Status Updates From Frankenstein: A Cultural Hi...

"In the public imagination the two sorts of manmade monsters would intersect and mingle... In the mid-1930s, Capek reflected on all that had been done with his play. 'The author cannot be blamed,' he wrote, 'for what might be called the worldwide humbug over the robots.'" It's interesting to differentiate between the flesh Monster of Shelley, and the machine-Monster of the Universal movies, and of Capek too.

It's so interesting the progression this book draws through the different sciences that gave the Monster his life and embodied the new, cutting-edge technology that the society at the time feared, from electricity to biochemistry. And the different fears that the Monster himself represents -from fear of transgressing on nature to the almost cyberpunk fear that mankind can be updated or even replaced with machines.

I think the thing that allows people to compare marginalized populations to the Creature unfavorably is the muteness that the Creature gained after the theatrical adaptations. In the book, there's still an association between the Creature and Black enslaved people, and Native Americans, but it's more in the sense that they're all oppressed by the small-mindedness of the minority. The muteness makes him monstruous.

"The piece upon the whole has little to recommend it," one critic wrote "but that, as far as times go, will be no great obstacle to its success."

"The Lackington & Hughes first printing sold out, and of the £208 net profit, Mary Shelley received nearly £70 -- around £3000 today, not a lot, but more than her husband would ever earn with his writing."

"Radu Florescu, in his 1975 book..., presents complex links to an actual Castle Frankenstein near Darmstadt, Germany, suggesting that the author and her companions visited it during their 1814 European travels, but there is no solid evidence to prove his theory."

Very interesting, I think Charlotte Gordon presents this as fact. I wonder what the truth is.