During the long Ranarök of 1816, the ‘Year Without a Summer’ when the world was enveloped in a nuclear winter following the eruption of Mount Tambora, Mary, along with Shelley and her half-sister Claire Clairmont were near neighbours and frequent guests of Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati on the shore of Lake Geneva. The novel itself also has a creation myth, inaugurated by Percy Shelley’s anonymous introduction to the first edition and expanded into a full narrative by Mary Shelley in her introduction to the Standard Novels edition of 1831. In gothic terms, only the Dracula mythos is as culturally endemic.įrontispiece and Title Page to Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ That most people encounter the story first through one of the numerous film versions adds a further mythic layer populated by visions of Boris Karloff’s monster and Peter Cushing’s mad doctor, of De Niro’s tragic outcast, Herman Munster, Bladerunner, and the Bride of Re-Animator to name a few of the many. Frankenstein is also the source of one of the shaping myths of modern culture, a cautionary tale in which a scientist in pursuit of truth but unfettered by morality is destroyed by his own creation. As a response to Milton’s Paradise Lost the novel explores and interrogates the Christian myths of creation and fall. It is there immediately in the novel’s original subtitle ‘The Modern Prometheus’, a comparison between the Faustian Victor Frankenstein and the Titan who stole fire from the gods and was punished horribly for gifting it to humanity. To read Frankenstein is to enter a realm of intersecting myths. ‘Conclusions most forbidden’: Frankenstein and the Romantic Hero
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