Frankenstein Now
From our guest editor, Dr. Robert Oventile
The English writer Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) published her novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in 1818, two hundred years ago. Soon after publication, Frankenstein began to spawn literary offspring, with the first stage adaptation, Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, appearing in 1823. Since then, the plays, novels, films, comics, and poems adapting, rewriting, revising, and responding to Frankenstein have multiplied and mutated.
In her introduction to the 1831 edition of the novel, Shelley writes, “And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper” (xii). Shelley is referring to her novel, and to Victor Frankenstein’s creature within it, but the novel’s “hideous progeny” of literary, artistic, and cinematic offspring continues to proliferate as well.
Why “hideous”? The philosopher Jacques Derrida hints toward an answer: “A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future” (Points 387). The future “breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can therefore only announce itself, present itself, in the species of monstrosity” (Of Grammatology 5). In Frankenstein, the creature arrives to humans and human communities “in the species of monstrosity,” as inassimilable to “constituted normality” and bearing futures the novel’s other characters seem never to have anticipated. Of course, as the novel unfolds, the more the humans reject and turn away from the creature, the more monstrous the future becomes. However inherently monstrous futurity is, there may be different degrees and types of monstrosity worth fighting for or against. This is one of the novel’s striking implications for contemporary readers.
To celebrate Frankenstein’s bicentennial, Inscape invited authors and artists to multiply further the novel’s progeny. Among the resulting works are poems, essays, photographs, and digital art. Each engaging Frankenstein in a unique way, each iterating and revising tropes and topics from the novel, these works variously wrestle to welcome the monstrous, to welcome the future.
Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Johns
Hopkins UP, 2016.
---. Points … Interviews, 1974–1994. Edited by Elisabeth Weber, translated by Peggy
Kamuf, et al., Stanford UP, 1995.
Shelley, Mary. Introduction. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, by Shelley,
Signet, 1965, pp. vii–xii.
In her introduction to the 1831 edition of the novel, Shelley writes, “And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper” (xii). Shelley is referring to her novel, and to Victor Frankenstein’s creature within it, but the novel’s “hideous progeny” of literary, artistic, and cinematic offspring continues to proliferate as well.
Why “hideous”? The philosopher Jacques Derrida hints toward an answer: “A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future” (Points 387). The future “breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can therefore only announce itself, present itself, in the species of monstrosity” (Of Grammatology 5). In Frankenstein, the creature arrives to humans and human communities “in the species of monstrosity,” as inassimilable to “constituted normality” and bearing futures the novel’s other characters seem never to have anticipated. Of course, as the novel unfolds, the more the humans reject and turn away from the creature, the more monstrous the future becomes. However inherently monstrous futurity is, there may be different degrees and types of monstrosity worth fighting for or against. This is one of the novel’s striking implications for contemporary readers.
To celebrate Frankenstein’s bicentennial, Inscape invited authors and artists to multiply further the novel’s progeny. Among the resulting works are poems, essays, photographs, and digital art. Each engaging Frankenstein in a unique way, each iterating and revising tropes and topics from the novel, these works variously wrestle to welcome the monstrous, to welcome the future.
Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Johns
Hopkins UP, 2016.
---. Points … Interviews, 1974–1994. Edited by Elisabeth Weber, translated by Peggy
Kamuf, et al., Stanford UP, 1995.
Shelley, Mary. Introduction. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, by Shelley,
Signet, 1965, pp. vii–xii.
