The play Frankenstein, written by Mary Shelley in 1818, has impacted popular culture for almost 200 years but it is more than a work of gothic horror that has been adapted many times.
Origin of the monster
Legends are born among legends and on the night of June 17, 1816, one began to emerge, that of Frankenstein, who after an afternoon of rain, confined Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Pollidori, Claire Clairmont y Percy Bysshe Shelley in a villa in Switzerland and after reading fantastic horror stories from German romanticism, the famous English writer began to shape what would later become her most famous work.
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However, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus – the full name of the novel – did not see the light of day until 1818 and although it had a moderate success, due to being considered “just another” of the Gothic works, it did not reach notable importance until 1831, when this literary period ended and Shelley was able to have a second artistic life thanks to the depth of his creation that, beyond talking about a monster, talks about humanity, its fears in a philosophical environment. of constant moral struggle.
Regarding the almost mythical anecdote of the town, the author commented in her prologue of the 31st that she sought to achieve “A story that speaks of the mysterious fears of our own nature and? “would awaken the most intense of terrors, a story that would make the reader afraid to look around, that would freeze the blood and accelerate the heartbeat.”in such a way that he configured a monster with all these peculiarities typical of his time.
The modern Prometheus and his ancestral myth
The subtitle of the novel —The modern Prometheus— is no coincidence: Mary Shelley wanted to place her protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, within a mythical tradition that embodies the search for forbidden knowledge and the punishment for defying the limits imposed on humans. In that sense, Prometheus, in Greek mythology, He is the titan who steals the fire of the gods to give it to men; an act of compassion, but also of defiance to Zeus, who condemns him to suffer eternally.
Likewise, Frankenstein steal the “fire” of modern gods: the power to create life, an act that previously belonged only to divinity. Shelley translates the myth into the language of science of his time with the electricity, anatomy, experimentation, and turns the mythical figure of the titan into an enlightened scientist, a symbol of rationalist ambition and the desire to dominate nature.
Two monsters, one work
Throughout the entire work, the reader faces a dilemma and that is to shed light on who the true monster is, in such a way that there are two: Victor and his creation.
Terror generally makes visible the fears of the masses and in an era of scientific prominence, Victor Frankenstein is a man who with his intellectual arrogance He plays at being god, at giving life and also being the origin of horror, because when he sees the result of his creation he is shocked and despises it, thus setting the beginning of the terror of giving life without responsibility, that is, an ethical monster.
On the other hand, the creature stands out, who is born as a tabula rasa, open to affection and knowing the world from scratch, but after receiving the back of his creator and society for his ugly appearance, he becomes violent, becomes a murderer and finally a hermit.
“I did good and misfortune was my reward” is one of the most notable passages of the creature that highlight that its violence has its genesis in rejection.
In such a way that Frankenstein and the creature are two parts of the same monster, the human.
Shelley’s vision
The author proposes that this monstrosity is not a question of appearance but of the failures of society, the abandonment and lack of empathy that make up monsters, a premise that seems valid in societies to this day.
These ideas haunted Shelley’s head for a long time and although less known, the author wrote several stories such as The Immortal Mortal, The Transformation and Roger Dodsworth, as well as a novel titled The Last Man considered a set of “Frankensteinean” works by scholars of her work, who claim that they expand the conversation on the topics addressed in her 1818 work.
The appearance of the monster
Throughout different film adaptations, several proposals have been presented for what the creature created by Victor Frankenstein looks like; Mary Shelley describes her as a “grotesque and disproportionate figure”, which has translucent skin that allows her muscles to be seen, more than two meters high.
But it is the appearance of Boris Karloff in the 1931 film Frankenstein, produced by Universal Pictures and directed by James Whale, the image of the green monster that has flooded popular culture, although it is not seen in the film because it is black and white, but the production put that color makeup on the actor, to give the sickly and cadaverous tone they were looking for.
Del Toro and Frankenstein in literature
The seventh art has somewhat eclipsed the literary side of Guillermo del Toro and although his creation The Strain is very famous, together with Chuck Hoghan, the man from Guadalajara had a written approach in a Spanish edition of the work.
This is Frankenstein Annotated, which compiles all the footnotes made by Leslie S. Klinger, who in the original English edition also included countless illustrations from the original English edition.
In this book published by the Akal publishing house, Guillermo del Toro tells of his first contact with Shelley’s work: “it was through the movies, like almost everyone else. I marveled at Karloff and the creation of Whale,” he writes, but he also tells what his first approach to the work was like. “It was in my teens when I found a paperback edition.”
In his participation he also relates that the story of the creature made him cry: “I cried for the monster and admired his thirst for revenge. He spoke to me about the essential contradictions of the spirit and the world. And beyond all the tragedy, a devastating idea for me arose: the villain of the work was life. “Being” was the definitive punishment and the only blessing we received. And in the absence of love, it was Hell.”
Del Toro and his vision of the monster
The man from Guadalajara also identifies with Frankenstein, according to his text, as he feels like a “strange” with the society that surrounded him and accurately describes the work as “the first epistolary novel” that he read.
Finally he makes it clear that he has a great conception of literature and its history, as he compares Shelley to Goethe when he says: “he seems to have an innate understanding of the arrogance of knowledge. He employs surgery, galvanism and chemistry only to grant an audience to the solitary wretch that we all are. The impossibility of death is, for me, the greatest of tragedies for the monster: the fact that his creator did him good and gave him a body that endures despite him; his person, his lonely and desperate person.