Lester D. Friedman and Allison B. Kavey, Monstrous Progeny: A History of the Frankenstein Narratives (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 82. 40. Hoeveler, “Nineteenth-­Century Dramatic Adaptations,” 186. 41. Forry, Hideous Progenies, 63. 42. Kurt Gänzl, “Lutz, (Wilhelm) Meyer (1829–1903),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). http://­0​-­w ww​.­oxforddnb​.­com​.­opac​ .­unicatt​.i­ t​/v­ iew​/a­ rticle​/­34639. 43. Pisani, ­Music for the Melodramatic Theatre, xvi. For a definition of “incidental ­music” in the context of nineteenth-­century melodrama see xvi-­x vii. 44. Samuel Murray Hussey, The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent (London: Duckworth and Com­pany, 1904), 274. For Martin’s nickname, see Julie Anne Stevens, The Irish Scene in Somerville and Ross (Newbridge: Irish Academic Press, 2007), 81. 45. Luitgard Schader, “Preface,” in Paul Hindemith’s Frankenstein’s Monster Repertoire. For String Quartet (Mainz: Schott M ­ usic Edition, 2009), n.p. See also Rüdiger Jennert, Paul Hindemith und die Neue Welt: Studien zur amerikanischen Hindemith-­Rezeption (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 2005), 45. 46. David Drew, “HK Gruber: A Formal Introduction from Two Sides,” Tempo, New Series, 126 (September 1978): 19. 47. Among the ballets: Wayne Eagling, Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus (1985); ­Matthew Wright, The Ballet of Doctor Frankenstein and his Monster (1988); Michael Kallstrom, Frankenstein (2016); Lowell Liebermann, Frankenstein (2016). Among the chamber operas: Frederic Rzewski, Mary’s Dream (1984); Allan Jaffe, Mary Shelley (1996); Mira J. Spektor, Villa Diodati (2012). Among the operas: Joseph Baber, Frankenstein (1976); Gregory Sandow, Frankenstein (1980); Joseph Turrin, Frankie (1990); Neil Wolfe, Birth/day: The Frankestein Musical (1993); Philip Hageman, Dark and Stormy Night (1997); Andrea

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Liberovici, Frankenstein Cabaret (2001); Sally Beamish, Monster (2002); Shirley R. Barasch, Mary Shelley and Her Frankenstein (2009). 48. Stephen Luttmann, Paul Hindemith: A Research and Information Guide (New York: Routledge, 2009), 423. 49. Georgia Rowe, “Frankenstein. A Symphony by Mark Grey, Comes to Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall,” Marin In­de­pen­dent Journal, April  25, 2016. http://­w ww​.­marinij​.­com​/a­ rticle​ /­ZZ​/­20160425​/­NEWS​/­160426781. 50. Alicia Cook, “The Evolving Style of Libby Larsen” (Master’s diss., Butler University, 1996), 83 and 82. 51. Libby Larsen, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus: An Opera in Three Acts, 1989 (Fenton, MO: E. C. Schirmer ­Music Com­pany, a division of ECS Publishing Group), i. By kind permission. 52. Libby Larsen, “What the Monster Saw,” in Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus: An Opera in Three Acts. https://­l ibbylarsen​.­com​/­i ndex​.­php​?­contentID​= 2­ 36&profileID​ =­1 199&​startRange. 53. Deborah B. Crall, “Context and Commission in Large-­Scale Texted Works of Libby Larsen” (Ph.D. diss., The Catholic University of Amer­i­ca, 2013), 88. http://­cuislandora​.­w rlc​ .­org​/i­ slandora​/­object​/e­ td%3A237​/­datastream​/­PDF​/­v iew. 54. Larsen, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus: An Opera in Three Acts, i. 55. Crall, “Context and Commission,” 82. 56. Libby Larsen, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, a musical drama without intermission in prologue and fourteen scenes, based on Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus,” m ­ usic and libretto by Libby Larsen (Boston: E.  C. Schirmer M ­ usic Com­pany, 1990), 353. In Larsen’s opera, Ship Victor is “a wizened, older Frankenstein [. . .]. The Victors represent crucial, antithetical aspects of the creative act. [Stage] Victor [tenor] embodies invincible, singular ambition, unmindful of the consequences. Ship Victor [tenor] embodies the tragic hindsight of consequence” (Larsen, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus: An Opera in Three Acts, ii). 57. Fred R. Blanks, “Live Per­for­mance: Vanishing Singers.” The Musical Times 132, no. 1786 (December 1991): 621. 58. Robyn Holmes, “Richard Meale 1932–2009,” in The Australian Acad­emy of the Humanities: Annual Report 2011–2012, ed. Elizabeth Webby (Canberra: Australian Acad­emy of the Humanities, 2012), 30.

chapter 8

z Enter Monsieur le Monstre Cultural Border-­Crossing and Frankenstein in London and Paris in 1826 Diego Saglia

One of the most frequently quoted documents in Frankenstein’s reception history is Mary Shelley’s letter to Leigh Hunt of September 11, 1823, in which she recorded seeing Richard Brinsley Peake’s adaptation of her novel as Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein. ­After opening at the En­glish Opera House (the former Lyceum Theatre) on July 28, the play had a staggering initial run of thirty-­ seven nights, inspired three burlesques, and was successfully revived in 1824. On August 28, 1823, Mary Shelley attended a per­for­mance, during which she enjoyed Thomas Potter Cooke’s acting as the nameless Creature (indicated as “__________” in the playbill) and appreciated the fame the play indirectly brought her.1 Her remark in this letter about the Creature’s name—­“this nameless mode of naming the un(n)ameable is rather good”2—­qualifies Frankenstein’s creation as an enigma, a point of semiotic fuzziness, while also suggesting that, through his repeated acts of naming the Creature, Victor himself becomes the monster he is so insistently denominating.3 In the same year, Henry M. Milner produced a competing play, Frankenstein; or, the Demon of Switzerland, which opened at the Royal Coburg Theatre on August 18 and ran for a mere eight nights. This, however, was not his last attempt, for in 1826 he produced another play that transformed Shelley’s source material further and, as this essay demonstrates, made a decisive contribution to its popularity. Entering mainstream culture by way of t­ hese adaptations-­cum-­remediations, Frankenstein began to circulate more and more widely in the guise of a melodrama, with its mesmerizing spectacular aesthetics, clearly separated spheres of good and evil, and largely conservative ideological inclinations.4 The relevance of t­ hese early theatrical versions to the reception and diffusion of the Frankenstein tale is well known. As William St. Clair remarks, “it was not 15 7

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the book but stage adaptations of the story which kept Frankenstein alive in the culture.”5 Each per­for­mance of the plays of 1823 brought more ­people into contact with the story than the novel ever did at the time. The dramatizations thus opened a new phase in the reproduction of Shelley’s “hideous progeny,” rapidly becoming popu­lar favorites and increasing public demand for them. As a commentator wrote of Peake’s play in the London Magazine in 1823, “The audience crowd to it, hiss it, hail it, shudder at it, loath it, dream of it, and come again to it. The piece has been damned by full h ­ ouses night a­ fter night.” 6 The vari­ous ways in which Presumption reinvents the source narrative have already been the object of scholarly attention.7 The play introduces the figure of the doctor’s assistant (named Fritz) and the ele­ments of magic and alchemy, while the Creature’s strength is rendered by actions on stage that make vis­i­ble its superhuman physical power, something at which the novel only occasionally hints.8 Moreover, the play introduces an extensive creation scene accompanied by pyrotechnics and culminating in the Creature’s awakening and violent reactions. On the one hand, Peake’s Creature is a dumb, automaton-­like being with “the mind of an infant” easily hypnotized by m ­ usic.9 On the other, however, it is the focus of the play, a fact that marks the start of the misapplication of the name Frankenstein, which w ­ ill be reinforced by l­ ater remediations.10 Also, in line with the tenets of melodrama, Peake’s text emphasizes domesticity and the affections by ascribing Victor’s fatal experiments to unrequited love rather than to over-­reaching ambition. Similarly, making the death of Victor and his creation fully vis­i­ble, the play proclaims a complete defeat of evil that seems to deliver a moralizing interpretation in contrast with the novel’s open-­ended finale.11 ­These structural and thematic modifications correspond to as many changes to the ideological import of the tale. The play drastically reconfigures and reduces what Jeffrey Cox calls the “encounter with the absolute” offered by the novel, since the Creature no longer stands for a sublime force beyond ­human control but is a product of ­human ingenuity, a transformation which Cox reads as a “retreat from the Gothic’s radical questioning of traditional religion.”12 By contrast, Lia Guerra sees the Creature’s dumbness as contradicting interpretations of the play as a hollowed-­out version of its much more complex and resonant source material: muteness turns the gestural code into “prelapsarian speech” that is the play’s “only instrument for representing the sublime,” so that Presumption “only apparently” amounts to a “tamed and moralizing” rendering of Shelley’s narrative.13 As Steven Earl Forry acknowledges, the melodramas of 1823–26 “share the responsibility for shaping the destiny [. . .] of popu­lar conceptions of the novel,” yet the works staged in 1826 have received less critical attention, possibly ­because, coming a­ fter Peake’s inaugural adaptation, they have been often seen as belated and epigonic.14 But in fact, as this chapter aims to show, they made crucial contributions to the reinterpretation and diffusion of the Frankenstein tale. One

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major novelty was that, in 1826, Presumption inspired the French adaptation Le Monstre et le magicien which then provided the source for Milner’s The Man and the Monster and John Atkinson Kerr’s The Monster and the Magician. Focusing on this relatively underexplored Anglo-­French “conversation,” the examination that follows aims to demonstrate that the contemporaneous Frankenstein plays in London and Paris deserve further attention beyond assessing their respective merits, degrees of faithfulness to the novel, or levels of popu­lar success. The plays of 1826 recovered the changes made by Peake, contributed further transformations, and positioned Frankenstein in a trans-­Channel, Anglo-­French, performative, as well as more broadly cultural space. As the French and En­glish plays of 1826 made Frankenstein a hit on both sides of the Channel, Mary Shelley’s tale started its gradual conversion into a fully Eu­ro­pean phenomenon. Thus, with influences g­ oing both ways, the 1826 texts and per­for­mances provide a remarkable instance of transcultural traffic and exchange, while also making the Frankenstein phenomenon a highly significant example of intercultural transferences in Romantic-­period Eu­rope.15 France played a central part in this pro­cess. In Paris, Jean-­Toussaint Merle and Antoine-­Nicolas Béraud reworked Peake’s text into Le Monstre et le magicien, which opened on June 10, 1826 at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-­Martin for a run of 96 per­for­mances. They convinced the now gout-­ridden Cooke to resume the role of the Creature, and the play was such a success that it instantly gave rise to an unpre­ce­dented “Frankenstein-­mania” phenomenon in the French capital. Back in London, Milner produced his adaptation of the French hit for the Royal Coburg, The Man and the Monster; or, The Fate of Frankenstein (July 3, 1826), which proved nearly as popu­lar as Peake’s Presumption.16 A mea­sure of its success was that it was revived well into the 1840s and that it was published by John Duncombe in the year of its stage debut, unlike Presumption which did not appear in print ­until 1865.17 A more faithful version of the French play by John Atkinson Kerr, The Monster and the Magician, opened at the New Royal West London Theatre on October 9, yet ran for a mere four per­for­mances. In the same year, the success of this second wave of Frankenstein-­based entertainments inspired a revival of Presumption with a new ending in the style of the French play, which concluded with an impressive storm scene.18 A heavi­ly modified version of Peake’s melodrama, Merle and Béraud’s Le Monstre et le magicien was tailored to suit the taste of Paris theater-­goers. The frontispiece of the first edition defined it as a mélodrame féerie (the super­natural being a distinctive feature of French drama in this period) and as a play à ­grand spectacle, that is, one characterized by impressively spectacular devices. It was also a type of frénétique melodrama consonant with the kind of extravagantly hyperbolic lit­er­a­ture that was being promoted by authors and dramatists such as Théophile Gautier, Gérard de Nerval, and Charles Nodier, who is often indicated as having co-­authored Le Monstre et le magicien.19

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The play reworks Peake’s plotline and its sequence of episodes centered around the Creature’s creation, its wreaking havoc in and around Victor’s laboratory, the De Lacey inset tale, and the final catastrophe with the death of the creator and the monster. Merle and Béraud changed names and reassigned roles, setting the play between an unspecified central Eu­ro­pean location and the shores of the Adriatic Sea near Venice, or at least u ­ nder Venetian rule. Victor Frankenstein becomes Zametti, a sixteenth-­century alchemist (the time is that of Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus), aided by his servant-­assistant Pietro. Zametti has a six-­year-­old son, Antonio, and loves Cecilia, the ­daughter of an old blind man named Olben, and ­sister of Janskin, the leader of a band of gypsies, repudiated by his f­ ather in the style of Franz Moor in Friedrich Schiller’s Die Räuber. Zametti’s pro­cess of creation is aided by the Génie de la roche noire, the “Genius of the black rock,” a super­natural being that adds black magic to the play’s other féérie features (and a clear echo of the evil spirit Samiel in Carl Maria von Weber’s wildly popu­lar 1821, Der Freischütz). The cast also includes many additional characters—­male and female gypsies and villa­gers, sbires (henchmen), and Zametti’s servants. The Creature is eventually killed by lightning, electricity spelling its death rather than its birth as in l­ater cinematic reinterpretations. The production required the importation of complex new stage machinery from ­England. As theater historian Maurice Albert rec­ords, the man­ag­er of the Porte Saint-­Martin travelled to London to study new machinery and the ways of reproducing it in Paris. The result, Albert remarks, was nothing short of revolutionary: “Jamais, avant la repre­sen­ta­tion anglaise à la Porte-­Saint-­Martin du Monstre et du Magicien, on n’avait vu chez nous machinerie plus compliquée et plus extraordinaire” [Never, before the En­glish per­for­mance at the Porte-­ Saint-­Martin of The Monster and the Magician, had we seen more complicated and extraordinary machinery in our theaters].20 In par­tic­u ­lar, the vampire trap (known as la trappe anglaise or “En­glish trap”), in­ven­ted for James Robinson Planché’s The Vampire (1820) in which Cooke had also starred as the monstrous protagonist, astonished French spectators by enabling Zametti’s Creature to vanish instantaneously through solid surfaces. As Albert put it, in 1826 the Creature “bouleverse le théâtre du sous-­sol aux frises” [upsets the play­house from the basement to the friezes], and spectators w ­ ere so shocked and terrified that “[ils] croyaient assister à la fin du monde” [they thought they ­were witnessing the end of the world].21 If this language may seem overwrought and not appropriately detached from the phenomenon it describes, in fact it echoes the expressions employed by con­temporary accounts and reviews of this frénétique melodrama to convey some idea of its effect on its awestruck audiences. Hyperbolic reactions from the time are well exemplified by La Nouvelle année littéraire, one of whose commentators exclaimed of Merle and Béraud’s play: “C’est une fureur! c’est une rage! Succès colossal!” [It’s a frenzy! It’s a rage! Colossal success!].22 Similarly, on July 10, 1826, Le Moniteur universel extravagantly

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remarked: “Le succès du Monstre est monstrueux comme lui-­même [. . .] les plébéiens du parterre et des galleries se font assommer pendant deux ou trois bonnes heures avant d’être placés; on se bat maintenant, on se tuera dans quelques jours” [The success of Le Monstre is monstrous like itself [. . .] the plebeians in the stalls and the galleries get knocked about for two or three hours before being seated; we fight now, we w ­ ill kill each other in a few days].23 The summer of 1826 saw Pa­ri­sian theater audiences in the throes of a passion for monstrosity which, though British in origin, had acquired peculiarly local features through what reads like a textbook instance of cultural translation and adaptation.24 As mentioned above, in London, Milner’s The Man and the Monster premiered in early July at the Royal Coburg. A few months ­later, Kerr’s more respectful though less successful The Monster and the Magician transformed Zametti back into Frankenstein and borrowed the nautical conclusion (Act 3, last scene) from the French source, making it more adventurous and increasing the opportunities for the use of machinery and other effects, as well as for the physical exertions of the actors playing the Creature and Frankenstein. Thus, Kerr gave the spectacular but relatively tame French finale the full treatment generally reserved for the nautical melodramas that w ­ ere beginning to dominate the stage thanks to such plays as William T. Moncrieff’s Shipwreck of the Medusa (1820), Edward Fitzball’s The Pi­lot (1825) and, l­ater, Douglas Jerrold’s Black-­Eyed Susan (1829). In several re­spects, however, it is Milner’s version rather than Kerr’s that deserves attention as, on the one hand, an original and transformative reworking of Shelley’s novel through the French reinvention of Peake’s melodrama, and, on the other, as the play of 1826 that, on the En­glish side of the Channel, actively contributed to the internationalization of Frankenstein. First and foremost, The Man and the Monster emphasizes a crucial change in the staging and per­for­mance of the monstrous. Both Peake’s and Milner’s plays re-­envision monstrosity as, in Chris Baldick’s definition, “something frighteningly unnatural or of huge dimensions” in contrast to earlier conceptions of a monster as a morally aberrant being, which ­were still pertinent to Shelley’s Frankenstein.25 Aptly, Milner’s melodrama adopts Peake’s denomination of the Creature as “__________.” Yet, at the same time, it develops in a dif­fer­ent direction, since it stresses the outlandish nature of the Creature by reinterpreting the unnatural coloring given to it by Peake’s Presumption and the French play. The original playbill for the former indicated that the Creature wore a light blue costume, and the Theatrical Observer dismissively called it a “blue dev­il.”26 The French play took this feature, made it a distinguishing trait of the Creature’s otherness, and started an irresistibly disturbing trend. In his Recollections and Reflections (1872), James Robinson Planché recorded his visit to Cooke in Paris and noted that “monstre bleu, the colour he painted himself” was “the fashion of the day” in the French capital.27 Instead, Sinnett’s Picture of Paris (1845), a guidebook

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that also offered a retrospective view of the rise and expansion of the city, ­later stated that this popu­lar color was “pale green à la Monstre.”28 E ­ ither way, the plays of 1826 in Paris and London decidedly shifted away from a more recognizably h ­ uman skin tone or even the yellowish one mentioned in Shelley’s novel.29 The stress was now on a non-­human tint qualifying the Creature as a visibly alien entity. Moreover, in Milner’s play, the tint spilled over onto the Creature’s body, since, as the direction in the printed edition specifies, its costume was “heightened with blue, as if to show the muscles.”30 Through this modification, possibly influenced by the French play in which, according to Planché, Cooke was painted blue, The Man and the Monster intensified the significance of the Creature’s blue otherness, throwing into relief its superhuman physique and strength as the most immediately striking signs of its potential for terrifying onstage action. The fact that Milner’s play offers a heavi­ly embodied repre­sen­ta­tion of monstrosity transforms further the Creature’s pre­sen­ta­tion and agency as established by Shelley’s novel, where at one point Frankenstein defines it as a “filthy mass that moved and talked.”31 By contrast, the plays abolish voice and (especially Milner’s) award primacy to the idea of the horrible “mass,” a frighteningly physical force that poses a potentially unconquerable threat. Moreover, this bears on what Peter Brooks sees as the Creature’s symptomatic function in the novel as “a signifier standing for the indecipherable signifier of unconscious desire.”32 That of the monster, he adds, is a “narrative of unrequited desire and unappeasable lack.”33 None of this is pres­ent or pos­si­ble in Milner’s play, where the body takes over and annuls the interaction of sight and speech, or vision and language, that is central to Shelley’s narrative evocation of the Creature. The Man and the Monster relocates its monstrosity in the body, which becomes the site of an unsettling otherness made directly vis­i­ble to the audience by the blue color and the muscular frame it enhances. In addition, as mentioned above, Milner’s melodrama places the Creature’s overwhelming physical presence center stage through a fully developed creation scene (Act 1, scene 3) characterized by an increasing tension and punctuated by appropriate ­music climaxing when the black cover hiding “a colossal h ­ uman figure” is removed and the monster “slowly begins to rise, gradually attaining an erect posture.”34 This initial shock is followed by the movement of the Creature’s eyes as it “glares [. . .] upon him”35 (a reprise of his awakening in Shelley’s novel), and then by a series of spectacular feats of physical agility, which, as in Peake’s Presumption, are a staple feature of his agency in the play. The Man and the Monster also accentuates the Creature’s colossal physicality by allowing it to range over a much more extensive portion of Eu­rope than the “Geneva and its vicinity” of Peake’s play.36 The action takes place near “the foot of Mount Etna,” and in Act 1 a gondola is seen approaching the Sicilian shore bearing Frankenstein’s patron, the Prince del Piombino, the prince’s ­sister, and several attendants.37 However incorrect and faintly absurd, this coupling of a

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Sicilian landscape with a Venetian boat suggests a broadly Mediterranean location (from the Adriatic to the Ionian sea) that, in turn, highlights the play’s engagement with an entire geo-­cultural space. As in the novel, this geography relates to the Creature’s ability to abolish distance through its superhuman strength and speed. It intimates that its monstrosity can spread virus-­like beyond geo­graph­i­cal barriers and other obstacles. Similarly, it hints at the scientist’s insatiable, high Romantic Wanderlust. His definition as a “foreign adventurer” by Quadro, the prince’s majordomo, defines him as a particularly mobile or “liquid” figure who disregards the local and domestic ties promoted by con­temporary melodramas.38 More radically than its pre­ce­dents, Milner’s play enables the creator and his creature to travel over vast territories, thus making fully pres­ent to the audience the uncontainable danger they embody. Monstrosity becomes a universal threat that can affect every­one everywhere. Furthermore, from a historical-­cultural perspective, the relocation of the plot to the South signifies a return to the Mediterranean and Catholic settings of 1790s Gothic, as well as a reference to the South of Eu­rope, and Italy especially, as a po­liti­cally explosive area in the 1820s. In his version of the French play, Kerr kept the original references to Venice and the Adriatic, the inland setting associated with the Bohemians (or gypsies), and the German-­sounding surnames of several characters. In par­tic­u­lar, Kerr’s melodrama characterizes Venice through its distinctive institutions (as in the mention of the “Council of Ten”) and by awarding it a policing function,39 while the catastrophe unfolds among the waves of the Adriatic, the sea that was traditionally linked to the city’s commercial and naval power. As already mentioned, Milner moves the setting to Sicily, but keeps a reference to Venice through the introduction of the gondola. Another shared feature is that both plays are set in lands in turmoil, with roaming outlaws (in Kerr) or villa­gers on the rampage (in Milner). Similarly, both works conjure up a more diverse and detailed social picture than Peake’s Presumption, one that is endowed with geo-­political nuances in line with the situation of Mediterranean countries, like Venice and Sicily, as potentially explosive, revolutionary locations throughout the 1820s. The eruption of the volcano (the play closes with Etna “vomiting burning lava” 40) is telling in this re­spect. A highly popu­lar feature of illegitimate entertainments, especially melodramas, and a symbol of the power of nature over Frankenstein’s aspirations, the eruption is also a modified version of the arctic funeral pyre at the end of the novel. In historical and po­l iti­c al terms, it reads as a coded reference to the vari­ous revolutions and states of unrest in Southern Eu­ro­pean countries, as mentioned before—­from the uprisings in Spain and Portugal in 1820, and in Piedmont and Naples (and Palermo) in 1820–21, to the Greek fight for in­de­pen­dence.41 In The Man and the Monster Milner delves further into socio-­political concerns by presenting not only the typically melodramatic theme of home but also

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an aristocratic space, the prince’s palace and estate,42 an eminently unstable location owing to Frankenstein’s experiment, the monster’s destructive actions, and the villa­gers’ and guards’ pursuit of it. In par­tic­u­lar, the socio-­political issues inscribed in this place revolve around the agency of the crowd. In line with the French source, and as in Kerr’s version,43 Milner introduces large numbers of villa­gers who repeatedly appear on stage in pursuit of the monster. A ­ fter Julio, the young prince, has been found dead (Act 1, scene 8), the “variously armed” peasants begin to chase the monster—­the indication “variously armed” reappearing explic­ itly in the long stage direction for Act 2, scene 4, and implicitly in the finale when the Creature counter-­attacks and forces the villa­gers to retreat.44 Thus the villa­gers become a newly con­spic­u­ous feature punctuating the play through a choreography of pursuits that make the crowd a highly perturbing component of Milner’s dramatis personae. This is accentuated by the fact that, though the crowd’s movements are confined to the estate, it actually takes justice into its own hands by arming itself and being “furnished with strong cords.” 45 In other words, the crowd mutates into a mob that con­temporary audiences might interpret as an allusion to the revolted crowds of Southern Eu­ro­pean revolutions and of more general situations of socio-­political instability. The play’s construction of a fraught socio-­political context is made patent also by the introduction of the figure of the prince, who openly declares that “rank and opulence can never do themselves greater honour, than by protecting and assisting talent and genius.” 46 He stresses this point further by noting that “the prince who, conscious of his merit, rewards, assists, and forwards it, not only reaps the fruit of his sublime discoveries, but becomes the sharer of his immortality.” 47 Aiming to benefit eco­nom­ically from Frankenstein’s discovery, the prince is not only an old-­style patron acting out of aristocratic largesse, but also a capitalistic investor. In turn, that of the peasants is not a revolt against capitalism per se (indeed, they never rebel against the prince), but a way of opposing and neutralizing the product of cap­i­tal­ist investment, the Creature itself. This development is a major step forward in the transformation of Frankenstein into a byword for socio-­political and economic threats and a “con­ve­nient tag for ­t hose who feared change.” 48 As Jane Moody has pointed out, Milner “transforms Mary Shelley’s novel into a quasi-­political drama about rebellion against an autocratic power,” and does so by expanding the category of the monstrous, which is no longer limited to the Creature, but also characterizes Victor and the prince through his autocratic display of power.49 In addition, even the Creature’s death in the crater of Mount Etna indicates that, though hounded and ultimately defeated by the prince’s troops, it has not “capitulated to the power of the state.”50 As a result, the Creature reads not only as a manifestation of cap­i­tal­ ist power, but also as its antagonist, bearing out Franco Moretti’s interpretation of Frankenstein as a fictional translation of the socio-­economic nightmares

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induced by advancing capitalism.51 The moment in Act 1, scene 8, when “the Monster rushes up the steps of the throne and laughs exultingly,”52 delivers a final tableau encapsulating the Creature’s semiotic ambivalence: is it laughing at the prince and the soldiers? Or is it laughing b ­ ecause, having enthroned itself, it proclaims that, what­ever its enemies may do, no one can stop the pro­gress of technology and capital? If all the features examined so far are indicative of the structural, thematic, and ideological transformations in Milner’s play, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, The Man and the Monster is not merely relevant in light of such intra-­textual questions, but also from a broader, extra-­textual perspective. Together with its French antecedent and to a lesser extent Kerr’s play, Milner’s melodrama was a crucial starting point for the transformation of Frankenstein into a phenomenon transcending linguistic and cultural bound­aries within the context of interrelations connecting the London and Paris stages. The ongoing and often fraught conversation between the two theatrical traditions made a major contribution to the mutation of Frankenstein into a cultural product aimed at transnational audiences. This cross-­Channel theatrical traffic, which never completely stopped during the long conflict of 1793–1815, resumed with renewed intensity in the post-­ Waterloo years. The two cultural capitals kept an eye on each other and imported their respective products (though with a significantly higher number of French plays travelling to ­England) within a general climate of national jealousy and competition. The Frankenstein plays of 1826 ­were an expression of this climate, as indicated by an overview of current theatrical offerings published in The New Monthly Magazine for December 1827. The author begins with a series of remarks about Paris and the contradiction characterizing its theaters ­because of the existence of a “sub-­t heatrical public” that enjoys “the most extravagant violations of all rules” and, in the case of plays from beyond the Channel, despises Shakespeare, yet “doat[s] on Mr. Cooke in the Monster, and consecrate[s] ribands to his fame.”53 The paradox of Pa­r i­sian audiences who reject canonical En­g lish drama but extravagantly worship Cooke in Le Monstre affords too good an opportunity for an anti-­French jibe to be missed by this commentator, who, by the same token, confirms the careful, and largely envious, scrutiny of the theatrical season of both capital cities on the part of French and En­glish critics and reviewers. The success of Merle and Béraud’s play in 1826 Paris was undeniably phenomenal. On June 13, 1826, L’Etoile, journal du soir defined it as the most impor­tant dramatic event of the week. It also reported that the play had been “long-­temps annoncé sous le nom de Frankenstein” [announced for some time with the title of Frankenstein], which testifies to the familiarity of the French public with Shelley’s original (the novel had been translated into French and published in 1821) and to the fact that the name could be used to increase expectation and attract

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viewers.54 The article also contains a telling misunderstanding, since the author describes the Creature as “une statue animée” [an animated statue] which mutates into “un monstre hideux de formes, ami du mal” [a horribly ­shaped monster, a friend of evil].55 In other words, at this point the Creature is already metamorphosing into the artificial, technologically manufactured monster of ­later, and especially cinematic, remediations. Fi­nally, in keeping with the conservative outlook of the newspaper, the author applauds the final punishment and “dénouement convenable” [appropriate catastrophe], which spells the destruction of the “horribly ­shaped monster” and completely neutralizes its threat.56 As to the development of the transcultural destiny of Frankenstein, the article in L’Etoile highlights how the 1826 production of Le Monstre et le magicien saw the importation of new stage devices that ­were formerly available only “sur les premiers théâtres de Londres” [in London’s premier theaters] and particularly, but not exclusively, the trappe anglaise.57 This machinery, moreover, did not just come from London, but was the work of an En­glishman named in the frontispiece to the published playtext as Tomkins.58 The reviewer praises this technician’s innovative mechanisms and the astonishing effects they afforded in connection with the monster’s first appearance on stage: “la manière dont il s’enfonce sous la terre” [the way it sinks underground], its bursting through walls, fire and explosions, and the realistic impression of the waves and wind in the closing scene.59 Tomkins’s trappes ­were also especially effective in the scene where Zametti conjures up the “Genius of the black rock” and in the episode where the monster seizes Zametti’s son, Antonio, and makes his escape by g­ oing through a solid wall.60 Of course, the latter feat of physical prowess was part of Cooke’s “remarquable” per­for­mance of monstrosity, that is, his translation onto the Pa­ri­sian stage of the pantomimic skills he had been honing in London play­ houses for about two de­cades.61 Contravening further any hierarchical distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate drama, the author suggests that “il est une foule de procédés mécaniques employés dans cet ouvrage que l’Opéra ne peut se dispenser d’adopter” [­there is a wealth of mechanical devices in this work which the opera cannot refrain from adopting].62 Thus, while celebrating the play’s spectacularity and its En­glish origins, the article bears witness to the climate of competition between legitimate and illegitimate entertainments, which at this time characterized both London and Paris, as well as declaring the primacy of illegitimate spectacle in terms of profit if not prestige. On the one hand, the article in L’Etoile sheds light on the pro­cess of the internationalization of Frankenstein by examining the vari­ous ways in which the British theatrical tradition began to infiltrate the Pa­ri­sian stage in the early to mid-1820s. Also, besides illuminating forms of cultural comparison and self-­positioning, it registers the anx­i­eties raised by intercultural contacts and exchanges between a culturally influential France and a po­liti­cally and eco­nom­ically dominant Britain. Yet, on the other hand, as an article in a daily newspaper offering an

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immediate reaction to the play, it does not explore the implications of Le Monstre much beyond the text and the per­for­mance in question. By contrast, Stendhal offered a wider-­ranging response to the play in his series of “Sketches of Pa­r i­ sian Society, Politics, and Lit­er­a­ture,” written in French and then translated into En­g lish, and published in The New Monthly Magazine between January 1826 and August 1829. Reacting to the universal worship of Cooke recorded by L’Etoile, Stendhal begins his remarks on Merle and Béraud’s play by focusing on the actor’s overwhelming popularity. At the same time, he examines the broader significance of this phenomenon by describing Cooke as a transnational icon and then transforming him into a symbolic crucible of Anglo-­French theatrical, and more comprehensively cultural, relations. Providing more than a mere reconstruction of the changes Shelley’s Creature undergoes on stage, Stendhal opens up a complex nexus of questions concerning cross-­Channel exchanges and, especially, that of the imperviousness of French culture to the tradition, as well as present-­day manifestations, of Britain’s theater. In the concluding paragraph of the (undated) “Sketch” published in the issue for July 1826 he writes: “An En­glish performer named Cooke has lately appeared with extraordinary success at the Theatre de la Porte Saint Martin. The piece in which he has performed is a melo-­ drama entitled “Le Monstre,” taken from Mrs. Shelley’s romance of Frankenstein. National vanity has at length permitted an En­glish actor to appear on a Pa­ri­sian stage; but I ­shall return to this subject in my next letter.” 63 In the next article, dated “Paris, July, 1826” (and published in the New Monthly for August 1826), Stendhal resumes his observations by noting that “the En­glish performer, whom I mentioned in my last letter, is playing with increased success” and that his acting has “excited by turns, the terror and the tears of the ladies.” 64 Cooke’s per­for­mance aside, the secret of the play’s popularity remains a mystery to Stendhal, who declares it to be “quite unintelligible.” 65 He also finds the w ­ hole theatrical and social phenomenon associated with the play and actor utterly “trifling in itself.” 66 And yet, in his discussion he awards Cooke and Le Monstre a relevance and an emblematic function that go well beyond the acknowl­edgment of yet another fash­ion­able but mediocre play on the Pa­ri­sian stage. He sees them as the germs of a radical transformation of theatrical taste in the French capital and no less than the pos­si­ble beginning of a reformation of the national drama. In the “Paris, July, 1826” sketch Stendhal adopts the standpoint and opinions of a French commentator unaware of Cooke’s popularity in London. At the same time, though, he voices his own firmly held and highly polemical views on the inadequacies of French culture by levelling an attack at the customary French hostility to British drama and actors, which had climaxed a few years previously when, in July 1822, the “Penley troupe” had been hissed off the stage while performing Shakespeare in En­glish (again at the Porte Saint-­Martin theater). This

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incident was the occasion for Stendhal’s caustic two-­part essay Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825), in which he advocated an injection of En­glish dramaturgy as a way of renovating and modernizing French theater.67 In the sketch dated “July, 1826,” he resumes his castigation of his compatriots’ reluctance to welcome British or English-­language plays and performers, but also moves his critical standpoint from a French to an international and transcultural one; in the pro­cess, he awards the stage Frankenstein of 1826 an emblematic role in the fortunes of the cultural relations between the two rival capitals. For Stendhal, the Frankenstein phenomenon of 1826 amounts to more than the occasional success of an ephemeral play. It represents a significant episode in the development of cultural modernity, in that it encapsulates the tensions between the traditionalism of what was known as the Classical faction and the countervailing revolutionary tendencies of the Romantics, as well as between an antiquated concept of national theater and its reformation. Stendhal goes so far as to suggest a hybridizing pro­cess based on “the grave, reflective, half-­English character of our theatrical audiences in 1826.” 68 In view of what he interprets as the changing taste of Pa­ri­sian theater-­goers, he suggests that the mania for Frankenstein could usher in the creation of a highly beneficial English-­language theatrical season in Paris: “The success of Mr. Cooke has accelerated, by five or six years, the period when we may hope to see an En­glish theatre established in Paris.” 69 An English-­language season in the French capital could indeed bring about a progressive cultural rapprochement of the two cities and nations, paralleling the appreciation of French drama and per­for­mance made pos­si­ble by London’s season of French-­language plays and confirmed by “the applause the En­glish are now bestowing on Pothier, Bernard Leon, and Perlet.”70 In addition, an English-­language season would set in train the renovation of the French stage which, Stendhal bluntly declares, “can only be reformed by an approximation, in the repre­sen­ta­tion of ­great po­liti­cal catastrophes, to the methods employed by Shakespeare.”71 Thus, while reprising the main ideas in Shakespeare et Racine, he assigns to Le Monstre and Cooke’s contribution to its success a pivotal role in the pro­cess of cross-­cultural influence and mutual transformation linking Britain and France—­a pro­cess rooted in forms of gradual admixture and interpenetration, since only what Stendhal sees as the unfolding “half-­English” character of the Pa­ri­sian audience (at least the more cultivated sections of it) can provide the necessary premises for this renovation to spread and proliferate. Thus, the circumstances of Cooke’s triumph no longer appear trifling. They are, rather, indicative of a potential sea-­change in the French theatrical and cultural world. “It is curious,” Stendhal notes, “that the success of a bad melodrame should prove a death-­blow to the partizans of old ideas.”72 However, internal cultural politics aside, Stendhal also casts the Frankenstein phenomenon as a crucial episode in the unstoppable increase in cross-­Channel contacts and

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exchanges that leads to the creation of an intercultural space with incalculable consequences, especially for France. In addition, though focusing exclusively on the impact of Merle and Béraud’s work in Paris, Stendhal’s sketches afford revealing insights into the import of the plays of 1826 more generally. Thanks to Le Monstre and Milner’s melodrama and, more limitedly, Kerr’s version, Frankenstein began to overcome linguistic and cultural bound­aries and gradually came to occupy an intermediate position in which two cultures scrutinized, examined, and borrowed from each other. In view of this pro­cess, Milner’s play needs to be read as a culturally transitional text, one that toned down the féerie features of Le Monstre et le magicien, while still overtly acknowledging its French origin in the frontispiece of the first edition.73 More generally, the Frankenstein plays of 1826 in London and Paris, together with the broader cultural comments and reflections they generated, testify to the existence of an intercultural space in which the British capital figured as a lively center for dramatic productions adapted from foreign sources, whereas the French one experienced a progressive exposure to foreign drama and acting. In a letter dated July 18, 1826, Mary Shelley asked the playwright John Howard Payne, then in Paris, to buy some books for her: “I have not yet received the drama of F. [Frankenstein]—­I want [. . .] to purchase & send me another book— it is the edition of LByron works published at Paris.”74 The “drama of F.” is, of course, Le Monstre et le magicien, which was driving Pa­ri­sian audiences crazy in the summer of that year. ­There seems to be no evidence to confirm ­whether she ever obtained a copy of the play, ­whether she read it and what she thought of it, or even if she ever attended any per­for­mances of Milner’s and Kerr’s melodramas. Yet the request to Payne testifies to her awareness of the increasingly international popularity of her Creature. She knew that “Frankenstein” had become a trans-­Channel phenomenon, that it was now as familiar to theater-­ going audiences in Paris as it was in London, and that it had started fostering new progenies on the Continent and that it was living a bilingual life that was increasingly in­de­pen­dent from the novel. By the end of 1826, the international and transcultural existence of the Frankenstein myth was well ­under way.

Notes 1. Mary Shelley, Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 136. 2. Shelley, Selected Letters, 136. 3. Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York: Routledge, 1989), 133–5. 4. See Jeffrey N. Cox, “The Death of Tragedy; or, the Birth of Melodrama,” in The Performing ­Century: Nineteenth-­Century Theatre’s History, ed. Tracy  C. Davis and Peter Holland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 161–81. 5. William St. Clair, “The Impact of Frankenstein,” in Mary Shelley in Her Times, ed. Betty  T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 51.

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6. “The Drama,” London Magazine 8 (September 1823): 322. 7. See Jeffrey N. Cox, “Introduction,” in Seven Gothic Dramas 1789–1825 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), 66–69, and Diane Long Hoeveler, “Nineteenth-­Century Dramatic Adaptations of Frankenstein,” in The Cambridge Companion to “Frankenstein,” ed. Andrew Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 175–80. 8. See Louis James, “Frankenstein’s Monster in Two Traditions,” in Frankenstein, Creation, and Monstrosity, ed. Stephen Bann (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 80. 9. Lia Guerra, “ ‘This nameless mode of naming the unnameable . . .’: Frankenstein a teatro,” in Il teatro della paura: scenari gotici del romanticismo europeo, ed. Diego Saglia and Giovanna Silvani (Rome: Bulzoni, 2005), 194. 10. See Cox, Seven Gothic Dramas, 68 and Steven Earl Forry, Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of “Frankenstein” from Mary Shelley to the Pres­ent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 36–37. 11. Guerra, “ ‘This nameless mode,’ ” 187. 12. Cox, Seven Gothic Dramas, 67. 13. Guerra, “ ‘This nameless mode,’ ” 197, 194 (my translation). 14. Forry, Hideous Progenies, 3. 15. The materials examined in this essay lend themselves to a variety of potential teaching applications at vari­ous levels. Most evidently, the 1826 Frankenstein plays can be employed to focus on modes of adaptation (novel to stage) and forms of pre-­cinematic entertainment, and, from a thematic perspective, to explore questions of corporeality, performativity, and po­liti­cal and economic ideologies. More generally, this textual corpus may offer useful insights for comparative, cross-­cultural analyses and for examinations of the nature and development of transcultural phenomena. In ­t hese ways, this essay implicitly expands and updates the suggestions offered in Approaches to Teaching Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (New York: The Modern Language Association of Amer­ i­ca, 1990). 16. Forry, Hideous Progenies, 11. 17. Forry, Hideous Progenies, 13. 18. See Michael Burden, “The Novel in the Musical Theater: Pamela, Caleb Williams, Frankenstein, and Ivanhoe,” in The Afterlives of Eighteenth-­Century Fiction, ed. Daniel Cook and Nicholas Seager (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 204. 19. On the French phenomenon of Romantisme frénétique, see Anthony Glinoer, La littérature frénétique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009). See also Ginette Picat-­ Guinoiseau, Nodier et le théâtre (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1990). 20. Maurice Albert, Le théâtre des boulevards (1789–1849) (Paris: Société française d’imprimerie et de librairie, 1902), 307. 21. Albert, Le théâtre des boulevards, 307. 22. Quoted in Christian A. E. Jensen, L’évolution du romantisme: l’année 1826 (Geneva: Droz; Paris: Minard, 1959), 35. 23. Quoted in Sarah Hibberd, “Monsters and the Mob: Depictions of the Grotesque on the Pa­ri­sian Stage, 1826–1836,” in Textual Intersections: Lit­er­a­ture, History and the Arts in Nineteenth-­Century Eu­rope, ed. Rachel Langford (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 33. 24. On cultural translation, see Diego Saglia, “Modes of Transit: Cultural Translation, Appropriation, and Intercultural Transfers,” in Bridging Cultures: Intercultural Mediation in Lit­er­a­ture, Linguistics and the Arts, ed. Ciara Hogan, Nadine Rentel and Stephanie Schwerter (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2012), 93–112. 25. Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity and Nineteenth-­Century Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 10. 26. Hoeveler, “Nineteenth-­Century Dramatic Adaptations,” 176–7. 27. James Robinson Planché, The Recollections and Reflections of J. R. Planché: A Professional Auto­biography (London: Tinsley ­Brothers, 1872), 1: 90.

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28. Frederick Sinnet, Sinnet’s Picture of Paris (London: Joseph Masters; Paris: F. Sinnet, 1845), 149. 29. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text, ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 39. 30. Forry, Hideous Progenies, 190. 31. Shelley, Frankenstein, 121. 32. Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 212. 33. Brooks, Body Work, 213. 34. Forry, Hideous Progenies, 194. 35. Forry, Hideous Progenies, 194. 36. Forry, Hideous Progenies, 135. 37. Forry, Hideous Progenies, 190, 191. 38. Forry, Hideous Progenies, 197. 39. Forry, Hideous Progenies, 225. 40. Forry, Hideous Progenies, 204. 41. In this re­spect, see Percy Bysshe Shelley’s description of the new dawn of libertarian movements in Southern Eu­rope as a volcanic explosion in the opening stanza of his “Ode to Liberty” (1820). 42. See Forry, Hideous Progenies, 190. 43. Forry, Hideous Progenies, 222. 44. Forry, Hideous Progenies, 198, 202, 204. 45. Forry, Hideous Progenies, 202. 46. Forry, Hideous Progenies, 192. 47. Forry, Hideous Progenies, 192. 48. St. Clair, “The Impact of Frankenstein,” 55; see also Forry, Hideous Progenies, 36. 49. Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 95. 50. Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, 95. 51. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Won­ders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms (London: Verso, 2005), 85–90. 52. Forry, Hideous Progenies, 198. 53. “The Drama,” The New Monthly Magazine, 21 (December 1827): 511. 54. “Théâtre de la Porte-­Saint-­Martin. Le Monstre et le magicien,” L’Etoile, journal du soir 4041 (June 13, 1826): 4. 55. “Théâtre de la Porte-­Saint-­Martin,” 4. 56. “Théâtre de la Porte-­Saint-­Martin,” 4. 57. “Théâtre de la Porte-­Saint-­Martin,” 4. 58. See John McCormick, Popu­lar Theatres of Nineteenth-­Century France (London: Routledge, 1993), 153. 59. “Théâtre de la Porte-­Saint-­Martin,” 4. 60. See McCormick, Popu­lar Theatres, 153. 61. “Théâtre de la Porte-­Saint-­Martin,” 4. 62. “Théâtre de la Porte-­Saint-­Martin,” 4. 63. [Stendhal,] “Sketches of Pa­r i­sian Society, Politics, & Lit­er­a­t ure,” The New Monthly Magazine 17 (July 1826): 90. 64. [Stendhal,] “Sketches of Pa­ri­sian Society, Politics, & Lit­er­a­ture,” The New Monthly Magazine 17 (August 1826): 184, 186. 65. [Stendhal,] “Sketches” (August 1826): 186. 66. [Stendhal,] “Sketches” (August 1826): 184. 67. Diego Saglia, “Theatre, Drama, and Vision in the Romantic Age,” in The Oxford Handbook of Eu­ro­pean Romanticism, ed. Paul Hamilton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 761.

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68. [Stendhal,] “Sketches” (August 1826): 184–5. 69. [Stendhal,] “Sketches” (August 1826): 185. 70. [Stendhal,] “Sketches” (August 1826): 185. 71. [Stendhal,] “Sketches” (August 1826): 185. 72. [Stendhal,] “Sketches” (August 1826): 184. 73. Forry, Hideous Progeny, 189. 74. Mary Shelley, The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980–88), 3: 403.

chapter 9

z The Theme of the Doppelgänger in James Searle Dawley’s Frankenstein Daniele Pio Buenza

James Searle Dawley’s film Frankenstein (1910) is an adaptation or, following Werner Wolf,1 an intermedial transposition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). Given the technical affordances of the cinematic medium at the time, Dawley could not transpose the entire novel: his Frankenstein, thus, focused on one of the themes of the original—­t hat of the doppelgänger. In the discussion that follows, the analy­sis is developed on two interwoven levels. First, I w ­ ill look at the filmic text, and the promotion surrounding it, to show how the theme of the double was elaborated, both within the film and in relation to the source text.2 Secondly, I ­w ill show how the intermedial nature of Frankenstein concerns not only the external dimension of the film, through explicit references to lit­er­a­ture and doppelgängers, but also the deeper meta-­ filmic dimension, through implicit references to the (self-­reflexive) relationship between fiction and psychoanalysis. Thus, this essay has the potential to engage scholars, teachers, and students interested in cinema and psychoanalysis and, at the same time, it could be used as a way to further explore some of the main themes of Shelley’s novel—­such as, for example, Frankenstein’s subconscious. The essay is divided into four parts: an introduction, in which the 1910 Frankenstein and the promotional narratives around it are placed within the pa­norama of the early American film industry; a synopsis of the film, which outlines the main events of the plot; a close reading of the film, which analyzes how the theme of the double is developed, also in relation to the scientific context of the time; and a conclusion, which suggests in what ways, and why, the intermedial nature of Dawley’s Frankenstein involves, and requires, a reconsideration of the overall cultural significance of the film. 173

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Frankenstein: A “Liberal Adaptation”3 The first ever filmic transposition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was released on March 18, 1910. Written and directed by James Searle Dawley, it was titled Frankenstein, and it starred Augustus Phillips as Frankenstein, Charles Ogle as the creature, and Mary Fueller as Frankenstein’s bride. It was produced by the American Edison Studios (part of the Edison Manufacturing Com­pany), and shot in January 1910 at their studios in Decatur Ave­ nue, the Bronx, New York. Frankenstein is less than 14 minutes long, an average length at that time for the many motion pictures that w ­ ere constantly being released by the cinema industry.4 Like other films, too, it had a short life span: once distributed and shown, the copies would be sent back. Yet, Frankenstein was also unique: ­because of the special effects and the elaborate make-up that was used, the shooting lasted three days—as opposed to the single day that usually sufficed to make a film. Its prominence is attested by the fact that a photo of a scene featuring the creature was on the front cover of the promotional brochure—­The Edison Kinetogram, dated March 15, 1910—­that was sent by the Edison Com­pany to its distributors.5 The choice of transposing a literary classic was also fairly common at the time, and it can be explained as the attempt to legitimize the still new cinematic medium “through contagion” 6 and to transform it, in a Bourdieusian vision of the cultural field, into a highbrow form of art by emphasizing the seriousness of the content.7 Indeed, on a practical level, transposing lit­er­a­ture had the potential to appeal to the affluent ­middle classes, satisfying both the movie exhibition industry, which yearned for the legitimization of the new medium through such prestigious recognition,8 and the American bourgeoisie, who could thus justify their enjoyment of the new art. But it is also clear that Frankenstein was made and promoted for a wider audience: the choice of a literary subject was seen as a way to educate the lower-­class masses,9 and the use of special effects could attract that part of the public that was less interested in the story or its origins. The Kinetogram makes plain this double promotional effort, dividing the potential public between ­t hose who had read the novel, and ­t hose who had not: To ­those who are familiar with Mrs.  Shelley’s story it ­w ill be evident that we have carefully omitted anything which might by any possibility shock any portion of an audience. To t­ hose who are not familiar with the story we can only say that the film tells an intensely dramatic story by the aid of some of the most remarkable photographic effects that have yet been attempted. The formation of the hideous monster from the blazing chemicals of a huge caldron in Frankenstein’s laboratory is prob­ably the most weird, mystifying and fascinating scene ever shown on a film.10

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The plot description/commentary provided in the Kinetogram follows ­these two audience-­oriented narratives: one discussing the content of the transposition and directed, supposedly, at the educated upper classes; the other emphasizing the film’s spectacular aesthetics, addressed to ­t hose who, according to the production, would not have allegedly been able to engage with the deeper meanings.11 More generally, the function of the Kinetogram was to sell Frankenstein: first, given the moralistic preoccupations of the time,12 to state in print that the content of the film had been self-­censored, and cleared of any pos­si­ble moral impurities, was valuable information that would put the minds of all ­t hose involved in the cinema industry at rest; secondly, to focus the narrative on the scenes that featured special effects, even if to the detriment of a detailed account of the plot, served to stress t­ hose ele­ments which, in the production’s view, could make the film more appealing and, thus, more profitable.13 As a result, the Kinetogram’s exegesis of the film is patently skewed by its propagandistic slant. Although Frankenstein is advertised as a “liberal adaptation” of Shelley’s work that “concentrate[s] its endeavours upon the mystic and psychological prob­lems that are to be found in [Shelley’s] weird tale,” the way the Kinetogram explains how this is achieved is evidently nothing more than an anti-­censorship moral clarification imposed on the film. This is quite clear from the last intertitle, which explains that the creature had been created by the impurity of Frankenstein’s love for his bride.14 In no way, however, could such a conclusion have been reached, ­either from the fragmentary description provided in the Kinetogram or, as we ­w ill see, from the film itself: when the monster dis­appears, he does so of his own accord and ­t here are no signs (scenic or other­w ise) that show how this happened ­because of Frankenstein’s newly purified love. Thus, rather than bringing the viewers any closer to understanding the meaning(s) of the film, the Kinetogram’s exegesis has two contrary effects. Firstly, it increases the perception that the film is episodic and full of illogical gaps, or, as Shane Denson put it, that it “lacks [. . .] sophisticated narrative development, depth of characterization, and psychological motivation.”15 This perception is also strengthened by the direct influence that the Kinetogram has on some of the intertitles, which attempt to bridge the difference between the filmic repre­sen­ta­tion of the story and the psychological interpretation. Secondly, the promotional narrative featured in the Kinetogram advertises the content of the transposition as more unfaithful to Shelley’s original than it r­ eally is. Despite the technical difficulties presented by working with a single reel of film, in fact, the transposition manages to explore one of the themes of the source text, that of the doppelgänger, with a certain critical depth, modernizing its meanings in a way that fitted in with the cultural climate of the 1910s.

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Frankenstein’s Synopsis The story develops through a series of tableaux which, with one exception, are shot from a fixed-­camera, long-­d istance frontal perspective. This a­ ngle, as in most early films, gives the impression of sitting in a theater.16 We count nine dif­ fer­ent scenes,17 each preceded by an intertitle which explains what is about to happen, and in which no direct speeches are ever reported. The intertitles can be divided into two types: the first type are narrative and useful to explain the plot; the second type are interpretive—­they address the psychological dimension of the characters, attempting to connect the film more closely to the Kinetogram’s account of it. Both types are affected by the quantitative and qualitative imbalance between images and words that characterized cinema in t­ hose years.18 Furthermore, the intertitles belonging to the first type, despite being key to a basic understanding of the plot, suffer from the fact that they rely too much on the viewers’ previous knowledge of Shelley’s Frankenstein, while the intertitles belonging to the second type are ­t hose which lead the audience the most astray b ­ ecause they force the psychological interpretation of the Kinetogram onto the film. The following analy­sis, in line with the divisions made in the Kinetogram, ­will divide the film into three parts: the first act, comprising five scenes, from Frankenstein’s departure to the aftermath of the monster’s creation; the second act, of two scenes, from the moment of Frankenstein’s return home to just before his marriage; the third act, also of two scenes, from Frankenstein’s marriage to the disappearance of the monster.

Act One Act one is the part where the greatest temporal shift takes place: between scenes one and two, two years go by. The first intertitle prepares the viewer for the reason of Frankenstein’s farewell to his f­ ather and his beloved (1), telling the audience that “Frankenstein leaves for college.” The second intertitle takes us, without any further explanation, to the moment Frankenstein has succeeded in his research: “two years ­later Frankenstein has discovered the secret of life.” On his knees, like a new Hamlet, he talks to a skull (2). Thus, the following scene leads the spectators to the moment “just before the experiment” (as the intertitle reads), when Frankenstein writes a letter to his beloved (3). The contents of this letter are shown on the screen: he states that he has discovered “the secret of life and death” and that, in a few hours, he w ­ ill create “the most perfect h ­ uman being.” Also, he writes that once he has accomplished such a task, he ­will return to claim her as his bride. The scene ends with Frankenstein throwing the letter on the desk, taken by the frenzy of the upcoming experiment. The following intertitle warns the

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audience that “instead of a perfect ­human being the evil in Frankenstein’s mind creates a monster.” It is the first intertitle that refers to Frankenstein’s psychological dimension: up to this moment, he seemed intentioned to create a real ­human being—as in Shelley’s novel. The scene of the creation follows (4). It is the only scene where two dif­fer­ent camera ­angles alternate: one, in which we have the usual long shot that shows the w ­ hole scene; and the second, a point-­of-­v iew shot in which we share Frankenstein’s view as he peeps through the hole in the door of the alcove where the creation takes place. The creation itself resembles more a magic act than a scientific creation: Frankenstein throws some substances into a vat and, ­after a substantial puff of smoke, the monster starts growing from the inside. Frankenstein does not realize he has created a monster u ­ ntil the end of the pro­cess; once born, the creature’s abominable hand, coming through the door, is the ele­ment that confirms that he did not manage to create a “perfect h ­ uman being.” The last scene of the first act brings us back to Frankenstein’s room (5). The intertitle reads: “Frankenstein appalled at the sight of his evil creation.” Frankenstein recoils in his room and sits down at his writing desk. Then, he stands up again and points his fin­ger at the off-­screen space from which he came in: the monster, despite his physical absence from the stage, is already a presence. Frankenstein, at this point, falls on the bed: it is not clear ­whether he has fainted onto it or not. While he is lying t­ here, from the back of the scene (and thus from a dif­fer­ent place than the one indicated by Frankenstein), the monster peers at his creator through the curtains of the bed, just like Frankenstein peered in at him while he was forming in the vat. Frankenstein wakes up and sees the monster, and faints again to the floor. The monster realizes that Frankenstein’s servant is coming into the room and leaves the scene, disappearing ­behind the curtains. The servant finds Frankenstein senseless, lying on the floor, and revives him. The latter, once awoken, looks around for the monster and, seeing that he is no longer t­ here, starts crying.

Act Two The first scene of act two (6) is introduced by the intertitle “the return home.” It is a transitional scene to set up the continuation of the story back at home, and serves as a bridge to the longest scene of the film. Frankenstein is welcomed back by his f­ ather and his f­ uture bride; Frankenstein and his beloved embrace. The following scene (7) thus constitutes, almost on its own, the entirety of the second act. The intertitle reads: “haunting his creator and jealous of his sweetheart for the first time the monster sees himself.” Frankenstein is sitting in his library reading a book (at the bottom left-­hand side of the screen). On the right-­ hand side, a mirror widens the camera ­angle, opening onto a space that would other­w ise be cut off from view. A closed door is reflected in the mirror. While

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reading, Frankenstein stops for a second and raises his head as if to think about something. At this point, his ­f uture wife enters the room and closes the door b ­ ehind her. Frankenstein first stands up, and then kneels on the seat while his beloved comes next to him to put a r­ ose into his jacket’s buttonhole. She then sits on the armrest and they embrace; ­a fter this, she stands up and takes what appears to be a teapot and goes off-­screen to the right, walking past the mirror. Once Frankenstein’s beloved is gone, the monster opens the door, appearing in the mirror. As if in an act of recognition, Frankenstein points a fin­ger at the reflected image of the creature; he then stands up and turns ­towards him, recoiling while he approaches. The two point at each other; then, Frankenstein bids the monster to leave by indicating the door from which he entered. At this juncture, through similar gesturing and also with the help of what appear to be intelligible words,19 the creature starts communicating with him: first, he points ­towards the off-­screen space where Frankenstein’s f­ uture wife now is; then, ­towards Frankenstein; fi­nally, in an accusatory manner, ­towards himself. For the first time, moreover, the creature goes on to touch Frankenstein: in two attempts, he successfully takes the r­ ose from the buttonhole and throws it to the floor. Realizing that Frankenstein’s ­f uture bride is returning, the monster hides ­behind a curtain at the center back of the screen. Frankenstein’s beloved carries in a tray with some cups which she puts on the ­table. Frankenstein, worried, places himself in front of the curtain hiding the monster; he then convinces his ­f uture wife to leave the room, accompanying her to the door. In the meanwhile, the monster comes out from ­behind the curtain. Frankenstein closes the door and goes ­towards the monster to face him: the latter, once more, points his fin­ ger at his creator, and then at the door through which Frankenstein’s ­future wife has just gone. Th ­ ere is a verbal altercation followed by a strug­gle, in front of the mirror, and Frankenstein is very quickly brought down to the floor. At this point, however, the monster looks up and, for the first time (as we know from the intertitle), he sees his own reflection: he stares at his image; then, he raises his hands and points his fin­ger, once more reproachfully, ­towards Frankenstein. Fi­nally, the creature raises his arms and face to the ceiling and hurries away t­ owards the same door from which he had entered.

Act Three Act three opens with the intertitle “on the bridal night Frankenstein’s better nature asserting itself.” We are brought to the night of the wedding, when the guests are leaving the ­house (8). The newlywed ­couple stands at the center of the scene and several p ­ eople go to shake their hands and take their leave. When the c­ ouple is fi­nally left on their own, Frankenstein closes the glass door (at the center-­back of the scene): they are, thus, in the intimacy of their home. He

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accompanies his wife to one of the internal doors. Once she has left, he sets about ­going to bed: he blows out the candles and then, apparently remembering something ­else to do, goes off-­screen. At this point, the monster appears from ­behind the glass door, enters the main room and, cautiously, goes into the bride’s room. When Frankenstein returns, he sees the main door open and is alarmed. He closes the door again. Suddenly, his wife comes onto the scene ­running and she faints at Frankenstein’s feet. While he attempts to revive her, the monster arrives, unnoticed by Frankenstein, who is startled when the being bends close to his ear as if to tell him something. He bids the monster go away indicating the door and, as the monster does not move, he takes a candelabrum from the ­table to hit him. But Frankenstein is disarmed by the creature, who also manages to throw him to the floor. At this point, the monster opens the glass door and escapes. In the meantime, the bride has awakened: she tries to hold back Frankenstein from chasing the creature, but she is not successful. The intertitle introducing the final scene (9) reads: “the creation of an evil mind is overcome by love and dis­appears.” We are in the library again. The monster enters through the door, and he walks around the library cautiously and suspiciously. At one point, he finds himself in front of the mirror: recognizing his image, he seems disgusted by the reflection. As he stares into the mirror, the monster dis­appears, unlike his reflection, which remains trapped in the mirror. Repeating the creature’s earlier gesture, his reflection raises his hands to the ceiling. Frankenstein now enters the room and moves about as if looking for something, possibly the monster (from the intertitles it is impossible to tell ­whether this scene takes place immediately a­ fter the chase in the previous scene). When he finds himself in front of the mirror, he looks at the reflection therein and sees the creature (who is now standing still as if waiting for Frankenstein to arrive) instead of himself. Frankenstein covers his face with his hands, and when he points his fin­ger at the monster, the latter dis­appears from the mirror as Frankenstein’s own reflection reappears. Astonished, he draws near to the mirror to touch it. Then, he turns away from it and goes out on the left—­towards the door. The door opens and his wife enters, they embrace, and the film ends.

The Doppelgänger In the final scene, through the scenic device of the mirror, the theme of the doppelgänger becomes evident. Doppelgänger narratives involve a duality of the main character who is e­ ither duplicated in the figure of an identical second self or divided into polar opposite selves. According to Gry Fauholt, the two narratives correspond to two dif­fer­ent types of psychological prob­lems. Characters who have identical alter egos are ­t hose who have refused to accept the identification with their specular image which, as explained in Jacques Lacan’s theory

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of the mirror stage, is necessary for the development of the ego. Characters who have doppelgängers that are physically dif­fer­ent from them are, instead, cases of split personalities deriving from the refusal of what Lacan called castration—­ the renunciation of the socially unacceptable sides of the self to gain access to the symbolic order and assume a social identity.20 As in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in Dawley’s transposition the doppelgänger also comes out of a split personality which produces a monster. In the following section, I analyze how this happens. Furthermore, I show how the film widens the critical reach of Shelley’s original, commenting on the relationship between lit­er­a­ture and the creation of the double—­and, by extension, on the (self-­ referential) relationship between fiction and psychoanalysis, which was at its critical peak in the years in which the film was released.

The Doppelgänger in Frankenstein The origins of the concept of the doppelgänger lie at the intersection between fiction and real­ity. As Karl Miller has explained, its very roots can be traced to lit­er­a­ture.21 As a case in point, the pioneering psychoanalytic elucidations made by Otto Rank, starting in 1914 with the essay “Der Doppelgänger,”22 looked at the literary, mythical, ethnological, and psychological sources of the concept.23 His analy­sis, which would then go on to influence Sigmund Freud’s Das Unheimliche (1919), opening to some of the most seminal insights on the theme, not only examined the relationship between fiction and doubles,24 but was also set in motion by a fictional product: the film Der Student von Prag (dir. Stellan Rye and Paul Wegener, 1913), loosely based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “William Wilson” (1839), in which the protagonist’s doppelgänger is created through a mirror. Mirrors, in par­tic­u ­lar, occupy an impor­tant place throughout Rank’s study, especially in the parts dedicated to lit­er­a­ture and anthropology. Rank’s reading also shows how, to a 1910s’ critical eye, mirrors could be recognized as signs of doubles. They, in fact, had already been used in this guise in other media. In lit­er­a­ture, for example, they had assumed both a meta­phorical and non-­metaphorical value: “William Wilson” ends with the protagonist stabbing his double only to realize, through his reflection in the mirror, that he has stabbed himself.25 In Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” (1910), instead, we read, “it was, in the night, as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the depths of a somber and im­mense mirror. It would not be true to say I had a shock, but an irresistible doubt of his bodily existence flitted through my mind.”26 Apart from the self-­explanatory scene of the mirror, other filmic signs could also help the public in interpreting the creature as Frankenstein’s doppelgänger. According to Ralph Tymms’s analy­sis of literary psy­chol­ogy the creation of the double usually stresses its “magical, occult, psychical or psychological qualities.”27 The film refers to this magical dimension both theoretically and practically.

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First, the Kinetogram’s specification that the “adaptation” would focus on the “mystic and psychological” ele­ments of Shelley’s original confirms, precisely, what Tymms would find almost 40 years l­ ater. Furthermore, looking at the Merriam Webster dictionary of the En­glish language published in 1909, we find that the word “mystic” has three meanings which all, in some way, refer to a mysterious and magical dimension.28 Secondly, in the film, the monster’s creation takes place through a magic act. The mise-­en-­scène as well as Frankenstein’s proxemics are unmistakable, from his act of pouring a substance that he has created into a large vat or cauldron, an item easily recognized from stories of witches and wizards, to the two puffs of smoke coming out of the vat, and the upward movements of Frankenstein’s arms and hands, bidding his creation rise while also accompanying the smoke. But the film’s use of the magic trick has two more practical functions as well, shared with other early films: first, it allows the production to avoid the repulsive scene of Frankenstein sewing up corpses; secondly, it connects the public to the world of magic and popu­lar illusion shows (and sideshows). Such shows seldom failed to enthrall audiences, which explains why magic tricks w ­ ere rather common in early cinema.29 Magic is, thus, one of the many threads weaving through the film, where bodily and ­mental experiences are intertwined with two dif­fer­ent dimensions, the real and the fictional. The Kinetogram, in its first few lines, hints at this double dimension. Speaking of the literary origins of Frankenstein’s story in Geneva, it states: “the creation of the Frankenstein monster slowly grew in Mrs. Shelley’s mind, possibly much the same as it developed in the character of Frankenstein himself.” Since Shelley and Frankenstein are assumed to undergo similar ­mental pro­cesses in the creation of the monster, this premise places on the same level the “real” world (Mary Shelley’s) and the world of fiction (Frankenstein’s). This critical stance affects the way the theme of the doppelgänger is developed in Frankenstein, making its comprehension quite difficult at a first viewing. Using it as a key to decipher the film, however, it is pos­si­ble to observe certain details which help us uncover some of the meanings of Dawley’s transposition which, up to now, have mostly been overlooked. Let us take into consideration the sequence of scenes three, four, and five (before, during, and ­a fter the monster’s creation): since the creature is only a ­mental construction of Frankenstein, scene four does not exist in the real­ity of his world.30 Thus, if we remove it from the filmic progression, we are left with Frankenstein in his room, with a book open, which he touches twice—­before and ­a fter the creation. Meta­phor­ically, then, lit­er­a­t ure can be considered as the main trigger leading to the creation of the doppelgänger.31 Confirming this pos­si­ble interpretation, the next apparition of the creature takes place in the library of Frankenstein’s ­house, in what is the longest scene of the film (7). The library is, moreover, the only place that is named in the

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Kinetogram: it is the room where the bound­a ries between real­ity and fiction are removed. Th ­ ere, it is from one of Frankenstein’s solitary m ­ ental rambles that the ­whole narrative unfolds: Frankenstein is seated, reading a book, when he stops to “reflect”—­raising his head. In that precise moment, his ­future wife enters the room, becoming a “reflection” in the mirror: the wife is, thus, the visual rendition of Frankenstein’s thoughts, representing his good side as well as society’s idea of what is good; the mirror, instead, is a win­dow open onto his mind. This is why the monster and the wife never appear in the mirror together—­except for two or three seconds while she is leaving the library, when they both give their back to it. The wife and the monster never actually share a scene in which they are both active and conscious.32 Also, the fact that Frankenstein is the only named character in the story is not accidental, but indicates that he is, indeed, the only real character. Hence, and given the wife’s moral weight, her actions assume a very par­tic­ u­lar significance. Specifically, the fact that in the same scene, before g­ oing off-­ screen and just before the appearance of the monster, she picks up the book that Frankenstein has been reading, commenting on it with a rather stern and worried expression, is an impor­tant detail. Her face, that is, indicates that, as had happened in the first act, ­here too lit­er­a­ture serves as a point of departure for the creation of the monster. Not only is the library the location where fiction and real­ity blend, it is also the room in which the bound­aries between physical and m ­ ental experiences dissolve. It is in the library that the first physical fight between Frankenstein and the creature takes place; and it is ­here that the monster first has a discussion with Frankenstein, also engaging him on an intellectual level (the fact that in the film nobody has taught him how to speak also confirms the creature’s metaphysical and psychological nature). Also, and importantly, the library is the location where Frankenstein “plays twice with” the visual space si­mul­ta­neously showing on-­screen (within the shot) and off-­screen (outside the shot) spaces: hence, to have the full picture, viewers are obliged to divide their attention between Frankenstein’s a­ ctual physical body and his reflection in the mirror. As a consequence, the disappearance of the monster can only happen in the library. In the final scene, compared to scene seven, the shot is taken from an ­a ngle that highlights the mirror, now occupying one-­third of the screen—­ vertically, on the right-­hand side. The monster enters the room through the door and, once in front of the mirror, his bodily presence dis­appears while his reflection remains in the mirror. Frankenstein, who between the end of scene eight and the beginning of scene nine has for the first time actively chased the monster, re-­enters the room, stands in front of the mirror (representing his mind) and finds the dreaded reflection: thanks to his active quest of the monster and the ensuing pro­cess of self-­a nalysis, however, he can now recognize that side of his split self that is not accepted by (and acceptable for) the Other. Thus,

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by pointing the fin­ger at his ill-­disposed doppelgänger (once more, in an act that could resemble a magician’s trick), he overcomes the monstrous side of his self and, through the final celebratory embrace with his wife, accesses the symbolic order.

Conclusion To fully appreciate Dawley’s Frankenstein, the film should be partly detached from the promotional narratives presented in the Kinetogram: the reading given ­t here is tainted by the attempt to avoid censorship and it diminishes the content of the film and its message. Dawley’s Frankenstein is, thus, less episodic and fragmented than it is usually thought to be, even though the complexity of the message contrasts with the affordances of a single reel of film and makes it difficult to understand. The film pres­ents two types of intermedial relationships. The first, extracompositional, relates Dawley’s transposition to Shelley’s Frankenstein, to which it is both faithful and unfaithful; if, on the one hand, the psychoanalytic origins of the two doubles are the same, the triggers for the creation and apparitions of the two monsters are dif­fer­ent. In this sense, Dawley’s Frankenstein is a rather power­f ul work of art for all ­t hose scholars, teachers, and students who would like to explore the theme of Frankenstein’s subconscious from a dif­fer­ent ­angle. As an intermedial transposition, moreover, Frankenstein occupies an impor­tant critical place in the history of cinema and intermediality ­because it is one of the first ever transpositions of the theme of the doppelgänger from lit­er­a­ture to cinema, and one of the first cases in which mirrors are used for the cinematic repre­sen­ta­tion of such a topos.33 The second type of intermediality is of an intracompositional nature and, therefore, features in the film through explicit and implicit references. Explicit references to lit­er­a­ture and doppelgängers are made through the mise-­en-­scène of the relationship between books and the monster’s creation and appearances. The implicit references, instead, originate from a deeper exegetic level in which books stand for fiction in general, and the monster symbolizes the theme of the double. They, thus, critically operate in two ways. First, they transform Frankenstein into a self-­referential reflection on the role of cinema as mediator of the theme of the doppelgänger between lit­er­a­ture and the audience. Secondly, they extend and modernize Shelley’s thoughts on the double, placing them squarely within the cultural “structure of the conjuncture” of Western socie­t ies in the 1910s,34 when doppelgängers lingered in an intellectual—­a nd intermedial—­ liminal space between fiction and psychoanalysis. As we have seen, only four years a­ fter Frankenstein’s release, the psychoanalyst Otto Rank would get the idea to analyze lit­er­a­ture and fictional stories, in search of the double, from a film which featured, like Frankenstein, a mirror and

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a doppelgänger—­Der Student von Prag. In many ways, Frankenstein (in all its incarnations) thus anticipates and symbolizes the scientific efforts of Rank and of psychoanalysis at large: all of them explored the theme of the double, and obtained an intellectual grasp of it, through fiction and mirrors. The point-­of-­ view shot of Frankenstein in scene four, when he peeps in at the vat where the creation of the double is taking place, is not, thus, the means for an identification between Frankenstein and the common viewer, but the ekphrasis of psychoanalytical studies in their attempt to look into the “mystic and psychological” origins of the doppelgänger.35

Notes 1. The methodological frame of reference on the subject of intermediality is taken from: Werner Wolf, “(Inter)mediality and the Study of Lit­er­a­ture,” CLCWeb: Comparative Lit­er­ a­ture and Culture 13, no. 3 (2011). doi​.­org​/­10​.­7771​/­1481​-­4374​.­1789. 2. This essay does not engage with the musical cue sheet that, according to the production, was meant to accompany the film. This is b ­ ecause, in 1910, cue sheets ­were still a fairly recent creation, and ­music was mostly improvised on the spot. The impact of the production’s musical choices on the viewers’ experience of films was therefore still rather minimal. See James Wierzbicki, Film ­Music: A History (New York: Routledge, 2009). In par­tic­u­lar, on Frankenstein’s cue sheet see pp. 36–38. 3. The definition “liberal adaptation” comes from The Edison Kinetogram 2, no.  4 (March 13, 1910) (hereafter Kinetogram). Such booklets ­were published by the Edison Com­ pany and ­were defined, in their own pages, as a “semi-­monthly bulletin of moving picture news, with the emphasis on Edison Film and Kinetoscopes.” Conceptually similar to t­ oday’s promotional trailers, the description of each film usually featured the following: an on-­set film still taken from the scene, title, author, genre, date of release, release number, length, copyright date, the code for telegraphic ­orders, the list of characters with the actors’ names, and the plot (often interwoven with some commentary). Excerpts of the one promoting Frankenstein can be found in several books. The complete version, which is the one I w ­ ill reference in this essay, can be found online at http://­w ww​.­h itchcock ​.­hu​/­Filmes​/­Silent​ _­Horror​/­Frankenstein10​_­lrs​/­plotoffrank​.­htm. 4. Only in the mid-1910s did feature-­length films become the norm; see Cynthia Felando, Discovering Short Films: The History and Style of Live-­Action Fiction Shorts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 19. A detailed history of American cinema in the years of Frankenstein is in Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 5. The same image also appears on the cover of the London edition, dated April 15, 1910. 6. Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, trans. Peter Collier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 259. 7. As confirmed by Miriam Hansen in Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American ­Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), in t­ hose years “the cinema became the site of a strug­gle over cultural authority” (63). 8. Mark Jankovich, “Frankenstein and Film,” in The Cambridge Companion to “Frankenstein,” ed. Andrew Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 191. At the time of Frankenstein, this effort was so impor­tant that even the exhibition spaces where films ­were shown w ­ ere being reshaped to attract the m ­ iddle class: between 1907 and 1913, o ­ wners of nickelodeons (usually associated with the working class) w ­ ere heeding the advice of the trade press to refurbish their halls into “handsomely decorated and well-­equipped l­ittle theatres.” Richard Butsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Tele­vi­sion, 1750–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 159. See also Shane Denson,

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Postnaturalism: “Frankenstein,” Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014), 116; and Bowser, Transformation, 42. 9. Bowser, Transformation, 42; Denson, Postnaturalism, 116. Educating the lower classes was also one of the main preoccupations of the patronizing American bourgeoisie at the time, thus, Frankenstein can also be seen as an attempt to si­mul­t a­neously profit by and resolve what was felt to be a prob­lem in American society. 10. For example, the closing scene, according to the Kinetogram, “has prob­ably never been surpassed in anything shown on the moving picture screen.” Such promotional stress on the special effects can also be found in con­temporary magazines and advertisements (Denson, Postnaturalism, 110). 11. For t­ hose who went to see the film knowing Shelley’s story it was a case of “primitive intertextuality” which required the cinema industry to explain and justify the reason for the modifications. “Primitive intertextuality” is the reliance on the spectators’ knowledge of a previous artistic product to make sense of the new one (Hansen, Babel, 45). Special effects, however, allowed “the cultured audiences to indulge in a ­little primitive excess without feeling too bad about it” (Denson, Postnaturalism, 119). 12. Reformers had expressed concerns about the new medium since its very beginnings: about the darkness of nickelodeons, which could f­avor sexual encounters; about the demographics of the audience, especially the fact that many c­ hildren attended unchaperoned; and about the content of the films. Butsch, Audiences, 153. See also Denson, Postnaturalism, 104. 13. According to Denson, all the promotional excerpts that stress such a dimension prove that Frankenstein’s roots lay in a “cinema-­of-­attractions” mode of cinematic spectacle (Postnaturalism, 110). 14. “­Here comes the point which we have endeavored to bring out [. . .] That when Frankenstein’s love for his bride s­ hall have attained full strength and freedom from impurity it ­w ill have such an effect upon his mind that the monster cannot exist.” 15. Denson, Postnaturalism, 107. 16. Dawley’s film is taken from: “Frankenstein (1910 Edison Production) HD,” YouTube video, 13:39, posted by “The Video Cellar.” https://­w ww​.­youtube​.­c om​/­w atch​?­v ​= w ­ -​ ­f M9​ meqfQ4&t​= 7­ 29s. 17. Although the distinction between the shot and the scene was not made at the time: thus, they would count 25 scenes, referring to the creation sequence as a series of “flash scenes.” See Denson, Postnaturalism, 107. 18. Bowser, Transformation, 140. 19. In this, thus, differing from Shelley’s version in which the creature had to learn to speak. 20. Guy Fauholt, “Self as the Other: The Doppelgänger,” Double Dialogues 10 (2009). http://­w ww​.­doubledialogues​.­com​/­article​/­self​-­as​-­other​-t­ he​-­doppelganger​/­. 21. Karl Miller, Doubles: Studies in Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 21. Gothic lit­er­a­ture prefigured the discovery that the ego is not a subject, but an imaginary construct. On Gothic lit­er­a­ture and the double see Mary K. Patterson, The Monster in the Mirror: Gender and the Sentimental/Gothic Myth in “Frankenstein” (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1987); Linda Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Paul Coates, The Double and the Other (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988). 22. Otto Rank, “Der Doppelgänger,” in Imago: Zeitschrift für Anwendung der Psychoanalyse auf die Geisteswissenschaften [Imago: Journal for the Application of Psychoanalysis to the Humanities] 3 (1914): 97–164. 23. The essay would then develop into a book: Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, ed. and trans. Harry Tucker Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971).

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24. “Fiction” ­here embraces not only novels, but also stories, fables, folkloristic tales, legends, and so on. 25. Edgar Allan Poe, “William Wilson,” in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings: Poems, Tales, Essays and Reviews, ed. David Galloway (Harmonds­worth: Penguin, 2003). 26. See Joseph Conrad, “The Secret Sharer,” in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and Other Stories, ed. John Henry Stape and Allan H. Simmons (London: Penguin, 2008), 181. My emphasis. 27. Ralph Tymms, Doubles in Literary Psy­chol­ogy (Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1949), 16. In Der Student von Prag, for example, the student Balduin is tricked by a magician into selling his own mirror’s image, which then starts persecuting him. 28. First, “of or pertaining to an ancient mystery”; second, “remote from or beyond h ­ uman comprehension; baffling understanding; unknowable; obscure; mysterious”; and, third, “pertaining to, or importing or implying, mysticism; involving some secret meaning; allegorical; emblematical.” See “mystic,” in Webster’s New International Dictionary of the En­glish Language (London: G. & C. Merriam Com­pany, 1909), 1431. 29. For the relationship between cinema and magic see, for example, Erik Barnouw, The Magician and the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). See also: Dan North, “Magic and Illusion in Early Cinema,” Studies in French Cinema 1, no. 2 (2001): 70–79. 30. The difficulty, for con­temporary viewers, in understanding the bound­aries between real­ity and fiction was noticed by the Dramatic Mirror reviewer: “when the monster, fashioned in sympathy with evil in Frankenstein’s mind, appears and terrorizes his maker, one finds one’s self very nearly accepting it as real­ity.” Quoted in Denson, Postnaturalism, 115. 31. Th ­ ere is no reference to Frankenstein’s solitude or to the death of his m ­ other, as in the source text. 32. In scene eight, for example, while the monster is on screen, the wife is lying on the floor senseless; and when the monster flees, she revives. 33. Mirrors have been used in this way many times, in cinema. See, for example, Donato Totaro, “The Con­temporary Doppelgänger,” Offscreen 2, no. 1 (1998). http://­offscreen​.c­ om​ /­v iew​/­doppleganger. 34. As proposed by Marshall Sahlins, the “structure of the conjuncture” is “the practical realization of the cultural categories in a specific historical context, as expressed in the interested action of the historic agents, including the microsociology of their interaction.” See Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), xiv. 35. The concept of ekphrasis is most commonly explained through the example of the verbal repre­sen­ta­tion of a work of art. In this case, following Werner Wolf, I extend it to the filmic repre­sen­ta­tion of psychoanalytical lit­er­a­ture. See Wolf, “(Inter)mediality,” 5.

chapter 10

z Perverting the ­Family Re-­Working Victor Frankenstein’s Gothic Blood-­Ties in Penny Dreadful Ruth Heholt Gothic fiction offered a testing ground for many unauthorized genders and sexualities, including sodomy, tribadism, romantic friendship (male and female), incest, pedophilia, sadism, masochism, necrophilia, cannibalism, masculinized females, feminized males, miscegenation, and so on [. . .]. If we apply ­these concerns to Frankenstein, ­there is no end to the directions in which this novel could lead us. —­George Haggerty 1

This chapter looks at the re-­working of the Frankenstein story in the Showtime/ Sky production Penny Dreadful (2014–2016). It argues that the show provides an excessive Gothic re-­imagining of the novel, which focuses on questions around fatherhood, patriarchy, and the disastrous relationships apparent in a truly dysfunctional ­family. Penny Dreadful is an in­ter­est­ing text to examine as it exceeds its originating tale, taking it into darker Gothic places, leading Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus ­towards an explication of the radical critiques and observations that ­were hinted at in the novel. In 1984 Mary Poovey famously argued that, “just as Frankenstein figuratively murdered his ­family, so the monster literally murders Frankenstein’s domestic relationships, blighting both the memory and the hope of domestic harmony with the ‘black mark’ of its deadly hand.”2 Frankenstein is resurrected and his domestic relationships are blighted still further as Penny Dreadful lays its own “deadly hand” on the novel’s narrative. This popu­lar tele­v i­sion series, which ran for three seasons (2014–2016) is a hybrid adaptation of some of the most iconic novels of the nineteenth c­ entury: Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and, of course Frankenstein. Benjamin 187

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Poore calls “the world of Penny Dreadful [a place] where characters from dif­fer­ ent nineteenth-­century stories, from life and death, from history and fiction—­ and from ­imagined versions of that fiction—­meet and cross-­pollinate.”3 Penny Dreadful is a glorious, bloody, gore-­fi lled mash-up of some of the greatest nineteenth-­century Gothic fictions. It re-­presents Frankenstein’s story as a twenty-­fi rst-­century re-­i magining clothed in Gothic glory. What is produced blooms like a dark flower that has been grafted with a dif­fer­ent, older species. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo assert that the concept of transmedia “adaptation” “brings out the Darwinian overtones of the word ‘adaptation’ itself, evoking adaptation as a means of evolution and survival.” 4 So what has this adaptation done in order to “survive”? What hybrid has emerged from this re-­working that has proved to be so popu­lar? This chapter looks at the excess of the re-­working of the Frankenstein story in Penny Dreadful, arguing that this new televisual adaptation of Frankenstein can itself be seen as a “hideous progeny” (F 10) which has a life of its own and which over-­reaches its parent text. Where Frankenstein explores themes of the ­family and parenting through expressions of instabilities, uncertainties, and failures as well as longing and fascination, Penny Dreadful provides a re-­reading, über-­reading, or extra-­ reading of the themes and concerns embedded in the novel. The tele­vi­sion series pres­ents a fantasy along the lines of “what could have happened next,” and as such can help to show students how a text can be adapted, extended, and “written back” to. Penny Dreadful takes characters from Victorian Gothic novels beyond their seemingly final textual life, enabling them to live anew—­affording them afterlives. And whereas the original Victor Frankenstein may have been cruel and neglectful, mistaken, hubristic, blind, and misguided, the new Victor is much worse. Victor’s “new” blood-­ties involve incest, necrophilia, abuse, and terrible vio­lence. Penny Dreadful produces a dark, Gothic text, which evokes a disturbing vision of perverted fatherhood, paternalism, and patriarchy. Of all the characters that extend their destinies in Penny Dreadful, Victor Frankenstein is afforded the most fully ­imagined ­future. In the series he does not create one monster, but three, and ­there is seemingly the potential for many more. Frankenstein has created a kind of perverted f­ amily and where Mary Shelley’s monster “murders Frankenstein’s domestic relationships,”5 in Penny Dreadful Frankenstein’s monsters constitute his domestic relationships. Season One begins with the two main characters, Sir Malcolm Murray and Vanessa Ives, gathering together a power­ful group to help rescue Sir Malcolm’s ­daughter, Mina Murray/ Harker who (as we know from Dracula) has been claimed by vampires. Miss Ives and Sir Malcolm enlist his servant Sembene; the young doctor, Victor Frankenstein; an antiquarian, Mr Lyle; and an American, Ethan Chandler (who, unbeknownst to all, is a werewolf). This unlikely band form a ragged kind of ­family, one defined through the recurring trope of fatherhood, its vio­lence, and its failings. Yet, among all the warped and dysfunctional f­ amily relationships, it

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is with Victor Frankenstein and his “hideous progeny” (F 10) that t­ hese themes are taken into new and more extreme territory.

­Fathers and M ­ others Our first visions of Victor are of a “resurrection man” up to his elbows in blood as he unpicks the inner workings of a severed ­human arm in a stinking, offal-­ filled, blood-­soaked place where bodies are on sale for ­t hose wishing to dissect them. What is most evident is Victor’s passion for his research; his frenzied pursuit of the “one worthy goal for scientific exploration [. . .] piercing the tissue that separates life from death,” 6 as he declares to Sir Malcolm. As we are of course aware, Victor’s pursuit of knowledge goes somewhat further than might be expected and we follow him to his laboratory where his apparatus and the inanimate figure of a reassembled man await lightning to strike. In a wonderfully Gothic scene of driving rain, darkness, and crashing thunder, we see the drama of the fizz and spark of electricity as lightning strikes Victor’s apparatus and animates the corpse. ­Those of us who are familiar with the source-­text think we know what is coming and we brace ourselves for a hideous monster and a devastating rejection. However, this scene in Penny Dreadful does not replicate the expected reaction or consequence. This “birth” is a gentle one filled with reciprocal joy and won­der between the newborn creature and Frankenstein. The creature is not hideous and the two seem to bond as they gaze at each other and weep with joy and love. Victor proves a tender f­ ather figure, caring for his newborn. He does not flee his creature, but takes responsibility and fulfils his role as ­father and creator. Further possibilities are opened up by the birth of the being they name together as Proteus, a choice laden with strong mythological associations (Proteus traditionally being the shape-­shifting herdsman of sea monsters): it seems as if Victor can make amends for the original sin in the original text. This occurs in the second episode, and throughout this episode we see Proteus grow and gain in self-­awareness. For the viewer, this seems to confirm that a sort of redemption from the original story is being offered: what might the Creature in Frankenstein have been like if he had been cared for properly? We are not to know. On their return home from Proteus’s first wonder-­fi lled excursion to the outside world we witness a scene of primal horror. In a scenario reminiscent of the original birthing scene in Alien, two bloody hands burst through Proteus’s belly, ripping through intestines and skin, literally tearing him apart. Another being steps through the remains, hideous and dripping with blood. As Victor cringes amidst the gory ruins of Proteus, this monster opens his mouth and hisses: “Your first born has returned, F ­ ather!” 7 And from h ­ ere the entire inflection of Frankenstein’s story is changed and re-­wrought. To a certain extent this scene introduces a version of the story we are familiar with: Victor’s abandoned monster has returned to demand retribution, to

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wreak havoc, and to demand a mate. This original creature is very close in appearance to the description given in the novel: “His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of pearly whiteness; but ­t hese luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-­white sockets in which they w ­ ere set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips” (F 58). Frankenstein’s first-­born in Penny Dreadful has long black hair and straight black lips. His pallor and the coldness of his skin are commented on at vari­ous times, and the terrible scars on his face are a testament to how he was created. Yet although he horrifies many, not all turn away from him. Over the course of the three series this “monster” becomes one of the central characters and is afforded much more of a life and a deeper characterization than in the original novel. The next episode follows on from the bloody re-­emergence of the original creature and ­t here is a flashback to Victor’s past and his own ­family. We witness a childhood trauma where Victor as a young boy comes across the body of his pet dog, which has maggots crawling out of its eyes. We see him with a loving ­mother who comforts him and he says to her “it is just thee and me now.”8 Yet as she holds him he is horrified to see blood trickling from her mouth as her eyes widen and she spews blood all over her son: she has tuberculosis, like many characters in Penny Dreadful. Victor asks his f­ ather if she w ­ ill “die t­ oday,”9 but his ­father turns away in silence leaving Victor in the doorway, witnessing the bloody suffering of his ­mother alone. He offers no guidance, no comfort, just silence and abandonment.10 At his m ­ other’s funeral Victor stands apart from his ­father and three b ­ rothers—­whom we see for the first and last time. This sketch of Victor’s f­amily, focused on his relations with his m ­ other and his f­ather, is extremely brief, comprising only a few minutes of the episode. Yet t­hese scenes resonate. The peculiar intensity of the relationship between Victor and his ­mother, as evinced by his referring to them as “thee and me” alone together, seems to wholly exclude the f­ ather and ­brothers. The latter appear not to signify and it is just ­after his ­mother’s funeral that Victor starts to read about anatomy. The suggestion is perhaps that all of Victor’s work is about reviving his dead ­mother—­re-­birthing her in some warped fantasy of maternal resurrection. ­These brief scenes meld the novel and the televisual narrative. In the novel, just ­after the birth of the Creature, Victor has his infamous dream: I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead m ­ other in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-­worms crawling in the folds of flannel. (F 58)

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Penny Dreadful mixes the “grave-­worms” with the dead ­mother in a dif­fer­ent way. It is Victor’s dog that has the maggots crawling out of its eye sockets, but this too signifies the death of his m ­ other and her demise is just as gruesome as the vision in the novel. Stam and Raengo discuss how adaptations themselves are sometimes seen in almost Freudian terms whereby “the adaptation as Oedipal son symbolically slays the source-­text as ‘­father.’ ”11 Mary Shelley’s novel is not however a “father-­text”; rather, it has always been mostly associated with the female gender—­more of a “mother-­text” and an oft-­cited example of the “Female Gothic.”12 Ellen Moers calls Frankenstein “a horror story of maternity”13 and t­ hese scenes are certainly a part of the body-­horror associated with ­mothers. From the point of view of many critics, to give birth is inevitably to “­mother.” Anne Mellor cites “Frankenstein’s failure to ­mother his child” and comments: “rather than clasping his newborn child to his breast in a nurturing maternal gesture, he rushes out of the room, repulsed by the abnormality of his creation. And when his child follows him to his bedroom, uttering inarticulate sounds of desire and affection, smiling at him, reaching out to embrace him, Victor Frankenstein again flees in horror, abandoning his child completely.”14 ­Here Mellor too associates Frankenstein with the “­mother” and laments his maternal failings. She claims that “Victor’s quest is precisely to usurp from nature the female power of biological reproduction, to become a male womb.”15 Gilbert and Gubar associate Victor with Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost and maintain that he was “never ­really the masculine, Byronic Satan of the first book of Paradise Lost, but always, instead, the curiously female, outcast Satan who gave birth to Sin.”16 Carrying this analogy further, they correlate Victor almost entirely with the feminine, asking in relation to the creature’s birth, “­Isn’t it precisely at this point in the novel that he discovers he is not Adam but Eve, not Satan but Sin, not male but female?”17 Yet if we are to be practical about it, Frankenstein incubates his Creature rather than bearing it through his own body—­the pro­cess more akin to the birthing practices of the male sea­horse or some species of fish, or perhaps a male penguin sheltering his egg. And although I do not wish to go against such illustrious scholarly pre­de­ces­sors, I do want to argue for the importance of fatherhood in Frankenstein as well as Penny Dreadful. Angela Wright asserts that “Frankenstein participates in the culture of a female Gothic tradition through what remains ­silent in the novel”18 and in much of the criticism about Frankenstein it is the masculine and fatherhood that is silenced. Bette London suggests that most “of the influential feminist readings [. . .] continue to pursue Frankenstein’s critical proj­ect, upholding the illusion of male gender-­neutrality, of the invisibleness of masculinity. Indeed, feminist criticism has taken the lead in promoting speculation on the monster’s female identity.”19 London argues that the emphasis on the feminine and the maternal almost erases the masculine, rendering it gender neutral, normalized, and invisible. William Veeder asserts that

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“[f]eminist theory with its recognition of the importance of the ­mother has prevented the overrating of the ­father [. . .] ­Mother can achieve such prominence that ­father is cast into shadow.”20 However, I maintain that in the novel fatherhood is neither undermined nor ignored. Similarly, in Penny Dreadful ­fathers are not cast into shadow; rather, the focus on fatherhood is both sustained and intense. Frankenstein himself sees this from his lofty patriarchal position (before his own fall), grandly proclaiming: “No f­ ather could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs” (F 54). The novel is dedicated to Shelley’s ­father, William Godwin, and U. C. Knoepflmacher has argued that “Frankenstein is a novel of omnipresent f­athers and absent m ­ others.”21 From a dif­fer­ent perspective, Angela Wright notes that it has “a reading list within its pages that lists only works authored by men,”22 and in discussing the novel’s apparent positioning as “female Gothic,” she argues that it in fact seems to be more aligned with the “male Gothic,” or at least inflected ­towards being more of a masculine-­facing text.23 And if fatherhood and masculinity are prominent themes in Frankenstein, I contend that in Penny Dreadful this is taken so far as to make Frankenstein only “­father.”

Victor’s Progeny In Penny Dreadful the creatures that Victor f­ athers are not made from pieces of ­humans gathered from the “charnel-­houses [. . .] [t]he dissecting room and the slaughter h ­ ouse” (F 54–55) and graveyards that are used to make the Creature in the novel. Rather, Victor re-­a nimates ­whole corpses, and this is how Penny Dreadful allows Victor’s creatures something Shelley did not grant her Creature: memory. All of his creatures remember (or at least begin to remember) their past lives. The gentle Proteus and the more monstrous original creature are not the only beings that Victor resurrects. In the extreme, Gothic world of Penny Dreadful, Victor births a resurrected “­daughter,” again extending its origin text, where Frankenstein creates a female at the violent behest of his original creation. In the novel, of course, Victor destroys the female before it is born and we only meet his Creature when it awakens. In Penny Dreadful, the third of Victor’s creatures is introduced to us in a very dif­fer­ent manner. Brona is a prostitute whom we see alive throughout Season One conducting a blossoming love affair with Ethan Chandler, the werewolf character. But Brona is d ­ ying of tuberculosis (a recurring cause of death in Penny Dreadful, as we have seen). Victor’s original creature has, as in the novel, insisted that he make him a “companion” (F 144). Victor sees an opportunity and murders the ­dying Brona, smothering her when Ethan is not pres­ent. The last scene of the season shows Victor cutting into Brona’s body as his creature watches, e­ ager to see his mate/wife begin to be (re)born. The viewer, however, over several episodes has seen an attractive, in­ter­est­ing, and well-­rounded character in Brona. We have witnessed a touching love story

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between her and Ethan and have been party to her suffering. This makes the prospect of Brona being turned into one of Frankenstein’s creatures take on an entirely dif­fer­ent import. We already know that Victor has murdered her and although her death was inevitable, the suggestion is that he wanted a corpse and did not care to wait. Further, as Brona’s corpse lies waiting to be brought back to life, Victor speaks tenderly to her inanimate body and, in one of the more disturbing scenes in the series, begins to touch her and feels her breast with evident lust. When Brona is reborn as Lily, the original creature is banished while Victor ostensibly “grooms” Lily for himself. It quickly becomes clear that if Lily is to be “wife” to anyone, it ­w ill be Victor, who has shown he wants her. One night during a storm she creeps into his bed and the incestuous relationship is consummated. In discussing the much more gentle relationship between Victor and Elizabeth in the novel, Gilbert and Gubar nevertheless cite “the streak of incest that darkens Frankenstein.”24 In the excessive world of Penny Dreadful this is explicit and also taken much further: Victor has murdered Brona/Lily and had sexual intercourse with her—­his newborn “­daughter.” Of his three creatures, it is Lily who is subjected to Victor’s most heinous abuses. With Lily, Victor enacts murder, incest, necrophilia, kidnap, and cruelty. Victor’s warped “fatherhood” echoes the evil Gothic patriarchs of the original fictions of the eigh­teenth ­century. Kate Behr says that the only idealized ­father pos­si­ble in Gothic fiction is one who is absent. She argues that when ­fathers are pres­ent in Gothic fiction, they are inevitably  . . . ​figures of negative power. They are every­t hing that the “good” f­ather is not. [. . .] Heroines are particularly vulnerable to the pres­ent ­father figures who direct the power and authority inherent in the title of “­father” inwards to enhance their own role, rather than outwards to care for the person ­u nder their protection. [. . .] [The heroine] becomes an object. The power and authority exerted by the pres­ent father/guardian is power stripped of care, concerned only with manipulating the object. The heroine is frequently considered only as a marriageable pawn.25

Victor does not “care” for Lily and she too, like the Gothic heroines of old, is entirely objectified by Victor. She is first created to be a wife to the original creature, but when Victor finds he desires her, he attempts to keep her for himself. Eventually, Lily escapes him and sets up home with fellow immortal Dorian Gray. However, she soon begins to or­ga­nize a w ­ omen’s revolution among her old “­family” of East End prostitutes and neither Dorian nor Victor can countenance such insubordination. They fi­nally collude, kidnapping her with the intent of performing some sort of lobotomy that ­w ill supposedly morph her into something more feminine. Victor takes Lily to Bedlam and chains her up, telling her, “­we’re ­going to make you healthy. Take away all your anger and pain and replace them with something much better; calm, poise, serenity. ­We’re ­going to make you into

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a proper ­woman.”26 And presumably this act of vio­lence ­w ill make Victor into a “proper” man—­father/lover/husband. Discussing Shelley’s novel, Kate Behr suggests that, In Frankenstein [. . .] Mary Shelley took the basic formula of the absent ­father with the hero’s consequent search for identity and used it in an extreme fashion that locates Frankenstein on the edge of the Gothic tradition. Mary Shelley removed the reader’s trust in the power of the paradigm. Th ­ ere is no beneficent action of Providence in the plot [. . .] nor do “good” f­ ather figures within the text exert any positive influence. In this tale the innocent are not protected but systematically sacrificed and the crime committed is that of creation by the ­father rather than the murder of the ­father.27

The crimes in Penny Dreadful, too, are committed by the f­ athers; theirs are the worst sins and h ­ ere too it is the innocent who suffer. Lily is not the only one of Frankenstein’s creatures to suffer. Victor has, as in the novel, abandoned his first-­ born. Behr says that, in the novel, “the monster is never given any status except that of creature or creation: he is not identified as “son,” nor given a name. A name would fix the monster within a social relationship to someone e­ lse who would have called him by that name. Without a name the monster is an outcast and an outlaw.”28 In Penny Dreadful Frankenstein’s original creature is likewise not given a name by his “­father.” He is first given the name Caliban by the kind but ineffectual old soak who runs the ­Grand Guignol theater in Season One; and in Season Two he eventually names himself a­ fter the poet John Clare. Speaking about Victorian masculinity John Tosh contends that “[t]he naming of c­ hildren, especially sons, was a m ­ atter for the f­ ather, reflecting his concerns about lineage, descent and heredity.”29 In line with the novel, Victor violently rejects any hint of “lineage, descent [or] heredity” in relation to his creature. His “hideous progeny” (F 10) cannot be named, it can only be denied. John Beynon proposes that “[t]he father-­son relationship has long been recognized as a hugely complex and frequently problematical one. The traditional concept is of the ­father as a bridgehead into manhood for the son.”30 Victor does not provide this “bridgehead” and has of course refused to “­father” his first-­born creature in any way at all. In a flashback we witness the “birth” of this first creature as he comes to life screaming in a bath of blood. The creature (now referred to by the name he selects for himself, John Clare) names his own rebirth as “abomination” and the ­whole scene suggests abjection and a ripping apart of the strongest of taboos. John Clare tells Victor, “the first h ­ uman action I experienced was rejection.”31 Victor has destroyed his own domestic ties. However, Victor’s sins do not go unpunished. As a text, Penny Dreadful demands retribution from its erring (indeed, quite appalling) ­fathers. Their neglectful, abusive, sinful, and taboo relationships literally come back to haunt

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Victor and Sir Malcolm Murray and both are forced to face up to their families and the consequences of their acts of cruelty and selfishness. Series Two revolves around an existential ­battle between the heroic band of characters and a group of Devil-­worshipping witches. At the denouement of this season, Frankenstein and Sir Malcom are trapped in a torture chamber in the Witches’ ­house where, through the power of the Witches, they are tormented by hallucinations of their dead and (half-)living families wrenched from the guilt of their psyches. In this episode Frankenstein’s creatures give voice to all that is unsaid in the novel. “­Father, your ­children have returned,” cries Lily.32 Hailed by the nightmarish hallucinatory visions of his “­children” as “­Father” (Proteus), “lover” (Lily), and “­brother” (the first-­born creature), Frankenstein is told that “we walk with your sin. Dead yet not fully alive,” and Proteus laments, “we w ­ ere born innocent. You made us into monsters.”33 Victor cries out that he is a scientist, but Lily c­ ounters that when he slept with her, “this was abuse, not science.”34 Meanwhile, nightmare visions of Sir Malcolm’s dead wife, son, and d ­ aughter are also tormenting him, laying his sins bare. As the camera pans back we can see both figures are alone in the room; their returning families are mere hallucinations, but Victor and Sir Malcolm are writhing in the grip of their terrible, tormenting visions tortured by sin, guilt, and failure. Visions of their families entrap them in a psychological hell. Yet perhaps paradoxically the fundamental impulses in Penny Dreadful are ­towards the creation of a f­ amily. Victor, like so many of the characters, desires a wife, a f­ amily, a home, and the quiet of mundane, ordinary domestic life. This is not pos­si­ble in the world of Penny Dreadful and even when domestic bliss is in sight—as it was for Sir Malcolm Murray for example—it is doomed to violent and utter destruction. In the narrative logic of Penny Dreadful, a “normal” ­family life is a fatal temptation, a lure and a trap. The very desire for a ­family leads to corruption. It is Victor’s desire for a wife and a f­ amily that is his final temptation.35 Victor’s nostalgic remembrance of Lily’s first awakening as an innocent, vulnerable creature who needed him and took joy in serving him, tempts him to render her thus again through vio­lence. Although he fi­nally offers Lily mercy and sets her ­free, enabling her to retain the memory of her own dead ­daughter, the trope of the ­family as both abject and taboo is not dismissed and instead continues with the story of his original creature, John Clare. John Clare finds the ­family he had before his death—­his wife and young son who is ­dying of consumption. He rejoins them in his reborn form and again takes up the position of loving ­father, caring for his boy with compassion, love, and tenderness ­until he dies peacefully. However, John Clare is tempted by his wife to resurrect their dead son in order that they may live as a ­family once more. And, while he of all creatures knows that resurrection is pos­si­ble, he decides to ­gently let his son go and instead of seeking reanimation or rebirth from Victor, he lays the corpse in the river and allows him to float away. This action represents true, tender

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fatherhood and the monster thus becomes the compassionate, “proper” ­father that Victor never was. In the Frankenstein narrative strain of Penny Dreadful the redemption of the ­father comes paradoxically with Frankenstein’s original creature through his rejection of the domestic, his refusal to reinstate his ­family structure, and ultimately his refusal to f­ ather in a selfish way.

The Blighted Domestic Spaces of Failed Fatherhood If Kate Behr is correct in her contention that “the conclusion of a Gothic romance is always a ­family environment. [. . .] The Gothic hero retires to a private domestic realm,”36 then perhaps we must ultimately reject Penny Dreadful as a Gothic romance. Recently, Jerrold Hogle has called Frankenstein “a supremely Gothic Romantic novel,”37 and it is tempting to place Penny Dreadful in the same category. Yet romance is scarce in Penny Dreadful and ­t here are no happy endings for any of the lovers. In relation to this, Kate Ellis’s book title is suggestive: The Contested ­Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of the Domestic. Unlike Behr, Ellis argues that the home, the private and domestic realm in Gothic fiction is never a place of peace and unity. She contends that the Gothic “is preoccupied with home. But it is the failed home that appears on its pages, the place from which some (usually ‘fallen’ men) are locked out, and o ­ thers (usually ‘innocent’ ­women) are locked in.”38 Penny Dreadful, too, examines the “failed” home, but in this text in the final reckoning it is the fallen men who are “locked in.” Victor’s two surviving creatures, Lily and John Clare, are allowed freedom of movement and the possibility, at least, of redemption of some sort. And while Vanessa Ives is sacrificed, Sir Malcolm, Ethan, and Dorian Gray are confined within the walls of their dark, Gothic mansions. Stam and Raengo ask, “Do not adaptations ‘adapt to’ changing environments and changing tastes, as well as to a new medium, with its distinct industrial demands, commercial pressures, censorship taboos and aesthetic norms? And are adaptations not a hybrid form like the orchid, the meeting place of dif­fer­ent ‘species?’ ”39 Penny Dreadful certainly pres­ents a dif­fer­ent species to its origin text and what it does is to question Frankenstein almost to breaking point. In the novel, Frankenstein is allowed a death in the natu­ral wilderness: the white, unforgiving spaces of the frozen North. In Penny Dreadful his fate is to be left alone, presumably to reside on his own in his dim and dreary rooms. The families that are left consist only of the men: the failed ­fathers for whom the “natu­ral” order has been turned on its head. Dorian too is left alone, doomed to an eternity trapped in his home. Sir Malcolm and Ethan become another sort of f­ amily unit, residing in isolation in Sir Malcolm’s dark mansion. The Victorian domestic Gothic is likewise turned on its head and the domestic spaces are no longer uncanny and dreadful; rather, they have been rendered un-­magical and mundane. Kate Ellis says that the novel “separates ‘outer’ and ‘inner,’ the masculine

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sphere of discovery and the feminine sphere of domesticity” 40 and although this is where we began in Penny Dreadful, this is not where we end. Penny Dreadful pres­ents a carnivalesque reworking of its source novels as it gives voice to the suggested, whispered, and silenced possibilities posed by Mary Shelley’s novel. Its re-­working of Frankenstein echoes and continues “the subversiveness of Mary Shelley’s critique of the ­family,” 41 but through its re-­imagining of Victor’s creatures, Penny Dreadful allows a severance of blood-­ties and an escape from f­ amily that points the way to freedom.

Notes 1. George E. Haggerty, “What Is Queer about Frankenstein?” in The Cambridge Companion to “Frankenstein,” ed. Andrew Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 120. 2. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the ­Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 126. 3. Ben Poore, “The Transformed Beast: Penny Dreadful, Adaptation, and the Gothic,” Victoriographies 6, no. 1 (2016): 63. 4. Robert Stam and Alessadra Raengo, eds., Lit­er­a­ture and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 2–3. 5. Poovey, The Proper Lady, 126. 6. “Night Work,” Penny Dreadful, Season 1, Episode 1, directed by John Logan (Showtime/ Sky, 2014). References are to season and episode. 7. “Night Work,” Penny Dreadful, 1, 1. 8. “Resurrection,” Penny Dreadful, 1, 3. 9. “Resurrection,” Penny Dreadful, 1, 3. 10. The same criticism is aimed at Victor’s ­father in the novel. See Kate Ellis who says, “He is an absent ­father for Victor not ­because he leaves home everyday but ­because he does not. He is so uninvolved in m ­ atters that do not pertain directly to the domestic tranquillity that he does not act to guide Victor’s interest in science.” Kate Ellis, The Contested C ­ astle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of the Domestic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 142. ­Here too the critique is of a ­father who ­w ill not guide or lead his son. 11. Stam and Raengo, Lit­er­a­ture and Film, 3. 12. See Ellen Moers, “Female Gothic,” in Literary ­Women: The ­Great Writers (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), 90–98 and Angela Wright, “The Female Gothic,” in The Cambridge Companion to “Frankenstein,” ed. Andrew Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), among other discussions. 13. Moers, “Female Gothic,” 95. 14. Ann K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York: Routledge, 1989), 41–42, my emphasis. 15. Mellor, Mary Shelley, 19. 16. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The W ­ oman Writer and the Nineteenth-­Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 233. 17. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman, 234. 18. Wright, “The Female Gothic,” 109. 19. Bette London, “Frankenstein, and the Spectacle of Masculinity,” PMLA 108 (March 1993): 256. http://­k narf​.­english​.­upenn​.­edu​/­Articles​/­london​.­html. 20. William Veeder, “The Negative Oedipus: F ­ ather, Frankenstein, and the Shelleys,” Critical Enquiry 12, no. 2 (1986): 365.

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21. U. C. Knoepflmacher, “Thoughts on the Aggression of ­Daughters,” in The Endurance of “Frankenstein”: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 90. 22. Wright, “The Female Gothic,” 101. 23. Wright, “The Female Gothic,” 101. 24. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman, 229. 25. Kate E. Behr, The Repre­sen­ta­tion of Men in the En­glish Gothic Novel 1762–1820 (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), 132. 26. “Perpetual Night,” Penny Dreadful, 3, 8 (2016). 27. Behr, The Repre­sen­ta­tion of Men, 129. Emphasis in original. 28. Behr, The Repre­sen­ta­tion of Men, 130. 29. John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-­Class Home in Victorian ­England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 80. 30. John Beynon, Masculinities and Culture (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2002), 130. 31. “Resurrection,” Penny Dreadful, 1, 3. 32. “And They ­Were Enemies,” Penny Dreadful, 2, 10 (2015). 33. “And They ­Were Enemies,” Penny Dreadful, 2, 10 (2015). 34. “And They ­Were Enemies,” Penny Dreadful, 2, 10 (2015). 35. This is also Vanessa’s final b ­ attle in Season Two. As Victor and Sir Malcolm are tormented by their returning families, Vanessa’s demons show her, instead of tormented, in a life of “normality”: husband, ­children, peace. This too is her temptation—­a ­family. Yet this is juxtaposed with the nightmare of the returning ­family for the two ­fathers, Victor and Sir Malcolm, and in order for Vanessa to achieve the “perfection” of the nuclear f­ amily she would have to (quite literally) sell her soul to the Devil, in the form ­here of Dracula—­himself a warped ­father figure. 36. Behr, The Repre­sen­ta­tion of Men, 113. 37. Jerrold Hogle, “Gothic and Second-­Generation Romanticism: Lord Byron, P. B. Shelley, John Polidori and Mary Shelley,” in Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. Angela Wright, and Dale Townshend (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 127–46, 125. 38. Ellis, The Contested C ­ astle, ix. 39. Stam and Raengo, Lit­er­a­ture and Film, 3. 40. Kate Ellis, “Monsters in the Garden: Mary Shelley and the Bourgeois F ­ amily,” in The Endurance of “Frankenstein”: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 124. 41. Ellis, “Monsters in the Garden,” 126.

chapter 11

z The Masked Performer and “the Mane Electric” The Lives and Multimedia Afterlives of Margaret Atwood’s Doctor Frankenstein Janet Larson

1 In 1966, ­after winning awards for two debut poems (Double Persephone, 1961, and The Circle Game, 1963),1 but still a “new” poet, the 27-­year-­old Margaret Atwood collaborated with Canadian visual artist Charles Pachter, who had illustrated other earlier works, to put her “Speeches for Dr. Frankenstein” into the form of a small 29-­page book, crafted of handmade paper, hand-­lettered, and bearing his “beautiful and whimsical artwork” on ­every page.2 Most of ­these drawings, fit accompaniments to early Atwood gothic, are “whimsical” in the way Edvard Munch’s The Scream is: creepy projections of the disturbed mind onto distorted landscapes, whorls of grotesque fetuses, shrouded lurking larvae, tangled neurons, grinning skeleton heads—­lots of heads, detached, solo or grouped as though displayed on a petri dish. Only 15 copies of this book ­were made, and 14 w ­ ere in existence 46 years ­later when the House of Anansi Press announced on November 2, 2012, that this “unique piece of cultural history is now available as an enhanced eBook for iPad,” accompanied by “features”—­Atwood’s introduction, audio of her reading the poems, m ­ usic, and video interviews with the artist.3 This re-­production by Anansi Digital was in keeping with the press’s policy of supporting experimental literary forms. The only prob­lem, one consumer commented on Goodreads, came with the new digital medium: “I suspect that the best part of Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein is contained in the a­ ctual tactile objets d’art which Pachter produced and I was, unfortunately, unable to download.” 4 What do poetic and electronic media have in common, then? You can hold them in your hand, except you c­ an’t. 201

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Atwood herself is a ­great fan of hi-­tech and other experiments with popu­lar culture. Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein took a dif­fer­ent digital turn in 1980, when Canadian composer Bruce Pennycook, at the time a professor at Queens University (Kingston, Ontario) in the Departments of ­Music and of Computing and Information Science, was commissioned, with support from the Canada Council of the Arts, to set stanzas 1, 4, 7, and 10 of Atwood’s poem to digitized ­music accompanying a soprano voice (with concluding “bells”)—­a 15-­minute contribution to a “touring program of works called ‘Singing Cir­cuits’ ” (1981).5 While o ­ thers have adapted her work for films and operas, Atwood has written three TV scripts, drawn “Survivalwoman” for Kanadian Kultchur Komix, and composed several libretti—­including Frankenstein Monster Song for the ­a lbum As Smart As We Are by the American art rock group One Ring Zero (2004), who produce a klezmer-­like sound with unusual instruments and invited her to play one with the band, an event recorded for a YouTube video.6 The same year she conceived of “a remote robotic writing technology,” the LongPen, a commercially ­viable tool (for which she holds several patents) that allows her to sign books and interact with fans aurally and visually on “virtual book tours,” thereby reducing “the carbon footprint and personal stress” of ­t hese trips.7 Atwood is also the first contributor to the ­Future Library proj­ect, which ­will hold the manuscript of her novel Scribbler Moon, completed in 2015, u ­ ntil it is published in 2114.8 One c­ an’t help but notice several ironies with the multimedia afterlives of Atwood’s revivified Frankenstein. If an enhanced eBook cannot reproduce the sensation of handmade paper to the touch, the poet has l­ ittle to offer the ­actual reader’s fin­gers but has much to give the eye and ear and the tactile imagination. And above all the kinesthetic imagining of pain: her poem thrusts pointy images at (or into) the reader from the opening lines, where the wrist of the poised “performer / in the tense arena” “extend[s] a scalpel.” In the second section, “A sharp twist / like taking a jar top off / and it is a living / skeleton, mine [. . .].” In the third section, the scientist/surgeon “thrust[s]” at the rebellious “­thing”—­“It spring[s]”—­and he “cut[s] / with delicate precision.”9 The kinesthetics get more grisly and sadistic ­until the doctor’s recoil begins to arrive in the fifth section and the plot roles flip in the sixth: “I pull around me, r­ unning, / a cape of rain,” cries the pursuer pursued, and twisting back on himself, he asks: “What was my ravenous motive? / Why did I make you?” (6). The “creature” knows: “You sliced me loose / and said it was / Creation. I could feel the knife” (10). Do we need to see a knife on the page/screen to feel it? Yet Pachter’s art drives the image deeper, into Frankenstein’s divided psyche: in the first illustration, a shaggy figure, back to us, f­aces the far horizon’s full moon (divided by a black bar) with one raised arm ­shaped like a “scalpel,” pointed at the figure’s own head. Or is it a pen? Ironies also attend the sequence of this text’s material production and reproduction: poem written with pen or pencil (Atwood’s preferred instruments)

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becomes handcrafted art object, a cultural throwback, which is then fast-­ forwarded into digital-­era translations, visual and aural.10 What seems most striking about the multiplication of cutting-­edge technologies in ­these afterlives is their contrast with Mary Shelley’s archetype of the “mad scientist,” inventor of procedures for manufacturing—­literally, “hand-­making”—­a living creature out of lifeless digits and other ­human and animal parts. ­There is also some potential—if less obvious—­irony in the House of Anansi’s promotion of the handcrafted book it digitized as “a piece of cultural history”—­ Canada’s: but not only b ­ ecause two gifted artists from Toronto collaborated to make it. The founding commitment of the press in 1967, motivated (according to co-­founder Dennis Lee) by “a desperate anger about the fact that ­we’ve never taken this country seriously enough to fight for it,” was to publish young Canadian authors.11 Already by 1969, this explic­itly pro-­Canadian small press was responsible for publishing “one third of all novels in En­glish Canada”; in 2007, Anansi was named Publisher of the Year, a prize that historically had gone only to major publishing h ­ ouses. Atwood’s work has been much concerned with the conundrum of identity for Canadians and their country. Although commanding a vast region, the world’s second-­largest nation by total area has long had a fraught po­liti­cal status. ­A fter holding this territory as an imperial possession for 100 years, Britain granted a federation of key colonies the status of a mostly self-­governing Dominion u ­ nder the name “Canada” in 1867; it moved t­ owards in­de­pen­dence in 1931 and achieved full sovereignty in 1982.12 But the condition of postcoloniality does not itself confer vibrant in­de­pen­dent cultures. Canada has long been subject to cultural imperialism by ­England and cultural as well as financial dominance by the United States. To assert a distinctive sovereign identity, Canada needed writers and ways to magnify their voices within and beyond its borders. By the 1950s Canadian lit­er­a­ture was beginning to be anthologized; an “enlarged version” of The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse appeared in 1960.13 The im­mensely influential critic Northrop Frye, who mentored Atwood at the University of Toronto, was generating interest in myths and archetypes and “encourage[d] a new generation of younger poets” to make “Canada the mythic center of their imaginative real­ity,” for “A Country Without a My­thol­ogy” (Douglas LePan’s [sic] phrase) could produce no “national lit­er­a­ture.”14 This seems a more peaceful way of being Canadian than fighting—­except for what Frye saw as the distinctively “Canadian [literary] genius,” neither American nor British, “the evocation of stark terror” in response to “the frightening loneliness of a huge and thinly settled country.”15 The Canadian wilderness is so daunting ­because the “vast unconsciousness of nature” implacably rebuffs “­human and moral values.”16 ­These physical and existential terrors made Canada a natu­ral environment, literally and figuratively, for literary gothic to flourish.

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Reflecting in 2002 on the artistic ferment of the 1960s that made Canada “such fertile ground” for experimental writing, Atwood recalls that “it ­wasn’t taken for granted then” that “­t here is a Canadian canon” (though t­ here was) or “that a Canadian writer can be widely known, respected, and solvent”: “in such newly postcolonial times,” “the ‘real’ cultural places w ­ ere thought to be elsewhere.”17 But that “blank page” offered young Canadian writers, “An era of tremendous freedom. You d ­ idn’t have to worry about market forces [. . .]. You could travel strange roads, ­because ­t here ­were no highways. You ­d idn’t feel weighted down by your country’s cultural baggage, ­because—­officially, at any rate—­there ­wasn’t much of it.”18 A “rambunctious eclecticism prevailed” in this period, and “out of that cauldron came [. . .] the idea of cultural nationalism.”19 Amid “the constant po­liti­cal pressure of US trade interests on Canadian policy and sovereignty,”20 the government saw it was necessary to develop “a policy toolkit for stimulating domestic popu­lar cultural production”—­shielding it from being defined narrowly by US-­oriented “free-­market ideology” and overwhelmed by American culture products—­“on the premise that state investment [in Canadian artists] builds nationalism and sovereignty.”21 The House of Anansi’s eBook of Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein was supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, major funding agencies in the toolkit that continue to support the Press. Nothing in Atwood’s poem—­with two exceptions I s­hall mention l­ater—is recognizably “Canadian” to the outsider; ­after all, it redeploys the central characters and plot ele­ments of a 148-­year-­old En­glish literary classic. Nonetheless, the use of multiple popu­lar technologies over the years for her own creative ends by the Queen of Can Lit, crowned by showers of prizes from her native country for de­cades now, has constituted a robust reply to a commonplace of Canadian communications theory, that Canada lacks its own popu­lar culture. Given that “globalization theory privileges technology in its models of transnational po­liti­cal and culture economy, chiefly for facilitating the mobile exploits of capital,”22 Atwood’s poem in its multiplying techno-­multimedia forms could be tagged as “a postcolonial site of globalized popu­lar culture”—­distinctively framed by governmental tools of cultural and “technological nationalism.”23 On the other hand, given its content, in its digital incarnation as an eBook Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein pushes back, even more decisively than the handmade book alone could have done, against the hegemonic naturalization of techno-­ instrumentality: for Atwood represents Frankenstein’s dark science as naturalizing nothing and poetically enmeshes his speeches in the self-­reflexively ironic contradictions of the un/natural. Thinking of Atwood’s fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan, one could say that her poetic form and language are the message of Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein, which is not the same as the several material forms of its transmission.

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Does the fact, then, that Atwood has kept on pushing into new techno-­media territories as venues for her own artistic expression have an ironic relationship to Mary Shelley’s novelistic treatment of the dangerous power of modern scientific knowledge, just as industrialization was ramping up in E ­ ngland, accompanied by Luddite uprisings at the time she wrote? L ­ ater readers who have propagated this “technological reduction” of the story24 have been tempted to see the atom bomb and the mentality it brought as Victor Frankenstein’s most terrifying twentieth-­century progeny, “the monster system that may destroy us all.”25 As John Whittier Treat observes in Writing Ground Zero: Japa­nese Lit­er­a­ture and the Bomb: The myth of a benevolent science [. . .] is invalidated once one realizes that complex lethal devices and the apologies made for them now control how we live. [. . .] We have surrendered ourselves to the “logic” of modernity, [. . .] to systems both technological and cultural [enshrined in vast, impersonal bureaucracies] that we have created but for which no one person or even imaginable group of persons maintains some sense of ethical obligation.26

For principled objections—to unimaginably lethal space weapons, grotesque experiments in species-­crossing, cloning and genet­ically engineering animals, cyborgs—­have steadily retreated before the implacable momentum of scientific and technological modernity. For readers alarmed by t­hese developments, Atwood’s Doctor Frankenstein adumbrates far more than the Shelleyean nightmare could have ­imagined. And yet, even though Atwood has long been keenly interested in science, along with her father-­ entomologist and brother-­ neurophysiologist, and although the poem features some imagery of “scientific experiment,” in 1966 she was drawing other fish to fry from Shelley’s richly toxic store.

2 For Atwood’s pioneering generation of Canadian ­women writers, a national tradition of writing the forbidding wilderness and the strug­gle for survival, which “fostered a Darwinian habit of seeing and placing the ­human as animal,” could be injected with fresh interest in literary archetypes and mated with a new consciousness of the female experience as “double.”27 ­These themes are intertwined in Double Persephone (1961), The Circle Game (1963), then The Animals in That Country (1968)—­and in between them, Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein (1966). In Mary Shelley’s masterpiece of literary terror, with its tradition of female gothic, mutual transformations of man and creature, and oscillations, twinnings, and mergings of victor and victim roles, Atwood found a narrative frame and patterns to exploit as well as archetype lodes to mine, not only for dramatizing female/male power strug­gles, but also for exploring the “primal aspect of nature

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both external to man and within him.”28 ­These preoccupations would define much of Atwood’s l­ater work, which Mary Shelley’s novel also influenced more broadly. The exploration of “dualities, dichotomies, tension between opposites,”29 along with selected archetypes, constitute the poetic methods that give imagistic, dialogical, and recursive structure to Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein. The doubling and splitting of the self twist and turn its main speaker, whose imagery slips between masculine and/or feminine, ­human and/or animal. His interior monologues also shift grammatically between the past tense of recollection and the pres­ent of experience; between first person (in registers ranging from detachment, arrogant self-­delusion, and violent cruelty to confession and impotent despair) and second person (to refer to the creature, then to himself as an object of contemplation or accusation); and between his differing “you’s” of address. The poem’s prominent “prisoning rhythms”30 repeat “I . . . ​you” as oppositional pairs: they strug­gle, then display their inescapable relationality or collapse into one “­Thing”; both scientist and his creation are fe/male and humanimal. All this, however, is represented in Frankenstein’s interior monologues: ­there are no quotation marks in the poem and we ­don’t see or hear from the creature “in person” u ­ ntil the poem’s end, and even then an elusive presence. S/he/it may be silenced or absent, a figment of Frankenstein’s imagination, or a dialogue partner whose presence is registered only in the speaker’s double-­voiced discourse— in his expressive duplicity, in his “words with loopholes” holding out the possibility of reinterpreting or taking them back, in his “words with a sideways glance” at the necessary antagonist or scapegoat his consciousness repeatedly calls up in language but ­isn’t ­there. Frankenstein’s speeches register his inescapable sense of lurking menace; but as I read the poem, Atwood’s main departure from Shelley’s classic is that she never exteriorizes the monster as a murdering villain on her poetic stage. Overviewing the text’s progression may help us catch t­ hese tangled pro­cesses in poetic motion. Atwood’s solipsistic protagonist “announces” himself in the opening lines as I, the performer in the tense arena, glittered ­under the fluo­rescent moon. Was bent masked by the t­ able. Saw what focused my intent: the emptiness The air filled with an ether of cheers. My wrist extended a scalpel. (1)

This is at first sight the self-­deluded performing male ego Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley knew, if “masked,” anesthetized to his own cruelty by ­imagined praise.

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Atwood shifts to pres­ent tense in section 2 as the scientist/surgeon relives the unhinged excitement of creating ex nihilo: The ­table is a flat void, barren as total freedom. Though behold A sharp twist like taking a jar top off and it is a living skeleton, mine, round, that lies on the plate before me red as a pomegranate, ­every cell a hot light (2).

The feminine imagery, domestic and sexual, with the suggestion of rape, sets up the gender politics of the male speaker’s mis-­imagining that “mine” means he owns another body; while “­every cell a hot light” evokes scientific experimentation as sexual excitement. In section 3, the ­battle in the laboratory commences with his protean “opponent,” not as male/female combat but as a strug­gle for survival fought against “totemic animal imagery,”31 and thus against dark forces in Frankenstein’s unconscious. “The t­ hing” that “refuses to be s­ haped” “dissolves, growls, grows crude claws” and “springs.”   I cut with delicate precision. The specimens ranged on the shelves, applaud. The ­t hing falls Thud. A cat anatomized. O secret form of the heart, now I have you. (3)

As he hears his bottled captives cheer from the bleachers, the transformations of wild to tame animal to t­ hing to (­human?) heart trigger the first appearance in the poem of Frankenstein’s “I . . . ​you” mantra of possession, a favored formula he d ­ oesn’t realize is unstable. References to the “­thing,” and then to the objectified “you,” shift in section 4 to faux-­intimate second-­person addresses to a captive female body: “Now I s­ hall ornament you. / What would you like?” If the “ornaments” he proposes are feminine—­ “Baroque scrolls on your ankles? / a silver navel?”—­the male speaker presumes to usurp a feminine archetype by announcing himself “the universal weaver.” With

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misogynist mal-­intent, he proposes to “complicate you,” “surround you with” a “web” of “intricate ropes” to “pin you down.” His final question, “Where s­ hall I put your eyes?” implies not only a dehumanized subject, but also torture as his object. ­A fter this monstrous burst of male mastery, Dr.  Frankenstein’s power/ knowledge, as it w ­ ere, runs downhill, and on a very rocky path. The creature ­will not be pinned down. In section  5, the speaker, repositioning the “you,” abruptly shifts to confession in past tense: I was insane with skill: I made you perfect. I should have chosen instead to curl you small as a seed, trusted beginnings. Now I wince before this plateful of results: core and rind, the flesh between already turning rotten. I stand in the presence of the destroyed god: a rubble of tendons, knuckles and raw sinews. Knowing that this work is mine How can I love you? (5)

The curious language of this section suggests “a botched creation” but the sequence is scrambled, like the body parts: “death and birth are hideously mixed” not only “in the creation of a monster out of the pieces of the h ­ uman body,”32 but also in its reduction to “rubble.” In ­these lines the creature is made, then unmade. What they recapitulate is Shelley’s narrative sequence of male monster-­making and female monster-­dismembering; and the allusion appropriately arrives in the poem just ­a fter the imagery of normal ­human birth. Frankenstein sees he has chosen masculine “skill” over feminine nature, but perhaps more surprising is his—­ momentary—­recognition of his blasphemy. Yet to whom does “the destroyed god” refer? Can that be the creature, or is he “stand[ing] in the presence” of himself (as usual), that is, his own self-­worship, now “destroyed”? This “presence” is also an absence. When the guilty speaker asks, “Knowing that the work is mine / how can I love you?” he seems to address not the creature but his own failure in a self-­ reflexive construction, which may seem wise in opposing “love” to “knowing” but which (literally) reveals his continued obsession with his own desire, what “I love.” In section 6 the performer has metamorphosed into an abject failed parent, as the creature he calls “larval” “arise[s]” in his chastened imagination to become,

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biologically and morally, a h ­ uman You, “red, / You are h ­ uman and distorted,” “have been starved / you are hungry. I have nothing to feed you.” From this terrifying image of his failure and lack, he tries to “escape”: “I pull around me, ­running, / a cape of rain.” Yet he continues to ask, more trenchantly than before: “What was my ravenous motive? / Why did I make you?” Is this “escape” or pursuit or both bound together? And how is e­ ither pos­si­ble? Shelley’s Frankenstein periodically halts the telling of his tale to Walton in order to reflect on its “lessons.”33 Self-­interruptions are constant for Atwood’s Frankenstein; but one is specially marked in section 7, when his torturously divided consciousness, returning to pres­ent tense, reaches for the seemingly higher, but hardly more comforting, level of personified “Reflection”:   you have stolen every­t hing you needed: my joy, my ability to suffer. You have transmuted yourself to me: I am a vestige, I am numb. (7)

In Frankenstein’s recursive, dialogical efforts at self-­redemption, ­here “You” and “I” merge in an abstraction. Personifying his own thought might be expected to inflate but actually shrinks him, as he acknowledges; he’s also discovered his numbness as a mode of escape (in the section just before we find him in the snow). Accused by Reflection of murder, he makes counter-­accusations and excuses, then in an evasive move of self-­d ivision accuses the “Blood of my brain” for “kill[ing] ­t hese ­people.” Section 7 just stops, inconclusively. Section 8 opens with Frankenstein outdoors, seemingly ready to face up. He begins: Since I dared to attempt impious won­ders I must pursue that animal I once denied was mine.

Recognizing one’s own darkness is a central princi­ple of Atwood’s ethics, yet for Dr. Frankenstein pursuit is a compulsion and thus can give no relief despite his guilty admissions. In this section’s shift to dialogue with his inward self, instead of the peace of self-­forgiveness the next two stanzas compel more pain in his wilderness pursuit/escape. The “Modern Prometheus,” the mythopoeic figure of towering ambition whom Percy Shelley (and Lord Byron) idealized as the victim

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of jealous gods, and whom Mary Shelley “complicate[d],” Atwood shrinks to “a cold / kernel of pain” whose “heart’s / husk is a stomach. I am its food” (8), a meta­phor of just recompense for starving the creature. Across the poem Atwood’s tortured egoist traverses a downward-­spiraling cir­cuit marked by imagery of payback: the “performer” who had salivated over the dissection ­table’s “flat void, / barren as total freedom” (2) now roams a “vacant winter plain,” “scratch[ing] huge rescue messages / on the solid / snow; in vain” (8)—­nature’s savage revenge on a pitiable figure. Yet Frankenstein is still “announcing” himself even as his voice is fading from the poem. At the start he is already on his way to becoming posthuman; in his last speech, we hear and see “the morph­ing of the ­human protagonist into his [. . .] presumed ‘othe[r]’ ”:34 “I am the gaunt hunter /[. . .] / lurking, gnawing leather” (9), like a loose starving dog chews his leash. In Shelley’s novel, hunter and hunted are mutually wretched gothic doppelgängers. Not quite so in Atwood’s rewriting, which lets the voice of the self-­deluding Frankenstein run on, exposing himself to himself, even more to us, through nine cycles. Meanwhile, the “sparkling monster,” who has already pranced forth at the start of section 9, gambols ­t here ahead, his mane electric: [. . .]. He dances spirals on the ice, his clawed feet kindling shaggy fires. His happiness is now the chase itself: he traces it in light, his paths contain it.

­ ese meta­phoric constructions cannot be ­either Frankenstein’s or the creature’s Th words: in this section and the start of the next, Atwood introduces a third narrative voice to execute the transition to the climax and authenticate the monster’s existence from a descriptive point of view that is at the same time sympathetic and celebratory. Section 10 dives deep below the surface to discern the creature as the archetypal “shadow” of the unconscious who performs Frankenstein’s nightmares—­a phantasmagoric shape-­shifter who then transmutes into a figure of “global terrors,”35 but who is nonetheless astonishingly playful: The creature, his arctic hackles bristling, spreads over the dark ceiling,

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his paws on the horizons, rolling the world like a snowball. (10)

Marge Piercy has observed that the “landscape of the psyche” in Atwood’s early work “tends to be a cabin in the woods, on a lake, a river—­the outpost of contact between straight lines [. . .] and natu­ral curves. [. . .] the imposed order and the wild organic community.”36 Speeches has no “outpost,” only opposing images: to Frankenstein’s linear conceptions of real­ity—­t he “flat void” of “the ­table,” the wrist extending the “scalpel,” the ropes to “pin you down,” the “equation” he ­will “carve and seal in your skull”—as well as to his fruitless recursions, Atwood opposes the circular images associated with nature and the creature (“curl you small as a seed,” “spirals on the ice,” the world as a “snowball”). The point of “contact” between the man and “that animal I once denied” is this dream, and in it the creature, articulate and learned like Shelley’s monster, fi­nally “glows and says”: Doctor, my shadow shivering on the t­ able, you dangle on the leash of your own longing; your need grows teeth. You sliced me loose and said it was Creation. I could feel the knife. Now you would like to heal that chasm in your side, but I recede. I prowl. I ­w ill not come when you call. (10)

It has been said that Atwood’s poem “renews established readings” of the novel by “imagin[ing] Frankenstein’s monster as a ­woman speaking back to her creator.”37 This interpretation offers too s­ imple a solution to the poem’s dilemmas and domesticates its gothic terrors. Instead of delivering a bracing feminist lesson to live by, Atwood, in creatively adapting Shelley’s literary allusions to Paradise Lost, imagines Frankenstein destroying “god” by playing at “god” while the creature, cycling through the roles in the biblical creation myth, becomes a self-­ wounded Adam as well as Eve “sliced [. . .] loose” and, with a final touché, Lilith. Rather than exposing “the myth of a benevolent science,” with its “complex lethal devices and the apologies made for them” that “now control how we live [. . .],”38—­t hemes that come into what Atwood calls her l­ater “speculative fiction,”39—at this earlier stage she had lethal gendered myths more in mind. Frankenstein is masculine and feminine for both writers, reduplicated and “transmuted” (section 7) over and over; the creature is represented as both, too,

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for dif­fer­ent reasons, but at the end of Atwood’s poem “he” is marked most as a female figure of victimization and survival—­a double figure Atwood would work out in Surfacing, her second novel, six years ­later,40 and in many other places with varying outcomes. Initiated by a male “I, the performer,” the poem gradually ropes its masculine and feminine princi­ples into a mutual strug­gle that fi­nally ties Frankenstein down, or strands him. Then Atwood’s figure of wild nature gambols forth and cuts it/her/himself loose.

3 Although applying to writing the term “experimental,” once associated with science, “may have faded somewhat,” Atwood has quipped, “the term remains, leaving b ­ ehind a faint whiff of formaldehyde and Dr.  Frankenstein”: “the dissection of language and narrative, and their reassembly into talking monsters, can strike us as cold-­blooded. Dr.  Frankenstein himself was not cold-­ blooded, however; he was a disrupter of social norms, a breaker of laws, a subversive idealist, a feverish believer in the new and the potential; and so it is with many ‘experimental’ writers.” 41 Atwood has said that she followed Mary Shelley’s model closely in Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein.42 What was most “experimental” about this text in 1966, before it became part of multi-­mediated and digitized proj­ects, and ­after, was the craft that disrupted the norms of traditional poetics in many ways for subversive thematic ends. In a 1978 New York Times interview with Joyce Carol Oates, Atwood explained: Id ­ on’t think of poetry as a “rational” activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more ­because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very impor­tant to me. But like many modern poets I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the ­middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in ­favor of echoes placed ­later in the poems. For me, ­every poem has a texture of sound which is at least as impor­tant to me as the “argument.” 43

What Atwood adds to Mary Shelley’s prose, which has its own musical motifs, is her carefully calibrated sound system—­orchestrated chimes and clashes, beats, pauses, and repetitions—­paired with her visual effects.44 In Speeches sound textures weave the reader into experiencing the delusion, hubris, and weakness within the doctor’s “feverish” assertions of self as we take in the internal echoes and dissonances that are “concealed” from him: even though he speaks the lines, he does not seem to hear his own patterns. His “I . . . ​it” repetitions in section 3 climax with the first “I . . . ​you” pair in the poem, a self-­focused, faux-­dialogical construction Frankenstein uses thereafter again and again as his favored construction of real­ity and relationship, so that it also becomes a motif. This is how

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Atwood does Shelley’s dialogues between the creature and Frankenstein: they are directed by and to himself and entirely in his own head. The Circle Game (1963), Branko Gorjup writes, “introduced into Canadian poetry a new idiom [. . .] quintessentially Atwoodian: ironic, direct, unadorned, accessible, emotionally detached, and as precise and pointed as a stiletto.” 45 Published two years ­later, Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein features detachment as his prob­lem from the outset and exposes it by stringing his speeches on Atwood’s “barbed lyre.” 46 Sometimes they vibrate with sinister “Ssss” sounds hissing back at him in his own voice, as many as five in one line in section 3. In section  5, the S’s shift their sound significance with a shift in feeling: “I was insane with skill,” a damning admission, is followed by “I should have chosen instead to curl you small as a seed, / trusted beginnings. Now I wince / before this plateful of results. [. . .].” (Atwood’s barbed lyre catches on “wince.”) Like ­these repeated consonants, rhymes internal to the verses also invite hearing connections—in the hopeless monotone of “plain,” “pain,” and “in vain” when Frankenstein is stranded in the snow (8); in the creature’s angry “feel the knife” and mocking refusal to “heal that chasm”; and in the heard irony of its final slant rhymes, “I prowl” and “[I ­will not come when you] call” (10). Internal sound and rhythm patterns are also crafted to reproduce the experience of violent conflict—in Section 3, for example, first built up with sibilants, alternating stresses, and driving spondees: “The t­ hing refuses to be s­ haped, it moves / like yeast. I thrust, / the ­thing fights back.” Next comes a longer internally hissing line growing the threat and stressing it with spondees (again)—­“It dissolves, growls, grows crude claws”—­followed by assonance in “The air is dusty with blood.” Frankenstein’s voice shifts back to a pair of trochees with spondaic force—­“It springs. I cut”—­before adding “with delicate precision.” This mellifluous phrase asserts the scalpel’s superiority (imaginary, not mentioned) over the creature’s only too sensory “crude claws” to demonstrate the elegance of Frankenstein’s skill, affirmed (again) by “applause.” But blunt spondees bust in: “The ­thing falls Thud. A cat / anatomized.” To Frankenstein it’s a triumph: he c­ an’t hear the brutality the poet supplies with sound; to the reader, he’s crushed by it. ­These short lines also offer a good example of Atwood’s “interest in the double, aural/visual, effects of poetry.” 47 Sherrill Grace thinks that “many of [Atwood’s] poems must be seen as well as heard,” 48 an insight that points forward to the collaboration with Pachter and the eBook. Yet they already are seen-­ and-­heard when we read the poems aloud with attention to the ways visual and aural images work together. For instance, we literally see, as well as hear, the verbal repetitions. When the monster speaks, he reverses Frankenstein’s many “I . . . ​you” assertions with his own diverse pairings of “my . . . ​you,” “your . . . ​your”; “You . . . ​I,” “you . . . ​your,” with a climax of “I,” “I” “I” overwhelming “you” at the creature’s moment of triumph (10). Atwood also executes aural/visual patterns by voicing circular

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images with internal sound rhymes, as when the creature “dances in spirals on the ice.” The large round eyes Pachter has given the grinning monster, as it leaps and bounds over the shrunken, slinking figure of its creator, literally bristle with triumphant mischief.49 But we also hear/see this mischief in the poem when the creature’s slant rhymes bite back: “your need grows teeth” (10), a line that forces attention to the closely-­placed ee’s on the page, challenging to say aloud without feeling one’s own teeth, perhaps si­mul­ta­neously seeing and feeling them as a grimace. The aural and visual work together in many places in this poem, down to the last line, “I prowl. / I w ­ ill not come when you call,” which conveys the sound-­ and-­sense of the creature’s circling by bringing back the sound of “prowl” with a slant rhyme, the creature’s final touché as he prances away.

4 Atwood is a felicitously idiosyncratic writer who refuses to be pinned down and has called art a way of “seeing in the dark.”50 It’s her way: the poet herself twists and turns as Speeches unfolds its darkness and deeper darkness to the reader. Atwood too is “the performer / in the tense arena,” “masked by the ­table” and “focused [on]” her “intent: the emptiness” (section 1) like the “blank page” that invited writing from young Canadian poets in the 1960s. But she is also pres­ent in other spaces the poet’s intent defines, such as the emotional blank inside the performer’s husk and his ambiguous intentions. The lines confessing that the “living skeleton” which “lies on the plate before me” is “mine” (section 2) may pick up additional resonances if we imagine we hear Atwood speaking them aloud. Meanwhile in Pachter’s drawings, the shaggy-­headed figure holding a scalpel/gun/pen to its head, whom the viewer assumes is Frankenstein, is transmuted in a ­later, closer-up sketch of a fetus X-­rayed inside the same shaggy head—­which, we see now, could be ­woman’s hair: the brain is the “chamber of horrors” where the creation of monsters begins, and where the writer must go to seek out the “secret form of the heart” (3). By section 5, the creator/ poet “wince[s]” too as she asks, “Knowing that the work is mine / How can I love you?” In creating such lines out of her own head, Atwood claims, as she acknowledges in the “Author’s Note” to the eBook, the inward darkness with which the artist strug­gles in daring to create what Shelley had called “my hideous progeny”. The writer too “must pursue / the animal I once denied / was mine” (8) and pres­ent for all to see, not least herself, what has been hidden: the poem she offers is her “plateful of results” (5). But it’s necessary for Atwood also to address the You’s in Frankenstein’s speeches to the reader. As a character says in The Handmaid’s Tale, “no one is exempt.” The Canada themes, embedded in the poem’s drama of victimization and survival—­the subject of Atwood’s handbook to Canadian lit­er­a­ture,

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Survival—­materialize as setting in the poem’s last sections, staged in Canada’s frozen north. In this wilderness, where “the sky is a black shell” over a “vacant winter / plain,” the creature executes “spirals on the ice,” his “arctic hackles / bristl[e]” in nightmare, and at the top of the globe “his paws on the horizons / roll the world like a snowball” (8, 9, 10). The poetry—­that is to say, the artist and her poetic creation—­triumphs, not by overcoming darkness but by giving complex expression to the terrifying wilderness of the ­human heart and, when Atwood is the gamboling poet, “Trac[ing] it in light.” Then comes her final twist: the poem unleashed “­will not come when you call.”

Notes 1. Double Persephone, published in 1961 by Hawkshead Press, Toronto (16 pages), won a commendation medal. The Circle Game (18 leaves), published in 1963 (Bloomfield Hills, Mich.) in a limited edition of 15 copies designed, printed, and illustrated by Charles Pachter, won the prestigious Governor General’s award (Robert Potts, “Light in the Wilderness,” Guardian, April 26, 2003). Two other limited-­edition poem texts illustrated by Pachter ­were printed by the Cranbury Acad­emy of Art (Bloomfield Hills, Mich.) before Speeches for Frankenstein was brought out. “Speeches” subsequently appeared in Margaret Atwood’s collection The Animals in That Country (Boston: L ­ ittle, Brown, 1968) and in Selected Poems, 1965–75 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976). Atwood has won bundles of awards for her work and in 2001 was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame (“Margaret Atwood.” https://­en​.­wikipedia​.­org​/­wiki​/­Margaret​_­Atwood). Most recently, in June 2016 she received the PEN Pinter prize, “given to a writer of outstanding literary merit who, in the words of Pinter himself on winning the Nobel, casts an ‘unflinching, unswerving’ gaze upon the world and shows a ‘fierce intellectual determination . . . ​to define the real truth of our lives and our socie­ties’ ” (Alison Flood, “Margaret Atwood Wins 2016 PEN Pinter Prize,” Guardian, June 16, 2016. https://­w ww​.t­ heguardian​.c­ om​/b ­ ooks​/2­ 016​/­jun​/­16​/m ­ argaret​-a­ twood​-w ­ ins​ -­2016​-­pen​-­pinter​-p ­ rize). 2. House of Anansi Press, “Announcing Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein: A Multimedia Atwood Pachter Proj­ect,” House of Anansi Press web site (November 2, 2012). https://­houseofanansi​.­c om​/­c ollections​/­i mprint​-­p oetry​/­products​/­s peeches​-­for​-­doctor​ -­f rankenstein​- ­epub​-­d igital. The book was first printed at the Cranbury Acad­emy of Art (Bloomfield Hills, Mich.) with 29 color illustrations in 1966. Students ­w ill not be able to experience the e-­Book if their institution’s library has not purchased it. Assuming that Mary Shelley’s novel has been discussed, the question for teachers to ask, then, is: how can we imagine what’s in the “enhanced” e-­Book? Students must bounce back to Atwood’s poem itself, try reading parts aloud, and rely on a printed text, though examined imaginatively and visually, and listened to in their own voices. Section II of this essay on structure and progression, and III on the poem as a “texture of sound,” give some clues about what Atwood’s poetic form “means,” inviting students into t­ hose levels of analy­sis. Her interpretation of Frankenstein is of interest in itself, of course, and can be compared to Mary Shelley’s. (e.g., Is Shelley’s Frankenstein as violently masculinist as Atwood’s? What does her characterization of the creature as female add?) But studying Atwood’s text also offers students the opportunity to see and hear what a poem does to the novel’s material, and to learn some of the technical terms in which poetry can be discussed and appreciated. Having gone through the poem slowly to examine t­hese features, the teacher might want to walk through it again and ask: in what ways does Atwood’s Dr. Frankenstein resemble the poet? How does the text also “confess” the poet’s challenges in examining the dark sides of life (my Section IV)? Then the teacher could go back to talk about the

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“Canadian” dimensions of the poem and Atwood as a distinctively Canadian poet (discussed mainly in Part I). Since Canada is rarely discussed in American classrooms, Speeches offers an opportunity to teach about the experience and cultural development of our neighbor to the north. It w ­ ouldn’t hurt to put up a map that shows how enormous Canada is—­and its Arctic (which comes into the last part of the poem). 3. House of Anansi Press, “Announcing Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein.” 4. Comment by user Dylan. http://­w ww​.­goodreads​.­com​/­review​/­show​/­1258040973​?­book​ _­show​_ a­ ction​=­true&from​_­review​_­page​=1­ . 5. “Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein” for Soprano & Recorded Sound (1980), with m ­ usic composed by Bruce Pennycook and text by Margaret Atwood (“Margaret Atwood,” https://­en​.­w ikipedia​.­org ​/­w iki​/­Margaret ​_ ­Atwood). Pennycook went on to establish two ­music technology degree programs at McGill University and served as its Vice-­Principal for Information Systems and Technology ­until 2000. 6. “Margaret Atwood.” https://­en​.­wikipedia​.o ­ rg​/w ­ iki​/M ­ argaret​_­Atwood. “One Ring Zero with Margaret Atwood in Toronto.” August 26, 2006. YouTube video, 1:27, posted by “House of Anansi,” November 1, 2012. https://­w ww​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­ZG0FDrl5UL8. Students can watch Atwood on this ­music video. 7. “Margaret Atwood.” https://­en​.­w ikipedia​.­org ​/­w iki​/­Margaret ​_ ­Atwood; Mark  A. McCutcheon, “Frankenstein as a Figure of Globalization in Canada’s Postcolonial Popu­ lar Culture,” Continuum: A Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 25, no. 5 (2011): 7, quoting Julie Rak, “Can(the) Lit: The Cultural Meaning of Atwood’s Long PenTM,” paper presented at TransCanada Two: Lit­ er­ a­ t ure, Institutions, Citizenship (University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada, October 14, 2007). The McCutcheon page numbers in my essay are on the printout of the post-­print version of his article from Taylor & Francis. 8. “Margaret Atwood.” https://­en​.­w ikipedia​.­org​/­w iki​/­Margaret​_­Atwood. 9. “Speeches for Dr. Frankenstein,” sections 1–3. What Atwood calls a “poem cycle” in ten phases is divided into ten unequal sections. My text, including the punctuation of the title, is taken from Atwood’s Selected Poems, 1965–1975 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 64–69. 10. In the Sixties, the period the poem belongs to, “multi-­media” popularly meant the projection of photo­graphs on slides accompanied by audiotaped ­music or a person standing t­ here reading a script. We thought that was pretty cutting-­edge. 11. “House of Anansi Press,” Canadian Encyclopedia online. http://­w ww​.­the​canadianen​ cyclopedia​.­ca​/­en​/­article​/­house​-­of​-­a nansi​/­. 12. “Canada​.­” https://­en​.­w ikipedia​.­org​/­w iki​/­Canada. 13. Sandra Djwa, “The Where of H ­ ere: Margaret Atwood and a Canadian Tradition,” in The Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism, ed. Arnold E. Davidson and Cathy N. Davidson (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1981), 16. 14. Djwa, “The Where of ­Here,” 16–19. 15. Northrop Frye, The Bush Garden (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1971), 138; quoted in Djwa, “The Where of ­Here,” 19. 16. Northrop Frye, “Conclusion,” in Literary History of Canada, 2nd  ed., ed. Carl  F. Klinck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 2: 342; quoted in Djwa, “The Where of ­Here,” 18. 17. Margaret Atwood, “Introduction: Ground Works,” in Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose: 1983–2005 (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), 257. 18. Atwood, “Introduction: Ground Works,” 259, 258. 19. Atwood, “Introduction: Ground Works,” 258. 20. McCutcheon, “Frankenstein as a Figure of Globalization,” 3. 21. McCutcheon, “Frankenstein as a Figure of Globalization,” 2, citing Peter S. Grant and Chris Wood, Blockbusters and Trade Wars: Popu­lar Culture in a Globalized World (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2004), 386–88.

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22. McCutcheon, “Frankenstein as a Figure of Globalization,” 3, citing Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture 2, no. 2 (1990): 1–24; and Saskia Sassen, “Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Ele­ments for a Theorization,” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 222. 23. McCutcheon, “Frankenstein as a Figure of Globalization,” 1. 24. Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-­century Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 8. 25. Judith McCombs, “Atwood’s Haunted Sequences,” in The Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism, ed. Arnold  E. Davidson and Cathy  N. Davidson (Toronto: Anansi, 1981), 50. 26. John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japa­nese Lit­er­a­ture and the Bomb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 11, 12–13. 27. Djwa, “The Where of ­Here,” 22–24, and 19–20. 28. Djwa, “The Where of ­Here,” 33. 29. Djwa, “The Where of ­Here,” 33. 30. Judith McCombs, “Atwood’s Haunted Sequences,” 39. 31. Eli Mandel, “Atwood Gothic,” in Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood, ed. Judith McCombs (Boston: G.  K. Hall, 1988), 115. http://­w ww​.­encyclopedia​.­com​/­a rticle​-­1G2​ -­3447300026​/a­ twood​-m ­ argaret​-­1939​.­html. 32. Mandel, “Atwood Gothic,” 117. 33. Andy Mousley, “The Posthuman,” in The Cambridge Companion to “Frankenstein,” ed. Andrew Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 169. 34. Mousley, “The Posthuman,” 158. 35. McCombs, “Atwood’s Haunted Sequences,” 50. 36. Marge Piercy, “Margaret Atwood: Beyond Victimhood,” in Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood, ed. Judith McCombs (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988), 60. 37. Susan Squier, Letter to the Editor, New York Times, April 19, 1992; see also Francesca Saggini, “Frankenstein: Presence, Pro­cess, Pro­gress” in this volume. 38. Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero, 11. 39. “Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could ­really happen” (Atwood quoted in Robert Potts, “Light in the Wilderness,” The Guardian, April  26, 2003. https://­w ww​.­t heguardian​.­c om​/ ­b ooks​/­2 003​/­apr​/­2 6​/­f iction​.­mar​garet­​ atwood). She places her novels The Handmaid’s Tale (Toronto: McClelland and ­Stewart, 1985) and Oryx and Crake (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2003) in this category. 40. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972). 41. Atwood, “Introduction: Ground Works,” 254–55. 42. Atwood, “Author’s Note” in the eBook of Speeches for Frankenstein (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2012), which is available only for readers of the eBook. 43. Joyce Carol Oates, “Margaret Atwood: Poet,” New York Times, May 21, 1978. 44. See Sherrill R. Grace, “Margaret Atwood and the Poetics of Duplicity,” in The Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism, ed. Arnold N. Davidson and Cathy N. Davidson (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1981). 55–68. Grace praises Atwood’s artwork for some of her poems and book covers, as well as the ways “she exploits the visual impact of poetic line on the space of the page to full effect” (58). ­Here I might mention that the ­whole ­middle section of Speeches (3–7) is set up in visual “couplets,” double lines without rhyme; the pairs are also separated from each other by blank space, visual apertures letting meaning sink in or leak away. The poem has many kinds of semantic and narrative lacunae as well. 45. Branko Gorjup, “Margaret Atwood’s Poetry and Poetics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, ed. Coral Ann Howells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 134.

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46. Barbed Lyres: Canadian Venomous Verses (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1990) is the title of Atwood’s edition of satires by Canadian writers. See Nathalie Cooke, Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 22. 47. Grace, “The Poetics of Duplicity,” 58. 48. Grace, “The Poetics of Duplicity,” 58. 49. In this wonderfully suggestive picture, Pachter has drawn stiff “bristles” all around the creature’s wide-­awake eyes that also look like mascara. 50. This line appears in Atwood’s Cat’s Eye (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1988).

chapter 12

z Young Adult Frankenstein Andrew McInnes

1 Conceived when Mary Shelley was 18 years old, Frankenstein voices the profoundly adolescent concerns of personal identity, rebellion, and responsibility. Critics such as Judith Bara, Pamela Clemit, and Ann Mellor have related the novel to Shelley’s own childhood and education, the educational philosophies of her famous parents—­Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin—­a nd the position of ­children in late eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­century culture, more generally.1 Using criticism of Frankenstein in relation to the Romantic child as a jumping-­off point, I analyze twenty-­fi rst-­century adaptations of Shelley’s story to explore ­t hese rewritings as repre­sen­ta­tions of a ­later cultural icon, the teenager. The three novels I focus on ­here, Kenneth Oppel’s This Dark Endeavour (2011), Christopher Priestley’s Mister Creecher (2011), and Kate Horsley’s The Monster’s Wife (2014), all seek to fill a gap in Shelley’s original text—­addressing, respectively, Victor’s teenage experiments with alchemy, how the monster tracked Victor from London to Scotland to have a female creature made for him, and the teenager doomed to become the monster’s bride. Moreover, each of t­ hese authors see a corresponding gap, or lack, at the heart of their teenage protagonist’s subjectivity: Oppel’s Victor is eaten up by fraternal jealousy and quasi-­ incestuous desire, increasingly lacking a moral compass; Priestley’s eponymous Mister Creecher’s lack of companionship and affection brutalizes him and in turn traumatizes his young charge, revealed to be the teenage Bill Sikes from Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist; and Horsley’s Oona literally lacks a healthy heart, but also burns with similar feelings of jealousy and desire as Oppel’s Victor. Connecting Frankenstein’s formal unruliness to the high passions of adolescence, Marshall Brown’s provocative “Frankenstein: A Child’s Tale” connects the novel’s interest in and reflection on monstrosity to childhood anx­i­eties and 2 19

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desires.2 For example, Brown lists Frankenstein’s childish qualities, beginning with the creature’s climactic decision to self-­immolate in the m ­ iddle of a frozen wasteland: ­ ere the monster’s impossible funeral pyre remains an adolescent flash in the H pan. And its self-­congratulatory defiance perpetuates the juvenile air of all the characters. Bratty to the end, the monster ­w ill not distinguish vindication from vindictiveness. [. . .] Frankenstein began as a game [. . .] and Mary’s Introduction not only puts the composition u ­ nder the guise of childbirth but is full of allusions to her childhood. [. . .] Frankenstein and his monster both idealize childhood, describe it at length and in infatuated terms, image themselves and ­others in the guise of ­children. [. . .] Birth fantasies and womblike retreats figure prominently, [. . .] but the entire perspective of the helpless mortal confronting a large and power­ful figure with a poor complexion also reproduces in distorted form infantile experiences and neuroses. Fi­nally, what has rarely attracted critical notice is the infantile character of the monster’s desire for a female companion.3

With this cata­logue of childishness—­the monster is “bratty” and, besides, incestuous in his desire for a sister-­mate; Victor is infatuated with an idealized vision of childhood; and the novel itself grows out of childish games and more poignant memories of childhood—­Brown situates childhood as the monstrous perversion at the core of Frankenstein. This chapter extrapolates the monstrosity and perversity of Frankenstein’s c­ hildren in con­temporary Young Adult (YA) fiction: the teen­agers in my chosen texts experience desire as lack, provoking perverse actions and violent reactions. Throughout the chapter, I am ­going to use “monster” rather than the now preferred “Creature” to label Frankenstein’s creation ­because the three Young Adult novels that I focus on are all fascinated by monstrosity and its dark correlation with adolescence. Each of ­t hese novels fleshes out a small part of the original Frankenstein. Oppel’s This Dark Endeavour, subtitled The Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein, imagines Shelley’s anti-­hero as the evil half of a pair of twins, beginning his alchemical researches as a teenager to cure his mysteriously ill ­brother, Konrad. Oppel is fascinated by the fragile masculinity of his protagonist, portraying Victor as a compelling mixture of charisma, arrogance, and passion. The teenager’s violent pursuit of Elizabeth Lavenza, ­here the betrothed of the ­dying Konrad, is stormily romantic, unlike the adult Victor’s lackluster wooing in Frankenstein. Priestley’s Mister Creecher reimagines Victor’s sojourn in ­England from the point of view of the impatient monster, shadowing him from London to the Lakes, hungrily awaiting the creation of his bride. Fi­nally, Horsley’s The Monster’s Wife, marketed as an adult horror novel but sharing with the earlier texts a sympathy for teen­agers as “monsters,” explores the impact of Victor’s creation of the bride for his monster on the island community

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of Orkney, from the point of view of another portentously sick teenager, Oona, whom Victor hires as a maidservant. Looking for criticism on Frankenstein in relation to c­ hildren’s lit­er­a­ture, I perhaps inevitably stumbled upon an article comparing Shelley’s novel to the Harry Potter series, as J. K. Rowling’s work sometimes seems to function as synecdoche and too often as a replacement for c­ hildren’s lit­er­a­ture as a w ­ hole. Noel Chevalier argues that “Rowling’s delineation of the limits of magic parallels Mary Shelley’s indictment of science in what is prob­ably the most famous piece of Godwinian lit­er­a­ture, Frankenstein,” exploring the complex interaction of “magical science” with issues of power, re­sis­tance, and justice in both texts.4 Furthermore, Chevalier briefly connects Victor’s creature with the Black f­amily’s house-­elf, Kreacher, as both are “ugly, malevolent, and reviled by humanity” but also hint at the possibilities of happiness and heroism.5 Chevalier’s piece ends on a speculative note, hoping for some of the ambiguity of Shelley’s novel to rub off on Rowling’s, partially b ­ ecause it was published before the conclusion of the Harry Potter series, but also b ­ ecause the links between Rowling, Godwin, and Shelley seem speculative too. Frankenstein has much more specific links to ­children’s lit­er­a­ture, particularly YA fiction, with explicit adaptations and implicit riffs on Shelley’s novel apparent not only in my selected texts but also ­running the gamut from Jon Scieszka’s comic Frank Einstein and the Antimatter Motor (2014), playing Victor’s tragic experiments as innovative farce, through Gris Grimly’s graphic novel Frankenstein (2013) to the more diffuse influence of Shelley’s original on texts such as Scott Westerfeld’s Pretties (2005), fascinated by body horror and the patriarchal demands on young w ­ omen. Karen Coats and Farran Norris Sands trace some of t­ hese connections in “Growing Up Frankenstein: Adaptations for Young Readers,” a critical survey of c­ hildren’s lit­er­a­ture influenced by Shelley’s novel, from surprisingly cheerful picture books through the tween anx­i­eties of the Monster High book series to two texts which I aim to analyze in more detail, Oppel’s and Priestley’s novels.6 Coats and Sands account for the seemingly strange fit of Frankenstein with books written and illustrated for a very young audience by focusing on how c­ hildren’s lit­er­a­ture resists the turn ­towards alienation and despair in the climax of Frankenstein to stress instead the importance of integration and tolerance of otherness. The Monster High novels, through the character of the teenage girl monster Frankie Stein, similarly focus on encouraging ac­cep­tance of the changing adolescent body by exploring Frankie’s relationship with her scars and neck bolts.7 Coats and Sands devote a detailed passage to Oppel’s novels about Victor Frankenstein, This Dark Endeavour and Such Wicked Intent, arguing that they demonstrate “psychological complexity” by “synchronously redeem[ing] and vilify[ing] Shelley’s characters through the exploration of domestic relationships.”8 In terms of YA fiction, particularly the repre­sen­ta­tion of the adolescent as monstrous, Oppel’s Victor actually returns a layer of ambiguity sometimes

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missing from con­temporary readings of Shelley’s anti-­hero: This Dark Endeavour’s Victor embodies the charisma and passion which Shelley’s Frankenstein tells of but does not show. Coats and Sands mention Mister Creecher more briefly, arguing that, “Priestley shows the positive, redemptive qualities of the creature, whilst si­mul­ta­ neously revealing Frankenstein’s baseness.”9 While I agree that Priestley’s depiction of Victor is more straightforwardly evil than Oppel’s complex portrayal of him, I argue that the repre­sen­ta­tion of Frankenstein’s monster in Mister Creecher is more ambiguous than Coats’ and Sands’ focus on redemption allows: the monster both cares for and threatens Billy, the novel’s teenage protagonist, whose experiences traumatize him and direct him ­towards a life of crime, precipitating the monstrosity which Priestley hints is an inherent part of the adolescent’s unstable personality. Together with The Monster’s Wife, Priestley’s and Oppel’s novels map Frankenstein’s monstrousness onto the personalities of their young adult protagonists, sharing a sense that monstrosity is founded on absence and lack.

2 Criticism on YA fiction is a growth area, increasingly distinguished from ­children’s lit­er­a­ture criticism as YA fiction has developed its own position within consumer culture. Mary Hilton and Maria Nikolajeva situate adolescence as a meta­phor for social change in YA fiction, arguing that, “[t]hrough sympathetically portraying the alienated pains and pleasures of adolescence, through enacting adolescence with all its turmoil, writers bring young readers face to face with dif­fer­ent forms of cultural alienation itself: the legacy of colonialism, po­liti­c al injustice, environmental desecration, sexual stereotyping, consumerism, madness, and death.”10 They provide a history of the development of YA from fin-­de-­siècle fiction which resists adolescence, instead depicting a nostalgic vision of pastoral childhood, through interwar cele­brations of the cult of the child, shadowed by grief at the massive loss of life in World War I, to the post-­war development of lit­er­a­ ture for and about teen­agers.11 Hilton and Nikolajeva see The Catcher in the Rye as the foundation of a YA canon, arguing that J. D. Salinger’s novel “established in lit­er­a­ture for and about the young adult the power­ful meta­phorical connection between a troubled inner life of the adolescent and the injustices and cruelties of wider society.”12 Oppel’s, Priestley’s, and Horsley’s novels represent their teenage protagonists as grappling variously with po­liti­cal and parental tyranny, class warfare, and gendered oppression. All three texts explore the internal, psychic pro­cesses of managing this sense of alienation, demonstrating that adolescence is founded on violent emotion and can lead to its violent expression without careful checks and balances.

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Robyn McCallum uses a Bakhtinian methodology to explore the repre­sen­ta­ tion of subjectivity in YA fiction, arguing that teenage identity is always oriented ­towards an audience. In her chapter on the role of the double in the formation of teenage subjectivity, McCallum analyzes three narrative strategies integral to the young adult quest for identity: “First, the double, or doppelgänger, is used to represent intersubjective relationships between self and other as an internalized dialogue and the internal fragmentation of the subject—­t he split subject. Second, characters are seen to experience temporal, cultural or psychological displacement and marginalization [. . .]. The third narrative strategy [. . .] is intertextuality.”13 My chosen Frankenstein adaptations share a common intertextual source; moreover, one that already has a power­f ul interest in the doppelgänger. Oppel, Priestley, and Horsley all use doubles to represent the subjective stresses of their adolescent protagonists: Victor jealously compares himself to the calm, collected Konrad in This Dark Endeavour; Priestley compares Frankenstein’s monster with the monstrosity lurking in the breast of the teenage Bill Sikes; and Horsley splits her narrative’s chronology to confront Oona with the mysteries of her friend May’s be­hav­ior and disappearance, as well as her own uncertain ­f uture. June Pulliam’s Monstrous Bodies, a feminist exploration of YA horror fiction, develops McCallum’s work on the double in YA fiction by connecting it particularly to monsters in the horror genre: “Horror redraws the bound­aries between the abject and the subject, between h ­ uman and nonhuman, through the figure of the monster, a type of Other and a double.”14 Monstrous Bodies has a lot to offer my reading of the subversive potential of Horsley’s repre­sen­ta­tion of the reanimated female corpse in The Monster’s Wife. Pulliam argues that “Young Adult horror fiction contains a monstrous Other and a teen protagonist (who are sometimes the same character) and explores issues that are of interest to adolescents such as sexuality and concerns about belonging. The monstrous Other is nearly always a sympathetic character in Young Adult horror fiction.”15 Further, her description of the monstrous Other teen protagonist resonates with Oppel’s Victor and Priestley’s Billy, both of whom mix sympathy with horror in their role as YA male monsters.

3 Kenneth Oppel’s This Dark Endeavour (2011) expands upon Victor’s account of his teenage fascination with alchemy in Shelley’s novel. In the 1818 version of Frankenstein, Victor wryly notes: It may appear very strange, that a disciple of Albertus Magnus should arise in the eigh­teenth c­ entury; but our f­amily was not scientifical. [. . .] My dreams ­were therefore undisturbed by real­ity; and I entered with the greatest diligence

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into the search of the phi­los­o­pher’s stone and the elixir of life. But the latter obtained my most undivided attention: wealth was an inferior object; but what glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the ­human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death.16

Oppel gives his Victor a deeply personal reason to pursue the creation of an elixir of life, by making his twin ­brother fall ill with a mysterious disease of the blood. He also reveals that their f­ ather Alphonse’s injunction against alchemy stems from personal experience: in a revelation which shakes the loving relationship between Frankenstein’s père et fils, Victor discovers that Alphonse had unsuccessfully attempted to transmute lead into gold in his own youth; moreover, he then used his faulty formula to get rich from Rus­sian and Eastern markets. Oppel adds ambiguity and complexity to the original novel’s portrayal of the extraordinary happiness of the Frankenstein f­ amily before Victor’s wayward experiments. His elder Frankenstein darkly reflects the son’s warped ambitions.17 Indeed, Oppel spells out the Oedipal subtexts of Shelley’s original by making Victor compete for his f­ ather’s affections at the same time as challenging the Frankenstein patriarch for dominance within the ­family circle. I am g­ oing to focus on the first chapter of This Dark Endeavour, tellingly entitled “Monster.” The first paragraph seems to catapult the reader into a full-on fantasy novel, rather than Shelley’s gothic sci-­fi: “We found the monster on a rocky ledge high above the lake. For three dark days my ­brother and I had tracked it through the maze of caves to its lair on the mountain’s summit. And now we beheld it, curled atop its trea­sure, its pale fur and scales ablaze with moonlight.”18 This scene is revealed as part of a theater per­for­mance, scripted by Henry Clerval, with Elizabeth Lavenza playing the monster. Henry’s play climaxes with Victor’s defeat of the monster, who, on the point of death, reveals the “face of a beautiful girl.”19 Victor asks her why she had attacked only him and not his ­brother: “­Because it is you,” she whispered, “who is the real monster.”20 Oppel thus commences his novel with a nod to a frequently rehearsed truism about monstrosity in Frankenstein. Concluding the per­for­mance, Victor turns on his b ­ rother, stating that he wants the monster’s riches for himself. The good twin of both play and novel asks, “Why should we not share this [. . .] as w ­ e’ve shared every­t hing ­else equally?” Freed by the context of Henry’s play, Victor is able to voice some of his darkest thoughts: “I laughed then, at the lie of it. ‘No twins are ever completely equal [. . .]. Though ­we’re of one body, we are not equal, ­brother, for you ­were born the sooner by two minutes. Even in our m ­ other’s womb you stole from me. The ­family birthright is yours. And such a trea­sure that is, to make this one look like a pauper’s pittance. But I want all of it. And I s­ hall have it.’ ”21 Killing Konrad, Victor finishes the play with a villain’s flourish: “Now I ­shall have all the riches in the world [. . .]. And I am, at last, alone.”22 Henry’s play allows Victor to voice his

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impermissible jealousies and desires: he r­ eally is jealous of his twin; his passionate relationship with Elizabeth is characterized by mutually destructive vio­ lence, hinging on the awareness of their shared animal attraction; he may not desire riches—he is disgusted by the l­ater revelation of his f­ather’s criminal activities—­but he definitely pursues knowledge and power throughout the novel; and his longing to be alone testifies to his striving for singularity. That t­ hese character traits are revealed in per­for­mance highlights the adult-­oriented subjectivity of Oppel’s teen creation, his craving for audience ac­cep­tance of his darkest thoughts and deeds. Monstrosity, duality, performativity: t­ hese are the vertices of Victor’s adolescent personality. By making Victor the sole first-­person narrator of the novel, Oppel makes him more straightforwardly sympathetic than the shifting perspective on the mature Frankenstein of Shelley’s novel allows. Oppel’s Victor is charismatic and alluring, even when his actions become increasingly questionable. He draws attention to his status as unreliable narrator, for example, when he is mulling over w ­ hether or not he w ­ ill take advantage of an intercepted love note between Elizabeth and Konrad: I did not know what I should do. I lie. I know exactly what I ­shall do.23

Victor’s play with modal verbs, “should” shifting to “­shall,” unveils his awareness and flouting of conventional morality. He meets Elizabeth at midnight, masquerading as Konrad, kissing his cousin-­sister, and fi­nally biting her lip so hard he draws blood (getting caught by giving her his monogrammed handkerchief). Oppel adds a kind of carnal sensuality to his Victor which Shelley’s more bloodless protagonist seems to lack. Passionate and performative, Oppel’s Victor pres­ents his teenage readers with a complex personality with whom they are expected to sympathize whilst also judging him, ultimately recognizing him as an uncanny reflection of themselves.

4 Christopher Priestley’s Mister Creecher (2011) rewrites Victor and Henry’s ­later travels from London to Scotland in Shelley’s Frankenstein, filling in the gaps of the monster’s experiences during this time, explaining how he keeps track of their movements around the capital, and on to Oxford, before climaxing in the deliberately Romantic setting of the Lake District with events which w ­ ill take Victor and the monster into Scotland and across to Orkney. The novel’s action is updated from the 1790s to 1818, the date of Frankenstein’s original publication. This allows Priestley to introduce Percy and Mary Shelley as cameo characters in his novel, and furthermore forms part of his novel’s intertextual design. Early

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on in Mister Creecher, a young boy named Billy is rescued from a gang of thugs by the eponymous monster, whom they have all mistaken for a robbable corpse. Mister Creecher nurses Billy back to health over the course of several days in which the boy drifts in and out of consciousness. At one point, Billy wakes up to find the monster reading a book in the twilight of their attic lodgings: It was an extraordinary sight. The book looked tiny in the ­giant’s massive grip. What was this weird creature, this frightful demon who did not eat meat, this growling brute who read books? [. . .] “What’s the book?” “Persuasion,” Creecher replied. “Yeah?” said Billy, “What’s it about?” “It is about a w ­ oman who loves a man, but he is thought unsuitable by her ­family.” “Why’s that, then?” said Billy. “He is not rich enough.” Billy snorted. “Sounds about right. Who wrote that, then?”24

Discovering that the monster is reading Jane Austen, Billy dismisses Persuasion as “a ­woman’s book!”, adding scornfully that “only ­women read novels!”25 Mister Creecher defends men as readers and writers of novels, and explains to Billy that Persuasion helps him with his En­glish. Austen’s novel returns at the climax of Priestley’s, when Billy buys it as a gift for his ominously ill lover, Jane Cartwright. In both appearances, Persuasion is used as a tool of perhaps poorly-­ thought-­out persuasion: Mister Creecher wants Billy to shadow Victor and Henry in their sightseeing tour of London, and ­later, across ­England, to Oxford, through the industrial North, and to the Lakes; Billy imagines a bucolic ­f uture for himself in Cumbria with Jane as his wife. The monster’s laconic description of Persuasion foreshadows the unhappy conclusion of Billy’s love affair, although his lover’s death rather than familial disapproval or lack of wealth fi­nally separates the pair. Jane’s death ­w ill also divide the unlikely pairing of Billy and the monster, sending Mister Creecher a­ fter Victor who is transporting Jane’s corpse into Scotland, and precipitating the monstrous in Billy, revealed to be an adolescent version of Charles Dickens’ infamous bully Bill Sikes, in Oliver Twist, who inaugurates his murderous ­career before returning to London. Mister Creecher concludes by revealing itself to be not just an adaptation of Frankenstein for a young adult audience, but also a twisted prequel to Oliver Twist, including a cameo by Fagin as a young Jewish pawnbroker as well as an extended exploration of Bill Sikes’ teenage traumas. By updating his novel to 1818, the publication date of both Frankenstein and Persuasion, Priestley does not just juxtapose Shelley with Austen (and ­later Dickens), but uses Austen to think about issues of class, masculinity, and

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language, which inform his adaptation of Shelley’s novel. Mister Creecher is especially concerned with a tragic vision of masculinity, the demands of which are already warping Billy’s personality, and which splits the monster between compassionate creature and wrathful, violent, monomaniacal demon. I analyze two instances of monstrosity in the novel, both involving the desecration of graves, ambiguously depicted on the novel’s original front cover image, showing a gigantic figure looming out of a grave lit from below. The first episode represents the monster’s complex reaction to his and Billy’s discovery of grave robbers at work in a cemetery outside Oxford. This scene takes place ­after the monster has explained his creation by Victor and his demands for a female creature as companion. Stumbling upon a group of resurrectionists, Billy attempts to shield his companion from them, explaining that the men are “[b]odysnatchers”: “The silence that followed this word seemed to last an age. A flood of images raced through Billy’s mind; the view of Frankenstein amid the bloody machinery of his work, the face of the hanged girl, the glint of yellow light that tripped along the saw’s teeth.”26 Billy’s imagination connects his recent experiences shadowing Frankenstein, combining Victor’s guilty horror at the execution of a servant girl in London, which replays the Justine episode from Shelley’s novel; Billy’s discovery of his macabre work; and his awareness that the monster’s creation would have depended on similar activities. The monster surprises Billy by rushing ­towards the men, snapping the neck of one and crushing his skull, breaking another’s spine with his own shovel, and killing the last man, out of sight but not out of hearing, in the recently robbed grave. Priestley’s liberal use of gruesome vio­lence reminds the reader of Mister Creecher’s monstrosity, belying Coats’ and Sands’ emphasis on positivity and redemption in their survey of ­children’s adaptations. Billy confronts the monster with his actions: “ ‘­You’re mad, you know that, ­don’t you? Where do you think Frankenstein got his bodies from? How do you think he does that filthy work you seem so keen for him to do? How do you think he . . . ​.’ ”27 The monster responds to the implied question about his own creation by opining, “Sometimes I wish that I never lived.”28 The third-­person narrator adds, “He wore the expression of a petulant child.”29 Priestley’s objective, third-­ person narrative voice allows the reader to evaluate the shifting relationship between Billy and the monster, particularly in terms of adult-­child relations. The monster begins the novel by saving Billy, nursing him back to health, and persuading him to spy on Frankenstein. He seems to fulfill the role of a caring, yet coercive adult. However, Billy increasingly has to care for the monster; at the end of this episode, he has to dig a bullet out of the monster’s shoulder, imagining it as a piece of dead meat. Thus Billy and the monster shift uneasily between adult and child roles, equals and dependents, painfully aware of their outcast, monstrous situations outside society. Each of them keenly feels the lack of ­family connections and friendship networks, but Priestley shows how neither young

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man is capable of forming an enduring partnership with the other, emphasizing how their shared sense of alienation, frustration, and monstrosity ironically keep them apart rather than bring them together. In one sense, Mister Creecher’s front cover image clearly alludes to the monster’s attack on the resurrection men: ­t here is a match between the eponymous protagonist and the g­ iant figure represented in illustrated form. However, Billy has a final encounter in a dif­fer­ent graveyard in the Lakes, in which he is mistaken for a resurrection man himself. Having split from the monster, whom he blames for frightening the heartsick Jane to death, Billy plans to return to London, but he first decides to pay his last re­spects at Jane’s gravestone ­after refusing to attend her funeral. He is horrified to discover “a fresh grave, open, newly dug.” Jane’s coffin has been disturbed and, sliding into the pit, Billy opens the lid: ­ ere was Jane, pale and beautiful, her long hair loose and flowing round her Th face. Her white shroud was torn and her chest ripped open. Where her heart would have been, ­t here was now a gaping hole, lolling like a fool’s mouth. “Noooooo!” screamed Billy. [. . .] Frankenstein’s words came back like an echo—­“I only need one more item and then we can go.” He’d taken her heart! He’d taken her heart for Creecher’s mate! “You evil bastard!” yelled Billy.30

Priestley shifts from Jane’s necrotic beauty to the horror of her bodily desecration; the grotesque simile “lolling like a fool’s mouth” linking the gruesome cavity in Jane’s body with, presumably, Billy’s own expression. As Jane died of a heart complaint, possibly exacerbated by viewing the massive form of the monster, Frankenstein’s decision to steal this organ fleetingly suggests his own devious half-­heartedness, as the female creature he has promised his monster ­will have a limited lifespan. Billy’s horrified cries draw the attention of angry locals, who m ­ istake him for a grave robber. ­Because Billy has transformed from a scrawny street urchin into a physically fit young man, honed by his travels across ­England and by working for his keep on a Cumbrian farm, the novel’s front cover image could equally well be a depiction of Billy in the pro­cess of escaping from Jane’s grave. Mister Creecher’s murder of the resurrection men in the Oxford cemetery and Billy’s mistaken identity at his lover’s graveside further connect them, although events have torn them apart. Frankenstein’s desecration of Jane’s dead body also helps to precipitate the monstrous in Billy, who decides to refashion himself as Bill Sikes, and begins to make his bloody way back to London by bludgeoning a local man to death with his new club: “Raising the stick above his head, he hit the man again—­ and saw the face of the sweep looking back—­and again—­and saw Fletcher—­and again—­Frankenstein this time—­and then one final, mighty blow cracked down on Creecher’s broken, bleeding face.”31 Billy’s imaginary destruction of men who

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have used or abused him—­the sweep who brutalized him as a child, Fletcher the gang leader who threatened to blind him at the start of the novel, Frankenstein who tortured him for information on the monster’s whereabouts, and the monster himself—is achieved through his first real murder, and marks the dissolution of his child identity, as he becomes Dickens’ g­ reat bully, Sikes.

5 Whereas This Dark Endeavour and Mister Creecher focus on the fragile masculinity of a jealous Victor, deceitful monster, and brutalized Billy, Kate Horsley’s The Monster’s Wife (2014) expands upon Victor’s sojourn on Orkney from the perspective of an ailing island teenager. In Shelley’s novel, Victor dismisses the island and islanders thus: “hardly more than a rock, whose high sides w ­ ere continually beaten upon by the waves. The soil was barren, scarcely affording pasture for a few miserable cows, and oatmeal for the inhabitants, which consisted of five persons, whose gaunt and scraggy limbs gave token of their miserable fare” (F 163). Horsley’s novel increases the number of islanders and describes Orkney as sublimely vegetative, belying Victor’s sneering dismissal. The Monster’s Wife was marketed as an adult horror novel but its emphasis on teenage experience connects it to the earlier texts by Oppel and Priestley. Moreover, the narrative techniques and thematic focus mesh with t­ hose described by the YA criticism cited earlier. Following McCallum’s second narrative strategy for representing the doubleness of adolescent identity, Horsley employs a deceptive temporal disjunction in the novel, which parallels Oona’s search for her friend May, who has gone ominously missing, with the awakening of Victor’s female monster. The reader is therefore led to believe that Victor has chosen May for his monster whereas he actually transplants May’s healthy heart into Oona’s corpse, ­after the monster frightens the physically frail teenager to death. Horsley’s repre­sen­ta­tion of Oona-­as-­monster also fits with Pulliam’s discussion of the sympathetic repre­sen­ta­t ion of monstrous female bodies in YA horror fiction. Horsley literalizes Victor’s violation of his female Creature in Shelley’s novel by representing him raping the reanimated Oona. However, The Monster’s Wife resists both the terms of its title and its status as a straight adaptation of Frankenstein. Oona escapes from Victor and begins a consensual sexual relationship with the monster, before realizing that he is more interested in mutually assured destruction with his vicious creator, and escaping to the mainland. Horsley’s repre­sen­ta­tions of Victor and the monster become increasingly antagonistic. Victor is superficially attractive to Oona as a mysterious foreigner, but is quickly revealed to be both physically and morally weak, with a disturbing taste for mixing anatomical drawings with pornography, which foreshadows his imprisonment and rape of the female creature. The monster shifts from object of

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terror, tearing apart a chicken coop for food (in a problematic divergence from the original’s vegetarianism), to a potential soul mate for the monstrous, reanimated Oona, before his (self-)destructive rage increasingly alienates him from his supposed “wife”—­his obsessive interest in Victor fi­nally allowing Oona to escape both men to reach mainland Scotland. The conclusion of the novel sees Oona finding solace amongst the war-­ wounded of Inverness: She went along, thinking about the men from the war, who ­were scarred and broken like her [. . .]. Many ­were broken, ban­daged, limping. By the time she reached the riverbank, it seemed that the place was full of ­people like her—­ the walking dead. Her heart trilled loud notes like someone singing. Th ­ ese days, the more she listened to it, the more it sounded like May humming a tune or gossiping or praying or scolding Oona.32

Cursed as a reanimated corpse on Orkney, Oona escapes to find a strange kind of solidarity among the scarred survivors of the Napoleonic Wars. Horsley’s novel, like Priestley’s, draws on historical context in order to suggest new configurations of living with monstrosity: Oona’s transplanted heart, received unwittingly and unwillingly from her friend May, murdered by Victor for this purpose, ceases to be a source of horror, discomfort, and shame, and becomes the source of a dif­fer­ent kind of solidarity with her dead friend, one based on the heart’s musicality and its memories of May. The final lines of the novel see Oona imagining travelling to “France or Germany, India or China”: “She pressed her hand into the half-­healed space between her breasts. May’s heart beat calm and steady against her ribs, not singing or scolding Oona this time, just asking where they w ­ ere. In a soft voice she answered, ‘­we’re ­free.’ ”33 Whereas Victor fails to save his ­brother and Billy’s experiences unleash the monster within, Oona’s monstrosity, her doubleness in that final first person plural, suggests the possibility of integration and ac­cep­tance: not negating her monstrosity but harnessing her dual nature to endure and explore. Studying ­t hese YA texts alongside Shelley’s novel offers several suggestions for re-­reading and teaching Frankenstein at both the secondary school and undergraduate level. As Lawrence Lipking argues, criticism of the novel can be characterized by its “one-­sidedness and complacency” in deciding what to tell—­ Victor’s selfish and self-­destructive pursuits versus the creature’s unhappiness and alienation—­and what to dismiss—­t he love and esteem characters hold for the scientist against the monster’s hellish drive for indiscriminate vengeance.34 Each of ­these YA Frankensteins offers an alternative perspective on Shelley’s text: while Oppel pres­ents readers with a Victor who embodies the animal magnetism Shelley’s Frankenstein appears to lack, This Dark Endeavour offers young readers a sympathetic, if flawed, teenager with whom to empathize. Mister Creecher emphasizes the monstrosity of the creature, with the teenage Billy witnessing

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his ambiguous friend’s murderous rage, thus allowing students, and young readers in general, to confront the monster’s hellish drive for vengeance more directly than in the original novel. Fi­nally, Horsley’s Oona re-­imagines the monster’s bride as a complex character, throbbing with inarticulate desire, thus enabling a re-­examination of the feminist philosophy underpinning Shelley’s Frankenstein. All together t­hese YA fictions emphasize the adolescent dimension of Frankenstein, both novel and hero.

Notes 1. Ann Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York: Routledge, 1989). For a biographical account of the impact of Mary Shelley’s childhood on her ­later writing, see: Pamela Clemit, “Frankenstein, Matilda, and the Legacies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, ed. Esther Schor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 26–44, for an exploration of her parents’ intellectual influence on Shelley’s early novels; and Judith Bara, “The Professor and the Orang-­ Outang: Mary Shelley as a Child Reader,” in Frankenstein’s Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, ed. Christa Knellwolf and Jane  R. Goodall (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 33–48, for an account of Shelley’s early reading and interest in scientific discovery. 2. Marshall Brown, “Frankenstein: A Child’s Tale,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 36, no. 2 (2003): 155. 3. Brown, “Frankenstein: A Child’s Tale,” 160. 4. Noel Chevalier, “The Liberty Tree and the Whomping Willow: Po­liti­cal Justice, Magical Science, and Harry Potter,” The Lion and the Unicorn 29 (2005): 409. 5. Chevalier, “The Liberty Tree and the Whomping Willow,” 410. 6. Karen Coats and Farran Norris Sands, “Growing Up Frankenstein: Adaptations for Younger Readers,” in The Cambridge Companion to “Frankenstein,” ed. Andrew Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 241–55. 7. Coats and Sands, “Growing Up Frankenstein,” 250–52. 8. Coats and Sands, “Growing Up Frankenstein,” 252. 9. Coats and Sands, “Growing Up Frankenstein,” 252. 10. Mary Hilton and Maria Nikolajeva, “Introduction: Time of Turmoil,” in Con­temporary Adolescent Lit­er­a­ture and Culture, ed. Mary Hilton and Maria Nikolajeva (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 1–17, 1. 11. Hilton and Nikolajeva, “Time of Turmoil,” 2–7. 12. Hilton and Nikolajeva, “Time of Turmoil,” 7–8. 13. Robyn McCallum, Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction: The Dialogic Construction of Subjectivity (New York: Routledge, 2012), 68–69. 14. June Pulliam, Monstrous Bodies: Feminine Power in Young Adult Horror Fiction (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 15. 15. Pulliam, Monstrous Bodies, 12. 16. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. D. L. MacDonald and Kathleen Scherf (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2005), 68–69. See the reworking of the same concept in the famous passage in the 1831 edition: “I chanced to find a volume of the works of Cornelius Agrippa. I opened it with apathy; the theory which he attempts to demonstrate, and the wonderful facts which he relates, soon changed this feeling into enthusiasm. A new light seemed to dawn upon my mind; and, bounding with joy, I communicated my discovery to my f­ ather. My f­ ather looked carelessly at the titlepage of the book, and said, ‘Ah! Cornelius Agrippa! My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this, it is sad trash.’ [. . .] When I returned home, my first care was to procure the ­whole works of this author, and afterwards of

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Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. I read and studied them with delight; they appeared to me trea­sures known to few beside myself” (F 39). 17. Th ­ ere is a second book in the “Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein” series, Such Wicked Intent (Oxford: David Flicking, 2012), as mentioned by Coats and Sands, which explores the claim of Shelley’s hero that he also sought “[t]he raising of ghosts and dev­i ls” amid his alchemical researches. In this second novel, Oppel’s protagonist seeks to bring back Konrad from the dead. Th ­ ere is not space to discuss this second sequel h ­ ere, only to note that it contains an amazing sequence in which Victor and Elizabeth raise a soulless mud-­child in which they seek to reanimate Konrad’s spirit. It goes spectacularly wrong, but also provides a rationalization for Victor’s l­ ater attempt to infamously create life without a w ­ oman: Oppel’s protagonist jealously blames Elizabeth’s maternal instinct to care for the monstrous infant for the failure of his plan. 18. Kenneth Oppel, This Dark Endeavour (Oxford: David Fickling, 2011), 1. 19. Oppel, This Dark Endeavour, 2. 20. Oppel, This Dark Endeavour, 3. 21. Oppel, This Dark Endeavour, 3–4. 22. Oppel, This Dark Endeavour, 4, original emphasis. 23. Oppel, This Dark Endeavour, 179, original emphasis. 24. Chris Priestley, Mister Creecher (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 30–31. 25. Priestley, Mister Creecher, 30–31. 26. Priestley, Mister Creecher, 213. 27. Priestley, Mister Creecher, 216. 28. Priestley, Mister Creecher, 216. 29. Priestley, Mister Creecher, 216. 30. Priestley, Mister Creecher, 373–374, original emphasis. 31. Priestley, Mister Creecher, 381. 32. Kate Horsley, The Monster’s Wife (London: Barbican, 2014), 254–55. 33. Horsley, The Monster’s Wife, 256, original emphasis. 34. Lawrence Lipking, “Frankenstein, the True Story; or, Rousseau Judges Jean Jacques,” in Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Context, Criticism. Norton Critical Edition, Second Edition, ed. John Hunter (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 313–31, 317.

chapter 13

z Revivifying Frankenstein’s Myth Historical Encounters and Dialogism in Back from the Dead: The True Sequel to Frankenstein Anna Enrichetta Soccio

1 Much has been written and theorized about sequelization in lit­er­a­ture and film.1 The practice of the sequel has been described from a variety of theoretical standpoints in its relation to literary and film genres and sub-­genres, to demonstrate how and to what extent it reflects the modern and postmodern concern about re-­telling and re-­writing the past. According to Ingrid E. Holmberg, the origins of the sequel can be traced back to Homer, and thus can be said to have developed as a literary form throughout the history of Western narrative.2 Her thesis is part of a wide-­ranging analy­sis of the phenomenon in a collective study edited by Paul Budra and Betty A. Schellenberg who have spoken of the dif­fer­ent uses of sequelization and describe it as “repetition-­w ith-­variation.” The two scholars have pointed out that a sequel represents the “par­tic­u­lar moment which it inhabits”3 and that it is intertexually dynamic.4 A sequel, therefore, is not configured only as the “ironic appropriation of images and stories,” which Linda Hutcheon so accurately investigates in her pioneering study on Postmodernism.5 But however varied and complex the definitions of sequel and its relation with postmodernist strategies of repre­sen­ta­tion may be, the fact remains that the sequel needs a “source-­text” upon which to construct its own narrative life in terms of “afterlife.” ­There exists, as Umberto Eco reminds us, many forms of “seriality” which are characterized by the massive use of repetitive procedures to invite the reader/spectator to recognize familiar patterns with “variations on the theme.” 6 2 33

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From the nineteenth-­century novel to con­temporary mass media, Eco gives instances of a larger aesthetics in which iteration and repetition dominate. “Retake,” “remake,” “series,” “saga,” “intertextual dialogue” are all forms that Eco discusses as typical of postmodern narrative methods which, by making use of repetitiveness and seriality, converge on a new theory of art or a “new aesthetics of seriality.”7 It is tempting to say that, as the sequential literary format employs repetition, redundancy, and non-­original schemes, it must therefore be regarded as part of such an aesthetics of seriality. However, one obvious question is ­whether sequel means continuation or rather investigation of the relationship between originals and derivatives. It quickly becomes clear that straightforward definitions are not easily traceable in terms of a theory that can give conclusive answers about the nature, scope, and methods of sequelization. I argue that, while offering a deconstruction and reconstruction of previous texts in an intertextual relationship, literary sequels si­mul­ta­neously open challenging pathways t­ owards innovative developments of the narrative material. Moreover, as Carolyn Jess-­Cooke has pointed out, “the sequel has no end; it is a perpetual diegesis with which consumers can engage as many times in as many ways pos­si­ble.”8 Such an interpretation resists the long-­standing idea that a story, like life, is delimited at each end by the bound­aries of a beginning and an ending. Theoretical languages, narra­ tology, semiology, structuralist and poststructuralist approaches have helped us understand that the time and space coordinates of a plot, a story, or more generally a text, establish insurmountable barriers before and ­after which nothing exists. What comes before the story starts and what happens ­after its ending is not significant for the comprehension and reception of the story itself. Frank Kermode has spoken of the sense of an ending in terms of apocalyptic and post-­ apocalyptic repre­sen­ta­tions of the world. What ­w ill happen ­after the end of the world? The question is as hard as it is complex.9 Insofar as narrative fictions are originated by the impulse to give order and sense to our real world, they need to represent the end of the worlds they offer. The idea of the end has become immanent in our thought as well as in our fictions.

2 Sequels stand at the very core of the Western literary tradition. Poets have always ­imagined what could happen ­after an event, ­whether historical or mythical. Virgil, for example, in telling the story of Aeneas’ journey from the broken city of Troy to Rome,10 opens the way to a practice of sequelization as a primary mechanism of stabilization and renegotiation of meanings and values across time.11 In recent years, it has primarily been film studies that have addressed such a practice to construct a theory of the sequel that could substantiate the unspoken assumptions governing its use; nonetheless, literary discourse enjoys a key

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advantage in reflecting on its own meanings, strategies, and procedures thanks to a long-­standing cultural debate on the nature and possibilities of narrative repre­sen­ta­tion. As one of the most “sequelized” novels ever, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley12 has been investigated from a wide range of perspectives. The question about what can or cannot happen beyond the textual limits of the novel itself has produced, over the last two centuries, innumerable afterlives that have testified to the tremendous potential of Shelley’s text. Not surprisingly, all such forms of “afterings” as Anne Humpherys calls them,13 confirm that in becoming the source of many other texts Frankenstein is, in Gérard Genette’s terms, a “hypotext” upon which several “hypertexts” can be “grafted,”14 thus attesting to the enduring fascination that Shelley’s story has exerted on its readers. “Sequels” are “hypertexts” insofar as they graft themselves onto the original and, in so ­doing, open up new prospects: first, a sequel discloses the hidden meanings of the original; second, it requires us to consider the many pos­si­ble ways in which the original plot can develop in the ­f uture; and fi­nally, a sequel allows a text to be continually re-­read and therefore, dynamically actualized. Interestingly, on a pedagogical level, the comparison of hypertexts with their sources is especially useful for in-­class activities ­because students may be surprised by finding so many parallels in our con­temporary world. Reading a sequel to Frankenstein or, more generally, one of its afterings, provokes an emotional response to a two-­hundred-­year-­old story that is perceived as continually in pro­gress; moreover, working on similarities and differences, students can develop their own critical response to the main issues that Shelley’s novel poses and to their multifaceted interpretations in more recent times, with the result that the more the students are aware of the play between the ur-­text and its afterings, the more they are aware of the complex dynamics between cultures across time and space. Back from the Dead: The True Sequel to Frankenstein by Stuart Land (2011)15 takes as its premise the idea that Victor Frankenstein’s Creature was a victim of his own creator and of humanity at large, and is now being given a second chance of being integrated in society. Unambiguously stating that the novel must be regarded as the “true sequel” to Shelley’s story, Land’s title also clarifies that the sequel entails a journey out of the underworld: the words “back” and “dead” create high expectations of finding a work predominantly articulated through images of a heroic quest out of (apparent) death into life. ­Because readers might be unfamiliar with this work, I ­shall briefly sum up its plot and structure. ­After discovering that “the huge man in the ice” found by some American tourists in the Arctic is still alive ­a fter two hundred years, Dr. Sergio Carerra, a cryobiologist, and his wife Sophia decide to take care of him as an “­adopted child” in their ­house in Florida. The revelation that he is Victor Frankenstein’s Creature quickly travels around the world: the media and show

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business cannot help but seek exclusive interviews, scoops, and stories about “Frankie,” as he is familiarly called. He ­w ill undergo experiences at a frantic pace, from Hollywood parties to plastic surgery, from a night with a prostitute to hom­i­cide, from the attempt to rescue his mate in the cold ­waters off the Orkney Islands, to the final decision to go “back into the fiction of Mary Shelley” (257).

3 One of the most effective strategies in Land’s novel is the frame story which, as in Shelley’s Frankenstein, offers more than one beginning: the first incipit introduces the protagonist, Dr.  Sergio Carerra, typing at a computer in his study, where personal and rather conventional items, such as pictures, artifacts, religious icons, travel mementos, and sports trophies surround the technological paraphernalia of his work life. As Dr. Carerra types, we find, quite unexpectedly, that he is not recording data or the results of an experiment. He is writing a first-­person narrative, an account of his own discovery of “love” through the incredible encounter with one of the most iconic characters of Western lit­er­a­ture, Frankenstein’s Creature. ­Here is Carerra’s beginning: “I write this account out of love. Th ­ ere can be no m ­ istake about this, for the crimes I have made against the world stem from that love. What I have just done to end this tortured history, this too was out of love” (1–2). The metanarrative level puts the emphasis on the time of the story. Dr. Carerra is writing about something that has just happened to him but that is also connected to the experience of all t­ hose who, in high school, have been asked to read and respond to one of the classics of  British literary history, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. At the same time, Dr. Carerra’s first sentences open an analeptic gap by which we know that the story we are ­going to read about deals with “love” and “crimes.” Such lexical choices suggest an immediate, though as yet still vague, relation with Shelley’s novel, whose structural binaries “love” and “crime-­for-­hate” constitute the foundation of the story. Moreover, Land’s beginning replicates Shelley’s framing device—­Robert Walton’s letters to his ­sister, which form the first level of narration. In his letters, Walton displays rationalism, self-­absorption, and a self-­ justifying attitude ­towards his own experience—­the voyage of exploration to the Pole, the encounter with Victor Frankenstein, and his role as the author of Victor’s “biography” (F 209–10). Similarly, Carerra starts by giving us his own perspective on the story; yet, he immediately states that his writing deals with someone e­ lse, the real protagonist of this story: “I ­will tell my—no, his story from the beginning” (2; emphasis added). In his short framing introduction, Carerra also anticipates what w ­ ill be one of the most per­sis­tent themes of the sequel, that is, the negative influence of the modern media upon society. This story is not about himself, but about a “person” whose “name” has been confused, mistaken,

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even distorted and misrepresented for a long time: “Although his story has its origins two hundred years past with quite a famous name, he, in fact, ­wasn’t a doctor at all. A s­ imple misnomer brought on by the advent of cinema” (2). Essentially, the popu­lar myth propagated by the media has done vio­lence in more than one way to the original text, leading to the conflation between creator and creature as well as to the attribution of the title “Doctor” to Victor, which has been taken for granted by generations of readers.16 In contrast, by introducing himself as a “doctor,” Carerra legitimizes his role as a scientist—­ and ­later also his role as a f­ather—­g iving scientific credibility to the events that follow. The second beginning of Land’s sequel is narrated by a more traditional hetero­ diegetic voice whose function is to render the implausible account acceptable to the reader. The scene is set amongst the Arctic ice cliffs and glaciers somewhere around Greenland, where an ordinary American ­family on vacation suddenly discovers that the youn­gest ­daughter, Tristin, has gone missing. A ­ fter being rescued, the l­ ittle girl tells of a man in the ice who, in her words, helped her to find the way back: “­There, frozen deep within the blue-­white swirls of ice was an incredibly huge man, his entire bulk covered in furs. Only the vaguest impression of a face was vis­i­ble within the shroud of a hood. It was hard to estimate the a­ ctual size of the man, for his enormity could have been a magnified illusion of the ice. One ­thing, though, was certain. His arm was outstretched and pointing” (6). No won­der that Land’s sequel starts where Shelley’s narrative ends: the Creature, having recognized his own wretched actions and bidding farewell to his listener and readers, dis­appears “in darkness and distance” (F 223). It is likely that Frankenstein’s monster w ­ ill die, as he speaks of his imminent death: “But soon,” he cried with sad and solemn enthusiasm, “I ­shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon ­t hese burning miseries ­w ill be extinct. I ­shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration ­w ill fade away; my ashes ­w ill be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit ­w ill sleep in peace, or if it thinks, it w ­ ill not surely think thus. Farewell.” (F 223; emphasis added)

Despite the lexical items that strongly emphasize the idea of death ­here, Shelley’s novel never describes the Creature’s death, nor is his corpse ever seen or found by anybody. The ending remains, in more than one sense, open and the reader is required to believe the Creature’s words about his ultimate destiny. On such an ambiguous ending, Land constructs his own discourse and exploits the opaque areas of Shelley’s text to develop his third-­millennium version of Frankenstein’s creature’s afterlife, while si­mul­ta­neously offering him compensation for the lack of affection and ac­cep­tance by h ­ umans. In this sense, the sequel becomes not only, as Carolyn Jess-­Cooke aptly says, “a trope of repetition, difference, continuation and memory,”17 but also a means to reinvent a popu­lar

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myth as part of a cultural strategy of actualization of its major themes and motifs. This enables the reader to engage with the past from dif­fer­ent points of view and reinvent it in the light of our post-­industrial era whose science and technology have challenged cultural assumptions on the limits of h ­ uman capacity and power. As an alternative to his extinction, Back from the Dead imagines Shelley’s character in a state of hypothermia that enables him to survive the extreme cold of the Arctic region for almost two centuries. Once found by the frightened girl, the “man in the ice”18 is taken to the high-­tech BioOnics Laboratory in Florida, to be studied, dissected, and analyzed as scientists usually do with extinct dinosaurs and other prehistoric fossilized animals. As a widely-­recognized authority in the field of cryobiology, Dr.  Sergio Carerra is secretly recruited to study and give official answers about the frozen creature. However, Carerra’s first emotional reaction to the realization of the existence of such a creature occurs in a dream that takes him back to his first year at the university, when he first watched an autopsy being performed on a corpse at the medical school. In the cognitive distortion of the dream, Carerra engages in a strange conversation with a cadaver about his missing internal organs, which tellingly anticipates the revivification of someone who is thought to be dead. ­Here, one more analogy with Shelley’s novel is suggested: at the beginning of Chapter 3 Victor Frankenstein remembers his first experience as a young student of medicine at the university of Ingolstadt where he was sent by his f­ ather who thought it necessary for his education. As early as this chapter the father-­ child relationship, which ­will be central to ­later developments, is well established (F 42–3). In Land’s sequel, Carerra’s parents also appear in the narration, although in an exactly opposite way: “Serge’s parents would have been just as happy if he became a placard holder at a roadside construction site or an astronaut, so long as he was happy” (12–3). Whereas in Victor’s case parental responsibility for his destiny of unhappiness and misery is clear, the autonomy given to Serge by his parents w ­ ill lead to a very dif­fer­ent relationship with the creature-­son. It ­will be based on sympathy and affection, care and protection, thus giving the “man in the ice” a second chance to be loved. Sergio Carerra’s wife, Sophia, a psychologist, is also attributed a parental role: she becomes the ­mother the Creature never had but, at the same time, she represents a standard of loving, gentle, and intelligent femininity much as Elizabeth did in Shelley’s novel. When the Carerras discover that the man in the ice is not only still alive but is, in fact, Frankenstein’s Creature they feel that he must be given the opportunity to be loved and fully integrated into h ­ uman society, in a way that was never granted him in his previous life. The pro­cess of unfreezing the Creature takes place in a science lab where monitors, oscilloscopes, dials, gauges, and all sorts of electronic machinery indicate that modern equipment is put to the test against a force that cannot be described

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as entirely h ­ uman. In an age of highly technological advancement and, sometimes, unscrupulous ge­ne­tic practices, Sergio’s relation to science is characteristically based on a sense of responsibility t­owards nature. He shows re­spect for the unexpected and understanding of diversity—­both biological and cultural. Unlike Victor’s dangerous attitude to scientific knowledge and painstaking research into the superhuman powers of creation, Serge’s view of his profession is closer to a spiritual vocation. He sees harmony in nature and feels science as part of the harmonious puzzle that is the world: “The sky was in the throes of another glorious multi-­colored sunset. He smiled to himself; all part of the experiment” (21). Thus, facing the Creature and recognizing that he is something unique, Serge admits with no hesitation: “It seems personal. I feel connected, in some way responsible” (27). That Frankenstein’s creature ­really existed and is still alive is confirmed by the Creature himself who immediately admits that he is Frankenstein’s monster and remembers all the events of his previous life. At this point in Land’s narrative, Mary Shelley’s book stands as the most precious source for the scientist to understand the incredible challenge he is g­ oing through: “If he is the real t­ hing, then Mary Shelley’s story is the only source we have to go by. I d ­ on’t remember enough of it to be accurate though. I remember the movies more, but I ­don’t think ­t hey’ll help us” (50). The intertextual aspect emerges by means of the popu­lar film interpretations of the classic novel. The story is filtered through collective consciousness and the repre­sen­ta­t ion that the film industry has given of it over almost a ­century. An excellent though humorous example of such vulgarization is when Sophia teases her husband with “a naked stiff-­legged walk around the bedroom imitating Boris Karloff in the movie, her arms reaching spastically out in front of her” (26). Such passages follow a coherent strategy to build a narrative whose function, so impor­tant to the sequel’s organ­ization, is that of renegotiating meanings and values. They recall an entire tradition and the ways in which that tradition has been interpreted through simplifications, reductions, and popularizations. Frankenstein belongs to the con­temporary imagination and popu­lar culture in a set of pictures and meta­phors that more than once diverge from Shelley’s original text. As George Levine acutely states, “It’s a commonplace now, that every­body talks about Frankenstein, but nobody reads it.”19 This is the position of the characters in Land’s novel: they must go back to the very source of the myth—­ Shelley’s novel—to learn all the details about the Creature, his birth and story, his feelings, his desires and crimes. However, in Land’s sequel as in con­temporary culture the portrayal of the Creature does in large part derive from the images passed down by the film tradition. In other words, Shelley’s text is replaced by the cinematographic reductions of it, which not only establish the story’s textual paradigms but also build all the imagery surrounding the Creature. As a result, the character’s appearance is precisely that portrayed in the film versions from Boris Karloff onward,

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so that we witness a “trans-­textual return” effect that moves from the novel to the cinema and from the cinema back to the novel, in a sort of dynamic circularity between media that sets in motion a dialogism operating both at the linguistic and expressive levels. H ­ ere, for example, is the description of Frankie’s body in Land’s novel: Now with the monster’s body seen in entirety, it became clear that his face, an ashen-­gray hue, ­wasn’t from grime or soil. His skin, from head to foot, was of the same ashen-­gray tone. Scars marked him like divisions on a map: massive, uneven and long. They bisected each shoulder and ran along both sides and down the center of his abdomen. His hands ­were sutured at the wrists as ­were the feet at the ankles. Even his fin­gers and toes had raised and knotted lines around them where they joined the main bulk of hand or foot. His sex, affixed the same as ­every other part, was in proportion to his huge size, and hairless like the rest of his body. The suture holes on ­either side of ­t hese horrible wounds, puckered deep into the skin, and profound indentations from the uneven sutures remained like quilted railroad tracks. E ­ very part had been stitched on in the crudest of manners, like a doll repaired by a frenzied young child. Fi­nally and forever, ­t here could be no doubt. This was truly a madman’s creation: Frankenstein’s monster. (62)

The Creature’s body has obviously been assembled from parts of corpses; he must therefore be none other than “Frankenstein’s monster.” His physical appearance is just what the film industry has always represented it to be, but he has the kindness and sensitivity of someone who has not been corrupted by the prejudice and cruelty of men. And, as implied in Shelley’s text as well, it is precisely ­human prejudice and cruelty that ­will drive Frankie to commit extreme acts. In Land’s novel, the use of plastic surgery is therefore justified by the Creature’s need to integrate into American society in the twenty-­first c­ entury, where he appears as a “totally new and improved, Frankenstein!” (166). The claim of his right to be considered a “­human being,” that is, one made by man from “pieces” of men, and of being accepted as part of a community is once again channeled through medical science; ­after the plastic surgery, Frankie admits: “I just wanted to be like every­one ­else” (176). But this adaptation to con­temporary standards of beauty conflicts with the interests of a show business industry that has been capitalizing on the “monster-­of-­Frankenstein phenomenon” and that is constantly in search of fresh novelties to exhibit, scrutinize, investigate, and even be horrified by: “You changed every­t hing by having that surgery. Your uniqueness is gone and now no one trusts you” (176). Unfortunately for Frankie, his body’s DNA eventually rejects the alterations made to it, and one night, during the preliminaries of a sexual encounter, his “Michelangelo’s David” (170) face regains its original features, leading to the ­woman’s death at Frankie’s own hands: “his face,

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his beautiful face, had almost completely reverted to its original horror! [. . .] In that wild moment of utter terror, with Kourtney’s frenzied thrashing in Frankie’s frightened grasp, came the point of both their destinies: her neck snapped!” (185–86). Land’s plot clearly incorporates “transmedia” ele­ments from vari­ous narrative strands and genres. Among the latter are of course the many horror films featuring the monster, but also some recent TV crime series, and ­t hese add several ele­ments and pretexts to the sequel that speak to the evolution of the “sequel” genre itself. The language of film and tele­v i­sion has clearly carved out its own sphere of action within the postmodern novel: by placing a literary classic at the center of the story, Land’s novel prompts reflection on the interpretations channeled through t­hose modern means of expression that have ­shaped our culture from the mid-­twentieth ­century to the pres­ent, bearing out the dynamic nature of Shelley’s myth and its openness to multiple cultural suggestions. Hence the need to “heal” the wrongs done to the Creature by giving him that “parental response” denied him by Victor Frankenstein and the sense of belonging denied him by the De Lacey f­ amily.

4 The “child adoption” by Sergio and Sophia Carerra is likely to bring happiness to the wretched Creature, fi­nally enabling ­human society to repair the wrongs and injustices it has done him. As the scene moves from the Arctic setting to Florida, and then to California—­from the Pole’s extreme cold to a warm climate and pleasant environment—­the quality of ­human relationships and feelings also shifts, as if to reflect the more suitable conditions for a loving and hospitable atmosphere. In this unlikely environmental context, the story develops along two dif­fer­ ent paths: first, that of the Creature’s involvement in a twenty-­first-­century lifestyle and in questionable practices such as popu­lar TV programs, Hollywood parties, and plastic surgery; second, a dialogic path whereby episodes from Shelley’s novel are re-­w ritten and narrated in the form of a dream, thus allowing a continual dialogue between the original and the sequel also in terms of narrative interaction. More specifically, the former path aims at actualizing the myth, rendering it closer, even more familiar to us, as if it ­were not only one of the icons from our shared literary past but the very embodiment of our modern set of values. The h ­ uman body is once again at the core of the author/reader’s concerns as a privileged site of transformation. And paradoxically, what­ever changes may be produced in it by twenty-­first-­century reproductive techniques and scientific advancement, t­ here exists a discrepancy between the outside and the inside, the body as physical manifestation and the body as the site of moral and spiritual questioning. As David Punter pertinently argues,

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The body can be changed, it can be subjected to all manner of prosthesis, extension, invasion, and it may well be that in the end [. . .], we are all in the act of becoming cyborgs; but while that transformation is incomplete, we still have to confront the fruits—­and indeed the by-­products—of our l­ abour, creatures that are not fully created, ­humans who suspect that they are not fully ­human, monsters who are even capable of entertaining doubts as to their own monstrosity.20

As to the use of dreams, it serves as a strategy for filling the lacunae in Shelley’s text. Back from the Dead is interspersed with Frankie’s dreams which, while retaining a substantial relation with the original text, offer new scenarios: dreams prove to be the most effective and appropriate means for conveying past experiences which the monster now does not recognize as his own. In fact, Frankie re-­tells Shelley’s story from the point of view of another “narrative” self, of that literary monster from whom he keeps his distance. Despite the fact that Frankenstein’s monster’s bad be­hav­ior is part of a myth consolidated over two centuries, Frankie condemns the Creature’s crimes. One remarkable example is the dream about Elizabeth’s death. ­After the discovery of Elizabeth’s body “lying across the bed in eternal sleep,” Victor realizes the consequence of “the horror and madness he had initiated” (150–51). Frankie awakens, full of anguish: “A screeching seagull dived for its morning catch, zipping in and out of the dawn fog, rocketing past Carl Avalon’s Malibu ­house on the way to the beach. Frankie jolted awake. He looked out the win­dow to the pacific, tears full in his eyes and the scent of perfumed powder lingering in his nostrils” (151). The burden of the past is too heavy. Frankie, a creature who stands on the threshold between ­human and nonhuman, life and non-­life, discovers that the memory of his own past crimes is painful and morally unacceptable. ­There is a hidden prob­lem ­behind the Creature’s dreams that makes the reader recapture and extend the power of the original. What­ever his reasons to seek revenge against his creator may be, what­ever change spiritual and cultural values might undergo, the Creature poses an ethical dilemma about the possibility of rejecting the past in ­favor of seizing new opportunities of life. Eventually, Frankie, Sergio Carerra, and the extradiegetic narrator as well find that, while the past can be reconsidered and revisited, ­there is no way to escape it. Therefore, despite all the efforts to make Frankenstein’s Creature a “man” of the twenty-­first ­century, he realizes that the only pos­si­ble f­ uture is to “go back into the fiction of Mary Shelley” (257). ­Until, that is, the next sequel revives him for further adventures. Postmodern sequels always raise the cultural question of giving a response to myths. In par­tic­u ­lar, in rethinking and renegotiating the essentials of Frankenstein, Land’s Back from the Dead attempts to give a narrative interpretation of Shelley’s novel while keeping in mind the capacity of other media to generate interpretations. In so d ­ oing, as readers we are offered a wide range of

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perspectives, all easily attributable to specific sources, which allows us to reshape our own understanding of culture. Put differently, Land’s creature is a fictional character who embodies the burden of a bicentennial tradition and reflects upon it. As a result, at first, he succeeds in integrating in a society that is seemingly ready to accept diversity. The ending of the story proves, however, that mythic figures retain their own specificity, rendering them more instruments to interpret than materials to be interpreted.

Notes 1. See, for example, Carolyn Jess-­Cooke, Film Sequels: Theory and Practice from Hollywood to Bollywood (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009); Carolyn Jess-­Cooke and Constantine Verevis, eds., Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010); Simone Murray, The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Con­temporary Literary Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2012); John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan (Kay) S. Picart, eds., Draculas, Vampires, and Other Undead Forms: Essays on Gender, Race and Culture (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009); Paul V. Budra and Betty A. Schellenberg, eds., Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998); Lester D. Friedman and Allison B. Kavey, Monstrous Progeny: A History of Frankenstein Narratives (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016). 2. Ingrid E. Holmberg, “Homer and the Beginning of the Sequel,” in Budra and Schellenberg, Part Two, 19–33. 3. Budra and Schellenberg, “Introduction,” Part Two, 7. 4. “[T]he sequel, by definition, is extravagantly intertextual, and so con­ve­niently formalizes the artifice of narrative, opening up the construction of history and meaning for critical query” (Budra and Schellenberg, “Introduction,” Part Two, 11). 5. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), 3. 6. Umberto Eco, “Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Post-­modern Aesthetics,” Daedalus 114, no. 4 (Fall, 1985): 161–84. 7. Eco, “Innovation and Repetition,” 166. 8. Jess-­Cooke, Film Sequels, 8. 9. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 6. 10. Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 5. 11. Jess-­Coke, Film Sequels, 53. 12. As David Punter points out, t­ here are at least thirty “recent Frankenstein narratives,” amongst which he examines Brian Aldiss’s Frankenstein Unbound (1973), Dean Koontz’s series of five Frankenstein novels, Susan Heyboer O’Keefe’s Frankenstein’s Monster (2010), and Michael Bunker’s ­Brother, Frankenstein (2015). David Punter, “Lit­er­a­ture,” in The Cambridge Companion to “Frankenstein,” ed. Andrew Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 206. 13. “I have [. . .] coined the word ‘aftering’ to describe the ‘writing over’ of Victorian novels”: Anne Humpherys, “The Afterlife of the Victorian Novel: Novels About Novels,” in A Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Patrick Bratlinger and William  B. Theasing (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 442. 14. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Lit­er­a­ture in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1997). “By hypertextuality I mean any relationship uniting a text B (which I s­ hall call the hypertext) to an earlier text (I s­ hall, of course, call it the hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary” (5).

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15. I would like to warmly thank Stuart Land for giving me permission to use and quote from his text (Lexington, KY, private printing, 2016). The book can be bought in Kindle format or as print-­on-­demand via amazon​.c­ om. Land explains that the first draft of the novel was a script for the film industry, but ­later he deci­ded to turn it into a narrative. The first version of the novel dates to 1999. All further Land quotations, henceforth referenced parenthetically in the text, ­will be from this edition. 16. As early as 1848, Elizabeth Gaskell wrote of the lower classes in her novel Mary Barton: “The actions of the uneducated seem to me typified in ­those of Frankenstein, that monster of many h ­ uman qualities, ungifted with a soul, a knowledge of the difference between good and evil,” Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, ed. MacDonald Daly (Harmonds­ worth: Penguin, 2009), 170. This passage shows that by 1848 the ­mistake about the name of creator and creature was already well-­established. 17. Jess-­Cooke, Film Sequels, 4. 18. It must be noted that, since the beginning, the narrators refer to the creature as “the man in the ice”; “the frozen man”; “the ­giant man”; “the guy”; all of which imply a h ­ uman dimension denied in Shelley’s novel. 19. George Levine, “The Ambiguous Heritage of Frankenstein,” in The Endurance of “Frankenstein”: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 3. 20. Punter, “Lit­er­a­ture,” 217–18.

Acknowl­edgments

The editors acknowledge with many thanks the permission to reproduce from several sources, and the kind assistance they received from the following individuals: for permission to use “Paré’s Hand, showing mechanical movement,” available at https://­wellcomecollection​.­org​/w ­ orks​/­bgj9rr8s, used on the cover of this book, the editors thank the Wellcome Collection (London, UK) and Ms. Daisy at the Media Office. The editors thank Mary Bergin-­Cartwright at Oxford University Press for her assistance with Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus, 1831 text. Oxford World’s Classics by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley edited by M. K. Joseph (1998, 2008). By Permission of Oxford University Press. Francesca Saggini and Enrico Reggiani thank Ms. Libby Larsen, Abi Enockson and Sarah Luehrs at ECS Publishing, who graciously gave permission to reproduce from, respectively, Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus: An Opera in Three Acts by Libby Larsen (E. C. Schirmer M ­ usic Com­pany, 1989), and from Ms. Larsen’s libretto. Francesca Saggini gratefully thanks Professor Cecilia Laschi (BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy) for sharing with her a picture of the humanoid, Sabian, and Robert Shatzkin at W. W. Norton for helping her with the permission to reproduce from Frankenstein: Norton Critical Edition, Second Edition by Mary Shelley, edited by J. Paul Hunter. Copyright © 1996, 2012 by W. W. Norton & Com­pany, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Com­pany, Inc. Lidia De Michelis would like to thank Alicia Ofori at Random House Group, and Beau ­Sullivan, at Penguin Random House LLC, for helping her with permission to reproduce from Robert Harris’s The Fear Index (Hutchinson, 2011). The Fear Index by Robert Harris. Reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. ©2011. Claire Nally would like to thank Faber & Faber for granting permission to reproduce from Nick Dear’s Frankenstein: Based on the Novel by Mary Shelley (2011). Federico Meschini would like to thank Vitoria Lee and Gregory Pan at Marvel for granting 245

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permission to use the covers of X-­Men (1 n. 40) and The Monster of Frankenstein (1 n. 2); also, Federico Meschini is very grateful to Roger Langridge, who kindly granted him permission to reproduce “Frankenstein Meets Shirley ­Temple Part 1” (illustration no.  6.1  in this book). Andrew McInnes would like to thank Kate Horse­ley and Chris Priestley for their support, Bloomsbury Publishing for helping him with permissions to reprint from Mister Creecher (2011), Barbican Press for helping him with permissions to reprint from The Monster’s Wife (2014); and Writers House (La Jolla, California) for assisting the author to reproduce from This Dark Endeavour (2011). Many thanks also to Kenneth Oppel and his literary agent for their assistance. Excerpts from This Dark Endeavour by Kenneth Oppel. Copyright © 2011 by Firewing Productions, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division. All rights reserved. Janet L ­ arson would like to thank Cailen Swain at Oxford University Press Canada, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Com­pany, and Curtis Brown (London), particularly Deena Butt, for assistance with reprinting from Speeches for Dr. Frankenstein, from Selected Poems, 1965–1975 by Margaret Atwood. Copyright © Oxford University Press Canada 1990. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Excerpts from Speeches for Dr. Frankenstein from Selected Poems, 1965–1975 by Margaret Atwood. Copyright © 1976 by Margaret Atwood. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Com­pany. All rights reserved. Also, many thanks to Deena Butt at Curtis Brown (London), who kindly assisted the editors to reproduce from Margaret Atwood, Speeches from Dr. Frankenstein. Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of O. W. Toad Ltd. Copyright © Margaret Atwood, 1968. Fi­nally, Anna Enrichetta Soccio thanks Stuart Land for his gracious emails and permission to reprint from his novel, Back from the Dead: The True Sequel to Frankenstein (2016). Grateful thanks, as ever, to Laura Kopp, who assisted us in vari­ous ways in the preparation of the manuscript. Her curiosity, intelligence, and sharp eye are a parachute for any author. Un grazie di cuore! At Bucknell University Press, we would like to thank Pamelia Dailey for her round-­the-­clock assistance, and Greg Clingham, who has been particularly generous with his advice. This book owes its existence in print to him. Many thanks also to the anonymous reader, whose generous words of encouragement and sound advice spurred us at the right time to move forward with our work.

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Index

z Page references for figures are italicized. abandonment, 93, 109, 110, 189, 190, 194 Abbot & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), 3, 120, 133 ab-­human, 17, 28n44 Achebe, Chinua, 145 adaptation, 1–3, 6–7, 10, 27n41, 28n43, 38–39, 41, 70, 87, 89–90, 98, 105, 107, 119, 121, 123, 124–26, 133, 138n7, 148, 151, 155n35, 157–61, 170n15, 173, 181, 184n3, 187–88, 191, 196, 219, 221, 223, 226–27, 229, 240; adaptation studies, 1–2; intersemiosis, 6; liberal adaptation, 174–75; sequelization, 233–34; seriality, 233 A for Andromeda, 38, 41; Victor Fleming, 38 Agamben, Giorgio, 108, 110 AI. See artificial intelligence A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), 41 Aldiss, Brian, 34, 35; Frankenstein Unbound, 43, 87 algorithmic system, 52, 54, 55, 64 android, 12, 39–41, 47n39, 70, 74, 79, 81, 82, 129 Andromeda Breakthrough, The, 38 Ariosto, Ludovico: Orlando Furioso, 35 Aristotle, 5, 6 artificial intelligence, 10–13, 16, 27n36, 27n39, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 52, 54–56, 61–65, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 82; emergence of, 41–42 Asimov, Isaac, 40, 48n40; Susan Calvin, 40; I, Robot, 39; “Liar,” 48n41; “The Machine and the Robot,” 40; “Runaround,” 40, 48n41 Atwood, Margaret, 6, 8, 24n15, 201–15; The Animals in That Country, 205; The Circle

Game, 201, 205, 213; Double Persephone, 201, 205; The Handmaid’s Tale, 215; Scribbler Moon, 203; Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein, 201–2, 205, 206, 212, 213; Survival, 214–15 Austen, Jane, 44, 226–27 authorship / author, 12, 36, 43, 53, 58–59, 61, 90, 125, 127–29, 131, 135, 160, 192, 203, 214, 219, 236, 241 automaton, 12, 25n24, 26n33, 39, 41, 88, 158 Avatar, The, 38; Dr. Michael Earle, 38 Babbage, Charles, 25n24 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 223 Banks, Don, 150 Banksy, 108 Barthes, Roland, 21, 25n24 BBC, 38 Bear, Greg: Blood ­Music, 39 ben Bezalel, Jehuda Löw, 15, 36 Bernard, James, 150 Berners-­Lee, Tim, 41 Bérubé, Michael, 91 Bhabha, Homi, 104–5 Bierce, Ambrose: Moxon’s Master, 39 Bishop, Henry Rowley, 149 Blade Runner (1982), 36, 38, 47n35, 73, 74, 75, 77, 81; Roy Batty, 36, 75 Blomkamp, Neill: District 9, 109 Bodenland, Joe, 43–44 body, 7, 158 bot, 6, 11, 12, 15, 77, 78; chatbot, 15; fembot, 69–83

27 1

2 7 2 I n de x bound­aries, 3, 7, 8, 12, 17, 20, 50, 56, 59, 60, 62, 65–66, 74, 96, 102, 108, 113, 165, 169, 182, 223, 234 Bourdieu, Pierre, 174 Boyle, Danny, 8, 90 Braham, John, 149 Braidotti, Rosi, 17, 104 Bride of Frankenstein (1935), 2, 119 Bride of Frankenstein (2009), 44 Briefer, Dick, 126, 127, 128 Brontë, Emily, 44 Brooks, Peter, 162 Brough, William and Robert: Frankenstein; or, The Model Man, 149 Brown, Fredric: “Answer,” 41 Byron, Lord, 43, 52, 152, 169, 209 Campbell, Clyde C. See Gold, Horace L. Campbell, John W., 35 Canetti, Elias, 56 Čapek, Karel, 20, 37; R.U.R. (1920), 20, 37, 47n28 capitalism, 51–52, 64, 72, 93, 95, 106, 114, 164–65 Carey, Peter, 116n12 Carlyle, Thomas, 8 chatbot. See bot child, 13, 27, 52, 57, 93, 94, 115, 190–92, 194, 195, 219, 220, 235, 238, 241; ­children’s lit­er­a­ture, 221, 222, 227; the Romantic child, 219 childhood. See child Cicero: Somnium Scipionis, 35 Clarke, Arthur C., 13, 41; “Dial F for Frankenstein,” 41 Cobert, Robert, 150 Cobley, Jason, 124 Colossus (1966), 42 Colossus: The Forbin Proj­ect (1977), 42 comic book, 2–3, 16, 27n41, 119–37; Bizarro, 137; Ann Brewster, 124; Dino Castrillo, 124; Classic Comics no. 26, 124; DC Comics, 134–36; Eternity Comics, 125; Frank Einstein and the Antimatter Motor, 221; “Frankenstein Meets Shirley ­Temple Part 1,” 122, 138n4; Golden Age, 126; The Incredible Hulk, 129, 133, 134, 136; Kanadian Kultchur Komix, 202; Jack Kirby, 2, 23n9, 124; Roger Langridge, 122, 138n4; Stan Lee, 2, 16, 23n9, 126, 127, 129, 139n22; “The Mark of the Monster!,” 130; Marvel Classics Comics no. 20, 124; Marvel Comics, 127–32, 130, 132; The Monster of

Frankenstein, 132; Patrick Olliffe, 124; Martin Powell, 124; Prize Comics, 126, 127, 128; Ruth A. Roche, 124; Superman, 120, 126, 134–37; Warner, 124; Robert Hayward Webb, 124; X-­Men, 2, 16, 129, 130, 134 computers, 41, 42 Conrad, Joseph, 104, 145; The Secret Sharer, 180 Cooke, Thomas Potter, 148, 157, 159, 160–63, 165–68 Corman, Roger, 43 Cortana, 78, 83n19 Count of Cagliostro, 44 Court of Arbitration for Sport, 113 Cox, Cindy, 147 creation, act of, 4, 7, 8–9, 11, 13, 57, 69, 70, 79, 89, 91, 107, 112, 157, 158, 160, 162, 176, 177, 179–84, 214, 220, 227, 239 creaturely life, 59, 63 Cremaschi, Inisero, 38 Crichton, Michael, 41; Jurassic Park, 39 Cumberbatch, Benedict, 87, 90, 93, 94 cyborg, 13, 17, 20, 41, 70, 78, 81, 90, 105, 111–12, 205, 242; The Cyborg Handbook, 112 Darwin, Charles, 28n43, 37, 45n3, 53, 62, 188, 205; The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 56; On the Origins of Species, 56, 60, 61 Darwin, Erasmus, 33, 45n3 Davis, Carl, 150 Dawley, James Searle, 173–74, 180–81, 183 Dear, Nick. See Frankenstein: Based on the Novel by Mary Shelley Defoe, Daniel, 104 Deleuze, Gilles, 20, 113 De Man, Paul, 29n58 Denson, Shane, 125, 175 Dick, Philip K., 22, 41; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 38, 41, 74 Dickens, Charles, 44; Oliver Twist, 219, 226, 229 digital: human-­digital, 58–59, 61–63; post-­digital age, 69 disability studies, 8, 16, 89, 93, 95–98; disability drag, 94 diversity, 4, 96, 239, 243 Donaldson, Roger, 38 doppelgänger, 173–84, 210, 223; Der Student von Prag (1913), 180, 184; the double, 173, 180, 183, 184, 223 Dunlap, Paul, 150

I n de x Eco, Umberto, 2, 3, 23n7, 137, 233, 234. See also reader response Edison Kinetogram, The, 174–76, 181–83, 184n3 education, 4, 11, 13, 96, 123, 124, 219, 238 ekphrasis, 184, 186n35 Elliot, John, 38 Epic of Gilgamesh, 35 ethics and morality, 3, 4, 5, 13, 15, 16–17, 39, 50, 52, 61, 62, 65, 69, 71, 75, 76, 82, 87, 88, 91, 94, 98, 102, 103–4, 111, 113, 114, 205, 209, 225, 241, 242; amoral, 57; post-­ ethical, 15 evolution, 5, 6, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 62–64, 70, 75, 77, 78, 80, 188 Ex_Machina (2015), 13, 69–83; Ava, 69–71, 73–79, 81–82; Nathan Bateman, 69–76, 78–82; BlueBook, 70, 71–74, 76; Caleb Smith, 70–71, 73–82 fan, 1, 3, 44, 202; crossover, 44 fanfic, 1, 44 Fanon, Franz: Black Skin, White Masks, 107–9 fatherhood, 35, 38–39, 52, 56, 57, 76, 81, 187, 188, 189–97, 237, 238 Faust myth, 51, 88 fear, 50, 51, 54, 56, 59, 60, 62, 65 Feldman, Dennis, 38 fembot. See bot femininity, 70, 77, 79, 238; hyperfemininity, 13 feminist criticism, 78–79, 111–12, 191, 211, 223, 231 femme fatale, 77 finance, 50–51, 52, 54, 57–60, 62–66, 121, 203; digitization and finance, 54; financial crisis, 50, 65; spectral finance, 51, 65 Forbidden Planet (1956), 39 Forry, Steven Earl, 159 Frankenstein (1910), 173–84 Frankenstein (1931), 2, 5, 119 Frankenstein, afterings and afterlives, 1–3, 4, 5, 7, 21, 23n6, 24n15, 52, 64, 233, 235, 237; comics adaptations, 2–3, 16, 27n41, 119–37; fanfic, 44; film adaptations, 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 24n15, 25n22, 44, 69–83, 87, 119, 123, 187–97; Frankenstein complex, 40, 41; graphic novels, 10, 124, 125; Frankenstein (2013), 221; illustrations, 119–37; theater adaptations, 8, 10, 17, 19, 25n22, 27n41, 87, 119, 147, 157 Frankenstein: An Adventure in the Macabre (1927), 17

27 3 Frankenstein: Based on the Novel by Mary Shelley, 90–95; Nick Dear, 8, 95; Victor Frankenstein, 90, 94; National Theatre, London (2015), 87, 90–94; science in, 91; Underworld, 90, 92 Frankenstein; or, The Model Man, 149 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus: frontispiece, 7, 8, 9, 20, 21, 119, “Introduction” (1831), 22, 25n19, 89; teaching, 65–66, 113–14, 230–31, 235; themes, 4, 6 Frankenstein; or, The Vampire’s Victim, 149 Frankenstein Papers, The, 44 Frankenstein Quartet, The, 150 Frankenstein: The Graphic Novel, 124 Frankenstein Unbound (1990), 42 Frankenstein, Victor, 34, 36, 37, 39, 43, 44, 52, 56, 69, 71, 72, 73–74, 79, 88, 104, 112, 115, 120, 123, 126, 127, 133, 136, 137, 160, 220–22, 232n17, 235, 236, 238, 241 Franklin, Benjamin, 44 freak show, 95–96 Freud, Sigmund, 53, 57, 120, 191; Das Unheimliche, 180 Frye, Northrop, 203 Fueller, Mary, 174 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 244n16 Gates, Bill, 53, 54, 56, 71 gaze, the, 20, 73, 94, 107; scopophilia, 16, 20 Genette, Gérard, 22n5, 235 Geneva, 43, 52–53, 54, 55, 56, 60, 162, 181 Gernsback, Hugo, 36, 46n20 Gibson, William, 88; Neuromancer, 42 Gilbert, Sandra M., 191, 193 Godwin, Francis, 145 Godwin, William, 145, 192, 219, 221 Gold, Horace L., 38 Golem, 15, 36, 37 Google, 15, 63, 71 Gothic, 18, 34–35, 51–53, 55–62, 65–66, 110, 124, 158, 163, 187–97, 201, 203, 205, 210, 211, 224; Female Gothic, 191; Gothic novel, 33, 34, 36, 62, 88, 188, 196; Gothic uncanny, 51, 55; Victorian Gothic, 56, 188; graphic novel, 10, 124, 125, 221 Grey, Mark: Frankenstein Opera, 151; Frankenstein Symphony, 151 Gruber, Heinz Karl, 150 Guattari, Félix, 20 Gubar, Susan, 191, 193 HAL 9000, 13, 36, 42, 58 Halberstam, Judith, 5, 7, 24n17, 59

2 74 I n de x Hall, Stuart, 102 Hamilton, Edmond: Metal ­Giants, 39 Haraway, Donna, 17, 111 Harris, Robert: The Fear Index, 50–66 Heinlein, Robert: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, 42 Henry, Richard. See “Richard Henry” Hindemith, Paul: Frankenstein’s Monster Repertoire, 150 HOLMES IV, 42 Horn, Charles Edward, 148, 149, 154n28 horror, 8, 13, 20, 43, 51, 53, 60, 64, 72, 79–82, 108, 110, 121, 123, 126, 127, 129, 137, 148, 189, 191, 214, 220–23, 227–30, 241, 242 Horsley, Kate: The Monster’s Wife, 219, 229–31 House of Anansi Press, 201, 203, 204 Howell, F. Clark: March of Pro­gress, 75, 80 Hoyle, Fred, 41: The Black Cloud, 38 Hughes, Thomas A., 149 ­human, 4–7, 10, 11, 13, 15–21, 39, 40–42, 44, 50, 52, 56–58, 61, 63, 65, 69, 70, 73–75, 82, 88, 89, 92, 101–15, 144, 145, 149, 151, 162, 203, 206, 223, 241, 242 humanoid, 7, 12, 14, 27n36, 40, 88, 245; Sabian, 14, 245 Hunt, Leigh, 143 Hutcheon, Linda, 5, 233 Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World, 37 hybrid. See hybridity hybridity, 17, 18–19, 24n17, 52, 61, 63, 65, 101–5, 108, 112, 114–15, 168, 187, 188, 196 Igor, 8, 24n18, 44, 95–97 incest, 187, 188, 193, 219, 220 Industrial Revolution, 88, 92, 95 interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, 1, 6, 21, 24, 51, 52, 87, 147 intermedial. See transmedia International Association of Athletics Federations, 113 internet, 15, 41, 53, 55, 56, 60, 69, 70, 72, 78 intertextuality, 21, 38, 114, 133, 185n11, 223, 225, 233, 234, 239–40 intertitle, 175–79 inter/transcultural transferences, 2, 159, 165, 166–69 Jack the Ripper, 44 Jeffery, Scott, 112, 114 Jenkins, Henry, 1, 22n4. See also fanfic Jobs, Steve, 71 Johannesburg, 109

Jones, Dennis F., 42 Jonze, Spike: Her (2013), 59, 77 Karloff, Boris, 7, 19, 119, 129, 135, 139n22, 239 Kepler, Johannes: Somnium, sive Astronomia Lunaris, 35 Kermode, Frank, 234 Kerr, John Atkinson: The Monster and the Magician, 159, 160, 161, 163, 165, 169 Kessel, John: Pride and Prometheus, 44 King, Stephen, 123; It, 43 Klimt, Gustav: Portrait of Margaret Stonborough Wittgenstein, 82 Kraushaar, Raoul, 150 Kristeva, Julia, 8 Kubrick, Stanley: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), 13, 36, 42, 58 Kureishi, Hanif, 110 Lacan, Jacques, 179–80; mirror stage, 180; symbolic order, 180, 183 Lampedusa, 109 Land, Stuart: Back from the Dead: The True Sequel to Frankenstein, 235–43 Lang, Fritz, 13, 41; Metropolis (1927), 13, 41, 73, 81 language, 11, 12, 58, 64, 65, 110, 145, 148, 162 Larsen, Libby: Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, 1, 151–52; “What the Monster Saw,” 151 Lee, George Alexander, 149 Lem, Stanislaw: Solaris, 39 LePan, Douglas, 203 Lewis, Matthew G.: The Monk, 34 Lilith, 211 Lochhead, Liz, 8, 24n15, 25n20 Locke, John, 11 London, Bette, 191 London Summer Olympics (2012), 113 Lotman, Yuri M., 20 Lutz, Wilhelm Meyer, 149 machine, 5, 8, 11, 16, 17, 19–20, 36, 39–41, 55, 57, 63, 64, 70–71, 73–75, 77–80, 81–82, 88, 89, 92, 96–97, 105, 112, 160–61, 166, 227, 238 Maclise, Joseph, 90 Malouf, David, 152 Marx, Karl, 51 masculinity, 77–81, 191–92, 194, 196–97, 206, 208, 211–12, 220, 226, 229 Mbembe, Achille, 103, 105 McLuhan, Marshall, 4, 204 McNeely, Joel, 150

I n de x

27 5

Nagata, Linda: Limit of Vision, 39 naming, 13, 27n36, 157, 194 normalcy, 7, 16, 87, 89, 94, 96–98, 104, 110, 191, 195, 208 novum, 36

Pachter, Charles, 201–2, 213–14 Paralympics, 112, 113 parthenogenesis, 78 patriarchy, 70, 71, 80, 81–83, 187, 188, 192, 221 Payne, John Howard, 169 Peake, Richard Brinsley, 25n22, 119, 147; Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein, 119, 148, 149, 157, 158–63 Peaslee, Richard, 150 Pennycook, Bruce, 202 Penny Dreadful (2014–16), 5, 87, 123, 187–97; Victor Frankenstein, 188, 189, 191; Vanessa Ives, 188, 196; Sir Malcolm Murray, 188, 189, 195, 196; Proteus, 189, 192, 195 Persuasion, 226 Petrucha, Stefan: The Shadow of Frankenstein, 44 Phillips, Augustus, 174 piano meta­phor, 144, 146 Pierce, Jack, 19, 119 Pistorius, Oscar, 21, 105, 112–13 Plato, 8, 12, 26n25, 113 Poe, Edgar Allan, 46n20, 129, 180; “William Wilson,” 180 Pollock, Jackson: No. 5, 1948, 75, 78 Poovey, Mary, 187 postcolonial, 101–4, 106, 108, 113–15, 203–4, 272; colonial, 103–5, 107; postcolony, 101–15 posthuman, 6, 15, 16, 19, 50, 52, 63, 104, 107, 111–15, 116n15 postmodernism, 3, 44, 66, 91, 125, 233–34, 241, 242 Pride and Prejudice, 44; Kitty Bennet, 44; Mary Bennet, 44 Priestley, Christopher: Mister Creecher, 219–20, 221–23, 225–31 Prometheus myth, 15, 72–74, 101–2 prosthetic body, 20–21, 89, 97, 105, 112–13 psychoanalysis, 47n25, 173, 180, 183; castration, 180; Oedipal complex, 59, 191, 224 Pulliam, June, 223, 229 Punter, David, 241–42

Oates, Joyce Carol, 212 Ogle, Charles, 174 Oppel, Kenneth: This Dark Endeavour, 219, 221, 222, 223–25, 229, 230–31 Orwell, George: 1984, 53 otherness, 74, 88, 107, 161, 162, 221; the Other, 21, 53, 102, 104, 182

race, 13, 18, 79, 107, 136–37 Radio Tele­v i­sione Italiana, 38 Rank, Otto, 180, 183 reader response, 2–3, 11, 17, 21–22, 59, 70, 114, 131, 138n1, 194, 202, 212, 222, 227, 233, 238, 241, 242–43 remediation, 52, 59, 62, 66, 157, 158, 166

Meale, Richard Graham: Mer de Glace: An Opera in Two Acts with Prologue, 152 Mechanical Turk, 12, 26n33 Mediterranean, the, 105, 108, 163 Mellon, Alfred, 149 Mellor, Anne K., 19n25, 78–79, 191, 219 melodrama, 147–49, 157 Merle, Jean-­Toussaint, and Antoine-­ Nicolas Béraud: Le monstre et le magicien, 159, 166, 169 Merleau-­Ponty, Maurice, 113 Michelangelo: Sistine Chapel, 10 Microsoft, 15, 77 mi­grant, 18, 102, 105–10, 114 Miller, Jonny Lee, 87, 90, 91, 93, 94 Miller, Karl, 180 Milner, Henry M., 148, 149, 157, 159, 161–65, 169; Frankenstein; or, The Demon of Switzerland, 148, 157; Frankenstein; or, The Man and the Monster!, 148 Milton, John: Paradise Lost, 11, 191, 211 mirror, 177–84 mise-­en-­scène, 181, 183 Moers, Ellen, 191 monster, 2, 5, 6, 7, 15, 16, 17, 18, 39, 40, 42–45, 51, 57, 62, 64–65, 70, 74, 91, 94–95, 102, 107, 108, 110, 112, 114–15, 120, 121, 125–27, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136–37, 147, 148, 150, 151–52, 157, 159–66, 174–83, 187–90, 194–96, 202, 205, 206, 208, 210, 211, 213–14, 219 monstrous, the, 18, 21, 50–55, 57, 59, 62–63, 70, 102, 127, 160–61, 183, 219–31, 237, 239–42 morality. See ethics and morality Moretti, Franco, 18, 45, 164 motherhood, 56, 57, 79, 189–92, 224, 238; motherless reproduction, 57–58, 61, 70, 191 musico-­literary analy­sis, 143, 144, 147

2 7 6 I n de x Res­nick, Mike, 44 “Richard Henry”: Richard Butler and Henry Chance Newton, 149 Roberts, Adam, 34, 36, 45 robots, 7, 11, 12, 14, 15, 20, 27n34, 36–37, 39–41, 42, 47n39, 48n41, 69, 78–98, 203; cognitive robotics, 11–12 role of the reader. See reader response Romantic. See Romanticism Romanticism, 3, 5, 8, 10, 11, 12, 21, 52, 58, 82, 91, 102, 152, 159, 163, 168, 196, 219, 225 Rossum’s Universal Robots. See Karel Čapek Rowling, J. K.: Harry Potter, 221 Rucker, Rudy: The Ware Tetralogy, 39 Rushdie, Salman: The Satanic Verses, 101–2, 108 Rye, Stellan, 180 Saberhagen, Fred, 44 Said, Edward, 102–3, 105 Salinger, J. D.: The Catcher in the Rye, 222 Salter, Hans J., 150 Salzedo, Leonard, 150 Sawyer, Robert J.: Wake, 41; Watch, 41; Won­der, 41 science fiction: biopunk, 38; cyberpunk, 42; emerging AI, 42; film, 69–83; golden age, 35, 41; history of, 35, 46n20; new wave, 41, 43; synthetic biology, 38; three laws of robotics, 39–40 scientific romance, 35, 38 Scott, Sir Walter, 26n30, 145 Self, the, 51, 104, 206 semiotics, 8, 13, 121, 127, 157, 165; intersemiosis, 6, 162 Shakespeare, William, 25n21, 104, 165, 167, 168, 274; Hamlet, 176; The Tempest, 39 Shalvey, Declan, 124 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft: childhood, 219; Falkner, 153n20; The Last Man, 143, 144, 152n4, 153n20; letters, 8, 143, 157, 169; Lodore, 153n20; Valperga, 144 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 25n19, 33, 34, 43, 44, 171n41, 209 Silverberg, Robert: Tower of Glass, 39 Siri, 78, 83n19 Skinner, Frank, 150 slavery, 8, 18, 28n19, 47n39, 112 Smith, Rick, 92 Smith, ­Will, 27n36 Smith, Zadie, 115n4 Soderbergh, Steven: Solaris (2002), 39 Son of Frankenstein (1939), 24n18, 119, 129

soul, 10, 61, 135 Species (1995), 38 Spielberg, Steven: Jurassic Park (1993), 39 Stam, Robert, 188, 191, 196 steampunk, 5, 8, 87–98, 135; science in, 88, 97; The Steampunk Bible, 88, 92; The Steampunk Magazine, 87; technology in, 88 Stendhal, 167–69 Stoker, Bram: Dracula, 187, 188 “structure of the conjuncture,” 183, 186n34 superhero, 16, 112, 114–15, 119, 120, 124, 126, 127, 137 superhumanity, 16, 113 surveillance, 53, 61, 62, 73, 82 Suvin, Darko, 36 Tarkovskij, Andrej: Solaris (1972), 39 Tay, 15, 22, 27n39, 77–78 technology, 4–6, 15, 36, 55, 57, 62, 70, 72, 73, 75, 77–80, 82–83, 88, 89, 90, 97, 105, 109, 135, 146, 151, 165, 202, 204, 238; hypertechnology, 88 telephone network, 41 Terminator (1984), 41 terror, 4, 5, 17, 18, 34, 51, 52, 64, 101, 167, 203, 205, 211, 230 Thomson, Amy: Virtual Girl, 41 Titian: An Allegory of Prudence, 75 Todorov, Tzvetan, 13 transhuman, 6–7, 16, 17, 19, 21, 58, 61, 63, 105, 112, 116n15 transmedia, 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 10, 16, 19, 21, 22, 24n18, 114, 121, 144, 173, 183, 188, 241 transposition, 2, 25n18, 27n41, 42, 43, 45, 95, 129, 137, 173–75, 180, 181, 183 Turing test, 70, 71, 74, 79 Turner, J. M. W., 109 uncanny valley effect, 12, 13, 15, 27n34, 40; Masahiro Mori, 27n34 Vandermeer, Jeff, 88, 92 Verne, Jules, 34, 46n20 Victor Frankenstein (2015), 7, 87, 94–98; the Creature, 94, 95; Victor Frankenstein, 94, 95–97; Gordon, 95; Igor, 94–97; Igor Straussman, 96 Victorian, 56, 88, 96, 134, 188, 194, 196; Neo-­Victorian, 87–89, 95, 98, 100n45 Vikander, Alicia, 73 Villa Diodati, 52, 89, 123 Vincent, Harold: “Rex,” 41 Virgil, 234

I n de x visibility, 73–75 von Holst, Theodor, 7, 9, 119, 229 von Kempelen, Wolfgang, 12 Wade, Joseph Augustine, 149 Waxman, Franz, 150 Wegener, Paul, 181 Wells, H. G., 37, 46n20; The Island of Doctor Moreau, 37 werewolf, 51, 135, 188, 192 Westworld (1973), 41 Whale, James, 2, 3, 5, 19, 27n38, 42, 95, 119 Wiebling, Peggy, 17 Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray, 187

27 7 Williamson, Jack: With Folded Hands . . . ​, 41 Williamson, Malcolm, 150 Wilson, Daniel H.: Robopocalypse, 42 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 219 world risk society, 65 World Wide Web. See internet young adult fiction, 219–31 Zelazny, Roger: Home Is the Hangman, 41 Zeus, 72, 74, 101 zombie, 18, 81, 110, 127, 134 Zuckerberg, Mark, 71

About the Contributors

Eleanor Beal is a Lecturer in the Department of En­glish at Manchester Metro­ politan University (UK) where she teaches lit­er­a­ture and film. She researches intersections of the Gothic, horror and the Spiritual in modern and con­temporary lit­er­a­ture, tracing reinterpretations of religion and theology and their connec­ tions to technology, the social, gender and the body. She has published on Cal­ vinism in horror film and postmodern forms of religion in lit­er­a­t ure. She is currently editing a collection on Horror and Religion for the University of Wales Press’s Horror Studies book series, and completing a monograph, Post-­Secular Gothic: Theology, Spirituality and the Challenge to Disenchantment for Palgrave. Daniele Pio Buenza works as a teacher of Italian lit­er­a­ture for the International Baccalaureate at Impington Village College (Cambridge, UK). ­After having com­ pleted his BA and MA at the Università Gabriele d’Annunzio of Chieti and Pescara (Italy), specialising in En­glish language and lit­er­a­ture, he completed a Ph.D. in Italian Studies at the University of Cambridge. His doctoral thesis focused on the analy­sis of the social and cultural significance of impegno (socio-­political commitment) in the work of the Italian singer-­songwriter Fabrizio De André. For the University of Cambridge, he also lectured on cinema and m ­ usic (in par­tic­u­lar on Federico Fellini) and supervised students on con­temporary Italian language, lit­er­a­ture and cinema. Lidia De Michelis is Professor of En­g lish and Anglophone Lit­er­a­t ures and Cultural Studies at the University of Milan (Italy). She has written on eighteenth-­ century lit­er­a­ture (Defoe, w ­ omen’s writing, po­liti­cal journalism, Anglo-­Italian relationships, transatlantic slavery), on con­temporary and 21st-­century British culture and fiction, and the cultural and discursive politics of Thatcherism and New ­Labour. Her current research focuses on nationhood, citizenship, asylum, 279

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fictional repre­sen­ta­t ions of illegal immigrants, imaginaries of risk, and, most recently, the populist discourse of Brexit and the emergence of Corbynism. Other research interests are postcolonial studies (especially South Africa and Black Britain), with a focus on migration and urban marginalization, and the cultural, discursive and spectacular politics of urban and anti-­austerity riots. Her publi­ cations include the monographs La poesia di Thom Gunn (1978), “More Worlds in Trade to Conquer”: la cosmografia mercantile di Daniel Defoe (1995), L’Isola e il Mondo. Intersezioni culturali nella Gran Bretagna d’oggi (2008), and the edited volumes Il fascino inquieto dell’utopia: Saggi in onore di Marialuisa Bignami (co-­ edited by G. Iannaccaro and A. Vescovi, 2014), and Prisma Sudafrica: la nazione arcobaleno a vent’anni dalla liberazione (1990–2010) (co-­edited by C. Gualtieri, R. Pedretti and I. Vivan, 2012). Recent essays published in Crisis, Risks and New Regionalism in Eu­rope: Emergency Diasporas and Borderlands (edited by Cecile Sandten, Claudia Gualtieri, Eike Kronshage and Roberto Pedretti, 2017), address Anders Lustgarten’s Lampedusa and Gillian Slovo’s The Riots. Claudia Gualtieri teaches Anglophone Lit­er­a­tures and Cultures at the Uni­ versity of Milan (Italy). She started her research ­career on Victorian lit­er­a­ture, British colonial writing of the nineteenth c­ entury, the construction of the “exotic,” repre­sen­ta­tions of Otherness, adventure tales and travel writing. Her current fields of research are postcolonial writing, theory and politics. She is the author of several articles on South-­African and Canadian writers and issues. Among her publications: Repre­sen­ta­tions of West Africa as Exotic in British Colonial Travel Writing (2002), Dalla En­glishness alla Britishness, 1950–2000: Discorsi culturali in trasformazione dal canone imperiale alle storie dell’oggi (co-­ edited by Itala Vivan, 2008), and Prisma Sudafrica: La nazione arcobaleno a vent’anni dalla liberazione (1990–2010) (co-­edited by L. De Michelis, R. Pedretti and I. Vivan, 2012), Utopia in the Pres­ent. Cultural Politics and Change, and Migration and the Con­temporary Mediterranean. Shifting Cultures in Twenty-­ First-­Century Italy and Eu­rope (both 2018). Ruth Heholt is Se­nior Lecturer in En­glish at Falmouth University (UK). She is the co-­editor of three collections: Gothic Britain: Dark Places in the Provinces and Margins of the British Isles (2018) with William Hughes, The Victorian Male Body (2018) with Joanne Ella Parsons, and Haunted Landscapes (2017) with Niamh Downing. She has or­ga­nized several symposia and is the editor of the peer-­reviewed journal, Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Super­ natural. She is currently working on a monograph on the Victorian author Cath­ erine Crowe as well as collections on Gothic animals and the New Urban Gothic. Janet Larson is Associate Professor of En­glish and served as Gradu­ate Direc­ tor at Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey (USA), from 2001–2017. She teaches courses in w ­ omen’s lit­er­a­ture, including V ­ irginia Woolf and Margaret Atwood;

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Victorian lit­er­a­ture and culture; narrative and discourse theory; narrative repre­ sen­ta­tions of war; and Green Lit, a multi-­disciplinary exploration of environ­ mental issues. She is the author of Dickens and the Broken Scripture (1985) and numerous articles on Victorian lit­er­a­ture as well as popu­lar culture subjects. Her current proj­ects include a monograph on Florence Nightingale’s pivotal trip to Egypt, an article about the cultural work of chronotope in the novel, and a book in pro­gress that analyzes biblical-­social discourse in Victorian ­women’s writing across the period. Andrew McInnes is Se­nior Lecturer in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture at Edge Hill Univer­ sity (UK). His research interests include Romantic period w ­ omen’s writing, the geographies of Gothic fiction, and c­ hildren’s lit­er­a­t ure. His first book, Wollstonecraft’s Ghost: The Fate of the Female Phi­los­o­pher in the Romantic Period, was published by Routledge in 2016. Federico Meschini is a Ph.D. student at the University for Foreigners in Peru­ gia (Italy), in cotutelle with École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He is also an asso­ ciate member of the University of Luxembourg Doctoral Training Unity, “Digital History and Hermeneutics.” He teaches Digital Humanities, Electronic Publish­ ing and Digital Storytelling at the Università della Tuscia of Viterbo (Italy) and he has been a visiting scholar at Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois (USA) and Bergen University (Norway). His scholarly articles are focused on knowl­ edge repre­sen­ta­tion, electronic scholarly editions and digital publishing. He is currently a member of the board of the Italian Association for Digital Humani­ ties, and he has been involved in several proj­ects about electronic editions and archives, digital libraries, eLearning and courseware. Claire Nally is a Se­nior Lecturer in Twentieth-­Century En­glish Lit­er­a­ture at Northumbria University, UK, and researches Irish Studies, Neo-­Victorianism, Gender, and Subcultures. She published her first monograph, Envisioning Ireland: W.  B. Yeats’s Occult Nationalism, in 2009, followed by her second book, Selling Ireland: Advertising, Lit­er­a­ture and Irish Print Culture 1891–1922 (written with John Strachan) in 2012. She has co-­edited a volume on Yeats, and two volumes on gender, as well as the library series, “Gender and Popu­lar Culture” for I. B. Tauris (with Angela Smith). She has written widely on subcultures, including goth and steampunk, and her most recent work looks at the development of steampunk in lit­er­a­ture, film, ­music, and fashion. Her monograph on this subject, Steampunk: Gender, Subculture and the Neo-­Victorian, ­will be published by I. B. Tauris in 2018. Enrico Reggiani is a Professor of En­glish Lit­er­a­ture at the Catholic Univer­ sity of the Sacred Heart in Milan (Italy). He has published widely on W. B. Yeats and other Irish writers, on writers of Catholic origin, culture and background (esp. En­glish and Irish from 1789 to 1918) and on interdisciplinary relationships

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between lit­er­a­ture and the economy. He also teaches Musical Languages in His­ torical Perspectives thanks to his competence in the musical and musicological fields. Since 2011, he has been the director of the Studium musicale di Ateneo “Note d’Inchiostro” at the Catholic University. At pres­ent, he is completing the monograph, A Tone-­Deaf Poet in the Land of Song. Musico-­literary Soundscapes in W. B. Yeats, and a post-­conference essay on “ ‘I prefer Shakespeare to Jean Paul.’ Schumann’s Compositional Reception of the Bard.” Gino Roncaglia is Associate Professor at University of Tuscia of Viterbo (Italy), external faculty member at Scuola Nazionale dell’Amministrazione (Italy), and honorary professor at the National University of Villa María (Argentina). He authored a number of scholarly books and papers in the fields of the History of Logic, and in Digital Humanities, including the reference textbook on new media Il mondo digitale (2001) with Fabio Ciotti. He also co-­authored the best-­ selling Italian manual on the use of the Internet, Internet: Manuale per l’uso della rete. His latest books include, La quarta rivoluzione: Sei lezioni sul futuro del libro (2010), and L’età della frammentazione: Cultura del libro e scuola digitale (2018). He is an author and scientific con­sul­tant for RAI Cultura, the cultural divi­ sion of the Italian TV Broadcaster RAI, and has contributed to several TV pro­ grammes on new media since 1996 (including the well-­known educational TV show Medi@mente, and more recently, Digital Worlds). Francesca Saggini is a Professor of En­g lish Lit­er­a­t ure at the University of Tuscia of Viterbo (Italy). She is the author of The Gothic Novel and the Stage: Romantic Appropriations (2015, Honourable mention at the ESSE Book Awards), Backstage in the Novel: Frances Burney and the Theater Arts (2012, Walken Cowen Memorial Prize for an outstanding work in eighteenth-­century studies) and La messinscena dell’identità: Teatro e teatralità nel romanzo inglese del Settecento (2004, “Mario di Nola” Prize awarded by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei). Her main field of research is popu­lar culture, in par­tic­u ­lar adapta­ tions and afterlives. Recent publications include Gothic Frontiers (co-­edited by Glennis Byron, 2012), Housing Fictions: The House in Writing and Culture, 1950 to the Pres­ent (co-­edited by Janet Larson and Anna Enrichetta Soccio, 2012), The House of Fiction as the House of Life: Repre­sen­ta­tions of the House in Lit­er­ a­ture and Culture, Richardson to Woolf (co-­edited by Anna Enrichetta Soccio, 2012). She is the recipient of several international fellowships, including the ASECS-­McGill Burney Fellowship (2015), the Lucy Cavendish College Visiting Research Fellowship (2017), and the IASH Visiting Research Fellowship (2019). Diego Saglia is a Professor of En­g lish Lit­er­a­ture at the University of Parma (Italy). His research focuses on Romantic-­period lit­er­a­ture and culture. In the field of Gothic studies he has worked on Ann Radcliffe, William Beckford, drama and melodrama, and narrative verse. He has produced the first critical edition

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of Robert Southey’s Roderick, the Last of the Goths (2012) and has contributed to Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic (edited by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright, 2014), The Gothic World (edited by Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, 2014) and Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (edited by Angela Wright and Dale Townshend, 2016). His monograph Eu­ro­pean Lit­er­a­tures in Britain, 1815–1832: Romantic Translations is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Anna Enrichetta Soccio is a Professor of En­glish Lit­er­a­ture at the Univer­ sity Gabriele d’Annunzio of Chieti and Pescara (Italy), where she teaches courses on nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century lit­er­a­ture. She is the author of book-­length studies on George Meredith (2001), Philip Larkin (2008), and Charles Dickens (2014). She has also edited a volume on Meredith’s Beauchamp’s ­Career (2008), and co-­edited a number of publications, including Housing Fictions: The House in Writing and Culture, 1959 to the Pres­ent (co-­edited by Janet Larson and Fran­ cesca Saggini, 2012), The House of Fiction as the House of Life: Repre­sen­ta­tion of the House from Richardson to Woolf (co-­edited by Francesca Saggini, 2012), and a special issue of RSV: Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, titled “Edward Lear in the Third Millennium: Explorations into his Art and Writing”, (co-­edited by Raffaella Antinucci, 2012–13). She has also edited an Italian translation of short stories by Elizabeth Gaskell (Racconti, 2017), and has published articles on Philip Larkin, George Meredith, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Nathaniel Haw­ thorne, Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Gaskell, Edward Lear, J. H. Riddell, E. M. For­ ster and Toni Morrison. She sits on the editorial board of the journals RSV: Rivista di Studi Vittoriani and Merope, and is a member of C.U.S.V.E. (University Centre for Victorian and Edwardian Studies) of the University Gabriele d’Annunzio of Chieti and Pescara.