Word: frankenstein
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Frankenstein is not simply a woman's revenge. It is not, in fact, simply any one thing. Beneath its rhetorical, overwritten surface, the novel moves as fitfully as a dream, allowing as many interpretations as there are willing interpreters. The classic Karloff films take only part of the story and twist that as well...
...monster is quick on his feet and can speak like a Romantic poet on an off night: "I will glut the maw of death until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends." Similarly, most popular dramatizations of the novel have singled out the Faustian side of Frankenstein's quest: the monster is his punishment for seeking too much power...
Mary's version is less moralistic and straightforward. Frankenstein may err in creating the monster, but he commits a far greater wrong in repudiating the creature once he brings it to life. The catastrophic failing is not too much ambition but too little compassion...
Even so, those who feel that twelve scholarly essays on Frankenstein are eleven too many may be half right. A fascinating subject is nearly buried in sepulchral dithering. True, the essayists are earnest and erudite, and their prose is rarely worse than that required to win the fellowships and respect of academe. But the capital offenses are all here: the preening citations of the obvious: "In the film The Bride of Frankenstein, as Albert LaValley reminds us, Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary Shelley and the monstrous bride . . ."; the fancy notion among professors that authors and characters " articulate" rather than speak...
Most of us first became acquainted with Frankenstein and his terrifying creation not through the pages of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel but through our childhood Saturday afternoons at the movies . . . By the time we read the novel the images from various films are so firmly imprinted on our minds that it is almost impossible not to filter the events and images of the book through the more familiar ones of the films. We are apt to distort the novel to fit a familiar mold, miss what is fresh or unfamiliar...