Everyone remembers Frankenstein‘s monster – helped along in large part by the 1931 film adaptation that made him so lumberingly, hulkingly corporeal. But fewer people remember that Mary Shelley’s most famous novel is also peopled heavily with ghosts, and a general pervading sense of the ghostly that reflects Shelley’s fascination with the supernatural and a genuine spiritual world. (more…)
Frankenstein is all about death. Death is embodied not only in the creature, composed of dead human and animal body parts, scientifically brought to life, but especially in the many deaths this creature brings about – from Frankenstein’s child brother William (and indirectly, Justine, who the monster frames for the crime), to Frankenstein’s closest friend Henry Clerval, and even his new bride Elizabeth Lavenza. Deaths are also present in other ways: just before Frankenstein leaves for Ingolstadt to complete his education, his mother dies from illness, and his father later dies of grief and shock after Elizabeth’s death and the harrowing incidents haunting Frankenstein’s life. Indeed, death begins to stalk Frankenstein in ever greater measure until his own final moments, which leads Frankenstein to assume that he lives a cursed life – a wretch, doomed to wander the earth alone, in the company only of his departed loved ones who people his dreams (his waking life has become a living nightmare). This may sound like a tragic, gothic plot, but did you know that Mary Shelley’s life was itself even more tragic, and that it even began to eerily resemble, in many ways, the cursed fate of her eponymous character? (more…)
A bitterly cold day has settled over London. The teeming bustle of St. Pancras Station lies nearby, but a hush falls over a small churchyard tucked in the streets behind it. The few remaining leaves overhead rustle dryly against the skeletal fingers of the trees that scrape the suffocatingly close, grey sky. In summer this unassuming, almost humdrum cemetery would be teeming with life, tourists huddled around one particular headstone – the one-time resting place of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, as its inscription reads – but now there is something hauntingly barren about the place. Golden lamps glow behind the small windows of the church, an inviting warmth that seems to amplify the creeping cold outside that raises up from the hard frosted ground wrapped tightly around its silent inmates. (more…)
Mary Shelley’s early life was made up of many wonderful and formative moments that would nestle in her memory, stoking her imagination, eventually to reemerge within her first and most famous novel, Frankenstein. For Day 3 of Frankenweek, this post explores one of these moments, experienced during her unique childhood, and its lingering impression on her. As the daughter of two of the most eminent writers of the age, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the young Mary Godwin was connected with many of the nineteenth-century’s greatest thinkers, who would often visit to converse with her father. Mary was often allowed to join these conversations, as a listener and occasional contributor. Undoubtedly the most significant of these visitors – and the one who would leave the most indelible impression on Mary – was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (more…)
The second in my Frankenstein at 200 Anniversary Blog Series looks at one of the most crucial elements of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: the profound sense of place that Shelley evokes as Frankenstein pursues his creature through increasingly wild and inhospitable landscapes that are repeatedly linked with death and the supernatural. From the seas of ice that open and close the novel, threatening to swallow and crush Walton’s ship, to the glacial summits of Mont Blanc, landscapes indicate the wild, sublime and insurmountable limits of nature that Frankenstein has attempted to transgress in his scientific creation of the ‘monster’, but which ultimately still wield their immense and unforgiving power over his mortal frame. They also represent Frankenstein’s increasing distance from the safe comforts of home, family and society – Frankenstein’s only comfort in such wild and harsh terrain is the spirits of the dead that seem naturally at home in such regions. But did you know that Shelley’s depiction of these landscapes is drawn from her own exciting travels, and that her experiences in these incredible real-life places form one of the central inspirations behind her novel? (more…)
Today marks the beginning of Frankenweek, and I’m celebrating with the first post in my Frankenstein at 200: Anniversary Blog Series. The story of the birth of Frankenstein as part of a ghost-story-telling competition in a storm-lashed lakeside villa is almost as haunting and fantastic as the novel itself. In the summer of 1816, the young Mary Godwin, only 18 years old, had just travelled to the continent with her lover, the married Percy Shelley, their infant son, William, and Mary’s step sister, Clare Clairmont. After meeting with the celebrated poet Lord Byron and his travelling physician Dr John Polidori in Geneva, they settled in a small lakeside cottage only a short walk away from Byron’s much grander rented mansion, the Villa Diodati. The parties met frequently, and it was at this villa, surrounded by vineyards and with magnificent views of the towering mountains and the shimmering lake beneath, that Frankenstein experienced its first sparks of life. (more…)
Kirstin Mills is an Australian artist, writer, lecturer and researcher following her endless curiosity into realms of imagination and wonder. Read more about her life & projects here.
