Halloween may be over, but “Frankenstein” is very much on the minds of those who will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the science fiction/Gothic novel on Friday and Saturday at Smith College.
At least 13 scholars, writers and artists, whose work was inspired by author Mary Shelley’s “hideous progeny” (as the book calls him) will show alternative film versions of Frankenstein, and talking about “the otherness” of the creature, that has resonance in today’s life.
Shelley’s original book title was “Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus.” And it’s not so much about the monster as it is about the man who created him — Victor Frankenstein, who takes the power of creating life into his own hands, and must pay lifelong consequences for “playing God.”
The two-day symposium “Creativity and the Creature: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at 200,” will explore many aspects of the novel, which continues to both shock and inspire new generations of artists to put their own spin on the story with new interpretations in film, novels and art.
“It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils,” Shelley wrote, in the voice of Victor Frankenstein, in the 1818 edition of her book.
“How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form?” Frankenstein says of his creation. “His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! …”
After describing the thin skin and “dull yellow” eyes that so repulsed him, Frankenstein goes on to say: “The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. For this, I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”
Inspired by a nightmare, Shelley started writing the story at age 18, but the book “Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus” wasn’t published until 1818, when she was 20. It was published anonymously, in an age when women weren’t supposed to be writing books, and when that particular book was said to be scandalous and disgusting.
Frankenstein Castle, overlooking the city of Darmstadt, Germany, may have been part of the inspiration, since Shelley had traveled near it before the book with published. In the 1600s, an alchemist had allegedly been involved in science experiments in that castle. While traveling to Geneva, Switzerland, Shelley and her future husband, Percy, along with the poet Lord Byron, had a competition to see who could tell the most frightening story. Shelley had dreamed about a scientist who had created a life and was horrified by his creation, so that was the story she told.
Planning for the symposium, which is sponsored by Smith’s Kahn Liberal Arts Institute, began about a year ago, Smith College literature professor Lily Gurton-Wachter said. In honor of the book’s 200th anniversary, she and Amherst College professor Amelia Worsley have been co-teaching a literature course on Frankenstein to students from both colleges.
Gurton-Wachter said her students are surprised to learn that a woman their age had written this still-popular classic, which some literary scholars consider to be the first science fiction novel ever written.
“There are a lot of different ways in which people have read the novel as about identity — or lack thereof,” she continued.
In the 1931 movie “Frankenstein,” the creature is shunned by its creator and goes through the movie without the ability to talk. But in the book, the exiled creature secretly watches a family and learns their language, and later even learns to read and write.
“In the movie, he’s a scary monster who is stupidly hurting people,” Gurton-Wachter said, referring to when he accidentally kills a child.
“But in the novel, he is eloquent and intelligent and able to explain that he has no friends or identity,” she continued. “He is driven away because of his ‘otherness.’ … It’s kind of amazing how people read the novel as an allegory for so many different things, like science, technology, race, gender, sexuality, disability, childhood and parenting.”
In the novel, Shelley never gave the creature a name, and its namelessness reflects how this being has no identity.
“The symposium aims to galvanize discussion and debate about why a text about creation and miscreation, written by a young woman with very big ideas, continues to be so extraordinarily generative and transformational,” a news statement about the symposium reads. “How can Shelley help us to think through contemporary questions about race, gender, sexuality, disability, identity, bioethics, reproduction, the environment, the human and the nonhuman?”
Staff reporter Diane Broncaccio has worked at the Greenfield Recorder since 1988. Her beat includes West County. She can be reached at: dbroncaccio@recorder.com or 413-772-0261, ext. 277.
■The college’s “Frankenstein” rare book collection
■In “Hypertextual Progeny,”
■“Frankenfilms from First to Latest,”
■“Monstrous Motherhood and the Rights of the Child”
■“Race Colonialism and Creolization in Frankenstein,”
■“Skin Shows, Rage and the Promise of Monsters: A Joint Reflection”
■“Darkness and Distance: A Closing Conversation”