Quote of the Day (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Offering the First Glimpse of Her Monster)

“Last Monday (July 31st) we were nearly surrounded by ice, which closed in the ship on all sides, scarcely leaving her the sea-room in which she floated. Our situation was somewhat dangerous, especially as we were compassed round by a very thick fog. We accordingly lay to, hoping that some change would take place in the atmosphere and weather.

“About two o’clock the mist cleared away, and we beheld, stretched out in every direction, vast and irregular plains of ice, which seemed to have no end. Some of my comrades groaned, and my own mind began to grow watchful with anxious thoughts, when a strange sight suddenly attracted our attention and diverted our solicitude from our own situation. We perceived a low carriage, fixed on a sledge and drawn by dogs, pass on towards the north, at the distance of half a mile; a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature, sat in the sledge and guided the dogs. We watched the rapid progress of the traveller with our telescopes until he was lost among the distant inequalities of the ice.” — English novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851), Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)

A few weeks ago I attended a lecture on Frankenstein that highlighted the opening section of the novel, from which this passage is taken—a set of letters from the explorer Robert Walton to his sister. His epic ambition—to discover the North Pole, in an age when ice and extreme cold posed mortal danger—anticipates that of Victor Frankenstein, a nearly frozen scientist he picks up in these barren arctic wastes.

In the grip of “the dark tyranny of despair,” Frankenstein warns against this quest for the glory accruing to scientific discovery: “You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did; and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been.”

The “shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature” is the rejected creation who has brought Frankenstein untold misery. The glimpse that Walton’s crew has of him here is elusive, to be filled in by the extended account that Frankenstein is about to offer the explorer.

Walton’s “frame story” (or, to use a term from one of my college English classes some years ago about Henry James’ “Turn of the Screw,” an “envelope story”) was not included in the classic 1931 adaptation of the novel starring Boris Karloff as the monster. Despite its many faults, the 1994 remake (from which the accompanying image was taken), starring Robert DeNiro as the Creature and Kenneth Branagh as Victor, did include this narrative device.

It will be interesting to see if Guillermo del Toro’s version (in limited release next week) will do likewise. I hope so, because it reinforces a lesson relevant to our time: that heedless pursuit of scientific knowledge might produce unexpected and unwelcome consequences.

Quote of the Day (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, on ‘A Steady Purpose’)

“Nothing contributes so much to tranquillize the mind as a steady purpose—a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.”— English novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851), Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818)

Quote of the Day (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, on How Invention Occurs)

“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out 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. In all matters of discovery and invention, even of those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of Columbus and his egg. Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it.”—English novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851), Introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein

The wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley—and creator of the paradigmatic sci-fi/horror novel Frankenstein—was born 225 years ago today.

While staying at a villa by Lake Geneva in Switzerland with her husband, the teenage Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley engaged in a contest with him and his friends (including Lord Byron) for the best ghost story by relating her tale of a scientist and the creature he made in a lab. Obviously, posterity regards her as the winner of the contest.

But the “materials …[to] be afforded” to create her novel did not come from a “void,” but from her own intellectual research into what was happening in the world of science, including Sir Humphrey Davy’s experiments with electricity, according to this article from Mental Floss Magazine.

For a fascinating discussion of the circumstances behind this dramatic creation, I urge you to read Australian artist-writer Kirsten Mills’ blog post from four years ago.

This Day in Film History (‘Frankenstein’ Scares Up Great Box Office)

Dec. 4, 1931—Universal Studios consolidated its growing fame as a creator and marketer of a new film genre with Frankenstein. Though its grand opening had taken place in Santa Barbara, Calif., in late November, its New York premiere on this date presaged an enthusiastic embrace of its hideous monster by a public living through a different kind of horror: the Great Depression. More than 76,000 watched the show at the Mayfair Theatre that first week before it opened to wider release.

Most interesting to the studio, of course, was the film’s profit margin. Universal couldn’t compete with major studios such as MGM in lavish spectacle, but it hoped to keep going with movies produced cheaply but distinctively. Frankenstein represented the triumph of that strategy: made for only $250,000, the film returned $12 million upon its release.

Frankenstein took even more liberties with its source material than the Universal release that opened up the talking-picture horror film in earnest earlier that year, Dracula. Unlike the monster in the 1818 novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the unloved creature onscreen compounded his ugliness with a pathetic inability to communicate, a virtually nonstop series of grunts and growls.

That vision of the character did not please the actor who had just achieved a career-making triumph with Dracula and who now stood to play another fearsome creature: Bela Lugosi. The former European matinee idol appeared in a 20-minute test reel for the part while still on the set of Dracula, but he was not happy about playing a non-talking role, complaining that he did not come to America to “play a scarecrow.” 

He much preferred the real Frankenstein—not the product of reanimated life, but the obsessed (and verbose) scientist who created him. It didn’t help that his proposed makeup design for the monster was rejected by Universal.

Universal, then, decided to look elsewhere for an actor to play the monster. It didn’t have to look far—a 44-year-old Briton spotted in the studio commissary by director James Whale, and offered a screen test on the spot. 

The actor, Boris Karloff, already in Hollywood for a decade, with roughly 80 films to his credit, still hadn’t made his mark with the wider public, so he jumped at the role. It only made his career, so much so that he called his character “My Dear Friend.”

That’s not to say, though, that it was easy to play. To start with, there were heavy boots (13 pounds each) he had to clomp around in, attached to steel struts that gave the movie monster his distinct lurch (as opposed to Shelley’s creature, whose frightening speed allows him to effortlessly elude captors). His dark, poorly-fitting suit was a nightmare to wear in the August heat. 

And Whale demanded take after take of Karloff lugging Colin Clive’s Dr. Henry Frankenstein up the hill toward the windmill for the movie’s climax, leaving Karloff with back problems so severe for the rest of his life that he would require three major operations.

Above all, there was all that make-up—3½ hours to put on, an equivalent time to take off.  The makeup Lugosi wanted for the role—a mass of dark hair, clay-like skin—would have been simpler to endure by comparison. 

Most of what is seen onscreen—the template for the popular image for the monster since then—came from Jack P. Pierce, the Universal makeup whiz who later came up with similarly indelible designs for the title characters in The Mummy and The Wolf Man. Even before working on Karloff, Pierce researched anatomy, surgery, medicine, criminal history, criminology, burial customs and electrodynamics. 

From that point on, he used grayish-green greasepaint on the skin, contrasting with the gray tones of the normal characters; electrodes protruding from the neck; and for the forehead, cotton and collodion (a foul-smelling liquid plastic). (See this post from nine years ago from the blog "Frankensteinia" on the marvels this makeup magician came up with.)

While often insistent on getting his way, Pierce accepted two suggestions by Karloff. First, the actor took out his dental bridge, giving one cheek a sunken look; second, upon Karloff’s remark that wide-open eyes created a stronger (erroneous) suggestion of human life, Pierce crafted droopy eyelids to underscore the impression of reanimated flesh. 

The second innovation made all the more remarkable Karloff’s performance, as he had to suggest the monster’s alternating pathos and malevolence without wide-open eyes that could express his feelings.

But the movie’s impact may have owed as much to its scenic and sound design as its extraordinary makeup. Frankenstein could only have been made several years into the talkie era, when Hollywood not only had enough time to absorb the style of German Expressionist films but also to experiment with sound.

The shadows and unusual angularity characteristic of directors Robert Wiene (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) and F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu) figure prominently in Frankenstein’s graveyard and castle scenes—environments that became commonplace in later horror cinema. These scenes also form a huge part of the movie's vertical orientation, climaxed by the monster reaching for the sun.

To heighten the ghoulish proceedings, a microphone in the coffin amplified the sound of the grave dirt hitting the lid; the “Castle Thunder” sound effect was used here for the first time; and the reanimated monster was introduced in full earnest to the audience when they could hear his heavy footsteps but not see his body.

This Day in Literary History (Shelley Elopes With 2nd Teenage Bride)

July 28, 1814—At 5 in the morning, a chaise whisked Percy Bysshe Shelley and the daughter of his hero William Godwin off to France. The elopement with 16-year-old Mary Godwin—better known today as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein—was the poet’s second in four years with a teenager—and solidified his reputation for flouting contemporary mores.

Much of the life and loves of the poet who desired to be one of the “unacknowledged legislators of the world” could be said to be a forerunner of the lifestyle of late-20th century pop/rock stars, in rather startling ways.

In the latter period, the objects of young girls’ affections were, more often than not, rock ‘n’ roll singers; in the 19th century, these sensitive bad boys tended to be Romantic poets, like Shelley and good friend, Lord Byron. In both cases, I suspect, there was an underlying motive that the woman wanted from her partner: write about me, the way Bob Dylan did about Joan Baez (“Visions of Johanna”) or Paul McCartney did about wife Linda (“The Lovely Linda,” of course).

On the versifiers’ end, motives might have been even less pure. A heart that loved only one object would build “a sepulchre for its eternity,” Shelley warned in “Episychidion.” Here’s how Stephen Stills translated that sentiment into current parlance: “Love The One You’re With.”

Percy and Mary had known each other for a year and a half, but the relationship had only became intense in the last two months. By early June, Percy was dining with Godwin and his enchanting daughter daily. By the end of the month, Percy and Mary had become lovers, even consummating their relationship by the graveside of Mary’s mother, early feminist theorist Mary Wollstonecroft.

Now the story begins to sound, for awhile, like something out of Romeo and Juliet, or Anna Karenina. You’d think that Mr. Godwin would be a bit reluctant in lashing out against a young poet who was financially supporting him. But the philosopher was old-fashioned in ways that Shelley hadn’t appreciated. And so, he banned Shelley from his home.

In intellectual candle-power, class, pedigree, and—we can’t forget—looks, poor Harriet Westbrook Shelley couldn’t compete with her not-much-younger rival. Harriet might have agreed with the sentiment voiced more than a century and a half later by folksinger Dory Previn, who found husband Andre Previn bewitched by good friend Mia Farrow: “Beware of Young Girls.”

Nevertheless, the life Percy built for himself and Mary in the next several years began to resemble the one he had with Harriet:

* Irish sojourn: Over the years, singer Marianne Faithfull—wanting a break from the madness of London, and, I recall once, saying she wanted to be among people forgiving of her past ways—has spent time in Ireland, even celebrating it in one of her songs, as “This land I go to when I’m tired/And need to see and walk in green.” In 1812, Percy and Harriet went to the Emerald Isle to campaign for social reform. He returned a few years later, this time with Mary, to lecture on the same subject. Then—as happened much later—the governmental authorities didn’t approve.

* Menage a trois—In the 1960s, David Crosby’s song “Triad,” with its bold call for expanded intimate relationships—“I don't really see, why can't we go on as three”—was controversial enough to ensure his departure from The Byrds. More than 150 years before, I think you can just imagine how Shelley’s similar feelings went over. In August 1811, he had invited friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg—like himself, expelled from Oxford earlier in the year for writing a tract called The Necessities of Atheism—to share their household. Harriet wasn’t keen on the idea. After the poet ran off to the continent with Mary, he took along her “chaperone” and half-sister, Jane Clairmont (who over the next five years, in a series of head-spinning personal changes, renamed herself Clara, then Clare, then Claire). He invited Harriet along, too—but she, in despair over the breakup and raising her two children by Shelley alone, committed suicide. Then, in early 1815, Hogg made another guest appearance in the Shelley household. His old friend, wanting to be hospitable, urged Mary to be a bit more friendly when Hogg came onto her. Mary, like Harriet, was not keen on the idea. Hmm...why not?

* Social ostracism—Shelley’s political radicalism, atheism and free-love principles made him persona non grata in England. He and Mary moved to Italy, where the restless couple spent their longest period of time. One night, while vacationing at Lake Geneva, the couple’s circle of friends—including Byron—sat up, at the latter’s suggestion, telling ghost stories. Mary’s became the basis for Frankenstein. A doctor present, John Polidori, used his famous patient, Byron, as the basis for a character who later became the prototype for Dracula, the “Twilight” series, and countless other vampires too ghoulish to count.

Eight years after running away, Shelley died in a drowning accident. His personal life was a mess, but what we remember him for—and what drew his two wives and friends to him in the first place—were his verses, much beloved by my writing hero, F. Scott Fitzgerald. He might have lived a rock-and-rock lifestyle before its time, but his best work remains fresh, original and powerful and will undoubtedly last longer than even the overwhelming majority of the greatest songs of the rock era.

Happy 250th Birthday to a Women’s Rights Pioneer

“I love my man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man.”-- Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

For many people today, the name Mary Wollstonecraft is short for Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who, in Frankenstein, created what might be the first great horror story.

Mary Shelley made a lasting contribution to modern thought with her critique of the unintended consequences of science. 

But her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (who died in 1797 from consequences of giving birth to her daughter) just as admonitory: the price paid by both sexes for what John Stuart Mill, in his own powerful critique of the same phenomenon during the Victorian Era, called The Subjection of Women.

Like the American feminist pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Wollstonecraft (whose 250th birthday occurs today) possessed a relentlessly logical critical intelligence and an incisive writing style that not only swept all before it but also still practically cries out for quotation. But, besides the quote above, over the years I’ve encountered more than one woman who’s echoed another thought of the great Anglo-Irish female radical philosopher:

“It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows, into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion, that they were created rather to feel than reason, and that all the power they obtain, must be obtained by their charms and weakness.”