In the summer of 1818,
twenty-year-old Mary Shelley (then Mary Godwin, although living as ‘Mrs
Shelley’ with Percy Bysshe Shelley in Geneva) wrote one of the most culturally
influential stories in the English language. Her Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus has spawned
countless adaptations across multiple media and has come to be a definitive
part of the Gothic and Romantic movements.
The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli (1781) |
To mark the bicentenary of the novel’s creation,
the Morgan Library & Museum has unveiled a major exhibition dedicated to
the work and its influence.
Three Witches, Henry Fuseli (1783) |
I began my visit by exploring the Gothic art that
inspired Shelley and her contemporaries. Many of these paintings draw upon or
suggest narratives, such as Henry Fuseli’s 1781 The Nightmare, in which
a demon crouches atop a prostrate woman’s chest, and his 1783 Three Witches,
which has influenced subsequent depictions of Shakespeare’s weird sisters.
There are also skeletal depictions of Death, such as John Hamilton Mortimer’s
drawing of Death on a Pale Horse (c.1775) and multiple instances of men
and women attempting resurrections by an open grave.
Death on a Pale Horse, John Hamilton Mortimer (c.1775) |
In the next section of the exhibition it’s easy to
see synergies between the Gothic imagination and contemporary scientific
advancements. Doctors and anatomists are depicted as grave robbers, while
artists show their instruments destroying and restoring life, as well as
extending it.
The Anatomist Overtaken by the Watch, William Austin (1773) |
Parts of the Frankenstein manuscript are on
display, as well as letters between the Godwins, Shelleys and others. The
romance of the Frankenstein’s creation, and the characters of Shelley,
Shelley, Byron and Keats, seem to add to its mystique and appeal, as much as
the story itself.
The manuscript |
In a second room we move out of the nineteenth
century and into Frankenstein’s afterlife in film and graphic novels. We
trace the monster’s evolution from reanimated corpse to superhuman villain to
participant in superhero-style showdowns. The movies become weather vanes for the
sensibilities of their time. For instance, the creature’s accidental child
killing appalled audiences in 1931 and so the moment was cut from the film. The
bride of Frankenstein (a creature Viktor chooses not to animate in Shelley’s
original tale) becomes part of our cultural
inheritance—here you can observe her wig, listen to her blood curdling screams.
A poster for the 1931 adaptation |
At the centre of the exhibition
is Richard Rothwell’s 1840 portrait of Mary Shelley. She watches over
proceedings serenely as movie buffs, bibliophiles, and lovers of the macabre
file through. I couldn’t help but wonder what she’d think of how Frankenstein
and his monster have outlived her and evolved and how amazed she’d be that a
tale born out of her time has come to represent so much about generations
since.
Mary Shelley, Richard Rothwell (1840) |
Which NYC exhibitions should the Secret
Victorianist visit next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by
tweeting @SVictorianist.