Frankenstein at 200
A wood engraving by Barry Moser accompanying a 1983 edition of ‘Frankenstein.’ © Pennyroyal Press, courtesy of the Morgan Library
The monster tramples all over the supposed line between high culture and pop culture.
Whether the Frankenstein monster can or cannot be killed is still debated among movie fans, raising the possibility that it will live forever. But one thing is certain: As of 2018, the creature has reached the ripe old age of 200 and shows no signs of going away soon. Mary Shelley’s original novel was published on January 1, 1818. Accordingly, the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein is currently being celebrated around the world. The crown jewel of these celebrations is the exhibition It’s Alive: ‘Frankenstein’ at 200 at New York’s Morgan Library, which runs through January 27, 2019. Without setting out to be, the exhibition is a kind of tribute to the entertainment world and can teach us a valuable lesson about culture—the way that high art grows out of and can in turn influence commercial culture, even the mass media.
Pages from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s manuscript of ‘Frankenstein.’ Bodleian Libraries, Oxford / via the Morgan Library
This is probably the most comprehensive exhibition about Frankenstein ever mounted, running the gamut from a copy of the 1818 first edition to the gruesome model for Robert De Niro’s makeup as the monster in Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 film version of the story. The exhibition is beautifully curated and genuinely thought-provoking. It has a grand narrative sweep, telling the story of the novel’s creation and chronicling its theatrical reincarnations, together with its spread to other popular forms of entertainment. One has to marvel at the way a novel written by a then-unknown teenager went on to conquer the world and achieve a protracted afterlife on stage, screen, and television.
Mary Shelley created one of the great myths of modern culture. Her book has never gone out of print and is still widely read. It continues to spark discussion of a wide range of serious issues, from the nature of life to the relation of the individual to society. Although Frankenstein inevitably loses much of its profundity in its pop-culture avatars, something of Shelley’s genius manages to survive even in comic versions of her story, such as Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974). In whatever form, the tale of a hapless yet threatening creature summoned into existence by the power of science challenges us to reflect on human nature and its limits.
The Morgan exhibition begins by setting Frankenstein in its historical and cultural context. With a well-chosen set of paintings and book illustrations from the late 18th century, the Morgan evokes the world of graveyards, ghosts, and goblins of the Gothic novel, the kinds of tales of terror that Shelley was reading when she wrote Frankenstein and that she set out to emulate. The highlight of this section (perhaps of the whole exhibition) is the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare, the archetypal Gothic painting.
Henry Fuseli, ‘The Nightmare,’ (1781). Bridgeman Images via Morgan Library
The second section places Frankenstein in the context of the Enlightenment and late 18th- and early 19th-century science. It offers a daunting array of scientific instruments from the period, including surgical kits and batteries, focusing on the grim practice of dissection and early attempts to use electricity to revive dead animals and even human corpses. But for me, the real thrill of this section is the rare opportunity to see William Blake’s The Ancient of Days, drawn from the Morgan Library’s own collection. This watercolor—the frontispiece of the poet’s Europe—is too delicate to put on display often, but the Morgan has risked the exposure because Blake’s portrait of a creator God working mathematically with a pair of compasses captures perfectly the scientific spirit of the Enlightenment.
The Ancient of Days,’ William Blake’s frontispiece to his ‘Europe: a Prophecy’ (1794).Photo by Janny Chiu / via the Morgan Library
The rest of the first half of the exhibition is devoted to the biographical background of Frankenstein, telling the story of the remarkable set of people who contributed to the book’s genesis. That means first and foremost Mary Shelley herself, but also her parents—the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the anarchist political philosopher William Godwin—as well as her husband, the Romantic poet Percy Shelley, and his friend and poetic rival, Lord Byron—together with several other fascinating figures. As knowledgeable as I am supposed to be in this area—I teach Romantic poetry—I was surprised to learn that, early in his career, Blake had illustrated two of Mary Wollstonecraft’s books. The literary-cultural circle in England in those days really was a small world—and the young Mary Shelley was at the center of it.
This section also features poetic juvenilia from Mary and Percy, landscape scenes from the Swiss environment that gave birth to Frankenstein, and a handwritten copy of Byron’s visionary apocalyptic poem, “Darkness,” the other great literary product of the disastrous weather of the summer of 1816. This part of the exhibition concludes by documenting the publishing history of Frankenstein, allowing us to see both Mary’s and Percy’s revisions to the original manuscript, as well as some of the changes made in the substantially revised edition of the book in 1831.
Poster for ‘Presumption!’ (1823) Photo by Janny Chiu / Courtesy the Morgan Library
The second half of It’s Alive deals with the journey of the Frankenstein story through popular culture down almost to the present day. The Morgan offers a rich sampling of theatrical representations, drawing upon playbills, contemporary illustrations, and promotional material to re-create the 19th-century reception of Frankenstein on the English and then the French stage. Most people will be surprised to learn that as early as 1823, a version of Frankenstein was playing on the English stage, retitled Presumption! or, the Fate of Frankenstein. Written by Richard Brinsley Peake, this play reduces Shelley’s complex and morally ambiguous novel to a simple moralistic tale of “the fatal consequences of that presumption which attempts to penetrate, beyond prescribed depths, into the mysteries of nature.”
Presumption! also reveals what happens when anyone tries to popularize a serious novel in another medium. Seeking to appeal to a wider audience, Presumption!, like a modern superhero movie, relies on what are today called special effects, resulting in the theatrical equivalent of an arms race. Within a year, Presumption! had been revised and the 1824 playbill promises prospective viewers the “mysterious and terrific appearance of the Demon from the Laboratory of Frankenstein. Destruction of a Cottage by Fire. And the Fall of an Avalanche.”
Even this level of spectacle was evidently not enough, because by 1826, the Presumption! playbill was now advertising: “With an entirely new last scene, A Schooner in a Violent Storm! In which Frankenstein and The Monster are destroyed.” Even though the playbill tries to reassure audiences that all this was being done “conformably to the termination of the original story,” we can see the logic of contemporary popular culture at work all the way back in the 19th-century London theater. To keep filling the seats, would-be blockbusters have to continually up the ante in terms of special effects.
Incidentally—and to its eternal credit— Presumption! introduced a character named Fritz into the story as the comic servant of Frankenstein, thus initiating a long line of more or less demented companions to the doctor, culminating in the Ygor/Igor figure, played so brilliantly by Bela Lugosi in Son of Frankenstein (1939) and Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein. Most people assume that Fritz/Igor was already present in Shelley’s novel, but he was not. This shows that the creators of the Frankenstein films did not always go back directly to the original novel as the source of their inspiration. Rather, the modern development of the story was mediated by a long theatrical tradition in 19th-century Europe. This section ends with an 1887 production called Frankenstein; or, The Vampire’s Victim, another example of how mass entertainment builds its audience. Universal Pictures was not the first to pump up box office revenue by uniting one popular monster with another.
When the Morgan exhibition gets to Frankenstein in film, it has an embarrassment of riches to present and does a good job of organizing this wealth of material into a coherent narrative. Again, it is surprising to learn how early Frankenstein came to the new medium of film. As early as 1910, Thomas Edison’s studio produced a film called Frankenstein. The exhibition includes a clip from this film, which has only a tangential link to Shelley’s novel. But at least it introduces a new level of special effects—still primitive by today’s standards, but they no doubt horrified audiences at the time.
Of course, the Morgan covers the classic Frankenstein films produced by Universal, concentrating on the original Frankenstein film (1931) and the best of the sequels, The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). These films are presented in terms of stills, posters, clips, and no less than Elsa Lanchester’s fright wig as the eponymous bride. The exhibition moves quickly through the later history of Frankenstein in film, as the story degenerated into strange hybrid forms to appeal to new audiences: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1958), and a Japanese knockoff, Frankenstein Conquers the World (1966), which introduces nuclear weapons into the story and ends with the monster facing off against a Godzilla lookalike. The exhibition concludes with a brief survey of how the Frankenstein story has migrated to other graphic media, including cartoons, comic books, and book illustrations (from some masters in the field, such as Lynd Ward and Barry Moser).
Poster for ‘Presumption!’ (1823) Photo by Janny Chiu / Courtesy the Morgan Library
I t’s Alive manages to be at once enjoyable and educational, as any good exhibition should be. Going through it is like rummaging through the attic of a weird uncle who is part art collector, part mad scientist, and part movie buff. In its total effect, It’s Alive can teach us an important lesson about the unexpectedly complex ways that culture operates. Most people tend to divide culture neatly into the high and the low. There are serious works of art that alone should be studied and can be appreciated only by an elite, well-educated audience. Then there are the works of popular culture, created for the ignorant masses and unworthy of being taken seriously. This understanding reflects an elitist contempt for commercial culture. High culture should exist in splendid isolation, cut off from the corrupting effects of low culture and market forces. In this view, there is only one direction to cultural development: DOWN. If high and low culture interact, it can only be a case of a serious work of art being vulgarized as it is popularized.
The cultural history of Frankenstein seems at first to illustrate perfectly this conception of cultural development. Shelley’s novel is a very serious work of art, analyzed endlessly by literary scholars. But when the commercial media got their hands on it, it was immediately reduced to a mass entertainment spectacle, with all its psychological depth gutted. Eventually the story descended to the level of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
It’s Alive complicates this simplistic narrative. First and foremost, the exhibition reminds us that, for all its literary sophistication, Frankenstein began squarely in the realm of popular culture. It was published in 1818 in the then standard three-volume format for novels, targeted for the mass reading public. Contrary to many accounts, Frankenstein was not at first a bestseller (the initial print run was only 500 copies), but still, just by being in novel form, the book was in the realm of the lowbrow. In the early 19th century, despite the earlier achievements of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and Austen, the novel was still looked down upon as a low and vulgar form, fit only for mass consumption. At the time, an author aspiring to be taken seriously would have written a poem, not a novel. Indeed, as strange as it may sound today, in 1818, an author ambitious for fame would be setting his or her sights on writing an epic poem as the true peak of literary achievement (as clearly was the case with all the Romantic poets, including Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy Shelley, and Keats). In 1818, no one could have imagined that Frankenstein would someday be one of the most frequently assigned books on college campuses or that revered academic institutions, such as the Bodleian Library at Oxford, would collect manuscripts, page proofs, different editions, and other memorabilia associated with Shelley’s novel as if they were sacred relics.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that Frankenstein is a simple product of popular culture and should not be taken seriously as a work of art. I was a pioneer in assigning Frankenstein in my courses back in the early 1970s, and my book Creature and Creator: Myth-making and English Romanticism (1984) was, I believe, the first to make Frankenstein central to the understanding of the whole Romantic period. I discuss the book as a gnostic rewriting of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), drawing upon Rousseau’s philosophical anthropology in his Discourse on Inequality (1754), and developing a proleptic critique of Shelley’s husband’s Romantic idealism in his Prometheus Unbound (1819). In short, I take Frankenstein very seriously indeed and show that the book has philosophical roots and philosophical depth.
I am not trying to lower our opinion of Frankenstein but to raise our opinion of popular culture. Or rather, I want to question the simplistic distinction between high culture and low. Just because a work grows out of or is in some way related to the commercial world does not mean that it is inferior in artistic quality. The great example of this truth is William Shakespeare. He was the most popular playwright in the commercial theater of his day, but of course he was at the same time the greatest dramatic artist.
It’s Alive shows that Frankenstein grew out of the popular culture of its day by chronicling its roots in the Gothic tradition. Without a potboiler, semi-pornographic novel like Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), there would be no Frankenstein. One might argue that Frankenstein succeeds as a work of art despite its roots in the Gothic. But in fact Shelley derived something positive from the Gothic tradition. These novels often have surprisingly sophisticated narrative structures, including frame tales and tales-within-tales. And so does Frankenstein. At its center, we are dealing with Robert Walton’s narration of Victor Frankenstein’s narration of the creature’s narration of a story told by the De Laceys. Shelley did learn something from her Gothic predecessors. Much of the complex effect of Frankenstein can be traced to the fact that the story is told from a variety of different perspectives. Sometimes popular authors may pioneer artistic techniques that more serious authors later put to better use. Authors are not necessarily at their best only when they work in isolation from popular culture.
This process works both ways, creating powerful cross-currents between so-called high culture and so-called low, thereby giving culture its genuine complexity. As It’s Alive makes clear, Shelley’s novel inspired a long tradition of Frankenstein stories in popular culture. Most of these works do not achieve the level of serious art, but we should not dismiss all of them as mere entertainment. The horrific material of the Frankenstein story, and the need to shock audiences, forced those trying to adapt the legend to popular media to be creative. Filming Frankenstein required all sorts of cinematic innovations.
In fact, film historians have come to appreciate the important role that some of the Frankenstein movies played in the development of cinematic art. The Universal horror movies of the 1930s were not taken seriously in their day, but we can now recognize in retrospect that their cinematic style marked an advance beyond the static camera techniques of the early talkies. Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein are now frequently credited with introducing the techniques of German Expressionist cinema to Hollywood. In their use of weird camera angles and of light and shadow, they hark back to the work of such great German directors as F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang (films like the former’s 1922 Nosferatu and the latter’s 1927 Metropolis).
In fact, for all their popular status, the Universal horror movies were among the most visually sophisticated films made in Hollywood in the 1930s. The best of these films, The Black Cat (1934), was directed by Edgar Ulmer, who had worked with Murnau back in Germany in the 1920s. The distinctive visual look of the Universal horror movies went on to influence the film noir movies of the 1940s, now regarded as genuine examples of cinematic art. And one of the greatest of movie masterpieces, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, ultimately grows out of visual techniques pioneered in films like Frankenstein. In short, the interaction between high and low art is not unidirectional, but can flow up as well as down—and then reverse directions. Culture is a very complicated business.
That is the lesson I learned from It’s Alive. It seems at first to be a crazy hodgepodge: a great painting by Fuseli here, a Marvel comic book there, one of Blake’s finest watercolors here, Robert De Niro’s makeup there, a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost here, a playbill for The Vampire’s Victim there, Byron’s great poem “Darkness” here, a Charles Addams cartoon there. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to what the Morgan has displayed. But that incoherence is actually a profound image of what a living culture looks like. Culture is not neatly divided into different and unrelated media or separated into spheres of high and low, hermetically sealed off from one another. Rather, in a real culture (and not an academic abstract mapping of it), the high and the low interpenetrate, giving life to each other, and the various media interact in complex patterns.
Accordingly, one may find great art in the oddest of places, even in the ghoulish story of a misshapen creature turned loose upon the world. High art can grow out of elements of popular culture, and can in turn inspire popular culture to new forms of creativity. Culture is chaotic. It results in artistic order, but not always in an orderly fashion. And that makes culture fundamentally unpredictable. What seems to be high may turn out to be grounded in the low, and the low may sometimes amaze us by ascending to the high. That is why nobody in 1818 had any inkling that Mary Shelley’s new novel would have such a long and distinguished cultural history, one that the Morgan Library could celebrate 200 years later. And if the Frankenstein story does live forever, it no doubt has many more surprises in store for us. Long live the Creature! And long live the commercial culture that has kept it alive all these years!
