FRANKENSTEIN: A CULTURAL HISTORY by Susan Tyler Hitchcock
(a book review by Mark R. Leeper)
My first thought on seeing Susan Tyler Hitchcock's FRANKENSTEIN:
A CULTURAL HISTORY was that it was very much a redoing of book I
had read previously. It is essentially a repeat of Donald
F. Glut's 1973 book THE FRANKENSTEIN LEGEND. Both books look at
the history of the theme and characters created by Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley from the novel up to each book's present
day. Each starts with a short history of Mary Shelley and her
circle of friends. But of course when the Hitchcock book gets
beyond 1973 it is able to cover material that Glut was not.
Hitchcock's style is a little more formal, or as formal as is
possible with this subject matter. She has thirty pages of
detailed footnotes at the back of the book and fourteen pages of
bibliography. Glut is content with a page or so of footnotes
after each chapter, but a much smaller total volume.
Interestingly Hitchcock includes in the bibliography a book of
essays about Frankenstein edited by Glut, but I see no reference
to his book written with so similar an intent.
Of course, the story of the writing of FRANKENSTEIN has been told
many times and has even been the subject of multiple films. A
distinguished group of friends including Percy Bysshe Shelley,
Lord Byron, John William Polidori, and Mary Shelley on a night in
Geneva in 1816 gave each other the challenge to write a ghost
story. (One wonders if Mary, the neophyte of the crowd, is not
now better remembered than her friends are. How many works can
the average person name by Percy or Lord Byron?) Mary wrote what
is now considered by many to be the first science fiction novel,
FRANKENSTEIN. (Incidentally, while FRANKENSTEIN is surely a
mainstay of fantastic literature, I believe it does not really
qualify as science fiction. In the novel Victor Frankenstein
after study of science, natural philosophy, alchemy, and magic
one day realizes he knows how to make a man. The novel never
makes explicit which of these disciplines he used nor what his
method was. The films made it concrete by suggesting that he
animated a patched together human using electricity. But for all
the description directly from the book he might have just made a
large homunculus or even a golem.)
More interesting at least to me is that is was not cinema that
created all the blood and thunder versions of the Frankenstein
monster. Within a decade after the novel was published and
proved to be a literary sensation there were five different stage
adaptations with varying degrees of graphic horror. June 19,
1823, saw a stage version called "Presumption" by William
Brinsley Peake. This play told the story of novel but made some
changes including adding a strange assistant for Victor
Frankenstein, named Fritz. So when Dwight Frye played Fritz in
the 1931 Boris Karloff film version, Fritz had been around almost
as long as Victor had, though he did not appear in the novel.
Hitchcock reports that Mary Shelley took great pleasure in the
over-the-top stage productions of her novel. So perhaps the
extremes of the film series might have met with her approval.
Causing confusion for later generations, in 1831 Mary Shelley
republished the novel under her name (the original version had
been anonymous) making a number of changes, including making
Elizabeth no longer a blood relation of Victor's.
Hitchcock continues through Universal Frankenstein films. What
she says has not much is new to a real horror fan. Mostly what
she writes is just a reminder of some aspects of the first two
films. Here coverage of other Frankenstein films is spotty. The
themes and characters of Frankenstein have arisen so many times
that not all can get the same attention. But some occurrences
are more important than others are and one would expect that
Hitchcock would cover both series, Universal and Hammer Films, in
some detail. In fact she probably has too much breadth and not
enough depth in some places to her cultural history. For both
the Universal Pictures and the Hammer Films series her coverage
of the first film or two in the series is reasonable, but she has
very little coverage of subsequent films in the series.
In addition, on page 211 she claims that Hammer's
Dr. Frankenstein lives in London and makes occasional trips to
the countryside. In fact the setting of the Hammer Frankenstein
Films is always someplace Germanic. It is puzzling how she could
have made such an error if the films were for her more than a
distant memory.
Relatively important films are pushed aside so that she can cover
the whimsical fact that genetically modified foods are derisively
called "frankenfoods". This could have been given just a quick
note. Most people who would read a cultural history of the
Frankenstein story are probably more interested in the film
versions than in political cartoons that have alluded to the
story. Not all allusions to Frankenstein from popular culture
are as interesting as other allusions.
But there is a description of some of the minor films, in some
cases giving them too much attention, like the execrable
FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACE MONSTER. And there are some
paragraphs on some of the Frankenstein-themed comic book series
as well as the famous "Classics Illustrated" adaptation of the
novel, a fond memory from my youth.
The book is fun, particularly the early portions. Hitchock's
book brings back some happy memories like staying up late on a
Saturday night to see the monster square off against the Wolf
Man. And reading it brings back recollections of reading "Famous
Monsters of Filmland". The book is an enjoyable read, but on the
whole I would a preferred an update of Glut's book.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Copyright 2008 Mark R. Leeper
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