Word: frankenstein
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ENDURANCE OF "FRANKENSTEIN" Edited by George Levineand U.C. Knoepflmacher; University of California; 341 pages...
...imaginary monsters that have lurched forth in the past two centuries, none has frightened more people more often than the one sparked into life by the idealistic scientist Victor Frankenstein. Dracula retains his bite, to be sure, and has flapped into current vogue on stage and screen. But the overtones of the thirsty count's exploits are chiefly sexual, leading to titillation rather than thought. That is not true of Frankenstein's man-made man-monster. He troubles the mind because he is a projection of the mind, a soaring ambition shockingly embodied in flesh. Mary Shelley...
Such speculation may seem lugubrious to those who know the monster only through Boris Karloff 's film impersonations or through such burlesques as the TV sitcom The Munsters and Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein. As this collection of twelve essays suggests, though, Mary Shelley's novel is a surprisingly open-ended source of disturbing, even terrifying implications. Its awkwardness and philo sophical uncertainties mark Frankenstein as the first and most powerful modern myth, not a pure Jungian river flowing through the collective unconscious but a polluted industrial spillway...
...impressionable Mary found a dreamer like her father, but several times larger than life. She absorbed much of his apocalyptic optimism and encyclopedic learning. She also took time to ponder the casualties that Shelley's blithe spirit left in its wake. In the year before she began Frankenstein, she bore Shelley a daughter who lived less than two weeks. She confided a heartbreaking vision to her journal: "Dream that my little baby came to life again, that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby...
...motherless child grew up to become, at first, the childless mother. What Mary knew of idealism and birth was darkened by what she had learned, painfully and young, of despair and death. In the clearest, most succinct essay in The Endurance of "Frankenstein, " Critic Ellen Moers points out that Mary was one of the few women authors until recent times who wrote and published successfully during the same years that they were having babies. Mary's pregnancies, Moers notes, "record a horror story of maternity of the kind that literary biography does not provide again until Sylvia Plath...