Black Frankenstein, by Elizabeth Young

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of the most thoroughly examined books in literary history. Its themes and manifestations permeate our culture and have yielded a massive and ever-growing body of work. Elizabeth Young’s Black Frankenstein, The Making of an American Metaphor (University of New York Press, 2008) is an important addition as it effectively breaks new ground, proposing a deep analysis of Frankenstein as a racial metaphor in American culture.

Perhaps the first metaphorical reference to Frankenstein came in 1824, shortly after Mary Shelley’s novel of 1818 had been adapted, with phenomenal success, to the theater. George Canning, the British Foreign Secretary, addressing the issue of the West Indian slave trade, referred to “the splendid fiction of a recent romance” in which a dangerous creature is “raised up” with “the thews and sinews of a giant” but with no perception of right and wrong. Canning, an abolitionist, was promulgating a slow and gradual approach to ending slavery, paternalistically warning against immediate emancipation of the Negro who possessed “the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child”.

Canning’s statement, without benefit of context, was used in America by proslavery apologist Thomas Dew as a vivid illustration of the dire consequences of abolition, and with it, the Black Frankenstein entered American consciousness.

Elizabeth Young tracks the onset of the metaphorical Monster and its affinity with the vocabulary of racial rebellion through political cartoons, editorial and fictional uses. In 1829, for instance, the language of Mary’s Monster, cursing his wretchedness, is identical to that found in an antislavery manifesto of free African American David Walker who wrote of “the Coloured people” as “miserable, wretched, degraded and abject”. The Monster spoke of revenge on his creator much like Walker’s admonition that, “some of you… will yet curse the day you were born.”

Young grippingly documents the Frankenstein parable in American fiction, touching, among others, on the automaton in Herman Melville’s The Bell-Tower (1855), Stephen Crane’s The Monster (1898) about a black coachman disfigured in a fire while saving the life of a white child, and The Sport of Gods (1902) by Paul Laurence Dunbar, that namechecks Frankenstein in reference to its murderous protagonist, a monster made by racism. Moving on to films, Young examines Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) as a monster movie, replete with its ugly stereotypes, and James Whale’s Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein playing out against the backdrop of the 1931 Scottsboro trial and the failure of an anti-lynching bill in 1935. Theme obliging, even the execrable Blackenstein (1973) merits analysis.

The book wraps with a fascinating exploration of comedian and activist Dick Gregory’s own explorations of the Black Frankenstein concept.

“I told Momma, ‘I just saw Frankenstein and the monster didn’t scare me’¨, wrote Gregory in his essay, Dreaming of a Movie (1968). “But now that I look back, I realize why I wasn’t frightened. Somehow I subconsciously realized that the Frankenstein monster was chasing what was chasing me. Here was a monster, created by a white man, turning upon his creator. The horror movie was merely a parable for life in the ghetto. The monstrous life of the ghetto has been created by the white man. Only now in the city of chaos are we seeing the monster created by oppression turn upon his creator.”

Note, the cover of Black Frankenstein uses Milton Glaser’s art from the inside-cover spread for Dick Gregory’s Frankenstein live album of 1971.

In an afterword, Young reflects briefly on Frankenstein references in the contemporary art of Glenn Ligon, pointing, perhaps, to the need for a full-blown survey of Frankenstein in the visual arts.

Black Frankenstein is a relentlessly serious, scholarly tome and the reader best come prepared to be challenged by some of its concepts, and provoked by some of its ideas. A chapter dealing with metaphor-making, the definition of monster metaphors, meta-metaphorical meanings and Frankenstein as a metaphor for metaphor itself demands careful reading and will no doubt boggle a casual reader.

On the other hand, if you’re willing to wade into this robust, remarkably researched study of Frankenstein’s cultural and racial significance in America, you’ll find there is much to discover here, and much to think about. Elizabeth Young’s Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor is a necessary and important addition to Frankenstein scholarship.

Elizabeth Young’s Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor (University of New York Press, 2008).

A short profile of author Elizabeth Young.

Read the introduction to Black Frankenstein, courtesy of NYU Press.

Black Frankenstein on Google Books.

Questioning Authority, a short interview with author Elizabeth Young.

New York University Press page for Black Frankenstein

Frankenstein Day

Today, October 7, 2008, is Frankenstein Day at the prestigious Bodleian Library of Oxford University, England.

The event celebrates the launching of The Original Frankenstein, a new and revolutionary edition of the novel edited by Charles E. Robinson. Manuscript pages in Mary Shelley’s own hand will be displayed (and a lock of her hair, too), and Mr. Robinson and guest Brian Aldiss, author of Frankenstein Unbound, will be speaking.

Charles E. Robinson, a Professor of English at the University of Delaware, is one of the premier scholars of Frankenstein, having meticulously studied the original Mary Shelley manuscript, cross-referencing contemporary accounts and Mary’s correspondence to determine the process and order of the writing of various drafts of the novel and the corrections and editing performed on it by Mary’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Robinson’s groundbreaking research yielded a book, The Frankenstein Notebooks: A Facsimile Edition of Mary Shelley’s Manuscript Novel, 1816-17, in 1996.

Now, with The Original Frankenstein, Robinson has undertaken to reassemble Mary’s original manuscript, the first version as written in 1817, entirely in her own hand, before her husband Percy began his editorial interventions and annotations.

The result, according to an Oxford University communiqué, is “a more rapidly paced novel… we hear Mary’s genuine voice which sounds to us more modern, more immediately colloquial than her husband’s learned, more polished style.”

Mary Shelley’s authorship has always been questioned to some degree, starting with the book’s publication in 1818, author anonymous, but quickly attributed to Percy by some reviewers. Last year, John Lauritsen’s The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein controversially argued for Percy’s blanket authorship, reducing Mary’s contribution to that of a mere secretary. With The Original Frankenstein, editor Robinson presents both the published version and the reconstructed original manuscript to demonstrate that Frankenstein was, indeed, Mary’s book.

The Original Frankenstein is available directly from the Bodleian Book Shop.

Here is the announcement page for Frankenstein Day.

With thanks to Susan Tyler Hitchcock of Monster Sightings for the heads up.

Related
The Great Frankenstein Controversy
Happy Birthday, Mary Shelley

The Meaning of The Monster

“I don't know why it is that Frankenstein's monster is my go-to guy to fight the blues” writes Arbogast, in a short post that manages, intuitively, to capture the meaning of The Monster, a metaphorical stand-in for the rejected, the oppressed, the lonely, the sad.

Needing to Feel Better… is a concise, wonderful reflection.

Meanwhile, The Monster as metaphor, and more precisely as a metaphor in American culture and its “racial resonance in the United States”, is the subject of Black Frankenstein, by Elizabeth Young, from New York University Press.

This is the real stuff, hardcore scholarship, meticulously researched. It’s a fascinating, provocative and challenging book.

I am currently plowing through this one and I’ll post a proper review when I’m done reading and thinking on it. Here’s the NYU page for Black Frankenstein, where you can access the book’s chapter-length introduction.

For those of you eager to dive in, Black Frankenstein is out now and its available through the Frankenstore.

The Scholarly Frankenstein

I’m awfully proud to report that this blog has been singled out by the brainy university types at Intute as “a useful research aid for those seeking to survey the uses to which the Frankenstein monster is still being put in popular culture, and the contemporary neo-gothic / neo-Victorian imagination in general.”

Intute (formerly known as RDN, The Research Discovery Network) is a UK-based consortium of seven universities and research partners working together “to advance education and research by promoting the best of the Web in one easily accessible place, providing access to quality resources through a process of evaluation and collaboration.”

Experts and subject specialists evaluate websites for quality and relevance, and the chosen ones are included in Intute’s free online search engine. From now on, searching Intute for Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, and things related will bring up Frankensteinia among a list of valuable web resources.

See, you’re not just entertained here, you’re edjukated, too!

Click here to see the Frankensteinia description page.

The Covers of Frankenstein : Master Movie Monsters

Perhaps he’s just a glum ghoul, but I always thought of the creature roughly caricatured here by M. Seltzer as a Frankenstein movie-inspired monster, with that tall billboard forehead and overhanging brow.

Published by Merit/Camerarts out of Chicago in 1965, this paperback original by Brad Steiger is a quick and fairly entertaining read, striding briskly through the history of horror films, cleaving largely to the familiar titles and the name stars like Karloff and Lugosi. Steiger displayed good knowledge and genuine affection for his subject, but there was nothing really new in here for genre fans, all of the material having already been mined by the then popular monster magazine.

In his introduction, Steiger staked the high ground, promising “no cute captions, no poisonous puns, no deprecating delivery of information”. Otherwise Master Movie Monsters actually reads like an issue of an average monster mag, with short-short chapters (one, on vampire films, runs barely two pages), and photo sections — a little murky on the cheap newsprint interiors — making up half of the book’s 122 pages. Arguments made are typical of the writings on horror films in the sixties, promoting monster movies as serious cinema and necessary catharsis, and decrying a “plague” of increasingly cheap sequels, culminating in “the final indignity of mockery and laughter when they (the Master Monsters) were forced to meet Abbott and Costello”. That was the conventional wisdom of the times, and it would be a few more years before the qualities of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein would come to be appreciated by serious critics.

Teen-age monsters are similarly snubbed, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) is singled out as a memorable but “minor” Master Monster, with the fifties belatedly redeemed with the “much-awaited Renaissance” signaled by Hammer Films and AIP’s Poe films.

Master Movie Monsters was author Brad Steiger’s second book, and a second pass at the subject following his Monsters, Maidens & Mayhem – a Pictorial History of Hollywood Film Monsters (also 1965). Steiger went on to an amazingly prolific career as a book writer, with 166 titles — currently — to his name. He specialized in the paranormal, cryptozoology, UFO research, also writing true crime and even biographies. His bio of Rudolph Valentino served as the basis for the 1977 film directed by Ken Russell. Steiger’s most recent titles deal with spirituality.

Brad Steiger’s official website. Steiger’s biography, with a complete list of published works.

Frankenstein: A Cultural History

Frankenstein’s themes, inherent and suggested, and, of course, its signifier character, The Monster, have been referenced in cultural and human affairs for almost 200 years, now.

Susan Tyler Hitchcock’s book, Frankenstein: A Cultural History, is an ambitious and satisfying overview of the phenomenon.

Hitchcock is an engaging writer and, best of all, she is generous and inclusive, as genuinely interested in Mary Shelley’s literary significance or the political interpretations of editorial cartoonists as she is in The Monster’s appearances in cheap B-movies and on Halloween masks. Dick Briefer’s comic book interpretation gets as much respect as Jung’s archetype of the shadow does in explaining The Monster’s sway on our consciousness.

Frankenstein movie fans might be a little disappointed by the film coverage in the book. Key versions are examined, and Boris Karloff’s iconic bolt-neck interpretation fairly permeates the narrative, but because the book is so wide-ranging, which is the whole idea, films are just a part of the greater story, and Hitchcock gets nowhere near — and never intended — a comprehensive study of Frankenstein in the cinema. It must also be noted that there are a couple of minor mistakes in the book’s film discussion. The Inspector Krogh (Lionel Atwill) character is first mentioned in the correct context of Son of Frankenstein (1939), but a few pages on, he is associated with the earlier Bride of Frankenstein (1935). In discussing Hammer Films’ Curse of Frankenstein (1957), credits belonging to Peter Cushing are attributed to his co-star, Christopher Lee. These are mere slip-ups, to be sure, but genre fans will bristle.

Frankenstein: A Cultural History succeeds because it takes large steps, with net cast wide, following Mary Shelley as she slowly gains acceptance for her seminal novel, and her extraordinary Monster as it inexorably takes its place as a central cultural icon.

Susan Tyler Hitchcock’s website, featuring an excerpt form the book.

Hitchcock’s blog, Monster Sightings.

The publisher’s Frankenstein page.

The Great Frankenstein Controversy

Number 4 on my list of Frankenstein Events in 2007: John Lauritsen’s The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein.

It’s an old story. From the moment it was published, anonymously, 190 years ago, critics attributed Frankenstein to the author of the book’s original introduction, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Even after Mary assumed her byline, Percy’s presence loomed as her editor, some said collaborator, in the authorship of the famous novel. To this day, scholars are still measuring Percy’s influence on the novel, chiefly through the study of his numerous annotations to Mary’s manuscript.

In March of 2007, writer John Lauritsen revived the controversy and cranked it up to eleven. Lauritsen argues that Frankenstein was written by Percy Bysshe Shelley, not Mary, whose contribution was basically secretarial, copying Percy’s work in her own handwriting as she had done for some of Lord Byron’s poems, preparing the manuscript for the printer. Lauritsen also suggests that the central theme of Frankenstein is male love, expressed both directly and in coded language that he, as a gay historian, is able to interpret.

Lauritsen’s forceful thesis, self-published under his Pagan Press imprint with the unmistakable title of The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein, ignited a firestorm in literary circles. It went ballistic, reaching a wider audience after Camille Paglia gave the book a short but resoundingly positive review in a Salon.com article.

What’s fascinating about Paglia’s review is not so much how completely convinced she is by Lauritsen’s arguments, as her gleeful celebration of its assault on stuffy old academia. Paglia writes: “Lauritsen's book is important not only for its audacious theme but for the devastating portrait it draws of the insularity and turgidity of the current academy… This book, which is a hybrid of mystery story, polemic and paean to poetic beauty, shows just how boring literary criticism has become over the past 40 years.”

A vastly different perspective on the book came from Germaine Greer whose article in The Guardian carried its own unequivocal title, “Yes, Frankenstein really was written by Mary Shelley. It's obvious - because the book is so bad”.

Greer writes, “The latest sensation to galvanise the torpid lit-hist-crit establishment is the "discovery" by market research analyst John Lauritsen that Mary Shelley did not write Frankenstein.” She then delivers a full-on blast against Lauritsen, complete with her own reading of Frankenstein as feminist text: “The driving impulse of this incoherent tale is a nameless female dread, the dread of gestating a monster… If women's attraction to the gothic genre is explained by the opportunity it offers for the embodiment of the amoral female subconscious, Frankenstein is the ultimate expression of the female gothic.”

Another good read on the subject is the transcript of an Australian ABC Radio program, The Book Show, featuring Lauritsen along with Percy Shelley expert Neil Fraistat, and Charles Robinson, author of The Frankenstein Notebooks. Its all very civil, composed and thoroughly fascinating. Fraistat makes an observation that, in the end, provides a satisfying coda to The Great Frankenstein Controversy of 2007:

“I think the interesting thing is that one of the things that John's book does that's so valuable is it acts as a kind of provocation, it makes people have to go back and really look at the evidence and think these things through for themselves.”

John Lauritsen’s website is here. Pagan Press is here, including a list of reviews, notably Camille Paglia’s, and Pagan Press' Frankenstein pages.

Germaine Greer’s article in The Guardian.

Transcript from ABC Radio’s The Book Show.

If you are interested in Lauritsen’s book, The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein, I suggest getting it directly from the author. Support small-press publishers!

The Frankenstein Events of 2007 Countdown continues on Wednesday, December 26.

Heads Up!

I honor every expression of the myth of Frankenstein, no matter how tawdry or superficial, because all show how broadly and deeply its meaning runs in the human imagination.

— Susan Tyler Hitchcock

As a non-fiction writer, Susan Tyler Hitchcock has penned a dazzling array of books on such varied subjects as religions around the world, the Roe v Wade decision, women in medicine, women explorers, a Victorian murder case, and how to grow wild plants indoors. She is currently a book editor for the National Geographic Society.

This fall, W.W.Norton will be publishing her new book: Frankenstein: A Cultural History.

You can read a tantalizing excerpt, as well as an author Q&A and early reviews on Hitchcock’s website. She also keeps a blog called Monster Sightings.

I’ll keep an eye out and I’ll report back here as soon as the book is published.

The Cabinet of Dr. Frankenstein

Actor Conrad Veidt never essayed the part, but his likeness has been used to represent the Monster.

The first example is an audiobook adaptation from Oxford University Press, Bookworm Edition, 1998. It uses an image cropped from a vividly colored poster for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919).

 

The second piece features artwork recycling Veidt’s dramatic profile and clutching hands from the poster for Orlacs Hande (1924).

Autour de Frankenstein ("Around Frankenstein"), was published in 1994 in the Cahiers Forell collection of the Faculty of Letters and Languages of the University of Poitiers, in France. It is a compendium of scholarly articles in French and English with such titles as Innocence, Injustice and Incomprehension in Frankenstein; Frankenstein and the Excess of Signification: a Case of Unstable Balance; A Map of Russia and Understanding Frankenstein: (A Geo-angelological Folly in Seven Chapters), and Legends of the Animated Body: The Case of the Monster.