My latest guest spot on From the Lighthouse – the literary podcast from Macquarie University’s Department of English – involved one of my favourite things to talk about: witches! Specifically, those gnarled, wisened, wonderful witches whose enduring mystery goes some way towards explaining the seemingly endless appeal of one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays: the bloody, ghostly and gory Macbeth.
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I’m very excited to announce the release of a wonderful new book on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which includes 17 chapters by international scholars (including my own) in celebration of Frankenstein‘s 200th anniversary! Global Frankenstein, edited by Carol Margaret Davison and Marie Mulvey-Roberts is published this month by Palgrave Macmillan. It has been called a “welcome collection of articles—about Frankenstein and science and technology, medicine and monstrosity, the spectacular and the visual…and the future—by a new generation of scholars,” which “brings the story up to date by viewing it from the perspectives, and through the concerns, of today. It’s a very suitable, and suitably global, 200th birthday celebration” (Professor Sir Christopher Frayling, author of Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years [2017]).
My chapter is entitled “Frankenstein in Hyperspace: The Gothic Return of Digital Technologies to the Origins of Virtual Space in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” It explores the uncanny return to elements of Mary Shelley’s context brought on by (more…)
Having explored some of the many fascinating and spooky contexts surrounding Mary Shelley’s novel, this final post for my 200th Anniversary Series looks at the novel’s entry into the glamorous world of film. Frankenstein has entered popular culture in a massive way, largely influenced by the famous 1931 film starring Boris Karloff with his neck bolts and lumbering frame, but did you know that this isn’t the earliest film adaptation of Frankenstein? Over twenty years earlier, in 1910, Edison Studios released a 15-minute feature that has become one of the most interesting films of the silent era. Designed to be accompanied by music, it loosely adapts Mary Shelley’s plot to represent the first time the monster was seen on screen. (more…)
A nervous crowd huddles in the makeshift amphitheater of a house near London’s Newgate Prison. The hum of voices rises and falls with the excited whispers and troubled exclamations of the surgeons and attending officials who have come to witness this spectacle. The lamps flicker overhead, casting a pool of wan light onto a table in the centre of the crowd; upon it, the pale, lifeless body of a man, hanged only hours before. In life he had been a murderer; now the purple bruise of the hangman’s noose swells darkly on his cold neck. The man leading the show busies himself around the corpse with shining metal equipment. An electric battery stands nearby, and the man leans over the corpse brandishing two conducting rods. The crowd hushes. A scintillating tremor of expectation sizzles through the mass of eager bodies, perched, awaiting what new horrors might be opened up by this latest scientific breach of the natural world – this time, of the boundary between life and death. The rods connect with the cold skin, a crackling buzz sounds – the electric pulse is delivered. A moment of quiet, and suddenly the dead man’s body moves. His eyes snap open and glare, glass-like, wide with animated horror at the men whose terrified gaze stares back. (more…)
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…)
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.
