COMPLETE GUIDE
MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN
086 | WW W.SCI FI N OW.CO.U Kfl esh, even though it’s described in the novel
as something that’s stretchy and too thin, that
doesn’t cover all the viscera and the muscles,
is something that is not as abject in terms of its
ability to fall apart as that of the zombies.”
It’s a potent work that fi nds the pressure points
in all our psyches – a craving for acceptance,
a paradoxical combination of rejection of
and craving for familial approval, an equally
confounding desire to be both unique and one
of the crowd – before pressing down, hard.
As Ní Fhlainn notes, the creature’s response to
Frankenstein’s callous rejection is appalling in its
brutality and wincingly familiar in its motivation:
“Revenge is one of the oldest narratives we
have ever had, in any form of storytelling.
You’re stripping away everything you can from
a person, just as the creature himself felt that
he was completely stripped of all kindness
or humanity. That idea that you can strip a
person down to their most vulnerable, just to
remind them that their hubris is what caused this
nightmare in the fi rst place. The fact that, at the
end, he does wander off into his own existential
loneliness takes us back to the beginning of the
novel where he feels abandoned.
“It’s a powerful thing in its own way, and I
think that suffering is what the creature really
wants, to impose that sort of emotional suffering
and bring it back to its original roots: the idea
that the decisions we make have consequences.
Shelley says in the second edition that there
was a lot of emotional discord in her writing
of the novel. She had at times a very strained
relationship with her father. She was doted
on by him, but she also felt emotionally at sea
because of her mother’s death. I think that
undertow does come out in the difference
between what you are expected to be and what
you are, all those frustrations we can relate to as
people, and it’s there in the relationship between
the creature and Frankenstein.”
Frankenstein was far from Mary Shelley’s
only achievement. After Bysshe Shelley’s death
in a boating accident in 1822, she spent the
rest of her life writing to support their son whilepromoting her late husband’s own acclaimed
work. Her literary output encompassed novels
and travel writing, all of it marked by her unique
imagination. She died of a brain tumour in
1851, aged just 53.
Ní Fhlainn deftly summarises her immense
signifi cance as a writer and a thinker: “In her
own writing, she has in a way birthed the
imaginings of modern science fi ction. There’s
no question about that. She came before all the
great male science fi ction writers of the 19th
Century. I think it’s incredible what she achieved.
Early science fi ction is rarely kind to women.”
Life itself wasn’t kind to Mary Shelley.
Through her writing, she seems to have found
a kind of peace with the competing impulses
and concerns that caused her so much pain,
marked as she was by unwarranted guilt for the
death of the mother she never knew and for the
brutally abbreviated lives of all but one of her
children. In another 200 years, there will still be
vulnerable young people who have cause to be
grateful that this titan of English literature was
brought into the world.Victor LaValle’s Destroyer is published by
BOOM! Studios and Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein is available on Blu-ray from Sony
Pictures Home Entertainment.COMPLETE GUIDE
MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN
(^086) WWW.SCIFINOW.CO.UK
FrankensteinFrankensteinFrankenstein Victor LaValle’s DestroyerDestroyerDestroyer is published by is published by
BOOM! Studios and Mary Shelley’s
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Pictures Home Entertainment.