Mary Shelley, and the Rise of a Monster
At movie awards ceremonies, most winners thank their stars, their agents, their significant others. Guillermo del Toro, during his victory speech earlier this year for “The Shape of Water,” thanked a teenager who had been dead for more than 150 years.
“When I think about giving up,” he said onstage at the British Academy of Film and Television Awards in February, “I think of her.”
“She gave voice to the voiceless, and presence to the invisible,” he continued, “and showed me that sometimes to talk about monsters, we need to fabricate monsters of our own.”
Mr. Del Toro was talking about Mary Shelley, the author of “Frankenstein,” and not for the first time. Adapting the novel — begun when Shelley was only 18 — has long been a dream project for the director, who has called Victor Frankenstein’s nameless creation “the most beautiful and moving” of all monsters.
The world will have to wait for Mr. del Toro’s version, but this is Frankenstein’s year. The novel’s 200th anniversary has inspired a cavalcade of exhibitions, performances and events around the world, from Ingolstadt, the Bavarian home of Victor Frankenstein’s fictional lab, to Indiana, which has held more than 600 events since January.
But when is it not the monster’s moment? Shelley’s novel has birthed a stream of adaptations and riffs, including at least 170 screen homages.
“The story touches on the most basic part of what it means to be an embodied human creature,” said Elizabeth Campbell Denlinger, a curator of “It’s Alive! Frankenstein at 200,” an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City that gathers artifacts including original pages of the manuscript. “It leaves us asking, Am I a monster too?”
“Frankenstein” was born in the summer of 1816. Mary Shelley and her husband, Percy, were guests at a Switzerland villa with Lord Byron and others, who passed the rainy days dreaming up ghost stories.
The first glimmerings of the monster came to her one night.
“I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together,” she recalled.
“Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus” was published anonymously two years later, in 1818. Since then, it has become the rare story to pass from literature into common myth. Even people who have never cracked the novel know the story of the misshapen creature patched together from human corpses who rebelled against his creator, or at least the greenskinned, bolt- in- the- neck image embodied by Boris Karloff.
But almost from the beginning, it also slipped the bounds of its own novelist creator, leaving some of its own patched-together parts behind, starting with most of the monster’s philosophical preoccupations, and his basic powers of speech.
In the first stage production, in 1823, the nameless creature was played by T. P. Cooke, an actor famous for pantomime, setting the template for an inarticulate, if not entirely wordless, monster.
If it took the medium of film to jolt the Frankenstein pop culture tradition alive, it also took the 20th century to fully activate its warning against science run amok. In a 1987 essay, the biologist Leonard Isaacs credited Shelley with writing what may have been “the first future myth,” which “lay waiting for human activity to catch up with it.”
A line of Victor Frankenstein from James Whale’s 1931 movie version — “Now I know how it feels to be God!” — was a frequent target of local censors, who saw it as blasphemous.
But if some hope to turn the story into a more positive one of ethical science, feminist artists and critics have read it as an allegory of male usurpation of female procreative power.
Margaret Atwood’s 1967 poetry collection “Speeches for Dr. Frankenstein” imagined the monster as a woman addressing her creator.
Other writers have used the story to create 21st- century political allegories.
“Destroyer,” a recent comic by Victor LaValle that transports the story to the age of Black Lives Matter, features two “monsters.” There’s Shelley’s original, who is found alive in the Arctic, and also an African-American boy who is shot by the police and then reanimated by his mother, a scientist and last living descendant of Victor Frankenstein.
Mr. LaValle said he wanted to embrace the creature’s — and the mother’s — rage, which he called “the right of the maligned and oppressed.”
Perhaps more simply, he also wanted to take readers back to what had drawn him to Frankenstein in the first place.
“As a kid,” he said, “I was drawn to the fear of the monster. I wanted a monster who would tear a human being in half, for better or for worse.”