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Frankenstein
作者Author  /  Mary  Shelley  瑪麗•雪萊
Mary Shelley's Film Adaptations
Margarette Connor
 

 

Frankenstein
 
 Introduction 
 Lake Geneva 
June 16th
The Evening's Challenge 
Intense Reading Program 
Quickly brought to Stage 
Film Versions
Earliest Frankenstein 
Series Worth Nothing 
 
 
Frankenstein: Introductory Essay
 
Introduction
Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein is a complex blending of many different themes.   Most people are familiar with the story, at least the version that has been passed down to us through the cinema versions, but many people are unaware of just how very complex it is.
 
 At the time she was writing it, Shelley was intellectually stimulated--reading Romantic poetry with her brilliant husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friends and working through John Milton's Paradise Lost among other great works.
 
But she was also grieving the loss of her first child, a terrible tragedy for any one.   But there was more.   Her half-sister Fanny Imlay had committed suicide earlier in the summer, as had Percy's deserted and unhappy wife, Harriet.
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Lake Geneva
  Mary Shelley was only 19, far from home, on the banks of Lake Geneva, Switzerland, during one of the worst summers on record.   It was cold and rainy that summer, and Geneva is no place to be under those conditions!
Modern Genevan sunset. Even with the electric lights, it's
still an awe-inspiring sight. Photo: Margarette Connor
 
 
I've had the great good luck to live in Geneva while teaching this novel, partially set in that city.   One summer course I spent doing this book and the film versions of it was another horrible summer--wet, cold and full of thunderstorms bouncing off the mountains that encircle Lake Geneva--the Alps and the French Juras.   After reading the book together and watching the films, my class and I felt we had some additional insights into what went into the book.   While one of the prettiest places on Earth, Geneva in the cold and rain can be quite spiritually oppressive.
 
Most people aren't as lucky as we were--to be able to study Mary Shelley's work "on the spot" is a rare privilege, but being aware of the depth of the book, and being open to delving into it, enriches not only the reading experience, but the viewing experience as well.
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June 16th
As all the introductions to the novel tell you, its inception came on a very special night. Thanks to the torrential rains, the Shelleys could not return to their own villa, so they had to spend the night at their friend Lord Byron's villa, Villa Diodoti.   The house party included Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron, and John Polidori, Byron's physician.  
 
This house party is immortalized not only in the film The Bride of Frankenstein, but also in Ken Russell's strangely compelling Gothic (1986), which gives a fictionalized account of the evening, with Natasha Richardson as Mary Shelley, Julian Sands as Percy Shelley and Gabriel Byrne as Byron.
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The Evening's Challenge

After giving themselves a good scare reading a collection of German ghost stories, The Fantasmagoriana , aloud, they set each other a task.   Each would write a horror story for the entertainment of the rest.

Shelley wrote a now-forgotten story, Byron wrote a story fragment, and Polidori began the "The Vampyre", the first modern vampire tale, which he later finished and published in 1819.

 
 
And poor Mary had a terrible time.   She couldn't get started.   But a few days later, she had what she called "a waking dream:"
 
"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, then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life...His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away...hope that...this thing...would subside into dead matter...he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains... 
 
( http://www.kimwoodbridge.com/maryshel/summer.shtml )
 
The next morning Mary realized she had found her story and began writing the famous lines that open Chapter Four of Frankenstein - "It was on a dreary night in November".
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Intense Reading Program
As I said earlier, Shelley was doing some heady reading that summer.   In the days before the creation of her story she and Percy had been reading and discussing Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Christabel", Germaine Necker, Madame de Stael's De l'Allemagneas well as Milton's Paradise Lost .
 
All of these influences can be found in the novel, but very few people who hear the name "Frankenstein" think of an intellectual novel.
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Quick brought to stage
The first dramatization of Shelley's novel came during her own lifetime.   It was a three-act opera by R. B. Peake titled Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein (1823).
 
When Mary Shelley attended a performance of the play, she commented that she was "much amused and it appeared to excite a breathless eagerness in the audience" (quoted in Donald A. Glut, The Frankenstein Legend , Scarecrow Press, 1973, p 32). A second adaptation opened the same year, as did a trio of comedic versions. In 1826, new versions were staged in London and Paris.
 
And the Frankenstein myth was off and running
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Film Versions
A quick search for "Frankenstein" on imdb.com brings up 102 hits, not including name matches!   And that doesn't include films like the recent Van Helsing in which Frankenstein's monster plays a key role in the story.   I discuss this film further on the Dracula introductory pages.
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Earliest Frankenstein
The earliest film Frankenstein was a silent 1910 version by Thomas A. Edison!   According to imdb.com, "Since its original release, the Thomas Edison Frankensteinhad been listed as missing; no copies of the film existed. An original nitrate print finally turned up in Wisconsin in the mid-1970s.
 
"Prior to the film's rediscovery, only a few images of Charles Ogle as The Monster were known to exist." (http://imdb.com/title/tt0001223/trivia)
 
So Frankenstein was ripe for cinematic treatment from the very early days of cinema.   I won't have a chance to treat all of the cinematic treatments.   Indeed, most of them are not worthy of comment, but I will be treating the most important:
 
Frankenstein (1931)
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Young Frankenstein (1974)
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994)
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Series worth nothing
After 1931's Frankenstein and its sequel Bride of Frankenstein , new directors and actors came on board and kept the franchise up.   Worth noting are 1939's Son of Frankenstein and 1943's Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman.
 
Also worth noting, as an excellent comedy-horror blend was 1945's Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein.   Abbott and Costello were a beloved American comedy duo from radio, film and television.
 
Finally, in the 1950s and 60s, England's Hammer Studios produced a number of Frankenstein films, most of which were funny, campy and a little scary.
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