“Oh, if only I could write a story that would make readers as horrified as I was that night! I would just have to introduce them to the apparition that haunted my dreams.” So exclaimed the young ladies of the 19th century when they were seized by the writing craze. But it took several years before the concept of the nightmare became established in the human consciousness, for it was from it that the young ladies drew the stories that horrified their readers.
In early 1782, the painter John Henry Fuseli exhibited his famous painting Nightmare at the Royal Academy in London. It depicts a young girl asleep, with a terrifying creature sitting or squatting on her stomach, its gaze fixed on the viewer. A horse’s head stares into the void through a red curtain in the background. On the wooden table in front of the bed are a glass and a mirror, supposedly reflecting the creature’s face. But the mirror is empty, the creature’s face is not visible.
Fuseli became famous for this painting. His work often explored the world of dreams, horror and visions, encouraged by English tales of horrific and strange events. This is why the visible world loses its reality in his paintings. He later wrote that dreams were a part of art “which no one has yet explored”. He was also said to have eaten raw pork steak in the evening in order to dream nightmare dreams. Later, the motif of this painting spread throughout Europe and became synonymous with nightmare dreams.
His painting was created before the Romantic movement swept across Western Europe and began to knock on the shell of a reason-oriented civilisation. Painters and writers of the early 19th century were certainly familiar with this painting. What made it so disturbing and chilling was that it is at the same time multifaceted. The wooden table is made in a contemporary style and represents a link with the present. But unlike the dream representations known up to that time, the painting does not represent the dream of a specific person, but a morbid dream in general.
The girl in the picture, the victim, is sleeping on her back, slightly turned to the left, her head and arms hanging over the edge of the bed, the creature pressing on her chest. Fuseli vaguely suggested something intolerable in those days. The creature, sitting on top of the young girl, is chewing something and preparing to have sex, while the girl, with her legs slightly apart, is waiting for either the creature or the horse to approach her, the latter being a folk sign of sexuality. On a symbolic level, the young girl in Nightmare is undoubtedly conceived as a victim of the fantasy of a sexual intruder.
In the paintings by Fuseli, it is almost always possible to see muscular large men in classic poses, but also provocative female characters with unusual hairstyles. Some believe that this represents the frustrated longing of a painter who met a woman in Zurich some years ago and painted her portrait on the back of his famous painting.
After the Romantics began to use dreams to seek entry into the darkness of the unknown, they also tried to conjure up nightmare dreams artificially. Some ate hard-to-digest food in the evening, others consumed large quantities of red meat, even though they had been vegetarians for some time. Not every such method achieved its purpose.
Sigmund Freud was also interested in this painting, but did not mention it in his writings, so a copy of it hung in the waiting room of his office. According to Freud, dreams are the “guardians of sleep” and represent unfulfilled desires in the waking state or repressed desire that cannot otherwise be realised. As a rule, these are erotic desires and lusts which take on a symbolic form. In nightmare dreams, this desire is said to be transformed into fear, and the more forbidden the desire, the greater the fear. Later, Freud remarked, a nightmare dream can also be an attempt to take control of a situation, but in any case it is the fear that the sleeping person fears most that comes to the fore.
At the same time as Freud was exploring dreams, the German painter Max Klinger painted his interpretation of Fuseli’s Nightmare entitled Dead Mother (1898) in his opus On Death. It shows a young woman on a mortuary stage, her hair decorated with flowers. A child is squatting on her chest, directing its gaze towards the observer of the painting. In the background, a dark forest can be seen through a doorway, the sea glittering in the distance. Klinger originally wanted to paint the child with an aged, demonic face, but then decided that it should have a beautiful and gentle face, in stark contrast to the mother’s haggard and emaciated face. In the final version, the child’s face reflects panic, while the mother’s is full of inner peace.
Unlike Fuseli’s Nightmare, in Klinger we see a confused child instead of a demon, a forest instead of a horse, and a dead mother instead of a sleeping woman with her legs crossed. Could it be that the mother died during childbirth? Or did it suck out all the juice of her life? It is also possible that the death of the mother represents the natural course of the circle of life. The individual dies – the human race lives on. This is the title that Klinger’s painting was ultimately given.
But why does the child have such a panicky face and why does he look at us so happily? Whatever our reaction to Klinger’s painting, Fuseli’s Nightmare has been transformed into a modern painting full of lust, fear and biology. What lies between The Nightmare and the Dead Mother, between the late 18th century and the late 19th century view, that is, a few nightmares later, is what the novel Frankenstein tells us about.
But there were other elements which, according to the influential philosopher Edmund Burke, evoked terror and fear in the observer or even the reader; castle ruins, bleak landscapes, deserted fields, dark forests, evil animals, fierce storms, deep ravines and raging seas. This enumeration sounds like the obligatory appendix to a horror novel.
The nineteenth century, especially its Victorian era, saw the birth of the great horror novels, which are still important as a literary genre today. Who does not know Frankenstein, Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, and the Hound of the Baskervilles, at least by name? All of this proves that these novels have become part of everyday culture. Of course, over the years, the main characters in these novels have taken on a different image from the original. Frankenstein has been transformed into a creature of steel bolts and scars, Dracula has become an attractive lion in a tuxedo, Mr Hyde has taken the form of a monkey wandering the suburbs of East London, and Sherlock Holmes, with his obligatory hunting hat and pipe, is proving his abilities even in the modern age. But none of these characters is true to the original from which they were created. In many new editions, their stories have been rewritten and events have been reworked to heighten the drama and adapt them to the present day.
Villa Diodati
The great novels of horror have always begun as fantasies by the light of gas lamps. They were the personal traumas of the writer, experienced and told to sensitive people. These traumas, translated into stories, have long since left the literary world to which they once belonged. They have been read everywhere, for reasons their authors could never have understood. Their origins can be found in the Greek and Roman sagas, but they can be traced back even further. But the birth of these horror stories can be found in the summer of 1816, in the peaceful and orderly setting of Lake Geneva.
Frankenstein, the story of a scientist who brings a corpse back to life and thus brings about his own downfall, has for two centuries been a symbol of the fear that accompanies the unchecked progress of science. It is 200 years since the Englishwoman Mary Shelley, who was still Mary Godwin when she wrote the novel, invented her horror story. This free-spirited girl was brought up by her father Godwin after the death of her mother and given a rich, if informal, education. While living in Scotland, she met the radical poet and philosopher Percy Shelley when she was only seventeen.
Percy had by then become estranged from his wife and spent a lot of time with the Godwins, having promised old Godwin that he would help him out of debt. Since he was unable to do so, Godwin was angry with him and felt betrayed. Percy’s rich and aristocratic family did not want to give him money for what they considered wasteful projects and wanted him to continue the traditional life of a rural aristocrat. But he had no such idea.
In 1814, Mary became involved in a scandalous affair with him. They met secretly at her mother’s grave, as her father was opposed to their union, and it was there that Mary pledged her love to him. The couple set off on a journey across Europe to avoid, at least for a while, unseemly gossip and to wait for England to eventually forget about their union.
On 13 May 1816, Percy Shelley, his fiancée, 18-year-old Mary Godwin, their five-month-old baby and her half-sister Clare settled in a hotel near Geneva. They were all exhausted, having travelled for ten days from London. Mary loved mountains and lochs, having spent her youth in Scotland.
A week later, they were joined by Lord Byron and his personal physician, Dr Polidori, and a few servants. The young Dr Polidori’s main task was to keep Byron’s personal diary carefully and conscientiously and to record his every move. Clare and Byron had known each other since England, they had fallen into a brief relationship and when Clare found out she was pregnant, she waited for the right moment to tell him. But he just said to her, “Is this baby mine?”
Within a week, Shelley and his group moved to the other side of the lake, north of the village of Cologny, to a two-storey house in the middle of a vineyard. The weather was not the best, with frequent heavy thunderstorms. It was like England. Lord Byron and his entourage took up residence in the nearby Villa Diodati and continued writing the third song of his romantic epic, The Voyage of the Nobleman Harold.
The first clue to the circumstances in which Frankenstein was written is found in Percy Shelley’s preface to the anonymous edition of Frankenstein in September 1817.
“It was cold and everything was wet. In those cold evenings, we would all gather around the fireplace with the fire crackling in it and read German horror books that we happened to find in the house. These stories made us want to write something similar ourselves. We agreed that each of us would write a story about unnatural events. But the night brought good weather, some of them decided to go on a trip to the mountains and we forgot our agreement. So this story is the only one that is written to the end.”
Mary wrote a new note to her writing in the introduction to the 1831 reprint edition of the book, fifteen years after these events. “It was a wet and unkind summer, which often obliged us to remain in the house. Inside we found some translations of German books with tragic content. There were stories about an unfaithful lover who embraced his beloved but only her leaden soul, stories about the founder of a family burdened with sins that forced him to give the kiss of death to each of his offspring who grew up …
We agreed that each of us would write a similar story. Byron had the easiest time, incorporating part of the story he had written into his epic Mazeppa. Shelley included events from his youth in his story. Poor Polidori had a horrible idea about a lady with a dead man’s head. He published this story in 1819, and it is about the love of a Swiss patriot for a woman who turns out in the end to be his sister. This was clearly an allusion to the incestuous relationship Byron was said to have had with his half-sister.
I have also tried to write a story that speaks about our hidden fears, a story that would scare the reader, that would make him look around in fear, making his blood run cold and his heart go crazy. Nothing clever came into my head, and it was not at all pleasant to be asked every morning if I had written a story yet.
Shelley and Byron talked a lot about the essence of life, I just listened. They also talked about Dr Darwin, and that was important for my story because they talked about his discoveries. He put a dead worm in a jar and made it move by some strange means. Even a human corpse can be brought back to life, as the examples of galvanic experiments show, perhaps we could just put together a creature from suitable body parts and give it the warmth of life.
Midnight had already passed when I finally fell asleep. In the morning I told them I had a story and started writing about my waking dream the same day. I started by saying: ‘It was a dark night in November…’ At first I thought I would just write a short story of a few pages, but Shelley urged me to expand it.”
Already in the introduction, one can sense the influence of melodrama, including rain, thunder, lightning and narratives that “make the blood run cold and the heart beat soar”. The first edition of Frankenstein was published anonymously. Percy Shelley himself corrected parts of it and made final proofs before printing, leading many readers to believe that he was the author of the novel. He therefore received more attention than Mary. She thought it was time to present herself as an author, but as long as her husband was alive, she did not have the courage to take this step.
In anthologies of horror novels, Frankenstein is still cited as an example of “women’s literature of horror”, and the description of events as the result of an extraordinary imagination. But Percy Shelley knew better than anyone what Frankenstein was about, writing that his wife’s novel was much more than the usual tale of witchcraft and ghosts. He argued that it really raised interesting questions and was based on her experiences. Those who read his introduction may indeed think that Frankenstein is nothing more than another tale of horror born of a stormy night. But it is in fact much more than that.
When Mary began writing her story on 17 June with the words “it was a dark night in November”, she had long since overstepped the boundaries of what was appropriate for a woman writer at that time. She wrote the story, which she initially conceived of as a short story to be told among friends, and which later became a novel, in what she expressed as “a delusional state, something between waking and dreaming”.
In this delusional state, she recalled the trauma of her own birth, as her mother died only 12 days after giving birth to her, and in February 1815, she herself gave life to a baby girl who died shortly after birth. She became pregnant when she and Percy were not even married and after Percy had moved away from his wife, a major scandal for the time. “People lump us in with prostitutes and seducers,” she complained.
Many literary historians believe that this is why the novel reflects her shame at the thought that she should have given birth. It is also true that Mary knew of the story from medieval Nuremberg in which Dr Faustus made a pact with the devil, and she was also familiar with the 1810 book Madame de Stael, which also contains part of the story of Dr Faustus. All this influenced her writing.
Dead matter comes to life
What is Frankenstein about? English polar explorer Robert Walton takes on board the Genevan scientist Victor Frankenstein and listens to his tragic life story. While researching medieval and modern chemistry at the University of Ingoldstadt, Frankenstein found a way to bring dead matter back to life. He secured male body parts from cemeteries and anatomical institutes, assembled them into a two-and-a-half-metre-tall creature and used an electric charge to bring it back to life.
But the sight of the creature’s “watery eyes” made him so depressed that he decided to run away and try to forget his blasphemous act. The violent death of his little brother reminded him that the creature was still free. Victor Frankenstein and the creature then met on a glacier in the Alps and the creature began to tell him that people everywhere turned away at the sight of his face. He also told him about how he had learned languages, literature and emotions while observing a poor peasant family and how he had read books he happened to come across. Finally, he told the scientist that he wanted a partner who would be like him.
He promised Frankenstein that he would leave Europe if he helped him find a partner. So the scientist and his good friend Henry Clerval set off for the Scottish Highlands to make good on their promise. But doubts about whether what he was doing was the right thing grew, and eventually they destroyed the female creature they had already made. This had devastating consequences for Frankenstein, who threatened, “I will visit you on your wedding night.” And he strangled Clerval to boot. Frankenstein was charged with murder and narrowly escaped conviction.
Despite the threat, Frankenstein married his youthful love Elizabeth, but the creature murdered her in their wedding bed. Frankenstein followed the creature across Europe to the Black Sea and on to the frozen North Pole before dying of exhaustion. Before that, he told his story to the polar explorer Walton. The creature paid one last tribute to its creator, then set off across the ice sheet into the darkness of night. Shocked, Captain Walton decided to abandon his exploration and return to England.
At the beginning of July 1816, Mary finally decided to give the novel the title Frankenstein. She was helped by a story told by Percy Shelley, who, in Byron’s company, had observed the castle ruins during walks by Lake Geneva and was reminded of his journey with Mary through the Rhine Valley, full of castle ruins, waterfalls and frightening sunsets. “Every hill was crowned by a castle. I looked at every picturesque ruin, every shadowy hollow and every stone overhang with curiosity and fascination, their names sounding like the titles of novels; all the ghosts of Germany haunted here…’ One of these ruins was called Frankenstein.
Towards the end of his journey along the Rhine, Percy arrived in Germersheim, where he could see the ruins of Frankenstein Castle, built around 1250. He and Mary walked for three hours to get there, but only got as close as the castle, as there was no way to go any further. The castle was not exactly one of the great medieval fortifications. The defensive towers were small and the walls were made of wood and stone, so that the whole thing looked more like a fortified farmhouse. That’s why it had a famous name – Frankenstein (Castle of the Franks) – and the legend of the alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel, who was born here in 1673 as a refugee and was therefore called Frankensteiner.
The story of Frankenstein does not have medieval roots, but is based on the present at that time. The scientific concepts that play an important role in the novel are based on the debates in Germany at that time about “man being nothing but an instrument of nature”, which Mary read about in various newspapers and books. In addition, a few years before Frankenstein was written, from 1816 to 1818, the origin of life was also the subject of much public debate in London, and the debate provoked fierce controversy. On the one hand, traditionalists argued that life came into being suddenly with a vital spark that awakened a soul of divine origin. On the other side was a radical new theory, a precursor to the theory of evolution, according to which life was merely the sum of all bodily functions, something purely material. No spark, no soul – just parents.
Mary Shelley came from a background where the latest technical developments were always known and discussed, and their house was frequented by chemists and philosophers. It was a time when everyone marvelled at the “phantasmagoria”, a mixture of magic lantern pictures, optical illusions and, as the climax of the event, a demonstration of a jumping electric current. It was also the time when Mary Shelley was reading the introduction to Humphry Davis’s 1812 treatise on the Elements of Chemical Philosophy, at the very moment when she was writing a chapter on Victor Frankenstein’s studies at the University of Ingolstadt. There, Frankenstein was searching for the ‘stone of knowledge and the elixir of life’, drawing on the observations of medieval scientists such as Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus.
The more Frankenstein’s personality developed in the novel, the more his split became apparent; on the one hand, mortality, the journey into the infinity of another world and the belief in a new being, and on the other, the gross materiality of the body and the acceptance of the occult.
In the 1818 edition of the novel, there is no allusion to Faust. There is no devil and, as one literary critic wrote, everything happens in the total absence of God. But as the personality of Frankenstein passed into everyday speech, and as his dramatisation became entrenched in mass culture, people began to speak of ‘Frankenstein’s monster’, thus transferring the name of his creator to the creature who created him. And it is understandable that the creature without a name only really became a monster after people rejected it. It was not a monster from birth, but evolved into one because of humans. This is the philosophical meaning of the novel, which is usually forgotten by readers and viewers.
The radical French Enlightenment even argued that man is nothing more than a machine that the Creator threw on the earth by accident. This, of course, immediately raised the question of whether human behaviour could be mechanically simulated. In 1769, the watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz made a wooden automaton of a small boy sitting on a chair in front of a table. He is still working today and writes various sentences with a goose feather, including “Je pense, donc je suis (I think, therefore I am)”.
Urar made more of these machines, and Mary Shelley undoubtedly saw them during her visit to Neuchatel in Switzerland in 1814. They were, of course, not ugly creatures, the skin on their faces was delicate and beautifully taut, their eyes looked out at the world, glassy but kind, they were dressed beautifully and, like automatons, they did quite ordinary things.
In the Hollywood adaptations of the novel, these artificial creatures are not adams, but creatures with scars, cuts and steel pins. The model for this design was a painting by the painter Goya of a lunatic asylum called Los Chinchillas from his 1799 opus Los Caprichos. The person in the painting, with his unusually high forehead and large feet, was a concept of mental and physical retardation. For a while, film make-up artists even toyed with the idea of presenting the monster as a robot or a mechanical man, but all that was left were the pins in his neck, where Frankenstein was supposed to be “connected” to the spark of life, or as some understood it, to electricity.
In Mary Shelley’s novel, there is no such thing. Even the author herself was convinced in 1831 that “a corpse can be brought to life again, as the cases of galvanic experiments prove”. Even the German physicist Ritter, at the beginning of the century, claimed: “Galvanic phenomena are a bridge between living and dead matter.”
It was in the works of the poet, botanist and philosopher Erasmus Darwin that Mary Shelley first came into contact with the theory of evolution, which was developed 60 years later by his grandson Charles Darwin. The role of the woman in the reproduction of the species is said to be only to provide the embryo with food and oxygen, and the qualities of the embryo are given by the man, and even these depend on what the man thinks about during the act of fertilisation. If, as was the case with Victor Frankenstein, the man thinks about monstrous things while he is doing it, his creation will be a monster too.
Meanwhile, rumours spread among the many English tourists on the other side of Lake Geneva about strange happenings in the villa where Percy Shelley and others were staying. Hoteliers lent binoculars to curious guests, and the curious then went around explaining that they had seen Lord Byron living there with a Mrs Shelley, reports of group sex and incestuous relationships, and of ladies’ underwear hanging on the balcony.
The rumours also reached the ears of the local police, who were no strangers to Byron and Polidori’s other quarrels with the local residents. In the summer of 1816, Geneva was flooded with wealthy English tourists who rented 25 villas in the surrounding area and were given hundreds of permits by the police to stay for several weeks. Thus, tourism in Switzerland became as synonymous as Lord Byron and scandal.
On the twenty-first of July, everyone except Byron decided to escape the stifling atmosphere of Villa Diodati and go on a trip to the nearby Alps. It was then that Mary Shelley decided to turn a short story into a novel. The proximity of the high mountain peaks, the clear air after a storm and the torrential streams made a great impression on her. On the twenty-third of July, they climbed by mule to the glacier that lay in the shadow of Mont Blanc. At the top of a nearby hill, Mary, looking at the icy mass and the steep mountain walls, decided that this would be the place where Victor Frankenstein and his creature would meet in the novel.
“Suddenly, I saw a figure approaching me from a distance at an inhuman speed… Its size exceeded that of a man. I was stunned, my vision glazed over, and I felt a nausea come over me”, Frankenstein speaks in the novel. Then, in a nearby hut, the creature began to tell him his sad life story and demanded that his father provide him with a woman with whom he could exchange affection. This was to be his right, which Frankenstein must not deny him.
Frankenstein becomes a monster
At the end of August, Mary, Percy and Clare left Switzerland and returned to England, where Mary continued writing her novel in Bath. Percy returned to London, trying to avoid his creditors and settle with his lawyers. These were not happy times for her. She learned that her half-sister Fany had died of too much laudanum, and shortly afterwards Percy Shelley’s first wife Harriet, whom Percy had left for Mary, drowned. As it later transpired, she was heavily pregnant.
Percy’s comment was harsh and cynical: “This poor woman, driven from her father’s house, fell deeper and deeper into prostitution until she was living with a servant. He left her and she killed herself.” Meanwhile, Mary’s father pressed Mary and Percy to marry anyway, and so they had a simple ceremony at the end of December 1816. The couple simply gave in to her parents’ pressure, as they considered the wedding to be completely unnecessary.
Meanwhile, the novel progressed, with Percy making grammatical corrections and sometimes trying to improve his wife’s writing style. He introduced more rhetoric and embellishments. Many of the swollen sentences for which Mary was later criticised by critics were written by Percy. In May 1818, the novel was finished and the heavily pregnant Mary wrote in her diary – Finis. Percy tried to find a publisher willing to print it on favourable terms.
The first two publishers refused to print it, and then an insignificant publisher decided to print 500 copies. Mary was then paid the reasonable sum of £28 and 14 shillings for the novel, which was published under the title Frankenstein or the New Prometheus, but this was far from enough to pay all the debts that had accumulated during the writing process. The first reviews in rather conservative newspapers were very restrained, to say the least.
The only clue critics had about the author of Frankenstein was the name Godwin. At a time when the political and social situation in England was so unstable that workers were smashing new machines and demonstrating against the government, it was risky for anyone to be associated with the name Godwin. The book touched on, as one critic wrote, ‘the most important things of our time’ and had to be handled with great care. Others thought it was written by Percy Shelley, because it was supposed to be full of poetic description.
When the news got out that Mary Shelley was the author, people immediately turned the record straight. “It’s a great book for a man, but for a woman, it’s absolutely gorgeous.” One critic tore the book to shreds, calling it “a collection of horrible and disgusting nonsense that makes the soul recoil and the flesh shudder”. Such divergent opinions, however, have only contributed to the success of the third edition of the book, which, as a popular folk edition, has been shortened a little and is still the most widely read today. It was published in 1831 and is already signed by Mary Shelley as its author.
Much of the radical thinking in the first edition was deleted by Mary, including the suggestion that Victor wanted to play God. The emphasis on darkness, blood and thunder in this illustrated edition was in keeping with the gruesome images in the book. Frankenstein was thus well on his way to becoming a myth.
The phrase “Frankenstein monster” entered the vernacular as early as 1881, describing something scary, strange, primitive and stupid. The transformation into a modern myth had already begun a few years earlier, in 1823, with the first stage production at the English Opera House. The production, entitled Conjectures on the Fate of Frankenstein, was accompanied by a protest rally outside the theatre. The demonstrators, allegedly belonging to the Humane Society, called on the fathers of the family to resist the production. Rumours had spread that it was linked to the Shelleys. And everyone “knew” that the infamous Shelleys were having group sex and incestuous relationships at the time Frankenstein was being made. Otherwise, the demonstrators shouted that the title alone said everything about the show. Mary Shelley’s versatile narrative was to be turned into something that wanted to imitate God, that is to say, to create a human being.
The publicity for the production read: ‘The mysterious and terrible appearance of the demon from Frankenstein’s laboratory.’ Otherwise, the audience enjoyed the special stage effects and the good presentation of the monster. The actor Cooke, who portrayed the monster, was to play the role many more times in the years to come. In 1826, he played the monster for 80 consecutive nights in Paris, a record. By the end, there were so many bodies on the stage that there could be no more, unless the soufflé and the orchestra had died, as a critic in the Journal de Paris wrote. In any case, it was the actor Cooke, with his many productions, who laid the foundation stone for the fusion of the scientist Victor Frankenstein and the creature into a single person.
Deviations from the original story soon became established and became an integral part of subsequent productions. In all of them, there is a scene in which Frankenstein breaks through the door, there is a comic servant in a supporting role and there are always quite a few musical interludes. The monster is always nameless and speechless and always wears blue socks. The ending is always apocalyptic. Some of the details change; sometimes the scientist and the monster die in an avalanche, sometimes in a blizzard or a storm, sometimes on Mount Etna, but the basic structure of the story remains the same.
The 1910 Edison film also stays true to the novel, with a slightly expanded story and alchemical inserts. Thus, the scientist creates his monster in front of the audience in a giant cauldron, which boils and bubbles, and then mysteriously transforms the skeleton into an oversized human being. But the film offers a different ending. The monster disappears and dissolves in a large mirror, giving the viewer the impression that it was the scientist’s alter ego from the start.
The Hollywood version, made in 1931 by James Whales, kept the comic servant Fritz, but turned him into a hunchback. The monster himself, played brilliantly by Boris Karloff, remains a grotesque, snarling and almost childlike phenomenon. Also new is the glass container with the inscription “Disfunctio Cerebri” and the abnormal brain inside. The ending has also been changed, so that the monster’s life ends in a burning mill.
The film was such a success that the film-makers decided to make a sequel, which they called Bride of Frankenstein. It was filmed in 1935 and is set on a stormy night in a large neo-Gothic castle on the shores of Lake Geneva. Lord Byron and Percy Shelley ask Mary to tell them another story. The key to this film was that the actress Elsa Lanchester played both Mary and the bride of the monster. Whether it is the bride of the scientist or the bride of the monster is not important in the end. The gentle young girl dreams of being chased by the monster, Boris Karloff, who loses his nerve once they finally face each other. The rest is just another of the film’s many stories.
Alone and abandoned
However, the many changes to the original setting in the adaptations since 1823 prove that it was difficult to change the basic idea of the novel. In fact, the structure of the novel is based on three parts; the letters of the explorer Robert Watson, the memoirs of Victor Frankenstein and the autobiographical narrative of the monster. What we have before us, then, is a novel within a novel, not just a single linear narrative.
In addition, Mary Shelley’s narrative is full of inconsistencies and unlikely coincidences. How can Victor Frankenstein make a two-and-a-half metre monster out of individual human body parts? How is it possible that, after less than a year, he speaks fluent English and is an expert in literature? There is an internal logic to the novel, but it is the logic of a dream. The popular additions and reworkings of the text since 1832 have succeeded, with new insertions and new insertions, in creating a parallel text that fills in the gaps of the original story and thus meets the expectations of the readers.
After 1832, Mary Shlelley no longer had any influence on these conversions. She never wrote a theatrical adaptation of the story herself, as she did not own the copyright to the stage adaptations of Frankenstein. However, she saw a theatrical adaptation of The Supposed Fate of Frankenstein and became convinced that the ladies fell unconscious during the viewing, and the theatre was in such disarray that some scenes had to be changed so that performances did not have to be cancelled.
“So I’m famous? Frankenstein is also very successful as a drama. I had a great time and it seems that the audience could hardly breathe from the tension.” The only thing that bothered her a little was the structure of events. So in 1831, when she rewrote the novel, she put all the popular and conservative interpretations back into it. The radical views of the events of 1816-1818 were definitively consigned to the past.
Today, the fame of the novel – which has been interpreted as, among other things, a feminist allegory of childbirth, the ecological wisdom of Mother Earth, a critique of the views of Romanticism, a response to the French Revolution, an attack on “masculine” science, the beginning of the fantastic novel, a key work of women’s horror and a reaction to the emergence of the industrial proletariat – has outlived all criticism.
Eight years after that fateful summer on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1816, where Mary Shelley conceived the idea of Frankenstein, all the male participants from Villa Diodati were dead. Dr Polidori – presumably as a result of a suicide attempt – had, according to the official version of the coroner’s report, suffered brain failure. Percy Shelley was caught in a storm off the coast of Italy in a sailing boat and drowned, Lord Byron died fighting for Greek independence and became a folk hero throughout Europe. Mary Shelley had six children, but only one survived, Percy Frorence. At the age of twenty-seven, a time when most people today are finishing their studies, she felt old. “I feel old, the way old old people feel. All I have left is my love for the dead.”
The remaining years were just a struggle to earn enough to live on. She had to ask her late husband’s family for help several times, but only under humiliating conditions. Slowly, everyone who had once been Percy’s friends abandoned her. In the end, she could only trust a few of her friends and she drifted further and further away from the world into the world of books. From 1839 she suffered from severe headaches and for a time was partially paralysed, which made it impossible for her to read and write. She died in London on 1 February 1851, aged 53. She is said to have suffered several strokes and doctors even claimed that she had a brain tumour. She died in a year when the World Exhibition highlighted the dominance of technology and science.
She was buried at St Peter’s Cemetery in Bournemouth. A few years later, a silver box containing part of her husband Percy’s heart was placed on her grave, and Mary always kept it in her bedside cabinet. Victorian England began to talk of a happy Shelley family, which in reality was never happy.
Most of the obituaries dedicated to her were short. In all of them, the writers stressed that she was a faithful and self-sacrificing wife to her husband Percy. This was true until the middle of the last century. Even the memorial plaques erected in the 19th century on the houses where she lived and worked – including Villa Diodati – mention only Byron and Shelley, but never her as the author of the novel.
However, Mary Shelley’s literary legacy is extensive. Shortly after her husband’s death, she produced a posthumous edition of his poems and letters. She also had his essays published. She also took up writing herself, but her novellas and short stories remained out of print for a long time. She was known only as the author of Frankenstein. But there is still something in her literary legacy that has survived, that has a life of its own and that Mary Shelley would never have recognised. It is what she called ‘the haunting product born in a dream’.
More horror
Frankenstein was, in fact, only the beginning of horror novels, as the following years saw the emergence of authors who added new things to this genre of literature. By problematising gender and sexuality, Abraham “Bram” Stoker, a former Dublin civil servant and manager of the Luceum Theatre from 1878 to 1905, wrote a horror novel called Dracula. He was an extremely serious man and never smiled in photographs. His novel is still the basis of hot-blooded debate more than a hundred years later. It was first published in 1897 and readers were horrified.
It was the Diamond Jubilee year of Queen Victoria’s reign, the height of the power of the British Empire and the year Sigmund Freud began his research into psychoanalysis. This was the year Stoker finished his journey through Transylvania, which he had begun seven years earlier. It was a journey through a landscape he had never visited. It all began on 8 March 1890, when he dreamt and later wrote on a piece of paper: “A young man meets a girl who wants to kiss him not on the mouth but on the neck.”
This nightmare dream was the beginning of the story of Dracula, only now it was a man who wanted to kiss a girl on the neck and drink her blood so he could live on. But the literary vampire – often an aristocrat with fashionable manners, a seductive voice and sensual lips – was actually born in the Villa Diorati 75 years before Stoker dreamt his nightmare dream. Dracula owes his birth to the evenings at the Villa Diorati, during which the participants told each other tales of horror. It will be recalled that Dr Polidori, Lord Byron’s personal physician, also told, and later wrote and published, his own tale of horror entitled The Vampire. The book was an instant bestseller, partly because everyone thought Byron had written it. Already in 1820, The Vampyre became the first novel about vampires in literary history.
But every genre of novel continues to evolve, and so in 1886 a book was published that was not about the demons and devils that surround us, but about the demons and devils within us. The 141-page book cost only one shilling and was entitled The Strange Tale of Dr Jekyll and Mr Jekyll. Hyde. It was Robert Louis Stevenson’s first commercial success. It was about a split personality, which was becoming more and more prominent at that time. The writers of the late 1880s, in their dual role of bourgeois and artist, discovering in themselves the ‘animal in human form’, were in fact obsessed with it.
But the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is not at all about the struggle between good and evil. As always, Stevenson – not too obviously – pointed out that something strange had happened because “the hypocrite Dr. Jekyll had let Mr. Hyde out of his cage”. Hyde”. Mr Hyde was as much a part of Dr Jekyll as Dr Jekyll was a part of Mr Hyde. Hyde. The tragedy of the story is that Dr Jekyll did not accept this and tried to win the game by separating the two parts of his personality.
The book took the reader from a normal world into a world of chaos and decay of people who did not live badly at all. Why was it so disturbing? Dr Jekyll is a respected doctor and pharmacist, but he has been involved in strange research, and he has had close contacts with the strange and brutal Mr Jekyll. Hyde. He tried to divide his personality into a good side and a bad side, and then the bad side of Mr. Hyde is the good side. Hyde’s bad side eventually prevailed over the likable Dr Jekyll.
But Mr. Hyde was not a beast running around beating up children from the start. He became more and more harsh because Dr Jekyll denied his existence, and this lasted until “the devil came roaring out of his dungeon”. The parallel with Frankenstein, who only became evil because of people, is more than obvious. Stevenson first encountered his story in his childhood, when he was tormented by nightmare dreams that never left him. The painter Fuseli also had a nightmare when he painted his painting The Nightmare. So there is hardly a good horror novel without dreams.
