FrankenLecture: "A Tale of Two Frankensteins"

When you read Frankenstein -- was it in high school? college? on your own? Did you use a Norton Critical edition of the book, or a Penguin Classic? 

In this lecture for English 20C at the University of California Riverside, PhD student Miranda Butler introduces undergraduates to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, explains the differences between the 1818 versus the 1831 editions, and gives a sneak peak of the Eaton Collection's 200 Years of Frankenstein exhibit.

If you can't remember what your book looked like, think back to the plot. Was Victor Frankenstein's love interest Elizabeth his cousin, or was she a problematically adopted orphan? Did Victor Frankenstein seem pretty level-headed, or did he whine incessantly about Destiny with a capital "D"? These questions can help you identify if you've read Mary Shelley's original 1818 text, or, her later edited and re-released edition in 1831.

Though the changes may not be as bad as George Lucas's 2000 additions to Star Wars, they are significant, and fascinating when put in conversation with Mary Shelley's biography and the larger literary culture surrounding her famous book. In this lecture for the UCR FrankenBlog, I tell all in "A Tale of Two Frankensteins."

Different houses built on the same foundation →

In this article for the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) postgraduate blog, I offer an academic review of the New York Times bestselling novel trilogy, Shades of Magic by V.E. Schwab. The series, which reached its thrilling conclusion with the final novel, A Conjuring of Light, on February 21, 2017, is set in four alternate-history parallel-universe versions of London in the year 1819. Using research in nineteenth-century scientific discourse, readings of works by Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, and recent scholarship in Victorian studies, I argue that Schwab’s novel invokes the language of early experiments in electricity and magnetism to configure both biological and spiritual ideas of life and death.

And, for fans of the series, I also offer my academic take (as someone writing a dissertation that came out of Dracula) on the whole "Alucard is Dracula spelled backwards" debate. Enjoy!

Click here to read the full article on The Victorianist.

Whiny Victor Frankenstein

Have you ever noticed that Victor Frankenstein seems ... well ... a bit whiny? You're not alone. Whether you're in a book club, high school class, graduate school seminar, or special collections library, Victor Frankenstein's constant complaining makes it seem like he spends "90% of the novel moping instead of doing literally anything else." [1]

My quick keyboard-shortcut search of Mary Shelley's 1818 text* yields the estimate that, within the novel, variations of the word "wretch" are used over 60 times, and variations of "miserable" or "misery" occur over 100 times. Often, these words are used to describe Victor himself, as he bemoans, and bemoans, and bemoans the misfortune of having accomplished exactly what he was trying to do.

Some viral social media posts have joked that this is because, contrary to popular film depictions, "Doctor" Frankenstein "WAS AN UNDERGRAD" [capitalization retained from original] who "...had no degree at all, he was at college for like, a year." One Tumblr user comedically calls Victor a "19-year-old sin machine," and another suggests that to recontextualize how we might view Victor today, we should: "Imagine hearing about the dudebro living next to u [sic] in the dorms: 'yah Dave dropped out cuz he built a [...] person.'" [2]

"Yah, Dave dropped out cuz he built a person." In the frontispiece of the 1831 edition of Mary Shelley's novel, "19-year-old sin machine" Victor Frankenstein flees the scene of his monstrous act of creation.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley), 1831. Eaton Collection. From the holdings of Special Collections and University Archives, UCR Library, University of California, Riverside. 

Hilarious and valid as these arguments may be, which attribute Victor's moping to his age, immaturity, and hubris, Mary Shelley herself seems to have intended for Victor Frankenstein to be as overtly whiny as he is. In her introduction to the 1831 edition of her novel, she explains her inspiration behind Victor and his Creature: 

My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw -- with shut eyes, but acute mental vision, -- I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handywork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade; that this thing, which had received such imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter; and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench for ever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at the bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes. [3]

True to her inspiration, Shelley's fiction brings this imaginary scene to life on the printed page, using intensely emotional language to craft the story's miserable tone and characterize the voice of our wretched Victor. The Creature haunts Victor's every sleeping and waking thought, as he always stands at his Creator's literal and metaphorical bedside, wide eyes "following" the guilty Victor, no matter how far he flees.

As a jokey, all-in-good-fun addition to the FrankenBlog, I have created the Twitter account @whinypantsfrank, which places images of the "whiniest" passages from Mary Shelley's original novel alongside humorous Tweets that use millennial punctuation and capitalization conventions to emphasize Victor's misery. Click here to follow Whiny Frankenstein!

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[1] This quotation comes from a viral Tumblr blog post, which can be viewed here.

*Note that this is a quick estimate rather than a thorough digital humanities project. I used an etext version of the novel available here via archive.org.

[2] See footnote 1. Some spelling and punctuation modified from original for clarity.

[3] Appendix G: Introduction. In Frankenstein: the Original 1818 Text. By Mary Shelley, edited by D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Ontario: Broadview Press, 1999), page 357. Bold print added for emphasis.