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divests a person of their humanity, ‘ as if such person was naturally dead ’, 3 while Alexandre Kojève equated the slave with a ‘living corpse’. 4 In Frankenstein , in which ample use is made of the discourse of slavery, Mary Shelley’s monster, like the slave, embodies the living dead, having been made out of corpses by Victor
‘“T HE ” X-M EN MEET F RANKENSTEIN? ” Perish the thought!’ (Douglas 309). Thus begins a letter found in ‘Mutant Mail-Box’, the official letter column of The X-Men comic book in the 1960s. The letter writer, Scott Douglas, is responding to a story featured in X-Men #40 (1968), titled ‘The Mark of the Monster’. In that issue, the X-Men encounter the notorious Frankenstein Creature. Douglas’s reaction to the tale is mixed. While initially sceptical about an encounter between the X-Men and the Creature, he felt that ‘it was a successful
S INCE ITS PUBLICATION IN 1818, Mary Shelley’s iconic novel Frankenstein has manifested throughout popular culture in a variety of adaptations across numerous media, making it one of the most adapted literary works in history. 1 Many of these plays, films, novels, comics, and video games – comprising the ‘Frankenstein Network’ of interrelated and interconnected texts – attempt holistic recreations of Shelley’s original material, emphasising the power struggles between Victor Frankenstein and his misunderstood Creature. These full
M ARY S HELLEY ’ S F RANKENSTEIN IS one of those rare works of literature that has assumed a life extending well beyond the novel itself. Frankenstein embodies a story that most people know, or think they know. What they do know of the story, however, is more likely drawn from Universal Studios’ 1931 film adaptation, directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s iconic bolt-necked ‘monster’. As Christa Albrecht-Crane and Dennis Cutchins note, ‘ Frankenstein … is so well known that a potential adapter
I N N OVEMBER 2014 THE BBC broadcast a television documentary, ‘Gothic Goes Global’, part of a three-part series with the overall title The Art of Gothic , in which presenter Andrew Graham-Dixon argued that one of the main reasons for the enduring popularity of texts such as Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stoker’s Dracula lay in their attempts to deconstruct imperialist rhetoric. Human beings at the end of the eighteenth century, he insisted, were no longer willing to accept without question the authority of (mostly self
Introduction I N M ARY S HELLEY ’ S NOVEL the central and most enigmatic moment in the life of Victor Frankenstein’s Creature is unquestionably its birth. When Victor Frankenstein faces his living Creature for the first time, he is excited by his success, but this short moment of fascination soon turns into a fearful experience of sour repulsion and disgust. The Creature’s assemblage emerges as a daunting mixture of life and death, self and other. The mystery driving this scene has led to a great number of
twentieth-century take on Frankenstein. Cronos is, therefore, just as much an atypical Frankenstein film as it is an atypical vampire film. Del Toro has combined the myths of Dracula and Frankenstein in order to form his own creation myth. According to David Skal, who refers to Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster as ‘the dark twins’, both characters are such familiar cultural icons that ‘each conjures
particular at Gothic novels that deliberately engage with the moral questions of that era, I want to show that Watchmen is an heir to what has been called ‘the philosophical Gothic’ in a strain of British radical fiction. I want to consider it specifically in relation to William Godwin’s St Leon and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . 2 Avowedly political novels in the Godwinian school
T WO PRODUCTIONS OF STAGE adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein emerged in the UK in the spring of 2011, both of which made explicit reference to their liveness in performance. The National Theatre in London production was based upon Nick Dear’s stage adaptation of the novel and was directed by celebrated filmmaker, Danny Boyle. It featured acclaimed popular television and film actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller. As part of its theatrical run, the production was commissioned, on a couple of occasions, to be
This essay argues that Victor Frankenstein‘s project, the creature that results from it, and the disgust inspired by the creature in all who behold him, all allude consistently and coherently to the infantile sexual theory of fecal reproduction. The fantasy of fecal reproduction, a widespread feature of male god creation myths, is integral to the structure of patriarchy, but is usually subsumed into the normative family structure in the course of the oedipal crisis and its resolution. Victor Frankenstein‘s violent repudiation of his creature stems from Frankenstein‘s inability - or stubborn refusal - to negotiate the transition between the oral-anal fantasy and the normative genital model. The violent disparagement directed at the creature by all who see him testifies to the social disruption threatened by this unresolved tension between the pre-oedipal economy, based on gift-giving and womb-envy, and the oedipal economy of rivalry, castration anxiety, and patriarchal appropriation.