The New Annotated Frankenstein Read online

  Behold: I live and will continue to live …

  —MARY SHELLEY, Valperga

  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

  ALL 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 a
re, 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 Hell.

  The Romantic essence was there—a notion well expressed by that other Romantic, Chopin, who once stated: “To die is man’s finest action—and what might be his worst? To be born.”

  The fascinating thing for me is that Romanticism was responding to an eminently modern notion: man is alone but for man. We are the plague and the poetry and we are imprisoned by the notions, the gaze of others upon us.

  The social misfit, the alienated being, comes to full fruition with the Industrial Revolution and the overcrowded loneliness of the big cities. The birth of the monster coincides socially with these modern concerns—it comes to be at the exact moment at which machines of our own creation usurp our function and surpass our skill and speed, displacing us into anonymity. The death knell of craftsmanship and thus of identity comes hand in hand with mass production of goods and the siphoning of the masses into identically constructed lodging to serve these machines.

  The science fiction aspects of Frankenstein have always struck me as a byproduct of Shelley’s desire to exonerate the existential villains of the past—the devil and sin—and to embrace the rational only as a tool to ask deeper, more urgent questions that are not circumstantial but universal.

  Like Goethe, Shelley seems to have an innate grasp of the arrogance of knowledge. She uses surgery, galvanism, and chemistry only to grant an audience to the lonely wretch that is all of us. The impossibility of death is, to me, the greatest of the tragedies for the monster: the fact that his creator made him well and gave him a body that endures in spite of himself—his self, his lonely, desperate self.

  There is, in my estimation, no more devastating ending in the history of literature than: “He sprung from the cabin-window, as he said this, upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance.”

  I believe that Shelley uses science in order to avoid either divine origin or intercourse as birthing devices for her creature. Trying to avert the usual discourse about good and evil for a larger one: the fact that we are all anomalies—unnatural beings born of spiritually barren parents. And it is very telling that she chooses Nothingness to stage the final dialogue between Father and Child. A frozen hell where warmth is absent and where life seems impossible. She elevates the theater of this encounter by setting it in the most abstract landscape in the whole wide world, and one of the most symbolic.

  At her very point of origin, Shelley traded her life with that of her own mother. For less than two weeks she rested in the maternal arms before losing her mother to the grave. Her only visitations were to her grave, and her joy was forever tainted by her pain and that most essential severance. Her origin was death and life her curse. Like her creature, she experienced the pain and steeled herself and found, in the learning of words, the only way to sing about her loneliness.

  Much tragedy was to befall her, more than most contemporary minds could bear. It is entirely understandable that she might have believed herself accursed. Most everyone she loved, she lost, and posterity has never offered consolation to the artist. She has always impressed me in a way similar to how the Brontë sisters impress me: Most people would like to travel in time to meet great statesmen or explorers. I would love to travel back to contemplate life with these remarkable women—to hear them speak, to walk by their side on cold beaches or moors and under impossibly steely skies. For I was born in a sunny place in the middle of a sunny country, but within me I had a kinship to the same spirit that animated their melancholy and art.

  I had seen Whale’s film, and I saw Shelley’s novel in the form of a Spanish paperback from Bruguera (my go-to dark fiction publisher in the late sixties, early seventies). Being an import, the book was not cheap. I saved my Sunday allowance for a couple of weeks and bought it. I read it in one sitting, and by the end of it, I was weeping. It was my Road to Damascus. It illuminated the reason I loved monsters, my kinship with them, and showed me how deep, how life-changing, a monster parable could be—how it could function as art and how it could reach across distance and time and become a palliative to solitude and pain.

  And here we are, two centuries later, faithfully depositing flowers to this most exquisite storyteller, this extraordinary Galatea who refused to be shaped by her circumstance and gave us all life. And we try, in return, to help her creature stay alive. We strive to turn a curse into a blessing.

  We hope that in some way, somehow, our gratitude, our love, can reach him like a whispered prayer, like a distant song. And we dream that perhaps he can stop—amid the frozen tundra and the screaming wind—and can turn his head and look back. At us.

  And we hope that then he might recognize in our eyes his own yearning. And that perchance we can walk toward each other and find meager warmth in our embrace.

  And then, if only for a moment, we will not feel alone in the world.

  FOREWORD

  BY LESLIE S. KLINGER

  THREE LITERARY FIGURES loom over the nineteenth century, their shadows extending into the twenty-first century: Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, and the Frankenstein monster. It is easy to describe the simplified, iconic aspects of each: Holmes, the “Great Detective,” the supreme rationalist, always in charge, never swerving from his pursuit of justice; Dracula, the “Master Vampire,” seductive, immortal, powerful, above the laws of human nature yet fundamentally human; and Frankenstein’s “creature,” terrific, superhuman,
but isolated and innocent, a product of presumption and prejudice. Yet they are far more complex in their original conceptions than these images suggest. Only by considering the sources—the books in which the figures first appeared—can we truly understand them.

  While it is beyond the scope of this book to consider Holmes and Dracula,1 The New Annotated Frankenstein allows us to explore Victor Frankenstein and his creature through the text of Mary Shelley’s story, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, as published in 1818. Two hundred years after its original publication, the book’s historical and social context, despite the story’s cultural familiarity, may be unfamiliar to many readers, and its language, ideas, and events difficult to readily appreciate; at the same time, two centuries of reinterpretation and reshaping of the work, and of adaptation into film and other media, have only revealed more about the genius of the original material. As biographers and scholars note, Shelley revised her tale in 1823 and 1831, but no previous annotated or scholarly edition of Frankenstein has considered the effect of her revisions or the possible reasons for specific changes. Finally, unlike the Sherlock Holmes tales or Dracula (which happen to have been written by men), Frankenstein surprisingly incorporates a good deal of the personal life of its author, and understanding those linkages enriches the story.

  The Frankenstein Dracula War, No. 1 (Topps Comics, 1995). Roy Thomas, writer; Claude St. Aubin, penciller (cover art by Mike Mignola).

  This volume is not specifically intended to add to the existing body of academic scholarship.2 Beginning in the last quarter of the twentieth century, women’s and gender studies gained ascendancy in college curriculums, as did considerations of popular culture; with the convergence of these disciplines, Frankenstein shifted from being dismissed as merely early “science fiction” to becoming a regular object of pedagogical scrutiny. An overview of important scholarship is contained in Appendix 5, below. This is also not a catalog of the thousands of reincarnations of Frankenstein on the stage, in films, television series, cartoons, comic books, games, and toys, discussed in Appendices IV and VI, below. Instead, this book seeks to show readers that the original text of Mary Shelley’s novel, when read thoughtfully, is far more complex and engaging than the simplistic story that most new readers, who know only the films or comics, expect to find.