There was a time for me growing up when Frankenstein was just a green guy that chased Scooby-Doo around. He adorned a cereal box of strawberry-flavored sugar that my mother would never buy. He slowly lumbered after my favorite mid-century comedy duos. And that was the entire story of Frankenstein.
Literally that. Neck bolts, forehead stitches, lift boots, and a somnambulant groan summed up the character pretty well for the purposes of any audience still entertained by the conceit.
At some point, we would grow up and realize there was a book about this guy. We’d seen the movies already, the cheesy ones and the funny ones. They introduced us to the melodrama of scientific hubris. All morality tales of the consequences of playing God; very “behave, or God’ll gitcha.” Prometheus as told in Sunday school.
He also did a killer rendition of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” in a top hat and tails.
Most of us remained there in our appreciation for the very story that invented modern science fiction. In recent decades, there’s been a push to remind non-readers that there was yearning in those moans and something real those outstretched, patchwork arms were reaching for.
Guillermo del Toro’s film adaptation of the novel, released last fall), capped the effort with a multiple-award-winning and mostly faithful-to-the-text film by the same name. The story was illuminated in the zeitgeist that led to new interest in the character. No longer a simple avatar for the doom that follows ingesting the Edenic apple from the Knowledge Tree, Dr. Frankenstein’s “son” was reanimated with a prismatic spectrum of protagonist perspective.
For context, Mary Shelley was a talented and fairly “modern” woman embodying Romanticism’s reaction to the Enlightenment. She ran in the bohemian circles populated by her husband (poet Percy Bysshe Shelley) and his coterie of libertines. They reveled in breaking ossified molds of morality and living deliciously ahead of the wake of miseries their selfish freedoms would churn.
The Marquis de Sade hung like a shadow of influence over the extreme individuality and moral relativism they would champion, maybe with some reservations.
Mary and Percy would elope in a breathless, corset-busting adventure that culminated in the suicide of Percy’s devastated, pre-existing wife. The romance and drama of the free-spirited couple would be chained by the all-too-real tragedies of her impending miscarriages and deaths of three of their children together. All attempts at sealing their love with creation were met with guilt, sorrow, abandonment, and loneliness.
Percy continued to philander, and her womb continued to produce nothing but mockeries of her desire for motherhood. She interpreted these coincidences of fate as consequences of faithlessness. Herein is where the themes of divine abandonment and the horrors of unholy birth would haunt her from the wings of her consciousness.
Critics have been deconstructing Frankenstein from overstuffed leather chairs in mahogany-walled libraries for the two hundred years since its publication. That discussion’s volume rarely reverberates through the walls to the Spirit Halloweens where Frankenstein truly “lives” in our pop culture.
An even more academic reading of the novel would highlight the autobiographical rhymes to Mary Shelley’s tortured existence. That’s where we begin with David Catlin’s adaptation for the stage and Richmond Shakespeare’s rendition of it.
via RVA Magazine
Read more, see more: https://rvamag.com/art/theatre/review-richmond-shakespeares-frankenstein-the-post-modern-prometheus.html
