Much Missed about Mary’s Monster

Despite all the new movie characters you will see portrayed by children in costume come Halloween, you might still spot that perennial favorite Frankenstein.  Usually that depiction will be modeled on Boris Karloff's makeup in the 1931 movie (perhaps all the way down to the lug-bolts on each side of the monster's head, an indication that he was put together from parts).  That movie has also been the primary vehicle through which people have learned a Frankenstein story.  But that movie diverged in significant ways from the original British novel by Mary Shelley.  And what was left out may tell us something significant about life, and even other species.

Mary Shelley

The 1818 original novel was inspired partly by Mary Shelley (wife of poet Percy Shelley) having heard about experiments in which scientists were beginning to discover physical connections between electricity, chemistry and biology.  For example, the severed legs of a frog would "kick" when an electrical current was applied.  Some scientists wondered if electricity could somehow bring a whole dead animal back to life.  Mary's imagination took the matter one step further by having her fictional young scientist use electricity to bring life to a being assembled from parts of human corpses.

So far, novel and movie are roughly the same.  The critical question is:  How will complications appear?  What matters has the scientist overlooked that will lead to difficulties (something any good plot needs, horror story or otherwise)?  In the movie, an explanation for the damage that will ensue is provided by the scientist's assistant unwisely having substituted a criminal's brain for a normal person's brain.  But Mary's book provided no such easy out.

In the movie, the monster was mute and slow-witted (probably because of that inadequate brain). In quite a contrast, the book's newly created living being is precocious, and quickly learns to talk quite well.  He even learns to read, and becomes quite erudite.  How could anything go wrong?

And yet, there are problems from the start, and they have to do as much with the scientist as with the monster.  The new being, desiring contact, reaches his hand out to the scientist's, but the scientist pulls back, avoiding touch.  That will be the key to the problems that continue to develop as the new being seeks companionship but cannot get it, and also seeks a mate but cannot find one.  For, after all, this new being is the only one of its kind.  Like all living beings on this planet, he needs others of the same species.  It is as if he were the last of a virtually extinct species the moment he was "born."

To put it in a nutshell, to me, Mary Shelley's monster story suggests not just the danger of arrogant science, but the even greater problems of living and of loving.  If social species such as mammals and birds could watch movies, they might also identify with the "monster."

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Have you ever identified with a monster in a movie, or thought about why we sometimes can?

(The drawing of Frankenstein is by André Koehne 

and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

(The portrait of Shelley is in the Public Domain because its copyright has expired.)

Ex Libris Nature

People don't use them much anymore.  Bookplates, that is.  (In case you're not familiar with their name, bookplates are those rectangular labels, about 3 in. x 4 in., that can be glued into the inside of the front cover of a book to identify the book's owner.  Sometimes the label bears the phrase "Ex Libris" or "From the Library of," ready to be filled in.)  I've been able to notice the decline in their use from having been a volunteer church librarian for almost three decades, and so having sorted through thousands of donated books whose owners have spanned several generations.

A first thought might be that paper bookplates have declined with the rise of electronic books. But the strong sales through Amazon show that physical books made of paper remain popular. (Did book-owners place bookplates in their books more often when, unlike today, a plethora of books could not be so quickly and easily purchased -- thus perhaps making them seem more precious?)

What interests me more about bookplates, however, particularly those from half-a-century to a century ago, are the designs of the artwork that adorn them.  Especially the way Nature so lovingly appears in the bookplates dating from about 1900 to 1950.

I know about them from owning two books published by Dover containing hundreds of samples from that pre-World War II era. There are bookplate illustrations with the lacy filigree of Art Nouveau, and bookplate illustrations with the streamlined polish of Art Deco.

Whatever the style or era, what I notice is the ways Nature appears in the art.  In a fair number of instances, the artwork portrays a person reading outdoors.  (Do people read outdoors much anymore?)  Even if the artwork portrays an inviting reading nook in the corner of a house, there will be a window there with a garden view for the imaginary reader to delight in when they look up from their book.

My hunch is that there is an unconscious symbolic connection between books and Nature.  When we read, and thus connect our minds and hearts with another living person, something living within us grows -- just like those living plants so frequently drawn by Art Nouveau bookplate artists. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. spoke to this enlivening quality of reading by making a comparison to the stimulating effect of music.  He wrote:

"The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts."

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If you had only three books to keep forever (and adorn with bookplates), what would those three books be?