Frankenstein

n.

1. An agency or creation that slips from the control of and ultimately destroys its creator: "How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect?" (Milton Friedman).
2. A monster having the appearance of a man.

[From Frankenstein, the creator of the artificial monster in Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.]

The clanking, bolted Boris Karloff, whose latest incarnation is the parodic Herman Munster, has become the popular image of the Frankenstein monster — in defiance of the illustration — accompanying the 1831 edition of Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, which depicts the creature as a far more human and personable-looking being. The monstrous brood of her creation is a hideous progeny that has found its way into cinema, popular fiction, and critical theory by taking literally the injunction in her introduction to the 1831 edition to ‘go forth and prosper’. The proliferation of the monstrous body is the anxiety that afflicts the mad scientist hero, Victor Frankenstein. His experimentation allegorizes not only the way in which science is not always in control of its metaphors, but also how men can lose control of the monsters they themselves create.

In preparation for his monstrous experiment Victor scours charnel houses, places for vivisection, and graveyards, for parts from which to assemble his New Adam or Modern Prometheus, which is the novel's subtitle. Body snatching was rendered obsolete a year after the third revised edition of Frankenstein by the 1832 Anatomy Act, which made available for dissection the bodies of unclaimed paupers. For this reason, the blasphemy of Victor's nefarious activities has impacted less on the modern reader than on Shelley's contemporaries. The monstrosity of his creation is predicated upon the dilemma that, despite his having selected the most beautiful parts, only God can harmonize the whole. The product of Victor's labours is a creature that is eight foot tall with yellow skin and straight black lips, from which he recoils in horror. Victor's reaction, in regard to skin colour, is replete with racist overtones. His creation is a mirror-image of colonization since, in wanting to reshape the world anew, he plunders the old. His aversion to his ‘hideous progeny’ can also be seen as a post-natal rejection of a newly-born infant by its mother. Some feminist critics have interpreted Frankenstein as an allegory of childbirth which, in this case, is the product of solitary male propagation, being the proverbial scientist's brain child.

Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley's mother, wrote about the importance of a maternal and nurturing presence in the upbringing of a child. Despite having mastered language and the range of human emotions, abandonment and the withdrawal of affection has warped Frankenstein's creation into the actuality of a monstrous self. Taking revenge on Victor, the creature murders his young brother William and pins the blame on a young family servant, Justine, who is eventually wrongly executed for the crime. Later he kills Victor's best friend Henry Clerval and his fiancé Elizabeth Lavenza. At the end of the novel, we are left to assume that he takes his own life in the Arctic wastes following the final confrontation between creator and created — which is foreshadowed by John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) from which the epigraph of the novel is taken. The trail of destruction and waste has been interpreted as a warning of the potential dangers of modern science. Had Victor not abandoned his original mentors, necromancers like Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, and Albertus Magnus, he might have created a harmless homunculus instead of the creature, who exacts revenge upon him.

The monster has been seen by Marxist critics as representing the new social order of the industrial proletariat, the destruction of the body politic by the mob in the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, and a Malthusian dystopia born of a monstrous growth in population (see Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798). The fear of breeding a race of monsters leads Victor to destroy the female mate he has created for his creature by dismembering ‘the thing’ he had put together. The perception of both creature and mate as subalterns, who are subhuman, is integral to the process of colonization and the concept of ‘thingification’ whereby the colonizer assumes a position of power and superiority over the colonized. Once it was known that the author was a woman, the novel become a trope for the monstrosities produced by the female imagination as a source of patriarchal anxiety. For this reason, Mary Shelley may have felt it to be incumbent upon herself to explain in her later introduction, ‘How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?’ (1831).

The impetus for completing the novel is thought by critics such as Marilyn Butler to have arisen from the interest of Mary and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley in current debates between the schools of vitalism and materialism as to the creation of life, experiments in galvanism on executed criminals, and a general vogue for automata. The genesis of the novel, which was first published in 1818, is explained in the preface to the revised 1831 edition, where Mary Shelley describes her participation in the ghost-story competition at the Villa Diodati in 1816. After a nocturnal conversation about Erasmus Darwin's apparent animation of a piece of vermicelli, she has a terrifying waking dream that gives her the idea for the creature.

The real nightmare described in the book, however, is the predicament of a being trapped in a monstrous body, who is sickened by his own image and shunned by human society. The text encourages the modern reader to reconsider the responsibilities of science, particularly in relation to such controversial areas as genetic engineering, cloning, and reproductive technologies. Victor's teratological experiment may even be read as a parable for the dangers of male science, which have escalated subsequently into the nuclear arms race. By questioning our received notions of aesthetics, particularly the way in which the creature is rejected by society on account of his appearance, the novel invites us to consider afresh the relationship we have with our own body and its interaction with the outside world.

— Marie Mulvey-Roberts

See also monsters.

The name of the creator of the archetypal zombielike artificial man, as well as the moniker given his creation. Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851), a classic of English occult fiction, was first published in London in 1818 in three volumes. It tells the story of how Dr. Victor Frankenstein creates an artificial man out of fragments of bodies from churchyards and dissecting rooms—a human form without a soul. The monster longs for love and sympathy but inspires only horror and loathing and becomes a powerful force for evil. It seeks revenge against its creator, murdering his friend, brother, and bride and ultimately bringing death to Frankenstein himself.

The book owes much to discussions of the time regarding the scientific work of Erasmus Darwin and to theories of spontaneous generation and the power of electricity, and is thus also an early science-fiction story. In her introduction Mary Shelley writes of the possibility that a corpse might be reanimated.

The book also contains powerful writing with an overall theme of the moral limits of science and technology. The subtitle refers to the question of whether science has the right to usurp the divine function of creation. (Prometheus was a mythological Greek who stole fire from heaven and thereafter suffered a horrible punishment from the god Zeus.) The book was also popular as a modern myth of the dangers of the industrial era and the many unplanned horrors created by human inventions manufactured to be a boon to the race.

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote a first draft of the story of Fran-kenstein in the company of Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, John Polidori, and Claire Clairmont when the group spent a week taking opium while vacationing at the Villa Diodati, Geneva, in the summer of 1816. Polidori's The Vampyre, came from a suggestion by Byron that weekend and generated interest in another monster theme, culminating in such later thrillers as Bram Stoker 's Dracula (1897).

Sources:

Baldrick, Chris. In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Florescu, Radu. In Search of Frankenstein. New York: New York Graphic Society, 1975.

Forry, Steven Earl. Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of Fran-kenstein from Mary Shelley to the Present. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990.

Glut, Donald F. The Frankenstein Catalog. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1984.

Troop, Martin. Mary Shelley's Monster. Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

The creator of a monster in a story, suggested in a dream, written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) for her future husband, the poet Shelley, and their friend Lord Byron during a wet holiday on Lake Geneva in August 1816. The monster, created from parts of dead men, represented the fearful power of science to create uncontrollable beings and forces that threaten and might destroy us. The titlepage of the novel (published in 1818) reads:








Mary Shelley gives the full story of how it came to be written in the 1831 preface to the novel.

Frankenstein has been reborn in many films (Daniels 1975), the first made in 1910 by the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison; sadly, this is lost, though there remain photographs of the first film monster: Charles Ogle. Boris Karloff played the monster in Universal Pictures' classic Frankenstein of 1931; his creator, Dr Frankenstein, vitalizes the monster most impressively by harnessing the powers of lightning with a wonderful apparatus. The same studio made seven sequels, while many other Frankenstein monsters appeared from other studios, demonstrating the power of a myth that represents the fears of our time.

(Published 1987)

— Richard L. Gregory

Bibliography
• Daniels, L. (1975). Living in Fear. (Reissued in 1977 as Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media.)
• Grylls, R. G. (1938). Mary Shelley: A Biography.

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - Frankenstein

Nederlands (Dutch)
Frankenstein (monster), monsterlijke creatie (die zijn maker vernietigt)

Français (French)
n. - Frankenstein

Deutsch (German)
n. - Monster (seinen Schöpfer vernichtendes Ungeheuer)

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - Φρανκενστάιν

Italiano (Italian)
Frankenstein

Português (Portuguese)
n. - Frankenstein (m) (romance de Mary Shelley)

Русский (Russian)
Франкенштейн

Español (Spanish)
n. - obra o trabajo que aterroriza a su creador, monstruo

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - Frankenstein

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
作法自毙的人, 法兰肯斯坦

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 作法自斃的人, 法蘭肯斯坦

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 프랑켄 슈타인 남작

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - フランケンシュタイン

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) فرانكنشتاين , عملا يسبب هلاك صاحبه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮מפלצת, דבר שנבנה והפך למפלצת, פרנקנשטיין‬

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