When you read the title of this article, you probably thought to yourself, “Oh, I’m familiar with that book. I have a general idea of what’s in it.” You probably thought of a Gothic castle situated beside some ambiguously European mountainside. It is the dead of night, with the dark, starless, and rainswept sky occasionally lit up by blinding flashes of lighting, soon followed by the whipcrack of thunder. The castle is darkened, save for an eerie green light ominously radiating out of the windows of the tallest room in the highest tower. Inside that room, it is a cacophony of scientific madness. Machine dials are whirring, Tesla coils are sizzling, mysterious green oozes are boiling, and, of course, there is a large figure lying on a dissection table covered by a white sheet. Standing over this table is the mad scientist himself: Doctor Frankenstein. He has a Victorian-era lab coat, cartoonishly large goggles, and a hairstyle that would make Einstein blush. Anxiously scurrying around him is his deformed, hunchbacked assistant Igor.
“It is time, Igor!” the scientist shouts with a dramatic flourish.
“Y-yes, master!” the hunchback replies, privately wondering if he should’ve taken that job as a French bellringer instead of doing whatever this madness is.
“Let us begin!” Dr. Frankie yells as he flips a large switch.
The dissection table gets hoisted up by the four chains attached to its corners. Up, up, up it goes into the highest part of the tower, until…CRA-BOOM! The top of the tower gets struck by lighting and the doctor cackles with manic insanity. As the platform gets lowered back down, the doctor wrings his hand with anticipation, his face twisted into a demonic grin. Both Frankenstein and Igor stand over the smoking white cloth, waiting to see what has become of the gigantic lump underneath. Then, an enormous green hand reaches out from under the sheet, and they hear a deep, monstrous moan.
“It-it’s alive! IT’S ALIVE!!!”
How close did I come to matching the image you have in your head? Of course, this is what everyone thinks of when they think of Frankenstein. So, how much would it surprise you to find out that the scene I just described is not similar to anything that’s in the book? Like, not even close. Replace the gothic castle with a plain German house, replace the sophisticated lab equipment with crude hand-me-downs, replace the mad scientist with a skinny college student, and replace Igor…with nothing, because he isn’t even in the book. The creature is also very different from what you’d imagine. He is not the Boris Karloff, trenchcoat-wearing, flat-topped, neck-bolted, hulking, green mass of monstrous muscle that the movies make him out to be. In the book, he is eight feet tall, with yellowish skin, and long black hair. There is also no mention of him having electoral bolts on his neck. Probably the biggest difference between the book’s creature and the monster in your head is that the book monster is considerably intelligent and actually learns to speak, and he speaks very articulately.
The story of how this book came to be is almost as interesting as the book itself. It was written by nineteen-year-old Mary Godwin while she was living with her future husband Percy Shelley. In the midst of a rainy month, the couple and their friends were looking for indoor activities to do. One of their friends, famed romantic poet Lord Byron, proposed that they should all write a ghost story. Mary was inspired by a recent scientific discovery called Galvanism. This experiment used electrical charges to stimulate the nervous system of a dead organism. Captivated by the thought of an overly ambitious and naive schoolboy taking this procedure too far, Mary began writing what she believed would be a short story. With some encouragement from her mister, she expanded the plot and filled out a complete novel. I couldn’t tell you what any of the other stories were that the group came up with, which says to me that hers must’ve been the best. Although initially published anonymously, she later republished it under her married name, Mary Shelley. Getting a book published under her own name was considered a major accomplishment for a woman at that time. The book was immediately well-received, and Mary Shelley became a respected name in the literary world, another amazing achievement for a woman living in the early nineteenth century. Not only did Mary pave the way for future female authors, but she also helped lay the groundwork for an entire literary genre, as most scholars consider Frankenstein to be one of the earliest examples of science fiction.
Read it to find out the differences, read it to support early female authors, or read it to appreciate the beginning of science fiction. Whichever reason tickles your fancy, you won’t regret picking up a copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein when you stop by the Charlotte Community Library. Also, we have this copy with a really cool Gothic cover, even though the illustration repeats the egregious sin of misrepresenting what’s in the book.
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