Frankenstein’s metaphor

 

 

The world’s most rewarding metaphor is now 200 years old. Since his dull yellow eye first opened on January 1, 1818 Victor Frankenstein’s creature has been compared to the Irish mob, the lumpen proletariat, the wandering Jew, and the UK Independence Party. Today he is spokesman for minority rights – including gay and lesbian and those born with disabilities and disfigurements – while his creator is patron saint of Artificial Intelligence, nanotechnology, robotics, bio-hackers, body-shaming and bad parenting. In English departments, where Mary Shelley has a dual identity as the celebrated author of a canonical novel and a woman writer excluded from the canon, Frankenstein is one of the five most commonly assigned texts. Linguistically, we talk about (genetically modified) Frankenfoods, Frankenstorms (stitched together from different weather systems), Frankenbikes (built from different parts) and Frankenbabies (born of three-parent IVF).

 

When I rang Penguin Books and asked them how many copies of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein they shift in a year, they told me “around 80,000”. I wanted to know because, according to the programme notes for Lisa Evans’s new stage adaptation of the novel, now showing at Northampton’s Royal and Derngate Theatre, “few people have read Mary Shelley’s seminal novel . . . (and) Frankenstein is a strangely neglected book”. As a writer myself, I can’t help thinking that if a novel that sells 80,000 copies a year is “neglected”, my own books must be non-existent.

 

Nonetheless, Evans’s adaptation assumes that Shelley’s novel needs interpretative help if it is to engage contemporary audiences. Like many modern productions of Shakespeare (for example), her play aims at “relevance”, by framing the story of Frankenstein and his Monster with a twenty-first century parable…

 

Frankenstein meets his creator (Robert Powell)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImpKcDYy7B8