The New Annotated Frankenstein

504 Pages·2017·144.5 MB·English

by  Mary Shelley

Behold: I live and will continue to live …
— , Valperga
MARY SHELLEY
CONTENTS
Introduction: Mary Shelley, or the Modern Galatea by Guillermo del Toro
Foreword
A Note on the Text
FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS
Afterword: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Genetic Engineering by Anne K.
Mellor
Appendix 1: Author’s Introduction [to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein]
Appendix 2: A Chronology of the Events of Frankenstein
Appendix 3: On “Frankenstein.” By the late Percy Bysshe Shelley
Appendix 4: Frankenstein on the Stage and the Screen
Appendix 5: Frankenstein in Academia
Appendix 6: Frankenstein in Popular Culture
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
Mary Shelley, or the Modern Galatea
BY GUILLERMO DEL TORO
A
LL ART IS self-portraiture.
All storytelling is autobiography.
The true North of life is death.
These are some of the truths evidenced by the work of a teenager, writing a
piece of fantastic fiction two hundred years ago. A beautiful tale of loss and pain
that, by being fantastic, allowed her to reveal her true self.
I have, perhaps, little to add to the scholarly and thorough annotations to be
found in this splendid volume Mr. Klinger has assembled. In the volume you
have in your hands you will find in equal measure erudition and passion. This
may very well be the best presentation of Mary Shelley’s book, or at least a
touchstone to be consulted time and again.
Knowing this, the only thing I can offer is myself. I can give back some
personal observations—love, and a little bit of autobiography—in talking about
a book, a character, and a writer who entirely transformed my life.
The monumental achievement of Mary Shelley grows considerably in our
eyes the more we know about the context in which the book was created.
Like all great movements, Romanticism was birthed out of rage and need: the
need to assert upon the world a new way of looking at things, a way to fight the
overbearing certainty of science, to understand the unholy uniformity of
mechanization and the need to rescue the numinous, the emotional, above all
things. To quote Lord Byron: “The great object of life is sensation—to feel that
we exist—even though in pain.”
The irony of it all is that Romanticism was considered iconoclastic and
rebellious and that, being a movement firmly gazing at the past, it became
thoroughly modern.
It was punk rock to the establishment, to academia and the puritan mores of
the time because it sought its roots in the provoking intersection of love and
death in the poetic balance between loss and passion, damnation and desire.
Romanticism was an exuberant, young movement and it pursued the
crossroads of all dichotomies as a source of true art. In ghosts, monsters, and
mystery—all essential elements of our past—it found a way to fight against the
stodgy narratives and values that dominated socially sanctioned art. It severed
any ties with reason and with a rebellious scream gave birth to a world of gods
and monsters.
Music, painting, and literature are steeped in outrageous passion and abandon.
Graveyard poetry ruminates darkly over death and decay but differentiates itself
from the memento mori by finding melancholy and desire in them, perhaps
because we innately understand that our permanent state is “not being” and that
our ignited state—life—is only transitory and precious. The call of the abyss is
the call of Mother Darkness, eternally casting Her shadow over our brief
scintillation.
The true North of life is death.
Mary W. Shelley was born in a world of men. Some pernicious and some
benign, but all of them firmly in control. In the very best of circumstances, a
woman could stumble upon a Pygmalionesque figure that bestowed his benign
prejudice upon her and attempted to sculpt her into being.
Shelley was, however, a precious rarity. Being the daughter of an enlightened
household and being painfully familiar with true loss, she was shaped by
absence as much as she was by knowledge, and, in her solitude, she found her
spirit—a spirit that saw no immediate benefit in the raging wound left in her
heart by the loss of mother, child, and sibling and the insurmountable distance
she felt from her father.
Then, as now, the game was socially and existentially rigged by men: a game
of chutes and ladders that was all chutes for her and all ladders for men.
Miraculously for us, Mary harnessed her gut-wrenching loneliness and
oppression and conjured a book that was destined to outlive and outshine those
of most of her male counterparts. This modern Galatea sang louder and clearer
and demanded to be let loose from all the modeling hands that surrounded her.
Her questions, like Milton’s, became universal, ontological questions. The
exquisite Via Crucis she crafted for her creature speaks to all outsiders, and will
continue to do so for centuries to come.
For if Hell is others, then the creature experiences it like no other protagonist
before him or since. And when he recognizes his true plea and the unforgiving
circumstances of his existence, he quests to kill his God, to seek his God and
curse him, for in lieu of love he chooses the one emotion he can dispense at will:
hatred. But like all art, the final element in this composition is paradox: when
you silence your God, when you free yourself of him and realize he was himself
a lonely man—simply a man—then you finally find yourself entirely,
inescapably alone.
The virtue of this masterwork resides in the fact that it operates purely at
various levels. First, it works perfectly as an engrossing yarn by utilizing a
shifting narrative: a letter, a testimony, and a plea from three men in a quest for
meaning—the captain, the scientist, and the creature. Its plotting and flow are
utterly engrossing, and the reader’s emotional alliance is usurped time and again
by the unforgiving circumstances of all.
At another level, the work is a perfect parable, albeit one that seeks to
dispense a most unforgiving truth. Parable is classically used to enlighten the
mind, to shine light upon knowledge, but Shelley uses it to gauge the depth of
our cosmic despair: the essential loneliness of our existence. Unlike Milton, she
doesn’t bemoan the loss of a paradise but rather reveals to us that there never
was one. In embracing these unforgiving truths and not finding solace in any
institutional comforts offered by church, by state, or by faith, Shelley concocts a
most contemporary, modern parable that is impossible to outgrow and almost
impossible to capture fully in any other medium.
In the popular imagination, and perhaps justly so, the creature and his creator
have now fused into a single figure and share a single name. And now
“Frankenstein” stands alongside that rarest of breeds—the literary figure that
transcends its source. These figures are used colloquially to represent a concept,
or many, and become an idiom. Dracula, Tarzan, Holmes, Watson—each of
them has now been worshipped in as many mediums as we can consume—
illustrated books, comics, film, television, radio, plays, figurines, statues, toys,
street names, municipalities—and can be used in our vernacular: “He is a regular
__________ ,” we say, and are understood even by those who have only the
vaguest notions of the literary source.
If we think of the creature as a shambling assembly of body parts (human and
animal alike), and we consider his painful quest into enlightenment, we will
come to an interesting question: “Where is the seat of the soul?” or rather
“Where did that spark come from?”
Was it lodged in a thorax? The heart? An unmatched forearm? Or was the
assembly of these parts an invocation of the ethereal planes—an edifice claiming
to be inhabited?
The same can be said about the many parts that animate the novel, for, yes,
the woes of the creatures are, somewhat obliquely, an autobiography of Shelley.
But then again she speaks not only of her own emotional/spiritual journey and
travails—she also serves us a travelogue of sorts, through regions that she
became familiar with, and a catalog of notions, both scientific and philosophical,
that intrigued her the most. These modern concerns, the uneasy truce between
science and religion, machine and man, permeate the work. The soul of the
book, then, I believe, resides in the unlikely combination of all these elements
that, for the first time in human history, seek to reclaim our awe through a basis
in fact and not through atavism and totem. For many, the book births a new
genre: science fiction. This can be debated in favor of or against, because to
classify is to confine, and like all great works, Frankenstein should be
unshackled from a single shelf and find its life source as a philosophical
meditation, a spiritual tale, a horror story, and a dire warning to science and its
limits.
The flame of Shelley’s intelligence burned brighter than any of her
contemporaries’, and the novel surges like an explosion with all the combustible
matter available to her. The scorch marks it left behind delineate a perfect
portrait of her soul and mind.
It has been oft repeated that of the tales invoked that “Year without a
Summer” in Villa Diodati, it is hers that lives on. Polidori’s seminal tale of
vampirism would transmute into Stoker’s Dracula, and Byron and Percy Shelley
birthed but a barren concept or two.
But her tale found true immortality and it reached me thus.
It is a child of particular disposition that looks at gargoyles while others sing
hymns to the Lord at church. I have to believe she felt, like me, more at home
with the wretched than with the winners. History is written by the victors, but art
is mostly chronicled by the disfranchised.
All of my life, I was in love with monsters; this is a fact. I discovered
Frankenstein through the movies—like most people do—and was enraptured by
Karloff and Whale’s creation.
It was years later, at the start of adolescence, that I stumbled upon a pocket
edition of Mary Shelley’s work. The first thing that struck me was its literary
devices—it was the first epistolary novel I had ever read—and the fact that, in
many ways, it bore little resemblance to its filmic counterparts.
Shelley’s book moved me to tears. I wept for the monster and admired his
thirst for revenge. It spoke to me about the essential contradictions of the spirit
and the world. And beyond the tragedy of it all a notion emerged that was
demolishing to me: the villain of the piece was life. “Being” was the ultimate
punishment and the only blessing we receive. And in the absence of love, it was