Frankenstein: The Real Story!!
Ever wonder who invented Frankenstein? Did you know that the movies and cartoons of Frankenstein don’t begin to touch the scariness, horror and sadness of the original story?
The real, original story of Frankenstein was written by an English teenager named Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. In June 1816, Mary was staying in a rented Swiss villa above Lake Geneva with her boyfriend, the rich, curly-haired romantic poet and political firebrand Percy Bysshe Shelley. They were joined by his friend Lord Byron and Mary’s half-sister, Claire, who had a baby with Byron and was trying to get him to marry her. Mary and Shelley weren’t married either, because he was still married to someone else, but that didn’t stop Mary and him from already having a couple of babies. Later that year, in December, Mary and Shelley did marry, after Shelley’s first wife committed suicide in a park in London.
Lord Byron was a famous poet, and also good-looking and rich; people said he was “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” He was married to a woman who liked mathematics and designed one of the first calculating and computing machines. Byron left his wife to spend time wandering around Europe with Shelley, Mary and Claire. The whole group was basically on the run from stuffy England, their families, Victorian values and the Industrial Revolution. Does this sound like an HBO special?
As the friends were hanging out in their Swiss villa, they decided to hold a contest to see who among them could write the scariest story. Mary was the only one who finished the challenge with a story she called Frankenstein.
The original Frankenstein, of course, is the name of the Monster’s creator, not the Monster himself. In Mary’s book the Monster is just “the Monster.” Victor Frankenstein, who made the Monster, is an orphan. He’s a confused but brilliant scientist, and he wants to create life, perhaps to make up for the death of his parents. The Monster starts out not bad at all. He becomes terrible only because everyone who sees his misshapen, bolted-together body throws rocks at him and pokes him with burning sticks. When people are afraid, they can get mean. After this happens several times, the Monster figures that the only way for him to have a friend would be to have Victor Frankenstein make another Monster like himself. At first Victor says OK, but then says No.
That’s the last straw for the Monster. The final scenes are a terrible chase into the Arctic and it doesn’t end well.
Happy Halloween!
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