Frankenstein: A Cultural History
Hardcover • W.W. Norton • Price $24.95 • ISBN 0-393-05741-0

It’s alive — the monster made by man, the myth that began as an English girl’s nightmare in 1816, now looms as a universal symbol for the irresistible urge to push the frontiers of knowledge, and where that urge will take us.

How did we get from there to here — from a soon-out-of-print anonymous novel to a bolt-necked caricature recognized the world around? From a Gothic romance to a loaded reference in the public debate over genetic engineering? Leaving no B-grade film unturned, Susan Tyler Hitchcock chronicles the evolution of a cultural icon, exploring what the modern myth of Frankenstein and his monster tells us about our human aspirations — and our deepest terrors.

Read the story of the novel’s creation, a soap opera played out by Romantic poets in the storm-strewn foothills of the Swiss Alps. Learn how the monstrous story instantly imprinted on the public consciousness, thanks to dozens of stage adaptations in London, Paris, and New York by the 1840s. See how, in the earliest years of American filmmaking, Thomas Edison brought the monster to the silver screen, even before Boris Karloff gave him the face and walk and groans that the whole world loves to fear.

Shock Theater, Herman Munster, Young Frankenstein, Marvel Comics, The Rocky Horror Picture Show — the monster’s tale has been told over and over. As Hitchcock shows, every retelling reckons with the deepest and most disturbing rumblings of the human condition: our inborn urge to overstep the limits of human knowledge, and our restless fears of where such ambitions might lead us.

With each chapter, Hitchcock sets the monster’s evolution against the science and technology of the times, showing how the myth has been retold as a response, and sometimes a premonition, of cutting-edge capabilities. Today more than ever before, the myth of Frankenstein speaks to a human future ever more thrilling — and frightening — as genetic science advances toward the ability to create life.

Excerpt

As darkness falls on Halloween night, a child stands at a full-length mirror, admiring his appearance, practicing the look, becoming the character one more time before he goes out into the world. His face is greased green, his eyes circled with black. A jagged red scar intersected with black stitches has been painted across his cheek. A fake black crop of hair bulks up his skull. Vague stubs of aluminum foil attach in a homemade way to his neck. He steps back, then walks into the frame of the mirror, his arms out, stock-straight; his hands blindly groping; his legs clumping with a jerky, heavy, stiff-legged gait. He lets out a deep-throated groan. Perfect.

This is our monster. This is the monster we know so well, the monster we have taken into our hearts and lives, the monster we love to tremble and to cheer for, the monster we fear, the monster we seek, and the monster we have become. This is the monster made by man. This is the monster called by his creator’s name, if named at all. This is the monster known as Frankenstein.

In the world of gods and monsters, he is not so very old. His origins trace back to a single source. His story has been called the first myth of modern times. It emerged at a turning point in Western history, when the moral universe was shifting and when some dared to believe that advances in scientific knowledge promised humans dominion over that which for centuries had been God’s alone. The story of Frankenstein’s monster is a myth of claiming long-forbidden knowledge and facing the consequences.

Many belief systems include stories of a hero who dares to stand face to face with the powers of the universe on behalf of the human race. In his classic study of mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell called this the quintessential myth of the search for meaning in human life. The hero is rewarded for his extraordinary courage and sent back to earth with gifts that will enhance human life forever after. The central figure of such a myth shimmers forth in human consciousness and cultural history -- Odysseus, Jonah, Beowulf in Western culture; Ramayana in the Hindu tradition; Scarface in the Blackfeet Indian tradition; and many others from around the world. Their stories convey to all that transcendent wisdom and rewards come to those who find the courage to push beyond normal limits and perform the impossible.

Other myths warn against such rash acts. Prometheus, Adam and Eve, and Faust crossed the boundary line that divides the human from the divine, and for that rash act they were punished. In these myths, the moral order -- the set of rules for playing this game of life -- is dictated by the deities, whether Zeus or Yahweh. Even if it is part of human nature to want to, even to be able to, transgress the boundaries set by God, humans must agree to live within limits and follow the divine command. In this moral universe, life presents a perpetual temptation. There is always farther to go, but the reward of a long and serene life comes to those who hang back and toe the line.

These two archetypal myths are essentially human -- and essentially contradictory. One inspires a human being to cross over into unknown realms, and congratulates any who does so. The other limits human pursuit and experimentation, threatening punishment to anyone who dares. These two ancient myths represent two very different world views with different assumptions about right and wrong, good and evil, the nature and purpose of human existence, and the future of humankind. On the axis formed by these two contradictory myths hang the culture wars of history and of the present day. They reverberate through every debate over life-and-death matters such as cloning, genetic engineering, euthanasia, and abortion. Progressives applaud the human drive to extend knowledge. They can be represented in Prometheus, who risked his own safety to give fire to humankind. Conservatives respect boundaries beyond which human understanding cannot or should not go. They more closely resemble Adam, tempted and fallen but seeking reentry into grace through obedience.

Both mythic views can be teased out of Frankenstein, an observation that goes far to explain the novel’s everlasting appeal. Frankenstein the man is both hero and villain, applauded for his courage and genius at the same time that he is punished for his pride and transgression. His monster is to be both feared and pitied; for the humans he encounters, he is the ultimate other and at the same time a mirror of the deepest self.

All great myths balance irreconcilable opposites, and this very characteristic has kept Shelley’s novel alive, retold and reinterpreted over and over, through almost two centuries. It is on the one hand so true as to be universal and, on the other, malleable enough to conform to different times, places, peoples, and moments in history. In this story reverberate the monumental paradoxes of life and death, right and wrong, human and divine. They may not register as a trick-or-treater admires his green makeup on Halloween night, yet the monster that the child is portraying remains a player on the great stage of human history because his story continues to raise, not answer, questions.

1. How did you get so interested in Frankenstein?
I have had a fascination with and affinity for the British Romantic poets forever. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and through that work I came to know and admire his wife, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. For about a decade I taught writing and literature to engineering students at the University of Virginia, and it happened that my class was reading Frankenstein in late October. I wore a Frankenstein monster mask to class one day, and we spent the entire hour comparing the students’ cultural assumptions about Frankenstein with the novel itself. That got me thinking: How did we get from there to here? How did a novel written by a teenager in 1816 become this world-recognized cultural icon? My book answers that question.

2. Your interest ranges beyond the novel, then?
I am fascinated with the literary original and equally fascinated with what we have done with it, and why. That class, which must have been in the early 1980s, was the start of my Frankenstein collection. By now, I own hundreds of books, magazines, comic books, and objects—from tea towels to boxer shorts, door decorations to jewelry—adorned with the monster’s image. I scan the Internet daily for appearances of the monster and post those of interest on my blog, Monster Sightings. [Patrick: make this a live link: http://www.monstersightings.blogspot.com] I honor every expression of the myth of Frankenstein, no matter how tawdry or superficial, because all show how broadly and deeply its meaning runs in the human imagination.

3. What do you think the myth of Frankenstein means?
The myth of the monster made by man explores the human drive to push beyond the limits of knowledge. That drive necessarily carries us into realms of risk and danger. Society has a love-hate relationship with this instinct. On the one hand, it is essential to invention and discovery; on the other hand, it may lead us down the road to unpredictably disastrous consequences. The monster embodies this ambivalence. The monster comes from an even deeper well of meaning, however, akin to what Carl Jung called the archetype of the shadow: the primitive life-force, the dark underbelly of our ideal and rational self which may be quieted or ignored in orderly society but which rears up and shows itself in times of chaos or social change.

4. What are your favorite versions of Frankenstein?
Every one has something to offer. I’m fascinated by the 1910 Edison film, which used mirrors to symbolize the near-identity of the creator and his creature. Karloff’s evocation of the monster, which locked certain elements into the myth that did not come from the novel, is at its finest in Bride of Frankenstein, an eloquent and witty morality play. A contemporary playwright, Barbara Field, wrote a version of the story, Playing with Fire, in which the young and old Victor Frankenstein interact with the just-born creature and the monster he becomes. There are so many interesting versions of the myth, as well as many works of art and literature inspired by it. I couldn’t even include all that interest me in my book.

Reviewers' comments

... Hitchcock's journey down the murky back alleys of this saga began one Halloween at the University of Virginia, when she was scheduled to teach Shelley's novel in her literature class and wore a "lurid green face mask" to school. . . . Her text grows out of such a fertile ground of scholarly research that any chapter might blossom into another volume.

   Thus it's all the more remarkable that this book is so much fun. . . . Moving gracefully from novel to film to metaphor, she spends little time theorizing. Her "cultural history" is so lively that at first you may decide it lacks scholarly ballast and slant. Soon, however, one sees that the author's admirable restraint serves to advance and streamline the text. In the last chapters, while addressing how academic criticism opened the door to "Frankenstein," Hitchcock's own work confirms the value of cultural history as a discipline.

—Michael Sims, LA Times, October 7, 2007

Read the whole review.

Susan Tyler Hitchcock has a Frankenstein problem — just look in her closet. You'll find 150 items of monster memorabilia at last count, from tea towels and aprons to socks and cereal boxes. "I admit it," says Hitchcock, author of the new book Frankenstein: A Cultural History. "This has been an obsession."

     What is it about Frankenstein that has fascinated us for generations? "Frankenstein is about daring to go where your mind takes you," Hitchcock says. "But that can be dangerous, and our society has a whole set of rules and regulations to keep us from doing that." In a world of cloning, computers, stem cells, and transplants, it's not surprising that the monster seems even more alive today than it did back at the dawn of the electrical age.

—Jennifer Hillner, Wired, October 2007

Read the whole article.

Hitchcock's study draws on eclectic sources—scientific debate, comic books, and even punk music—to stitch together a compelling text.

—Chris Schonberger, Entertainment Weekly, October 12, 2007

A thoroughly entertaining look at the iconic monster.
How did the unwed, 18-year-old mother of a toddler come to invent this nightmare creature with neck bolts, flattop head and that power unibrow? Hitchcock (Mad Mary Lamb: Lunacy and Murder in Literary London, 2005, etc.) suggests that Mary Shelley, soul mate of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, daughter of radical philosopher William Godwin and pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, had heard about ghoulish experiments with electricity on corpses of criminals, which momentarily seemed to twitch back to life. She may also have drawn inspiration from her own life-altering trauma in 1815 — the year before she thought of Frankenstein’s monster — when her first baby died after less then a month. Hitchcock fondly details how a novel prompted by a summer of reading ghost stories in Geneva has imbedded itself in popular culture. Frankenstein inspired hundreds of stage productions before the classic 1931 film and the not-so-classic ’60s TV series The Munsters, Young Frankenstein and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The author smoothly charts the monster’s transformation from cosmic and creepy to comic and campy, alongside Shelley’s slow evolution from overlooked to appreciated novelist. One memorable section details how Boris Karloff’s daughter Sara successfully sued Universal Studios for licensing products with his likeness on them; Hitchcock slyly notes that the monster once again broke free from its creator. In addition to selling 50,000 copies a year in America alone, Frankenstein lives on as a reference point in public discussions of genetic engineering and cloning. But the author doesn’t neglect one of the monster’s most enduring non-academic legacies: its ubiquity at Halloween.
Cogent vivisection of a literary legend animated by the universal human fascination with the dark side.
— Kirkus Reviews, August 2007

Literary historian Hitchcock (Mad Mary Lamb: Lunacy and Murder in Literary London) leads readers on a guided tour of Frankenstein appearances in this colorful and consistently entertaining narrative. The history begins, appropriately, with the monster's unlikely creation by Mary Shelley as a result of a ghost story challenge (also taken up by John William Polidori, whose tale of a vampyre would later inspire Bram Stoker). Hitchcock then lays bare the publishing world of the 19th century, a veritable Wild West of unauthorized stage adaptations, parodies and continuations in which Frankenstein thrived. James Whale's Karloff classic gets its due, as do the disturbing and innovative 1910 Edison Company production and the 1952 live television broadcast starring a drunk Lon Chaney Jr. Running throughout the book is the parallel story of the invocation of Frankenstein in the public discourse as a metaphor for subjects ranging from the Crimean war to genetically modified organisms. While some Frankenstein dilettantes might find the narrow focus of the book somewhat tedious, there are enough strange and delightful anecdotes to keep most readers engaged. B&w illus.
— Publishers Weekly, August 2007

Susan Tyler Hitchcock has given us the monster we have been waiting for: the experiment gone awry, the abandoned child, the sympathetic wretch who speaks like Milton, the lumbering mute, the bolt-necked killer. Hitchcock's wonderful survey of the nearly 200-year life of this monster helps us understand why we cannot forget him. An electrifying read.
— Ashton Nichols, Curley Professor of English Literature, Dickinson College

As one who has spent over a half century reading, viewing, musing upon (and once even abusing) the great myth of Frankenstein, I found Frankenstein: A Cultural History to be not only a very good read, but also an intellectually engaging experience. I recommend it highly to both general and scholarly readers alike.
— R. H. W. Dillard, professor of English, Hollins University, and author of Horror Films and Omniphobia

What the world has done with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein makes for a story often as fascinating as the one she originally crafted — and sometimes as horrifying as well. In Frankenstein: A Cultural History Susan Tyler Hitchcock ably tells that story in a clear, wide-ranging, and engaging narrative.
— Paul A. Cantor, Barrett Professor of English, University of Virginia, and author of Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization

This wonderful book takes us from the year 1816 up until yesterday! ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley — how her tale has been kept alive (It’s alive! It’s alive!!) in so many ways throughout all these years.
Madame Hitchcock, I’m nominating you for recipient of the Monster Maker Medal for the year 2007 A.D.!
—Zacherley

Susan Tyler Hitchcock’s book is very well done.
— Bela Lugosi, Jr.

Neither Mary Shelley nor my father, Boris Karloff, could ever have imagined the impact the Frankenstein story would have on our culture and on cinema history. It is a great honor to have my father included in Susan Tyler Hitchcock's well-researched and well-written book.
—Sara Karloff

I am very impressed with the detail and breadth of coverage on both the novel and its later incarnations.

—Charles Robinson, Professor of English, University of Delaware, and editor of The Frankenstein Notebooks

In this wide-ranging, incisively written and extraordinarily informative history, Susan Tyler Hitchcock analyzes and explains the resonance of one of our culture's most enduring myths: the tale of the man-made monster. Her book will be a useful guide for students of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and its descendants, as well as for the many general readers who have always been drawn to this fascinating story.
—Sandra M. Gilbert, Distinguished Professor Emerita of English, University of California, Davis, and coauthor of The Madwoman in the Attic

Related Links

Susan Tyler Hitchcock suggests these websites to those who are interested in her book, Frankenstein: A Cultural History.

• The National Library of Medicine’s 1997 exhibit, Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature
• Bakken Library and Museum Exhibition of Frankenstein in medical history
• Text of the novel (1831 edition), University of Virginia Electronic Text Center
• UPenn’s rich Frankenstein site, masterminded by Stuart Curran and his students
• Edison’s 1910 Frankenstein
• Edgar Winter Group plays Frankenstein, 1973
• Official site of The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein
• The Official Boris Karloff site