Frankenstein

There is a love story that binds a poet and a writer both English: Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) and Mary Shelley (1797–1851)

Mary is the daughter of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and grows up according to the libertarian principles of maternal ideology, Percy is married to Harriet, from whom he has children who will later be stolen from him. When they meet, Mary is seventeen, they fall in love, run away together and manage to get married only after his sudden widowhood. They give birth to many children of which only a few survive their parents. They find refuge on their wanderings in Italy, where Percy tragically dies in a boat off the coast of Lerici. They burn him on the beach of Viareggio, in pure romantic style, she returns to her homeland swearing that she will take care of the editions of her husband’s works and will bear his name until the end of her days.

He is one of the leading exponents of the Lake Poets, along with Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge. He writes “Ode to a Skylark” and the tragedy “The Cenci”, but the one that leaves a scratch, a paw, a footprint in the clay of the collective imagination and in the history of the fantastic is Mary.

Mary’s half-sister, Claire Clairmont, becomes the lover of Lord Byron, who begins to haunt the Shelleys’ house, Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, together with another friend, John Polidori. It rains, the evenings are tedious and cold, the company passes the time reading German ghost stories. The idea of ​​a competition is launched to see who writes the scariest and most intriguing Gothic story. Thus were born Polidori’s “Il Vampiro”, inspired by the figure of Byron and the first example of a refined and melancholy bloodsucker, and Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”.

At first she has no ideas, every morning she gets up and says that she hasn’t come up with any subject from which to draw an interesting plot, while everyone else is already writing. But she hears men discussing the principle of life, Darwinism, galvanism. Then, one night, she has a nightmare, she sees a terrifying being, assembled by a student who is kneeling beside him. She wakes up upset, she realizes that if she can put on paper the same fear that she felt in her dream, she will create something powerful.

And so it is, in fact. At the age of nineteen, in 1817, Mary gives life to a creature that will remain in the collective myth: the nameless monster shaped by the scientist Victor Frankenstein. The novel comes out in an anonymous and epistolary form and only later will it be discovered that the author is not Percy Bysshe Shelley but his young wife. It will be as successful as Bram Stoker’s later “Dracula” (1897).

Victor’s character is inspired by Percy Bysshe, has, like him, a love of science, passion and a spiritual soul. Pride drives him to pose as a creator, to want to overcome nature by giving rise to a being stronger, healthier, more intelligent and long-lived than normal. The opposite will happen: from the pieces of corpse sewn together and reanimated by the electric current (which then must have appeared as cience fiction and magic together) comes a horrible creature, with a scary-looking and animalistic manner, unable to hold back the murderous impulses. Obsessed with the thirst for knowledge, Victor went beyond the lawful and nature rebelled, man cannot compete with God, he cannot break the laws of the universe, on pain of death and destruction.

To unite Mary and her husband once again is the novel’s subtitle, “The Modern Prometheus”. In 1820 Percy wrote “The Prometheus Unbound”. It is interesting to see how both spouses were inspired by the same figure but using different aspects of the myth. In Mary, Prometheus does not just steal fire to give it to humanity, but uses it to mold clay and model man himself. In both cases Prometheus is a symbol of rebellion, of revolt against the divine will with all the ensuing consequences.

The novel’s atmosphere is influenced by the romanticism of Coleridge’s verses, in particular “The Ballad of the Ancient Mariner”. Metaphysical anxieties and dystopian scientific anticipations, such as those later developed by Wells in his novels, take shape in the fantastic setting of the Gothic. (“The Time Machine” is from 1895)

Beyond the ethical implications, however, the text strikes us for the profound romanticism of the figure of the monster, whom we all tend to call Frankenstein, mistaking him for his creator.

The monster has an evolution: he observes human beings, learns to speak from them, reads Milton and Victor Frankenstein’s diary. He learns the language, the feelings, the aspirations of men, he wishes to frequent them, to know them, to help them, to be liked. But his appearance condemns him: everyone refuses him, everyone runs away frightened in front of him, his kind gestures are mistaken for aggression. The pain crushes him, makes his anger explode and he starts killing again, he becomes fully what everyone thinks he is. Alone and damned he wanders the world, “Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded.”

The figure has a great romantic value, wrapped as it is in its immense solitude, it inspires horror and compassion together, because we understand that his wickedness derives from the pain and refusals suffered. In fact, he asks his creator to make him a bride, a female of his race. Victor Frankenstein sets to work, but then thinks about it, not wanting to produce a breed of opprobrium. When the monster discovers him, grief overwhelms him and he kills Victor’s beloved wife Elisabeth in revenge.

Just by reading Dr. Frankenstein’s diary, the unhappy being will discover how disappointed his creator is, how much he despises him and wanted him to be different. Like a child not loved by his father, he feels hurt, alone and desperate.

Then there will be the final confrontation, with the creature that will kill the creator (as in the last scenes of “Excalibur”, the film by John Boorman, where King Arthur and his son Mordred — born of incest with Morgana — kill each other). It is the eternal myth of the Doppelgänger, the malignant alter ego that embodies and exteriors all that is dark and evil in our soul, it is Mr Hyde for dr Jekyll, Gollum for Frodo, Voldemort for Harry Potter.

But how much pain, how much regret in the creature that destroys its creator. We are reminded of the first Star Trek (by Robert Wise, 1979) where the ancient Voyager 6 probe, which left the Earth hundreds of years earlier, desperately tries to reunite with the humanity that built it.

The same desire for unity, for reconciliation with the father / creator, and, at the same time, for cupio dissolvi, is found in Shelley’s novel.

“He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish. I shall no longer see the sun or stars, or feel the winds play on my cheeks. Light, feeling, and sense will pass away; and in this condition must I find my happiness. “

Not to be forgotten, the beautiful film that, in 1994, Kenneth Branagh drew from the novel, if possible even improving and completing the plot. The miserable monster is played there by Robert de Niro, Elisabeth Lavenza is Helena Bonhan Carter and Victor Frankenstein Branagh himself. Finally, we also remember the very successful parody filmed by Mel Brooks: Frankenstein Junior.