The Time Has Come

There isn't a sense of fear or guilt or doubt, but rather responsibility of the kind his contemporaries might have hoped Victor Frankenstein had. AI scientists gathered recently to talk about the prospects of machines becoming autonomous and smarter than humans. Significantly, they met at Asilomar, California—the place where geneticists met and agreed on a moratorium on research, concerned for the anti-human implications of their work.

Truth more interesting than theory

The publication of Charles Robinson's interesting The Original Frankenstein has given more people the opportunity to discuss the niggling claim that Percy Bysshe Shelley is more the creator of the monster and the myth than his wife-to-be. I appreciate the comment in today's Independent online review, in which James Grande says that “the theories that deny Mary Shelley's authorship are much less interesting than the true story behind Frankenstein.” Grande imagines the two of them passing a manuscript back and forth in bed. I like the image.

Continuing the row over authorship

Charles Robinson's new volume, The Original Frankenstein, published by Cambridge's Bodleian Press and noted here about a month ago, has sparked new discussions about who wrote Frankenstein. It is a debate not quite as interesting as those over Shakespeare or Homer, since there is only one alternative answer to Mary Shelley, and that's Percy Bysshe. It is also a debate that conjures up the same voices, in particular that of independent scholar John Lauritsen, who is PBS‘s unending champion and one of the few, if not the only, person who outright claims that Mary's husband wrote -- not helped her with -- the novel. Both Lynda Pratt in The Times and Jennifer Howard in the Chronicle of Higher Education took the opportunity to explore the issue again.

Vote green in the coming election

It has been an amusing intersection, the Halloween season and the U.S. election, spawning wonders like this one: JibJab - Frankenstein for President!


A special thank you to Pierre Fournier of Frankensteinia for finding this gem.

Speaking of the monster

I had a great afternoon last Friday, meeting with a few graduate students at the University of Virginia (mostly in English, one in Spanish) and showing them the high points of the Dome Room exhibit that features my collection of Frankensteiniana, hosted by the University of Virginia's Rare Book School and titled “The Monster Among Us.”

A University representative greeted us and said that after years of Rare Book School exhibits in the Dome Room, this is the first time that visitors have come to her to ask, “What is this and what is it doing in Mr. Jefferson's Rotunda?” We laughed, and talked about whether Thomas Jefferson might have read Frankenstein -- it's highly likely, but no evidence -- and I voiced my opinion of why it belongs: Because Mr. Jefferson was always an advocate of pushing the limits of knowledge, and that is what the myth of Frankenstein is all about. The official answer is that Rare Book School mounts Dome Room exhibition about the history of books, and this exhibit shows how one book has infused the culture of the world, influencing millions over almost 200 years.

“The Monster Among Us” will be in the University of Virginia's Rotunda Dome Room through the calendar year. Come see it if you can.

Move over, Santa

When I ask my mother, who edges in and out of aging dementia these days, what Halloween was like during my childhood, she talks about razors in apples. "I never got one," say I, eternal optimist and lover of the monster holiday. "Did anyone in our neighbhorhood ever get one?" She has to admit no. One scaremonger newspaper story 25 years ago and she's sure it was happening next door.

But all that is to say that times have changed and sadly children do not as often go out in costumed gangs on their own to trick or treat. I loved that evening. We did get to travel door to door -- saw inside neighbors' houses that we always wondered about from the sidewalk -- and got to walk through the darkness by ourselves, no adult watching over us. Thrills beyond treats.

New conventions are developing to assuage the fears of razor blade believers. Here is one from my homeland of Michigan: A monstrous grown-up takes children on his knee, asks them what they want to be for Halloween, and gives them a hug and a bag of candy. Might have possibilities -- although it's a little too mall-defined to satisfy my need for the fear that comes with chaos and the darkness of night.

Female gothic

In the 1970s, when Mary Shelley's novel was just peeking its head over the horizon and peering into the Ivory Tower -- or, in other words, when scholars were only just beginning to pay it respectful attention -- scholar Ellen Moers published an essay called "Female Gothic." In it she used the little-respected Frankenstein as a central example of the phenomenon of gothic horror, at its core feminine, because it is at its core a visceral, body experience -- scaring by getting down "to the body itself," "quickly arousing and quickly allaying the physiological reactions to fear." The frisson -- the little shiver of fear that we love to feel. That's at the heart of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

This seems to be the point made in this weekend's New York Times Book Review by Terrence Rafferty, who appropriately calls his round-up of female-written horror novels “Shelley's Daughters.”