1816: the year without a summer, the year of poverty, of the eruption of Mount Tambora that brought unceasing rain, cold, and the destruction of crops. Europe, already impoverished by the Napoleonic wars, saw its very survival threatened (The Raft of the Medusa by Géricault may well be taken as a symbol of that dreadful season). That same year, at Villa Diodati in Switzerland, nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley began to conceive her Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, which would be published two years later. The cultural context was marked, on the one hand, by Romanticism, with its exaltation of the hero who defies rules and aspires to the Absolute, and on the other, by scientific development. Particularly inspiring for the young writer was Erasmus Darwin’s theory of galvanism, which speculated on the possibility of reassembling and bringing back to life a dead body. Far from all the films we have seen so far about Frankenstein, the novel begins with Robert Walton, an English gentleman determined to undertake an expedition to the North Pole in search of a new maritime passage.
In a world traversed by light and darkness, a man defies nature to create the unnatural. The Creature is born, and with it, a tragedy. Guillermo del Toro reinterprets Mary Shelley’s masterpiece with the tragic grace of a Miltonian parable: the f...
Trapped in the ice, he glimpses in the distance a sled driven by a monstrous figure. The following day, another sled brings aboard a man in agony: Victor Frankenstein, who is rescued and begins to tell his story. During his studies of natural philosophy and medicine, Frankenstein had succeeded in bringing to life a creature assembled from corpses. Yet he was never able to love it: too ungainly, too deformed, he allowed it to flee, abandoning it to its fate. Wherever it seeks refuge, the creature is hunted down and mocked. When it begs its creator to “make” it a companion, the request is denied, unleashing its vengeful fury against all those Frankenstein loves. The doctor pursues the monster to the Pole, determined to end the chain of tragedies, but dies of hypothermia. Walton then feels bound to complete the mission. Meanwhile, the creature boards the ship, bends weeping over its creator’s body, and finally sets itself on fire, to prevent its remains from being used for study or experiments.
In the author’s introduction to the 1831 edition appears this quotation from Milton’s Paradise Lost:
“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?”
The subtitle The Modern Prometheus instead refers to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the titan, once freed, shapes men out of wax. I cannot say I feel sympathy, but certainly understanding, for that figure to whom Mary Shelley gave her voice.
