A Contemporary History and Disciplinary Approach to Frankenstein (1931)
Frankenstein (1931) – Contemporary History & Disciplinary
Any great work of fiction subverts expectations, in my opinion. As a long time not fan of horror films, I especially like a gripping bad guy to distract me from the scaries with rich social criticism. If the alleged monster isn’t a profound mirror held up to a society of torch-carrying, pitchfork wielding mobs who fancy themselves heroes only to be exposed as simply ignorant, impatient bigots upon reflection, I’m good. So, in this second installment of Spooky Season Monster Mash, we’re going to look at my favorite such monster, Frankenstein’s creature as portrayed in James Whale’s 1931 film Frankenstein, adapted from Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
The Review Roulette wheel landed on Contemporary History as our approach this week, and for days I have been thinking about what I want to do here. There’s certainly a straightforward lens of reflections here: the US is in the throes of Prohibition and the film boasts the joys and merriment of beer; we’re two years into the Great Depression and the film emphasizes the arrogant confidence only a senseless wealthy white man could have as he plays God; we’re four years into sound in cinema and Boris Karloff’s grunts as the creature, as well as Colin Clive’s exclamations of “It’s alive!” as Frankenstein, became voices as inextricable from the characters in our public imagination as their textual descriptions in Shelley’s novel. In fact, they surpassed Shelley’s novel and brought to life a monster of their own.
Side bar: I won’t lie to you: this review will be a little messy. I always think through my reviews as I write them but generally with a solid idea of the argument I am going to make as I form it. Today, I’m swirling with thoughts, so to honor a contemporary cultural icon of the same period as this Frankenstein, I’m going to take a stream of consciousness cue from William Faulkner as I meander through my thoughts and try to capture some lightning to bring this half-baked idea to life. This review will ultimately land in a contemporary history approach but will also take one of our new approaches to get there: the disciplinary approach of classical reception (my formal educational training as a classicist coming into play here).
So, to start, what if we get a little 3D here with our conception of culture? The public imagination can seem that way sometimes, or at least it’s multidimensional in my brain. If we take Mary Shelley’s novel as a starting point, Whale’s 1931 film as another, and present day 2025 at the other end of this makeshift spectrum, we can kind of pick Whale’s up to be the top of a tent. Stick with me.
There are easily hundreds, probably thousands of versions of “Frankenstein” or “Frankenstein’s monster” adapted and adapted and spun off and gender bent and subverted and refracted and echoed and alluded to ever since Mary Shelley’s novel. If we want to reflect back, Shelley could be an end point on the opposite side of the tent with cultural depictions of resurrection and monsters in other forms, like Lazarus in the Bible, Golems in Jewish folklore, and Pygmalion’s Galatea from ancient Cypriot mythology. It’s even right there in her long title, The Modern Prometheus, that she is pulling this ancient character and all his trappings forward into her modern day while twisting that mythology into a new one. We can pick any of these iterations of the ideas in the story and pull them up to be the top of the tent that we’re analyzing where each point influences the others and everything in between, almost like a crystalline structure of reflection and refraction. We’re almost there.
That kind of analysis is what I do in my other work like in my MA thesis on a post-war comic book about the goddess Venus, (shameless plug) in my book coming out next month on political influences on depictions of Christmas in the post-war period, and in my approach to how I conceive of the character of Santa Claus as an amalgamation of all the iterations of him that came before and after a particular version, like in this article on Miracle on 34th Street. It’s how my brain conceives of culture and particularly cultural icons/themes/tropes/genres as multidimensional, intergenerational, constantly referential, living, growing, amorphous entities a million times larger than they seem. It’s how we get to questions like “is Eliza Doolittle of My Fair Lady a Frankenstein’s monster of Victorian etiquette in Mary Shelley’s tradition of the creature and creator? Why or why not?” Which is, objectively, an excellent conversation starter for a very specific type of nerd who can match my freak, i.e. my husband who did not hesitate to answer the question thoughtfully and pose one back to me with absolutely no context for my asking. What a freak.
So, here, we’re pulling up Whale’s 1931 film to the top of the crystalline tent. If you ask most people to describe Frankenstein’s monster, they will invariably describe this one portrayed by Boris Karloff even if they’ve never seen the film: bolts in the neck, a mop of black hair, seemingly green skin (which is so crazy, this film is in black and white, but my brain is like “yes, green skin” because that’s how powerful cultural crystals and good marketing are), shambles when he walks, terrified of fire, inarticulate, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. None of those are explicitly in the book, apart from the temporary inability to speak and the fear of fire that is almost immediately resolved when the monster learns, as a young child does, that fire hurts but is useful for cooking.
And that’s all super interesting, right? Whale almost invents a totally different monster with a different-enough origin story that names are changed in this adaptation to displace it from the text, but still the iconography persists in our culture so much so that this vision of the creature and creator (as a mad scientist initially content with his creation and who works with a deformed lab assistant) has become not the top of the tent, but the starting point for some people. I will admit that I had never read the novel until this past August, just two months ago, and my crystalline imagination of the Frankenstein story reformed in my mind. I didn’t know that my cultural understanding of Frankenstein was from the films (of which I’ve really only seen Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974) parodying others) and a vague idea that the novel was more nuanced and complicated than films (as with the vast majority of film adaptations of books).
And that’s also fascinating right? Even if we’ve never seen the film or read the book, we have a cultural idea of a character in a physical form whose appearance isn’t even described in the source text. Frankenstein’s monster is really like Santa Claus, right? Our current idea of him largely comes from a consistently forming and reforming amalgamation of cultural depictions: A Visit from St. Nick (1823), Thomas Nast drawings from 1863 on, Coca-Cola ads from 1931 on, Miracle on 34th Street (1947). Each of these iterations built upon or revised the image that exists most prominently in our public imagination.
So, where am I going with all of this? How is this a contemporary history review of Frankenstein? Here’s where the goosey gets even more loosey: this 1930s moment is one of American redefinition and contradiction. It’s a period that leans into tradition but also modernism, sober realism but also slapstick, nostalgia but also innovation; a supernatural superhero serves as the spokesman for the newly conceived “American way of life”. And I think Frankenstein fits into those contradictions.
The film is resurrecting a 113-year-old book and modernizing it, giving it a new life, a new identity in a new time with new technology. It becomes its own fixed point on the spectrum of the life of the cultural ideas of Promethean myths and cautionary tales against resurrection while staking new territory in those cultural crystals by embracing the context of its own conception.
In this film, for example, Frankenstein’s monster is portrayed sympathetically. He is quickly abused and tormented by Fritz the lab assistant (Dwight Frye) with a physical deformity, who himself is derided by the scientist. This dynamic of punching down at those with less power is an interesting twist from the novel. In the novel, everyone Frankenstein loves is killed, including himself for revenge against the creator’s cruel indifference to the suffering of his creation. In the film, the only deaths are self-defense killings of Fritz and Frankenstein’s former professor, as well as the accidental death of a young girl with whom the monster was playing. This is a really significant place to diverge from the text and a telling one for the 1931 moment of contradictions.
The Great Depression and all the deathly trappings of poverty (starvation, exposure to the elements, desperation) were man made problems. It was a torturous period of completely unnecessary suffering made worse by the indifference of the power vested in the Hoover administration. In this cultural crystal structure, I think we could hold that profound mirror up to the American people and they would see themselves not in the angry mobs chasing the monster in Whale’s version, but in the monster himself, forced into conditions of life they did not choose and sentenced to suffer while the creator of said suffering enjoys beers and merriment in a life of luxury elsewhere. Crucially, the divergence of a vengeful creature to a mostly peaceful, accidentally murderous one is an insinuation that no matter how abused and tormented the monster is, it will never be worse than the creator who chose to do nothing in the face of others’ suffering. In the end, that power structure survives largely unscathed while the monster dies a fiery death, howling in pain and desperation.
This inflection point in the crystalline structure of Frankenstein’s cultural imagining is an especially significant one because it rewrote the lore with a modern twist and created its own monstrous, lasting identity in the life of the idea, just as Mary Shelley did 113 years prior. And I find all of that super interesting. I hope this all made sense as I tried to guide you through the chaotic crystal palace of ideas that is my overactive brain because (spoiler) next week is going to build on it a bit for a review of… [TO BE CONTINUED IN SON OF MONSTER MASH]
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