Hello, and welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. One of the oldest
works of science fiction. Many people would call it the first work of science
fiction, and a story that has been told and retold and retold again,
both under its actual name and in other versions, is the story of Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley. In just a few weeks, we have yet another Frankenstein
movie coming out, Lisa Frankenstein, as I've come to understand, this is
a was now being referred to as a coming of rage movie, in the
same idea as Megan's Body and other things like that. I don't know too
many of the details, but it was a good reminder to me that Frankenstein
is such a foundational story for so many of the kind of things we talk
about in this podcast. I had never actually read the book. Denie out
written the Star Wars. We keep finding new things she has expertise in,
but she mentioned that she had done her doctoral work in the literature of eighteenth
and nineteenth century England, particularly in terms of comics and the like, but
also had a lot of experience with other parts of literature, and so when
I said, hey, I would actually love to do something on the book
Frankenstein, Danielle was willing to step up. So Danielle, thank you so
much for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me. I love Mary
Shelley. She's actually has a little section in my thesis, not for Frankenstein
but one of her other works, The Last Man. But I read Frankenstein
first when I was like sixteen years old, and I don't know if I
appreciated it as much as I should have back then. But the more I
interacted with it, the older I got, the more I understood some of
the themes a little bit better, and I really enjoyed it now. Nice
Well, and for those of you who haven't read the book, don't worry
about it. This is kind of going to be two things. One is
it's going to be an introduction to the book itself and the very I mean
it is a book tailor made for superhero ethics. It's very much an exploration
of scientific ethics and all sorts of things around that and you know, questions
that are fundamental to science fiction in general. But also we're going to talk
about why is it that? Because I had always gotten a sense that the
story is misunderstood, but reading the book, it was vastly different than even
I was expecting, and so we're going to talk a lot about why that
is that this book is so different than how it's perceived in general culture or
even by those who think they're kind of doing more like accurate takes on it
and stuff like that. So, Denia, let me first get started with
tell us a little bit more about your background with the literature of this period
and works like Frankenstein. Well, I have an undergrad degree in English literature
and a lot of the classes I took for that were eighteenth nineteenth century British
literature, and then I have a master's degree in book publishing and my project
for that was actually doing an edited version of an eighteenth century novel, British
novel that came out. And so even though it wasn't Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or
any of her works at all, it was from an earlier period, it
did get me into the art of kind of revitalizing old texts and dealing with
them and how to how to explain them, I guess in a way that
the modern reader would understand. And then my PhD thesis was on the literature
of that period from a more visual perspective, but I did have to interact
with some of the textual aspects of it and how the textual and the visual
kind of meet in the middle. And so when I say that I dealt
with Mary Shelley a bit for my thesis. It was because the periodical that
I centered my thesis around called The Glass Looking Glass. It was a character
periodical and a visual caricature. So it was kind of like the early comic
strips, and one image they have in there is an image making fun of
Mary Shelley's the Last Man, and in the process they end up making a
lot of racist using a lot of racist stereotypes because they have a black woman
depicted as the last woman instead of the last man. And it was just
a job, a job at multiple different people and things, And that's kind
of got me more involved in Mary Shelley's life. I can see that,
yeah that and tell us a little bit about her. Yeah, well,
what to say about Mary Shelley other than she was It should be considered still
to this day, the mother of science fiction. This is one of the
if not the earliest, examples of a science fiction book, and it pains
me every time I see people say that some man who came along later was
actually as the father of science fiction, Like, yeah, maybe, but
she was the mother and she came first. And what's so interesting about her
life, I think is just that she surrounded herself by literary people, and
her husband was Percy Shelley, and her friends were like Lord Byron and several
others who were very literally her father himself was also her mother was one of
the early feminists of the age, and she came from a very literate background
and she continued that throughout throughout her life. But her life is just I
don't know it it's kind of sad. I mean, people know, I
don't know. People know that Percy died in a shipwreck and she had children
with him who also died. I think they only had one surviving child.
But he also their relationship was very like open kind of and are there's some
confusion about how happy she was about that, whether or not she liked that,
or whether or not she didn't, and whether it was him kind of
controlling that and wanting to live that life and forcing it on her, or
whether she went along with it willingly. And there's a book I read recently
called Mary or the birth of Frankenstein, and it's kind of a fictionalized account
of her life during the time where Frankenstein was conceptualized, and it is kind
of told the perspective of when she was younger and then when she was coming
up with Frankenstein. And it's very interesting. I learned a lot about her
that I didn't know, but it all comes to the point of her life
just being remarkable but also tragic. Yeah, and I think that's reflected so
much in Frankenstein. One thing, I know much less about her than you
do. But first, one thing just not kind of help groundless for people
when the age we're talking about is kind of the early part of the nineteenth
century. The book is first published in eighteen eighteen. And one thing I've
got to know Aboutter is not only is she the mother of science fiction,
but in many ways she's kind of the original Goth. I mean, forgetting
about the Goth tribes. She was deeply fascinated by death. As you pointed
out, there are a lot of different stories about her sexuality and how much
was her choice and how much was others. But one of the prevailing stories
about her, and I don't know if this is historically exactly accurate, but
I think the fact that it was considered a very believable story says a lot
of her interest in death is that she had her first sextual encounter in a
cemetery on her mother's grave and spoke positively about it, like it was not
meant as a like, you know, get back in her mother, but
a communing with of some sort. And I think that really comes out in
this book, because obviously this book is very much about the attempt to overcome
death and what that means and the ethics of that and things like that.
And one of the things I think that it's sort of weird because I want
to talk about the book, and I want to talk about the book and
about the conversations around the book, and so part of me feels like we
should just get to explaining the book itself, and I want to start with
this because I think there is so much confusion about it, and tell me
if I'm correct in this. One of the things that I think really marks
the book is, for the most part it is told from Frankenstein's perspective sort
of. It is a collect The book is, in theory a collection of
letters in which a British sea captain is writing to I think his sister,
and then he explains how bored he is, how much he wants a true
friend, and then he explains that this guy Frankenstein comes along, and then
he writes this like two hundred page letter in which he says, and now
here's everything Frankenstein told to me. And in the course of that, Frankenstein
dictates word for word letters that were written to him. So there are letters
within letters within letters within this book. But I and you know, one
of the biggest questions there's always about, like who is the monster in this
book? Is it the monster that Frankenstein creates with monster there in quotes,
or is it Frankenstein himself? And I was really trying hard to try and
read this through the eyes of someone writing it at the time, not as
I would look back on it now. But obviously I can't separate that bias
out entirely. But where I'm going all this is that it feels to me
like one of the main points of the book is that Frankenstein is himself a
deeply unreliable narrator, and as the reader were meant to not only judge Frankenstein
by what he actually says, but to pick up all of the clues and
to figure out there's a lot of ways in which his descriptions of things,
particularly the morality of it, are things that we shouldn't necessarily take word for
word because we are supposed to be seeing the flaws in him and his you
know, mego media is the wrong word, but you know, just his
his very kind of self serving version of the narrative in some ways. Is
that accurate? And is that fit? Kind of uh? Is this a
literary style that would have made sense at the time or was this kind of
a really revolutionary thing? I think it's it's kind of both. Well,
I can't answer this without going back to the fact that or stating the fact
that Frankenstein was published anonymously at first, and so I think a lot of
credit was given to Percy and people didn't really know like it was. It
was confusing at first, And sorry, I lost my train of thought just
on that quickly. I'm correct, that was not uncommon, like Jane Austen
also was published anonymously, right, because the idea of a woman writing these
things was not well regarded at that time. No lots of women published under
their own names. But you did have occasionally at times it would be published
just anonymously for various reasons. And so occasionally you'd have a female author who
chose to publish anonyously, and you also have male authors who did the same.
So, for example, there's a book that came out in early nineteenth
century before Frankenstein, called the Scottish Chiefs, and that was published anonymously,
and the person who got credit for it, or the person that people tried
to put the credit on, was Sir Walter Scott. And then eventually Jane
Porter, who was the actual author, she had the book published again under
her name, and then of course then it started getting a lot of criticisms
that it didn't get when Sir Walter Scott was thought to have been the writer.
So you have a lot of various reasons for doing it. But there
were other female authors who published under their own names. It just you know,
there were given takes to it. Yeah, and some of them did
make have a little bit of a career out of it too, But yeah,
so he was various off of that. But with Mary Shelley, to
go back to the original point is that it was kind of revolutionary, and
it was also pretty standard. A lot of early nineteenth century novels deal heavily
with letters, A lot of Jane Austin novels deal with letters, and so
that kind of meta style of like what is a letter what isn't is pretty
common for the time. But the perspective is interesting, and I would I
don't know if I would say that that in itself is revolutionary, but I
do agree with your point of it being that he is an unreliable narrator,
and I think that that's absolutely the truth because I think even through his narration,
even though it's biased and unreliable, you can still tell that the monster
isn't really a monster, like he's a monster in name, but he's also
a human. He's this he's this being that has been created and then been
left tiffined for himself and with no care, no guidance from his creator,
and he loves his creator when he's first welcomed into this world, and to
see his creator absolutely terrified of him and not wanting to have anything to do
with him is uh is I think the revolutionary part of this story, and
you can you can see that so much in the narration, even when it's
not from his perspective, and that to me is very very Mary Shelley and
her her her pain and a lot of her experiences coming through that monster.
It's like, you've created this thing. And I, now, this is
my own interpretation of it. I don't really I haven't read a lot about
you know, criticism about you know, literary essays about Mary Shelley's works,
But I do you see it as kind of like reflective of her relationships with
other people in her life, Like maybe she viewed herself a little bit as
the monsters, like you created this, you created me, and you've just
left me to go and no one to care for me. And then there's
also theories about it being partially about her child, who died when she was
just an infant, and how like she's created this thing and it's just gone
off and she spends the rest of her life like kind of looking for it
and never finding it. Yeah. Well, so let's go into the actual
story itself, and I'll kind of give my best version of a brief summary
of it, and then we can talk about these details for sure. So
because I think as you listen to this, for those of you who haven't
read the book, if you mostly know the story through like the original movies
or some of the kind of parody, or you know, like versions of
it, like Young Frankenstein, Frankenstein by the Great mal Brooks, or you
know, other ways, when the story has been reached, hold again and
again. Some of this is gonna sound familiar. Some of this may sound
very different. So we open, as I said, with this Captain Walton,
who's who has been writing letters to his sister. He encounters this person
who uh not to like the third letter about him. Do we learn that
he is actually doctor Frankenstein, or he's not a doctor, he's a student
Frankenstein. Victor Frankenstein, who is German Austrian. He's from Geneva. He
has been he was very smart. He grew up in kind of a nice
middle class home. And he's very interested in He's kind of like the bad
boy scientist of a more modern sci fi story, you know, in that
he is very bored by conventional study. He wants to study the unconventional.
And among other things, he's very interested in death. And he believes that
he can he can undo death. He comes to believe that. And and
here's some ways where it's interesting how this is both kind of the creation of
science fiction, but there are a lot of science fiction that clearly haven't been
invented yet. Because I was expecting like multiple chapters on him trying to figure
out a way to do this and then there being problems and there being that
one great breakthrough moment where he figures out how to do it, and is
he's so nervous and will it happen? There's none of that. There's none
of the like he admits that he basically sows this body together from body parts
found in graves, but that's done very it's a very kind of blinking.
You miss it when you think about the real horror of that. And there's
no egor there's no like bolt of lightning that has to hit the machinery to
power everything all that. Apparently in later additions to the stories, he just
doesn't and according to his narrative, he attempts to make a human being that's
even more beautiful than the normal human being, Like he doesn't make this to
look monstrous, and it is when he creates that human being, although who's
like even more and is also like much much taller than the average human being.
The being comes to life, and it opens its eyes, and it
is simply by looking at its eyes and seeing this like yellow, and then
he casts it very sort of demonic, devilish light that he immediately knows it's
a monster and he immediately runs away. I think we're supposed to what you
just said kind of reinforces this think that, like, how could you do,
like how we're supposed to judge him in that moment, Like, how
could you possibly think that, like just because of the color of its eye
it was a horrible and monstrous et cetera. And here again if you're expecting
that, Like so the monster breaks out and tries to fight him. No,
like, the monster doesn't appear again until two years later, when he
is he was studying somewhere else, but he's gone back to Geneva to be
with his family, in part because one thing they've found out is that his
little brother has been killed, and he's a good friend of the family named
Justine Is. Everyone thinks that she's committed the murder. There's some stuff about
how she is described that really I think is not necessarily social commentary as much
just we can read it as a huh, those were the times, I
guess because she's from a poorer family and she's taken in kind of like a
ward, but is also been expected to be a servant, and that's treated
as very charitable that they train her to be a servant. And I was
reading that today, like at some level at charity slash child labor who goes
okay, fine, but she is believed to be the murderer. Meanwhile,
there's a character named Elizabeth who is has also been adopted by the family and
raised. In the original version of the book, she is his cousin,
which again is sort of a like interesting eyebrow raising today because his mother explicitly
says he wants these two to grow up and be in love and be married
to each other. Apparently, in later versions published a few years later,
the fact that she was a cousin is removed, So this was You can
say whatever you want to say about that, but the point is that the
cousin's very upset. He is, like Paramour in the future, is very
upset, and Frankenstein is the only one who realizes that this murder must have
been committed by the monster, and so he goes through things he thinks about
telling someone. He doesn't think anyone will believe him, and so Justine winds
up being executed because there's nothing that she can do, and there's some harrowing
stuff about how much the church harasses her during this, forcing her to confess.
But he does nothing. He goes to try and continue his studies,
but he's haunted by this, and eventually he is he comes into a confrontation
with the monster. And if you're expecting now the Frankenstein monster that goes like,
GA, you know, I help me, that is one hundred percent
not what it is. The monster is incredibly eloquent, speaks in just as
many Why use one word when you can use five phrases that Frankenstein himself uses,
which I have a question later about if this is a Charles Dickens kind
of thing of you get paid by the word, or that's just the style
of the times. But he's very eloquent, and he really kind of lays
out this case against Frankenstein of as you said, I woke up and I
loved you and I wanted to love you, but you abandoned me. And
then he tells this harding story of how he went off into the woods to
try and hide, and he eventually sort of found this family. And apparently
he has like plus twenty on his stealth roles as well as plus twenty five
on his eavesdropping rolls because he's able to hide from this refugee family. While
listening to all their conversations we learn in incredible I think, very unnecessary,
but maybe it's important be foreshadowing detail detail about why this family of refugees and
that there's a blind old man, and that Frankenstein's creation starts to think that
if I can talk to that blind man, he will be able to help
me, because I've come to think of all these people as my friends.
He won't see my monstrosity. He'll be able to see past that and see
the real me, see that I'm not a monster, and hopefully that I
will be fine. And he has a good conversation with the father. They're
almost about to break through when the son comes back in and just goes like,
oh my god, this is a monster. He's attacking my father.
What can I do? And franken Stin's creation makes a point to say that
he does not fight back. He just goes off into the you know,
he hides. He takes the blows, but it's a real sort of mental
shattering moment for him, and so he goes off into the woods and resolves
that he will have revenge upon Frankenstein. And at this point now we have
not only the first science fiction and the first goth but also the first villain
origin story where we have a lot of sympathy for the villain. But he
then goes off the Deep Bend and he goes to Frankenstein, and at the
end of this he says like, I will I will stop killing your family.
I will stop targeting you if you will just make me a partner,
make me a wife, another dead creation like me that you bring to life,
and then the two of us will go off into the wildness of the
world, never to be seen by mortal man again, and everything will be
fine. And Frankenstein almost creates this creature, but then he sees the monster
the creation again at the very end decides he can't destroys the body, at
which point Frankenstein's creation is like, Okay, well we can't do this,
and more people are killed, and eventually they chase each other around the world.
Eventually we get to the Arctic Circle, which is where Frankenstein finally meets
Walton and the circle has now come all the way around, and tells Walton
the whole tale and says, I am about to die, but you must
finish off the monster, and in classic eighteenth century literature style, Frankenstein our
nineteenth century literature style, Frankenstein then just dies of exhaustion, a broken heart,
whatever you want to call it, being a wronged woman. I think
it's another description of that disease in nineteenth century literature. And then the monster
winds up killing himself as well, And so Walton is now relaying this whole
sad, tragic story to his sister. Did I miss out on anything?
Is that a very good A lot of details I missed, obviously, But
does that think it gives a clear picture of the story? No, that's
a really great summary. Yeah. Yeah, So let me just start with
kind of the more lighthearted question and then get into the actual details of it.
This book is incredibly wordy. None of it feels to me the way
actual people would talk to each other. And I don't know if that is
just because those were the dialects and the sort of linguistic tropes people used at
the time. Or to what extent it was somewhat expected in literature, either
because literature were supposed to be more high minded and more like poetic, or
because of the sort of Charles Dickens way. It's being published in periodicals and
people are being paid by the word, so they add as many words as
they can. Yeah, I think it's a little mixture. It's definitely like
her style of writing. The wordiness is not uncommon during the nineteenth century.
It was just like that. And how much it has to do with it
needing to be wordy to fill space and also to depending on how they would
get paid, is up to debate. But I do know that serialized publishing
was very popular during that time, and so what you would have is either
like with Dickens, sometimes it would originally be published in periodicals short sections and
then eventually put into books. Other times it would be published in volumes.
So like the Scottish chiefs I mentioned earlier, has nothing to do with this,
but it was published within like three or four volumes, and the amount
of volumes. What's interesting during this time is the amount of volumes could change
per edition, so like a first edition of something the first time it was
printed could have two volumes, and then when it's published a second time it
could have three, and so on and so forth, and things would change
between them as well. It's not as it wasn't as kind of standardized as
it is now. And yeah, so it really is up to debate.
But I will say the dialogue itself is not that different from other works of
the time, so it really is just kind of like, you know,
it's a product of its time. Okay, that makes sense. That makes
sense. So what do you think Mary Shelley is saying with this book?
Well, I am always struck when I first read it, I guess,
or maybe like the second time when I actually kind of understood it a little
bit more. I'm just always struck by how tragic the monster or the creation's
life is and how how prominent that is to the story. And you can
just feel like the sadness of it. And if you see, there are
play's theater adaptations of the book, and probably the most well known is the
one with Benedict Cumberbatch. He and I forget the other actor's name, but
he also played Sherlock in the US elementary show. They switched roles like every
night, so one night one of them would play the monster. The other
night the other one to play the monster. And that was probably for me,
the first time that I really hit like got the emotional aspect of it
to the extreme that I did. Is but they're all they're using the same
stuff from the book, so it's it's all there. Yeah, It's just
the monster's life is so tragic, and I really think that he is the
like truly kind of like a not really a villain of this story. He's
he's the product of his creation, of his creator. Truly, I think
he is maybe Frankenstein sees the worst of himself in this and he can't face
it and that's why he abandons it. And that it maybe like the creation
is a reflection of ourselves, and originally it is the most pure reflection of
ourselves. And I think maybe that is a little bit of what she's getting
at, maybe a little like self reflection and how we can take all of
our trauma and all of our the things that have happened to us and create
something like that and view it as a monster, but it's not really a
monster if it's a part of us. Yeah, Yeah, I mean,
one thing I'm really struck by is I think how Frankenstein himself, Victor is
so self delusional really in a lot of way, not in a kind of
like he's seeing Little Green Man or something, but in terms of he frames
things where you know, it's if anyone's had the experience We're talking to a
friend and you're like, oh my god, can you believe what my girlfriend
just did to me? All I did was like, you know, leave
her by the side of the road with all of her clothes and drive off.
And now she's so mad at me, and I just don't get it,
and you're like, dude, of course they're mad at you, and
like to me, he tells this harrowing story of how you know, his
creation is very clear, clearly saying I only became vicious and murderous because of
all these things that happened to me. But the thing that's so by that
understanding, like this seems a pretty clear like nurture verse nature idea. So
by that understanding creating this bride of Frankenstein, which is a very misnomer and
kind of shows already the like we're calling Frankenstein the wrong thing, let alone
all the gender politics of I'm creating a female version of you. So of
course she's gonna fall in love with you, and of course she's gonna go,
I want to go off in the woods with you. But putting all
that aside, there's absolutely no reason to believe that he create this second,
you know, creation that she will turn out to also be murderous, especially
if she has shown love and welcoming acceptance from day one. And yet he
can't think that way because his whole model of his own goodness is predicated on
the idea that he recognized the evil in this creature, not that he had
anything to do with it. And I just thought it was so striking that
he can't he in a way that I think is very familiar to a lot
of us, and I know I've been guilty of this at times, and
a lot. I think it's a very big part of gaslighting, for example,
like often the people who are the best gaslighters the first person that gaslighters
themselves. And that feels what Frankensin is doing here. You know that he
cannot allow the overwhelming evidence in front of him to convince him that maybe he
was wrong that night to run out. Yeah, I agree, And that's
why I kind of hold so much with the idea of the creation being like
an intricate part of ourselves, of being a meta for for the for the
what we create from our pain and our experiences, and if we just abandon
it, like what does that do to the world. It's here to our
world anyway, and just on a much you know, larger scale. But
I love the the fact that when the creation wants a company, he wants
a bride, he wants he wants a partner, because the first place he
goes when he runs off is to the little farmhouse where they don't know he's
there, but he's watching them. And that's what he sees is is love,
is acceptance? Is this yeah, this family unit? And he wants
that. And I think that's why he's so determined that his happiness will come
from from that. But he's seen that it can't come from regular people,
regular humans, because they don't like the way he looks. They're scared of
him, right, So it has to come from someone who looks like him,
or who who has the same you know, quote unquote abnormalities as him.
And and because then he'll be accepted automatically, because he'll accept her and
and yeah, and so I I love that that that it makes sense that
that is what he would want and and just not think of anything else because
of course, like these people don't accept me, these humans don't accept me,
but that this person who is created literally in my image, you know,
my as like me, then will accept me, which ironically was probably
also what Frankenstein was thinking and creating it. And that he would could play
god and this creature would would bow down to him and he probably would have
if he had stayed. Yeah. Well, I love that point, particular
about the wife because when when the simple fact that we're like going back and
fortune call it Frankenstein's monster, of Frankensin's creation is I think also brilliant of
Mary Shelley because, much to my frustration, he's never given a name,
you know, and I almost said it's because I think that's often how we
describe it. It's the monster, but he is a sentient being. He's
a person in that regard, if not human necessarily, and to not name
it it's so frustrating to talk about, but I think that's part of the
whole point. But to get back to it, the little cottage that he
goes to he sees a family. It's a multi generational family, and he
sees that there's a young man and a young woman who are family and that
they love each other, their their husband and wife, and also there's a
father figure and the father loves loves loves them, and there's also a sister
who's involved there as well. And and so I think for Frankens for for
Frankenstin's creation, part of why he fixates on a wife is that at first
he was also thinking a father could love me and Frankenstein is He very explicitly
says, Frankenstein, you are my father, and his father rejects him.
So of course horse the wife would be the only thing that would be left
there, you know. Yeah, yeah, and he it's something that or
she would be something that he could help create, not something that was helping
create him. Right. Yeah. He could be a little bit God as
well here and it's a very much like you know, God creates man,
Man creates woman kind of thing, ye, with all the parts of that
and giving me well, actually let me ask you that. Do you think
that? Was also something Mary Shelley was trying to comment on, especially this
idea of like, of course, like first of all, the very idea
that Elizabeth and Victor would grow up and thus just by definition, wind up
in love and marry each other, and we never hear a word about Elizabeth's
agency and all of that. And also this idea that they could create another
version of Frankenstein who would want to go off and marry him and live happily
ere after with him, and her agency is never considered in that. Is
that just the times or do you think Mary Shelley is making an intentional point
there. It's always difficult to tell, because one thing I've learned throughout my
studies of you know, gender throughout history and ideology or ideologies and discussions about
that, is that a lot of times we tried to exert our own opinions
about gender relationships from today onto what people were commenting on back then, and
it wasn't necessarily always the case. Sometimes it was. But like Mary Shelley
loved Percy. Yeah, I don't understand it, but she loved him,
and even when he wronged her, even when people gave him credit over her,
she loved him. And you know, there's there's a lot to be
said for that. There's a lot to be said for the fact that there
are heavy rumors that she was also involved with women and when the relationship was
open, and so it's difficult to tell whether or not she was commenting on
that. I do think that an interesting fact of her writing is that two
of her most popular books, Frankenstein and The Last Man, are from the
perspective of men. Oh. Interesting, her most famous works aren't from the
perspective of women, and I actually don't know if any of her works are
from the perspective of women, and so I don't really know what that's as.
Again, I've not read much into the literary criticism of that, but
I think it's it says a lot maybe about how she viewed life m h
for sure. Yeah, and that's what I expect. Like I said,
kind of why I asked you is because, yeah, I want to believe
Mary Shelley is this like suber proto feminist in that regard, But it doesn't
like that kind of story of you'll grow up with your ward and you'll expect
to be fall in love and married, I know is very common of the
time, and so I think it is, you know, always important to
recognize like a story can be really progressive in some ways, but also in
other ways just be reflecting the things that no one would think about but today
we would be horrified by. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Talk also
about the book in terms of its like we said about how science fiction,
and I think it clearly is, and that it's a story. To me
at least, I've always thought of that part of science fiction is you posit
a scientific possibility that doesn't exist in our own world and then ask questions about
what would happen if that was true, you know, like what if we
could go to Mars? What if we could you know, control the way
people think or whatever it is. And in this it's like, you know,
what if we could do this thing? What if we could bring you
know, create life out of death? And so again, through my modern
eyes, I want to look at this and go, well, this is
written at the time when the Industrial Revolution is really taking off, when a
lot of people in Mary Shelley's own England but also throughout the world, but
especially in England, are really horrified by scientific progress and the way, you
know, all the smoke and the mills, and think about the poem New
Jerusalem. It's written at this very time, you know all about how England's
green and pleasant land is being ruined by industry, and a lot of the
works about like what industry does to workers and stuff like that are happening,
and so to me, it's very easy to read it in a like the
line that keeps coming to me is from doctor Malcolm from Jurassic Park of just
because they could do a thing, they never asked if they should do a
thing. And it feels like that's part of what Mary Shelley is saying,
is that part of Frankenstein's problem in his conceit is that he never actually asked
should I do this? And he never prepared for the potential consequences. How
much of that do you think is accurate? And how much of that is
me wanting to read back into this sort of like proto you know, scientific
critique. Oh, I think it's very close. So during this time,
I actually have probably was starting to build up at this time. It didn't
really get to it's like true fruition until probably like eighteen twenty eight, eighteen
thirty. You have this idea of the March of intellect, which is a
direct response to the burgeoning technology of the time, and the growing industrialization,
like you said, urbanization, all this stuff. You have these products that
to us are like what even like that doesn't do anything, But to them,
we're revolutionary and we're changing like the very scope of things. Kind of
similar to the way that AI is changing things today, I would say,
is how these in how industrialization was changing things at that time, and you
have this fear of what that will do, But you also have the fear
of the upper classes that education is going down the ladder, the social ladder.
Education is being provided to people who it wasn't provided to in the past.
And the part of the march of intellect was also like what happens when
these people when not the right people have access to this education, to these
means that are beyond them and and stuff like that. So this is all
starting around this time that Frankenstein is being written and published. And also at
this time you have Grave Robberies, which very very popular and for scientific furthering,
you know, like whether whether or not it's it's it was ethical,
which it wasn't. I mean, you know, but you have scientists or
doctors who need to practice what they're doing and who or who want to further
their own education or want to further their own ego paying grave robbers to bring
them bodies from graves fresh bodies. Wow. And like in my periodical that
I studied, there were caricatures of this of grave robbers sneaking into to cemetery
and people used to camp out at freshly doug graves. People whose family member
had just died. They would camp out there for a few days to make
sure that the body wasn't stolen, if they could do that, if they
could sacrifice the time to do that, and any graves that weren't being protected,
usually sometimes the body would end up being taken and sold to for whatever
means it was being used for, usually scientists, like I said, And
so the idea of for doctor Frankenstein taking fresh bodies, cutting them up,
piecing them together is very reflective of the fear at the time of this,
Like people didn't want this to happen, and they were seeing it happen,
and it was also this they didn't understand what was being done with the bodies,
and so they feared it. And of course there's the whole ethical thing,
like I said, is wrong anyway to do it without permission, But
still there was this whole other fear of like what are they doing with it?
What's what's going to happen? And again the periodical I studied there was
in the same kind of series as the Grave Robberies. There was one where
they they show surgeons surrounded by creations, so you have you have like a
dog with another animal's leg or another animal's head, and they're all walking around
and then it's kind of like, what's net what are they going to do
the humans next? As a human on the table next, what are they
going to do with him? And in my mind, like all of this
with the creation of a new being is very reflective of the conversations that were
happening around that at the same time. Well, and it's funny how much
that specific dynamic now like this book has put its stamp on that because just
an example, a couple of months ago, I have a car that's very
beaten up that decided we're going to drive into the ground. It's been totaled
like the andinrd's fine, but the body is terrible. And I took to
a mechanic at one point the guy was like, yeah, look, I
could replace a lot of those side panels that are damaged, you know,
And what he said literally was they'd probably be different colors, so it looked
like a Frankenstein in a car. But I could do it, you know,
because what he meant was like taking pieces of different entities and stitching them
together to make something that looked okay, like giving a dog and a leg
from a different animal. So it's fascinating how much that word has kind of
entered our idea. Yeah, it's like, I don't know if you have
you seen poor things? Yeah? No, I haven't heard really good things.
It's kind of I've not read the book, so I don't know exactly
what Alistair Gray's influence was, but it does seem like Frankenstein was an influence
on on that story as well. It's kind of similar things. I can
see that. I can always see that, and I want to talk about
him becoming an influence on other things in just a second, but I just
want to ask a little bit more about the kind of classest idea you were
talking about, Like we can't let those people get the science. This isn't
meant as an attack on Mary Shelley, because again, creature of her times
and all that, But are you saying, you can think if there was
an element to that, that part of the idea is supposed to be that
Frankenstein himself is not sort of like a classically educated noble bearing and so oh
no, okay, she's meaning as a critique of that. Okay, yeah,
yeah, I don't I don't really think. I don't think that because
at the time, the surgeons who were doing this were well known and well
renowned surgeons who had very big egos. I can't there are some letters I've
read of surgeons talking about what they're doing and just like they really did,
a lot of them viewed themselves as God during this time where so little was
known, and so every discovery is like a it's a boost to your ego
because no one knew it before. But yeah, usually it was all the
ones I've read were about like well renowned surgeons. Okay, Well, certainly
this idea of Wasians who think they are God is one that was left long
ago in the eighteenth century, so nineteenth centuries, that's could don't have to
worry with that anymore. Well, so let's talk about how differently this movie
is now when this book is now understood, Because, as I said,
I think if you ask people what they visualize when they thee's Frankenstein, you
know, they see the monster that's been stitched together. They see, you
know, the the old European castle and the lightning bolt striking to like light
everything up. They see the like, you know, kind of mumbling.
It's kind of a zombie creature that can barely speak, let alone be as
eloquence as in this book. And they call the creature of Frankenstein. Where
do you think all this comes from? How is it that the sort of
popular media image that we've had for I think the first Frankenstein movie was made
around like the early nineteen twenties, so like almost one hundred years if not
probably more in terms of like stage plays and stuff, has gone so different
from the book. You know, I really don't know. I don't know
what the first adaptation was that changed it so drastically. If it was a
movie, I imagine that they needed they needed that scare, they needed that
thrill, especially when you know, I guess back when the first movie adaptation
was made, it was very visual, relied heavily heavily on the visual aspect
of it, and so they needed something to do with that, and also
there's the in when would this be late eighteen hundreds, eighteen eighties nineties,
you have Penny Dreadfuls, which are I don't know if anyone's seen the show
Penny Dreadful, it is basically adapting that. There were these little mini periodicals
like Penny periodicals is what they were called, and they have stories in them,
different stories, and a lot of them were They weren't always this,
but sometimes they would be scary stories, horror stories. And I don't know
if maybe some of those adapted Frankenstein or something similar to Frankenstein and turned it
into what we began to see more of in the twentieth century, But I
don't know. It's one of those things where it's like people become so fascinated
with the idea of this creation and become so afraid of it again. Like
I guess it fits in well if when you think back to like the grave
robberies and people being afraid of what was being done to those bodies, then
it actually does fit in quite well with with where Frankenstein comes from. It's
just a different type of fear you have there, a fear of the unknown,
of bringing someone back to life is now viewed as like fearful instead of
or maybe viewing it the way Frankenstein viewed it, instead of the way that
Mary Shelley viewed the process. Ye, well, and there's a weird sort
of mena narrative there, I think of. Mary Shelley is trying to write
the story about how what we visually think of as frightening isn't necessarily what we
are scared of what we think of as frightening from what we first learned,
Because yeah, I can very much understand it being like, you know,
what's more frightening than a sexually active or independent woman in the early nineteenth century,
let alone today, you know what's more frightening than a woman who's writing
about death instead of these like, you know, nice romances and things like
that. And so for today and today be like, no, we very
quickly go back to the scary thing is the monster, and that's what it's
all about. And then so when Frankenstein shows up, it's this monster zombie
kind of creature. It's and I brought out Jurassic Park again, and I
remember reading some things that Michael Crichton had talked about the original author of the
book where he had said he was a little like he loved the movie obviously,
and I'm sure he loved the paycheck the movie helped get him, but
that in his work, like the scary part is not supposed to be the
dinosaurs themselves. It's supposed to be these scientists who the dinosaurs without any thoughts
to their ethical consequences, and which I think, I mean, I've never
actually thought about this before, but I think it is very much a Frankenstein
story. You're bringing things back from the dead quite literally, and in a
book that can come across, but on screen, an ethical philosophical concept is
never going to appear as scary as the ten foot tall creature that's reaching out
to get you, you know, and it's it really feels like it's a
and that that happens all the time that you have. Another resaon that I've
talked about a lot in this podcast in reachent episodes is the Goji ra the
Godzilla movies where not in terms of being scary, But the original concept of
the movie was meant to be a story about post war Japan and the atomic
bomb and the horrible things the Americans did and coming to terms with the nuclear
age, and then within like three or four movies, you're just getting movies
of a guy in a rubber suit smashing buildings and being scary, and those
are fun movies, but they kind of completely missed the point. And I
think it's kind of similar thing happens here. Yeah, I agree. I
think that we started viewing Frankenstein's creation the way that Frankenstein viewed him, and
and then that just kind of became the new normal. And so, like
you said, it is quite quite meta that. Yeah, it's almost like
we're taking doctor Frankenstein for his word at everything and now are viewing the story
through his biases instead of through a more philosophical and theoretical aspect. But I
just it's it's still so fascinating to me that the monster has become known as
Frankenstein. Ironically, I think the adaptation that gets it the closest in terms
of of the longing there and the idea that this is your creation and you
should love it, is Young Frankenstein. Yeah. I was just thinking that
I love that movie, by the way, but there is the whole idea,
like, except he doesn't abandon him, so maybe, like I feel
like young Frankenstein is the like what if of Mary Shelley s Frankenstein. What
if doctor Frankenstein hadn't abandoned his creation? What would that have looked like?
What if they'd had a loving relationship father son relationship or brotherhood relationship and with
a bit of comedy added to it? Hold on looking up something quickly.
Oh, yeah, no, I think you're right. I think it is
in many ways very much a more accurate retelling. You know, it's very
much satire. Although again it's like I think, in many ways because it's
the one I probably saw the most growing up, you know, child of
a Jewish father and living in New York City where mel Brooks is basically like
a household god, you know, so the visuals of it, the black
and white castle, the mad scientist hair, the lightning egor, all of
these things really strike me. And you're right in that the creation the monster
is very lonely and is very sad. But what's interesting is that that's also
where the like I can only speak in mumbles and grumbles comes from. And
granted in the book that is true at the beginning, but he learns to
be incredibly eloquent within about two years, and I would actually say I think
the only other version I've seen where I don't think we have ever really focused
on who created this creature. Those probably totally in one or two stories.
But a Frankenstein Monster analog where I think it's sadness and loneliness and sort of
it's being misunderstood is often dealt with is Solomon Grundy from the Batman stories,
particularly from Batman the animated series, where Grundy is an antagonist. But I
think one of the things that really makes Batman so wonderful, especially in the
animated series, is that he's often able to identify with his with his villains,
and particularly in terms of him feeling very much like an outcast because no
one understands him and he's an orphan in all of this, he can really
relate to Grundy. And granted, Grundy is still the very monosyllabic, you
know, not very smart, does what other people tell him to do,
and we'll do terrible things unless someone stops him, but there's still a deep
sympathy for the character in a way that feels very authentic to this part of
this kind of telling the story. Yeah, yeah, I've never really watched
much of the Batman animated series, so I don't really know much about that
character. But yeah, the sympathy is always key for me. If it's
not there, then it feels like it's just a story meant to scare you
instead of a story meant to ask you to be a bit more introspective,
which is why I always heavily reck commend the plays because, like I said,
like they're so good, and I think the bended at Cumberbatch one.
You can get recordings of okay, but it's so good, and I recommend
watching like both, like the two versions of it, so they when they
switch roles. It's just it's amazing. It's it's incredible acting, it's incredible
storytelling, and the emotion is really there, and it's amazing what you can
get different from different actors in it, and you get to see it in
the same production, which is really cool. I have to say, I'm
sure so much of it is good and probably award worthy, but just from
hearing about it, I hope many awards went to or accolades at least to
the makeup and costuming department, because I can't imagine having to make up the
same people for two different roles, going back and forth every day, you
know, and having I'm sure just two different sets of the same costume made
and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Well, and it's interesting seeing
Frankenstein and Frankinstein's creation in that, like in a more realistic mode and not
not the you know, elongated head kind of and and the screws and everything.
It is really just there's a his face is disfigured because it's it's stitched
together, and so there's like a long gash, a crow like diagonal gash
across his face that's been stitched together. There's a few gashes everywhere that have
been also stitched together. And it's interesting to see it that way because I
think it garners more sympathy in the viewer, which is interesting in itself and
telling in itself. But yeah, it's just it's interesting to compare that to
the cinematic interpretations that we see. Yeah, very much. So, I'd
love to see that. And really it has been done on stage number of
times and other versions too. Yeah. Two last kind of questions about the
setting itself, and then we'll wrap up and do some quick bonus content on
a very different topic. When Oh, what was I gonna ask? So
I related to what you said there about the So the first is when I
think of when I think of the Frankenstein story, because it is about bringing
a creature back to life. I think today is very associated also with zombie
stories, and like there's I've seen some like descriptions of like that. The
zombie story has sort of two origins. One is the kind of mad scientist
doctor Frankenstein kind of idea, and the other is the kind of uh Caribbean
spirituality voo done what was often referred to as voodoo. That's an inaccurate term
sort of like I think very like you know, anglicized and you know,
horrified versions of these this folklore from Caribbean indigenous populations about you know, raising
the dead or in many cases I think not necessarily indigenous, but African slaves
who are brought over and then mixed with indigenous stories. To your knowledge,
would what awareness of those stories have gotten to someone like Mary Shelley by that
point? Were they aware of like what a word like voodoo or you know,
the idea or the word zombie or any of these kind of stories.
I'm sure there have been stories of people coming back from the dead since you
know, time memorial, but those kind of framings of the stories. Do
you know if that would have been a part of Mary Shelley's world at all.
If it was, it would have been heavily heavily anglicized. And what
I mean by that is it would have been told through British interpretations of it
and from explorers or from colonizers, from military people, and it likely would
have been heavily heavily racist. And I'm trying to think. I mean,
you have, like you have afro Been who wrote forget what it's called.
She wrote a book about an African man and I think he was from slavery
to freedom or something. And that was even that, even though it was
you know, there are arguments as to how well intentioned it was meant,
but even that is heavily heavily racist, heavily stereotypical. And all these stories
like they would get stories from the continent of Africa, from the you know,
South America and North America about these people and about these communities, but
they would not be told from those people. Yeah, of course, yeah,
So so to what extent, I'm not sure. And it might have
come like, you know, like down the pipeline or something. But right,
but yeah, and the other one is and the other question I had
for you, You know, that totally makes a lot of sense about what
I expected. And the other question I had for you is, again,
we talked about this as modern science fiction, but it is very different than
I think what a lot of people think of a science fiction today, in
part because the trope has grown and evolved and developed. And one of the
things I think that my probably might throw people is there's very little actual science
in the book. Like there isn't any actual description of like you have this
chemical and that chemical or this dow Hickey or I've marshaled the power of the
lightning or whatever I'm gonna curious to whatever. You know, how much of
that is just again that was how, you know, because she was inventing
a genre. There's nothing like else that was like it. And when it
is that, the need to not only say, oh, hey, this
cool scientific thing has happened, trust me, and let me tell a story
in that world sharks to become it's incumbent upon the author to explain the science
to you and the pseudoscience in a way that you believe it. I think
it's it's a product of its time and that they didn't have the information available
to them of you know, just randomly like can google, what do you
need to do this scientific procedure? How likely is this to happen? And
you have someone's written an essay about it, someone's written an article about it,
and there's pictures and diagrams and all this stuff. They didn't really have
that back then at all. And if they did in the form of you
know, actual written things, then that was heavily gate kept to scientific journals
or medical journals to the people who went to university, who worked at university.
The University of Glasgow has a museum called the Hunterian Museum and it's been
around for hundreds of years. It was around during the early nineteenth century and
at the time it's open to the public now and back then it was also
open to the public, but it became so busy because so many people were
going and it was It's a museum that has preserved like human organs and and
you know, quote unquote abnormalities that have happened in animals and other things,
and so it's very kind of grotesque and appealing to people to see because they've
never seen it before. And so this museum would be open to the public,
it would become so busy that students, I guess would complain that they
didn't have access to it and they needed it. And so the first people
they cut off from going were people in work clothes, and they had to
pay to get in. It wasn't free. So these work these people would
save up their money to be able to afford to go for the afternoon or
something, but they said, like, if you are in work clothes,
you can't come in. And those were the first people not allowed. And
even though people went who weren't students, who weren't also workers, and so
they they got to keep going. And so you have there's a lot of
debate about the what was available to whom because also at this time you have
public lectures, public mathematics and science lectures that are being given and people of
all genders and all backgrounds are allowed to attend. But again is kind of
the same issue. The first people who get kicked out are the people who
supposedly don't belong there in the first place, and so it just it wasn't
available the way it is today. But also I think there was more of
a focus on telling the story, like getting to the heart of the story,
like you said, I think you brought that up, rather than dealing
with the frilliness of this is exactly how it has to happen, like it
has to be believable. It didn't need to be believable for Mary Shelley,
it just needed it was the means to tell a story, to tell the
actual story that she wanted to. Well, that makes a lot of sense,
especially when you think about like this is just the beginnings of the scientific
revolution and the industry against the industrial evolution and that kind of thing in which,
you know, mass understanding of science is still very small, and so
the idea that most readers would have any kind of knowledge of death and things
like that, you know, in the way today it's like, oh,
well, I watched a five minute YouTube on aerodynamics, so I can tell
you why this space battle didn't make any sense, you know, in the
Star Wars thing or whatever. It is. Her other book, which I've
studied a little bit more, The Last Man, is about a global pandemic,
is published in eighteen twenty five and is about a disease that spreads and
kills everybody except for one man at the very end, and there's not really
much. So there's a little bit of explanation about how it got passed on
and everything, but as far as like the details you would expect today,
Like today, I feel like we need to know everything, like how did
it, what's the scientific name of this disease? You know which scientists were
working on it, and all of this. It's the same in that she
doesn't care, and she doesn't expect the reader to care. She expects them
to care about the heart of the story, the narrative. And I have
to say, as someone who has a you know, liberal arts humanity's love
of science fiction, that's perfect for me, you know, like when I
watched Our Trek, I want to engage in philosophical discussions over is data a
living being that has sentience and thus has rights, and whether his brain is
neutrino or reverse neutrino or you know, whatever's neural hatterns. I just don't
care about it, and total respect for those who are focused on those details.
And I think in some cases the science details become very important. But
yeah, to me, the main thing that is that I love about science
fiction is its ability to raise those questions. And with that I wanted to
close. I'm gonna give you a chance to say any the last things you
want to say, but I wanted to close with one quick quote from the
book that I thought was very interesting, given that it seems so clearly attempting
to raise these kind of issues, which and this is from the forward by
Mary Shelley, that any inference justly to be drawn from the following pages as
prejudicing any philosophical direction, There's nothing, And she's saying like, this is
what the book is not supposed to do. And one of the things she
says is of what she ends it with is nor is any inference justly to
be drawn from the following pages as prejudicing any philosophical doctrine of whatever kind.
Which I don't know if that's again just kind of a part of the style,
or if it's meant to be tongue in cheek, or if it's meant
to be a like, no, I'm just a little lady writing a book.
But like she's saying, this is just a story. Don't think there's
any philosophical arguments being made here. And that's clearly exactly not the case.
Yeah, it was kind of a safeguard. I think it's like like caricaturists
a lot of times would be like, this isn't what it is like,
we're not making fun of anybody. We're just we're just telling a little joke.
It's not we're not actually making any deep social commentary. And when actually
they were, and it's at that time you kind of have like a thin
line between what is just a book and what's rousing too much interest in something
or or too much anti whatever is being discussed at the time that was important
to the government or or it's a society, and and so you do a
lot of times have authors or artists have that little safeguard just like, yeah,
it's not doing any of this, even though it actually just tell the
story. Chill out it, Danielle, this has been fantastic as always.
Any last comments you want to make about this work, Well, I do
want to say I mentioned a book earlier called Mary or the Birth of Frankenstein,
which is a fictionalized account of her life around the time that she conceptualized
Rgstein. It's by Anne Eckout, and I would highly recommend if anyone's interested
in a little bit more about Mary Shelley's life. To read that, again,
it is fictional line, so there are a lot of liberties taken.
But it was really interesting to me, and it made me want to go
back and reread Frankenstein to see if seeing her story through this perspective, even
though it's fictionalized, made me think of Frankenstein any differently. Yeah, No,
I love that. I definitely we'll have links to that work as well
as hopefully if we can find the bencumber Batch Frankenstein a recording of it,
we'll links to all that in the show notes. We'll links to all the
awesome things that Danielle does. Because she's been on this podcast never time,
she's done a lot of writing. Her tweets and tiktoks alone are definitely worth
follows. You definitely check that out, and we want to know what you
think. Let us know if you want to email us, contact us in
any way all the innivasion of the show notes. We love your feedback.
We'll discuss it on a later episode. Danielle is first and foremost because he's
I understand her a Star Wars fan, and we're going to have her on
to talk about the bad Batch many times. The bonus content is gonna be
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