Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Frankenstein (1818 novel)

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why the novel Frankenstein is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the new SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

The Novel Frankenstein. Known for being movies. Famous for being Halloween-y. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why the Novel Frankenstein is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie, what is your relationship to or opinion of the novel Frankenstein? I mean, it's really interesting. Alex, did you know that Frankenstein is the doctor and not the monster? Wait, what? Huh? Excuse me? Yeah. Excuse me. So like when they're like, when you're like, oh no, look, a Frankenstein. You could easily be pointing to a doctor because Frankenstein is the doctor, not the monster.

A lot of people don't know this. Okay. Could I, and this is totally hypothetical, could I take this piece of information and use it to try to be superior to other people, in particular on the Internet? I mean, you can, but because you learned it from me, I'm sort of at the top of the superiority hierarchy. So just keep that in mind. No, I like it. I've never read the book. I've heard it's, you know, I've heard it's a little weird. Uh, but like the, yeah, I have seen, um, I have seen young Frankenstein, uh, which is, uh, it's a great movie. It's a Mel Brooks classics. I always love that. It's so good. It was interesting. Cause I actually

watched young Frankenstein the first time, ironically, when I was very young. And there were a few concepts in the movie that scared me. Oh, yeah, it was interesting. It was like, even though it was a comedy. So the idea, I think in the end of the movie, he the doctor like swap some of his brain with Frankenstein's brain. And that part, like freaked me out. felt, I felt like, like to cut out part of yourself, your personality and then give it to another being was strange and frightening to me. But I don't think, I don't know if that happens in the book. Cause you know, I didn't read the book. I don't read books. No, I'm joking. I read books. I rewatched Young Frankenstein a few weeks ago, and it is surprisingly faithful to the vibes of the horror movies and the book and everything. And I had to read the book in high school, in English class. Oh, really? For this episode, I read the 1818 original version.

Oh. Because we'll talk about how there were a few publications. Interesting. version. Oh. Because we'll talk about how there were a few publications. Interesting. This is our second SIF ever about a book, and it won't be very much like book club text analysis. This is more about the book in the world. So that'll be the focus. And then the bonus show is about the text of the book. We did that previously long ago with The Great Gatsby. I think it's a fun way to look at it because this book is like so famous beyond anybody reading it yeah it's such a thing in the world no exactly but the conch represents the society is it lord of the flats

i i just remember those those lit analysis classes in high school where it's just like, and what does the contra present? Society? You could write down society a lot on those tests and you'd get it right a lot of the time. Yeah. And this topic, it's been a frequent suggestion, especially recently. Thank you to Jay Smooks. Thank you to Shane Steiner's Monster on the Discord, who's having a little fun with the concept. This, I think, was originally suggested as a Halloween idea. And I really think of it, this is my weirdest take on it, I really think of it as a December, January, wintry weather book. Because almost all of it is either at the top of the Swiss Alps or fully in the Arctic. There's lots of snow.

The book ends with the creature trying to run to the North Pole, you know? Aw, and he becomes Santa. Oh, right. December episode. We did it. Christmas. Okay. He's big.

He's jolly. He's made out of assembled parts. He's Santa. Right. Santa is known for his separateness from the rest of humanity. Sure. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And yeah, and we will, I guess, spoil the book, but also not talk about the super specifics a lot. The full title is Frankenstein, semicolon, or comma, the modern Prometheus. And the extreme gist is that a guy named Victor Frankenstein becomes obsessed with reanimating tissue and creating life. He builds a guy, chases the guy, battles the guy, regrets it.

The guy tries to make Victor build it a female companion. Victor starts, but then stops. And before and after that that the being kills everyone victor loves and it ends with both of them dying tragically in the arctic that's it oh uh well you know that's what happens when you try to build a park for dinosaurs or something almost yeah Almost, yeah. And also the whole story is through framing devices. The thing most adaptations skip is that this is all an Arctic explorer writing letters to his sister. And he sees both of them in the Arctic and then picks up Victor Frankenstein and hears and writes down Victor Frankenstein's story. And then Victor Frankenstein describes other people's letters. It's a lot of nested letters in a way that students don't love, I think. Yeah, that was a thing. I thought that was that also a thing in Dracula or am I misremembering?

Because I remember there being a lot of like old timey horror books I tried to read. And then when I'm like on like the seventh letter and then I'm trying to keep track of like from so-and-so to such-and-such of such-and-such you know province I'm like I don't know I get it they're vampires yeah the books are only scrutable to postal workers otherwise can't do it can't read it and we're gonna start with a few stats and numbers, because on every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a set of fascinating numbers and statistics. And this week, that's in a segment called, I am a statsman for the county, and I count on CifPod, searching through my dock for another number load.

And I need stats more than want them. And I count stats for you all. And the Wichita Statsman is on the zoom call. Fuse bumps. That was beautiful. Thank you to Willow Tanager. There have been requests for falsetto and I didn't quite do that, but that's what's going on folks.

You gotta build up to it. You'll get there. Yeah. I'll, I'll animate some tissue to form a singer and then the singer will be my creation. And then I'll regret them doing all the songs. It'll be tough. They'll sing really good.

And then you'll be jealous. And that'll be your personal Jurassic Park. Yes. Welcome to Franken-sing. Will be the dramatic line. And then you see brontosauruses. It's getting confusing. Anyway, the first number this week is a year.

It is 1815. And 1815 is the year of a massive volcanic eruption in what's now Indonesia. Yikes. So that's where Indonesia. Hmm. Yikes. So that's where Frankenstein starts. Oh, wait. In the book or the origin of the book? The origin of the book, yeah. Oh, okay. What, did Mary Shelley erupt out of a volcano? Oh, that would be so sick. That would be so cool.

So April of 1815, Mount Tambora erupts and this kills tens of thousands of people right away and then many more afterwards in a series of global crop failures. Oh dear. Because this explosion's so big, there's an ash cloud across the region that winds its way around the earth and causes temporary volcanic winter everywhere it goes yeah i've kind of heard about this like that's like one of the problems with say like a volcanic eruption or meteor hitting or like uh nuclear explosions that people i mean it's not the first thing you think of but the the ash or the debris that gets in the air causes this winter. It blocks out the sun.

Crops die. You get famine and stuff. So it's just one other way that volcanoes screw us. Yeah. We must defeat the volcanoes. Have we tried shooting the volcanoes? But was this a frequently erupting volcano or was this pretty unusual? It was very unusual.

Yeah. Like it's a large volcano, but it's a once in a few centuries kind of event. I see. Yeah. It caused cold snaps in China that killed rice and forests and water buffalo. Oh no, not the buffalo. I know. That's almost bison, but different, no, not the buffalo. I know. That's almost bison, but different, you know?

So I'm very upset. And then the following year, 1816, Europe and North America basically don't have a summer weather-wise. It gets nicknamed the year without a summer. There's stuff like frost on the ground in what's now Virginia in May of 1816. Wow. They don't really get Virginia in May of 1816. Wow. They don't really get frost in May in Virginia. No.

I mean, I'm starting to understand why Mary Shelley has set her book in the snow in the Arctic. Yeah. Sounds like she had snow on the mind. She super did. And the next number here is something folks might know about the book, but there's a lot more to it. The next number is five, because that's how many people, including Mary Shelley, spent the summer of 1816 cooped up in Geneva, Switzerland. Wow. And Switzerland already gets cold.

So, like, how are they doing? gets cold so like how are they doing yeah they were suddenly surrounded by swiss winter weather yeah and what they thought was a summer vacation in geneva switzerland like a lovely lake town kind of thing it's not very conventional geneva got him got him rested yeah this this gets mentioned in the preface of the book, which is another thing that adaptations don't really do. From the first published version of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley credits this cold, rainy summer and the people she was with as the origin of the book. Right. In the first version, she said she and two other friends got cooped up by the weather and challenged each other to write a supernatural story to pass the time. So were there other stories produced out of this, or was Frankenstein really the only one that saw the light of day?

Weirdly, there was another huge story, and it's not by the person you would expect in the group either. another huge story and it's not by the person you would expect in the group either huh wait so so like another story produced by this same group of people like that mary shelley was cooped up with yeah and that's that's the big thing to explore about these five people because i'm excited takeaway number one Takeaway number one. Frankenstein got written within a five-sided love triangle. Oh, my goodness. Spill it.

Dish it. Tell me more. I read this book in school. I think a lot of people do if they read it at all. And I think what we're about to describe is something that not all teachers are super comfortable talking about or allowed to talk about. So here we go. Mary Shelley, who was not named that at the time, writes this during what's not only a kind of climate freak event, summer vacation that's a winter. She's also one point in an incredibly complicated and famous at the time series of love affairs and complexities. How old was Mary Shelley at the time?

She was 18. All right. Which is a cool age to be. It's an age that it's safe to talk about this without people tweeting at us. Yeah. Like, I think some people read this book at the age Mary Shelley started drafting it. You know what I mean? Like, like it's, it's so bonkers that she wrote anything, but especially in the weather and personal situation she was in.

No, I know. It's, it's a quite, it's quite a young age to have such a like world changing novel. I think it's the, it's the age that makes sense to have like a quintuple because that kind of complex relationship is definitely 18 year old. I have a lot of energy. I don't need to sleep. And like, I'm exploring the world in myself kind of stuff. Like I feel like the older you get the idea of a love triangle or love dodecahedron, it's just like, yeah, but I've got mail I've got to sort through. So how could I possibly. At age 19, you're given the green accounting visor that we all wear for the rest of our lives. Yes. But age 18, you're good to go. Let's either post on Tumblr about BTS all the time or do this kind of thing. Let's do it.

We love we love BTS. You have to say that, Alex. Otherwise, they're going to get us. Legitimately, I check some of it out and it's good. Yeah, there we go. Good. Yeah, we love go. Good. Yeah. We love BTS and we love all their fans. It seems positive.

I'm into it. Also, here in Beacon, New York, we have an art museum. They filmed one of their music videos there. For real. What? No kidding. Yeah. That's excellent.

It's called Dia Beacon. Check it out. Wow. Hey. Yeah. So I'm basically the additional member of BTS is what i'm saying alex fan cam alex fan cam you're just like sorting through your mail and like with these little what are they bokeh stars everywhere hooray right i think this is especially if you're never ever going to read the book, you can be thrilled to know that not only is this more of an Arctic novel, if you agree with me, than a horror novel, it's also written in some of the weirdest circumstances in literary history.

A lot of sources this week. Key source for this part is the book Romantic Outlaws by Endicott College Associate Professor of English Charlotte Gordon, who describes these five people in Geneva, Switzerland in a apocalyptic volcanic winter summer. Of love. Of love, yes. Apocalyptic volcanic winter summer of love. So five people. First one is Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, an 18-year-old girl who will later be named Mary Shelley

when she marries the poet Percy Shelley. Okay. And Percy Shelley is also part of this five. Ah, all right. Now we're starting things to get a little interesting. Immediately interesting. Percy Shelley and Mary are two years into a sexual relationship. They met when she was 15.

At the time, they had already had one baby together who died in infancy. Oh, boy. Also throughout their early relationship, Percy Shelley is married to someone else. Oh, OK. And then his pregnant wife proceeds to, it's very tragic, end her own life. And that opens the opportunity for a marriage. And then Mary changes her name. Right. But so he's basically estranged his wife for about two years at this point, and then gone on multiple European trips with Mary and others to just get

away. Right. Okay. Well, this is already like days of our lives. Yeah. Apocalyptic volcanic winter edition. Right. Just the first two people we talked about. Yeah. So there's three more people on the trip. All right. Let's hear them. One of them is Mary's stepsister.

All right. Who is also 18 years old. Okay. Her name is Claire Claremont. And she comes on the trip and then brings along a fourth person, which is her boyfriend, who is also everyone's boyfriend in like all of England. Oh. It's a British noble called Lord Byron. Wait a minute.

Hold up. I feel like I've heard of Lord Byron. And he's pretty famous. Yeah. He probably most of all, along with Percy Shelley, they were famous at the time. They were celebrity poets of England in the 1810s. Yeah. Famed poet slash gigolo, Lord Byron.

Gigolo is only unfair because he did not need money, baby. Like he, Byron was a proponent of free love and he was bisexual. Percy Shelley also into free love, possibly bisexual. So during or after or before this trip, the two of them, Byron and Percy, might have had a relationship. All right. And then Byron is less than a year into a marriage that has gone so poorly there are threats of lawsuits between both parties. Oh, how do you, I mean, that's a silly question. Like what, like what were the lawsuits?

Just like you never do the dishes or like you're a bad husband, Charlie Brown. Oh, uh, I would watch that special. Might break my heart. So he, the main issue was byron was living with the half-sister of his wife okay and she was pregnant possibly from him ah and so that yeah okay even in like patriarchal unfair to women law of britain she could kind of sue over that and that was part of it still yeah's, it's frowned upon enough, like where it's like, well, we were going to throw you in an asylum, but okay. You got a point.

Yeah. And, and Byron is here basically because Claire insisted on having sex with him. Okay. She wrote him a string of letters promising that she was uninterested in marriage, specifically promising she had no guardian or parent or brother, even though that was kind of not true. I'm Googling Lord Byron. I want to see. I mean. See what the deal is, what the pull is. Okay.

All right. I mean, he's got a little bit of What's that guy? He was in Twin Peaks Oh, Bob Bob is his name, he's a demonic voice Yeah In Twin Peaks and Dune Oh, Kyle McLaughlin Yeah, he looks like him

Kyle McLaughlin He looks a little bit like Kyle McLaughlin And I, yeah, alright Yeah. Him with that thin little mustache. Okay. I see it. I see it. Yeah. And his art was mostly like poems about wild, romantic, interesting people. It was a little bit of a literary rock star situation. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So he had groupies. star situation. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So he had groupies. Yeah. And Claire basically decided I would like to be a groupie and said as explicitly as possible over and over again in like 1810s British words, let's just have no strings attached relations all the time. All right. Yeah. And so Byron says, okay, I'll go to Switzerland and we'll do that.

And then within months of this trip, Byron will dump Claire after getting her pregnant. Like it's messy during and after. Yeah. We're still on four of the five people. On top of that, Percy has had a sexual relationship with both Claire and Mary before this trip. All right. Well, you know, I feel like in this situation, it might actually be healthier for them to form a quintuple. Just go for it. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Why limit at this point? Yeah. Look, I understand that society was not accepting at the time, but they were also not accepting at the time of like a lot of extramarital relations as well as out of wedlock children. So I feel like you should go for gold in that situation.

That was Percy's attitude toward Mary as well. That was Percy's attitude toward Mary as well. Before the trip, Percy tries to convince Mary to start an affair with another guy they know named Thomas Hogg, who is not on the trip. Okay. But he's like, free love for everybody. Why don't you just do that? Yeah. a sexual relationship with Hogg, but Hogg becomes her main emotional solace after her baby dies. So there's a strong emotional bond beyond the marriage. There's a lot going on. Right. Which is interesting because I am very poorly educated in terms of polyamory, but I think there are certain boundaries, of course, like that's like the, that's, you know, one of the ways to keep that any relationship healthy, of course like that's like they that's you know one of the ways to keep

that any relationship healthy of course but like yeah yeah if she's seeking emotional support from another person like outside of Percy in a more intimate way like was this a more like romantic kind of connection or was this uh just more like did see this, the other person is like a brother or something? It's, do you know? modern polyamory because this situation is very chaotic and bad, I think, even by those standards, because people are not agreeing or deciding on much of anything. They're just going for it in weird ways. I mean, it's like any relationship, right? Like you have to communicate and sort of be like, hey, this is what I want and what I don't want. and then let's see if we align on these kinds of terms. And then, uh, even if it's one, two, well, I guess one person, no, cause then you're just like in your head, do we agree? Yes. No. Um, but like, you know, whether it's two people or five people, I think, uh, you

need, need a lot of communication and it does not sound like they were communicating except through the art of fiction yeah there was another another problem here which is that Percy Shelley also became very good friends with William Godwin who is Mary's father and Claire's stepfather and you could be friends with a partner's parent but then shelly watching do all the in-law jokes all the stand-up in-law jokes right i'm joking jeez louise but so then the problem problem is that percy starts lending a lot of money to william godwin the father and stepfather of ladies he's hooking up with. And then this leads people to claim that Percy, like, purchased the guy's daughters.

Whoa. You know what I mean? Yeah. And that's probably not what happened, but it is weird. And it is a whole nother layer that becomes big scandal news in England. Yeah. None of this sounds particularly well thought out or healthy. But maybe that is what you need to be creative.

You need a completely toxic life in order to create any art. You can quote me on that. That's like the exact pitch for Lord Byron's career. Yeah. Is that you need to be a mess. And speaking of health, the fifth person on this trip finally is the personal physician of Lord Byron. What? Who is also a playwright and his name is John Polidori. Okay. He mainly comes along because Byron has a bunch of health problems from his crazy life all right is this secondary reason because he's having sex with lord byron or uh uh plausible it's it's unclear okay i i just thought that's where this was going because like you got like in such a messy kind of relationship thing. Why not like have, you know, your doctor also be your like, you know, your third and a throuple.

I don't know. It's almost much cuter than all that. I think that's where it's going. What happens is Polidori shows up to do his job and then meets and falls in love with Mary Future Shelley. Aw. He's like, I'm madly in love with Mary. That's the only person I'll ever want. Aw.

At one point, on a dare to impress her, he jumps off of the porch of the villa, which is an eight-foot fall, and sprains his ankle and is laid up for a while. Wait, onto ground? Yeah, yeah. Like, basically off a balcony. Yeah. But what did he think was Like basically off a balcony. Yeah. But what did he think was, he's a doctor. What did he think was going to happen?

Yeah, he is Lord Byron's doctor. He might be kind of a Dr. Feelgood, JFK pill guy. I'm a doctor, not a physicist. That's right. Yeah. It's different PhDs. And so then Palidori confesses his love to mary she says i only love percy i see as more of a brother which crushes him completely oh dear and then the really surprising thing is like in her original intro to frankenstein mary says that

she and two other friends on a trip got in a supernatural writing contest, pretty clearly meaning the famous writers Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. But partly to be close to Mary, Polidori also participates, and he writes a short story called The Vampire, spelled with a Y. And it's not the first ever story to have some of those tropes, but it's often cited as the first modern English literature vampire story. Wow. So again, the group is five people, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Claire Claremont, Lord Byron, and John Polidori.

All of them are romancing or loving at least one other person in the group. Yeah. In either Byron's villa or a small house rented nearby. And they were also anticipating running around enjoying the summer. Instead, it is a Swiss winter and they're all just stuck writing short stories, but mainly having huge emotions at each other. A Swiss winter night's dream by William Polycule Shakespeare. Polycule really sounds like a puck or fool type character in one of those Shakespeare plays. I love the word polycule. I barely grasp what it means. I completely, I think whatever, I completely think anyone should be able to be in consensual relationships in any way they want.

Yeah. But the word itself is really dope. I love it. Polycule. It sounds like an artifact imbued with arcane energy or something. Oh, yeah. Like the Avengers are gathering the cubes and they're all called yeah loki's got us loki stole the polycule and we gotta get back

yeah and and i haven't done it but you can do this multi-relationship thing in a positive way and these people profoundly did not like yeah. Apparently a few years ago, a Cambridge grad student discovered a lost memoir by Claire Claremont. And Claire wrote it when she was in her 70s, which is more than 50 years after this trip. And she was still furious about the trip. That was how horrible it was emotionally and morally and everything else. I mean. It was bad. It doesn't sound like they discuss things like on day one, like, like, let's just set up some ground rules.

You know? Yes. Yeah. It seems like Percy and Byron in particular just went around saying free love as I can do whatever I want. And Claremont said, quote, under the influence of the doctrine and belief of free love, I saw the two first poets of England become monsters, end quote. I don't know if you're emerging from an era that is like extremely sexually repressed in a lot of ways, and especially for women. And then you're just kind of going like, let's do like free love instead. I think it might be tricky,

especially pre-reliable birth control. Yes. It's an understandable, you know, creatives and or people in general would want to explore things other than the extremely restrictive sort of a relationship dynamics and social expectations of the time. But again, like probably it doesn't seem like there was,

maybe like Lord Byron and Percy Shelley were a little more free with the free love than say a woman who could get pregnant and then abandoned. Exactly. And yeah, they all got pregnant from these guys. And also these guys all die within a decade of the trip. Oh. Is another soap opera element.

Wow. All right. This trip was 1816. Polidori dies in 1821, probably taking his own life. And after racking up huge gambling debts. Oh. Percy Shelley drowns in 1822 in a Mediterranean sailing accident. And then Lord Byron dies in 1824 while participating in a revolutionary war in Greece.

Wow. It keeps in Greece. Wow. It keeps escalating. Yeah. Like it's, it's the way soap opera characters die off screen or in a weird shoot. Yeah. So, um, how old were the guys like during the trip? Were they also pretty young, like in their twenties or? In their twenties. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Older than than the women but not a lot right right yeah and so like this chaos is going

on and this weather is going on and mary shelley writes the first draft of frankenstein right like how incredible i mean that on its own is just the best. Good job. Yeah. Like when your life's a mess, the creative process is clean. That's not true. I'm joking. Like you can have, having stability and contentment in your life can actually be very good for the creative process. Now we're patching in Lord Byron for a rebuttal. Lord Byron? Perhaps you would have considered just taking a lot of opium. Perfect skeleton accent. Yeah, and this extremely messy situation also had a massive impact on the publication of the novel and the perception of it, which we'll talk about here in takeaway number two. Mary Shelley left her name off of Frankenstein in hopes of protecting her kids.

The novel Frankenstein was published anonymously, and the author was not known for several years, partly because of all of the context that went into the writing of it. Yeah, but how, so like, was the fear that people would read the Frankenstein book and be like, this sounds like a book a horny 18-year-old would write while in a very unhealthy polykeel situation. And what went down in swissigan the thing is basically this group of people was famous for their relationships before they went on the trip the trip was almost an attempt to escape london newspapers right and in charlotte

gordon's book she says that they would get written up in the papers as a, quote, league of incest and other horrible claims about themselves. And the newspapers would exaggerate beyond what was happening, invent new hookups. And so Mary's concern was that if people knew that not only she was doing all that, but she also wrote a book about a guy chopping up body parts. Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. Cause there was a lot of that in that book. Yeah. Like it, it does qualify as horror, especially the exhuming of human body parts and stitching them together and electrifying them is like, right. Uh, even more outrageous

then. And so people, so Mary's concern was if I put my name on this, they'll say I'm insane and take my kids. Right, right. It's like you have imagined something horrible and insane. Therefore, you are insane. Exactly. Yeah. And then they would notice her in the first place because of the celebrity notoriety, especially of Percy and of Lord Byron. And so that was like probably a fair concern. Bring a whole lot of heat down on the polycule. Right. It's like the movie heat. Like we can't take this much heat. We shouldn't have brought Wayne Groh to Geneva. Oh, that was stupid. Yeah. And so another source here is a piece by historian Jill Lepore, who says that in 1818, Mary Shelley had two infant children, was already considered immoral in a tabloid love life sense. And so she kept her name off this book about a guy chopping up bodies in order to make

sure that her kids would not be taken and given to foster parents or something. Right. A few tragedies happen from there because, for one thing, both of Mary's infant children at the time proceed to die. Oh, no. She and Percy will only have one more child who does live to adulthood, but that's it. And then also the anonymous publication choice leads people to spark conspiracy theories that Mary Shelley did not write the book.

Oh, yeah, that's fairly typical. Yeah. The two pieces of evidence are the anonymous first publication and then Percy was her husband and an artist and around a lot. So he put some handwritten notes into the manuscript, probably at her request. Right. You know, I don't want to say every scholar thinks this, but the general consensus is that Percy's notes were tiny word choice stuff. His biggest contribution might be giving the creature a black head of hair. Like he did not add a lot to the story or the concept or anything. That does actually change the whole book, though. Imagine a blonde Frankenstein's monster.

Right. Like, too handsome. It's too romantic. It's basically like a Twilight telling a Frankenstein, I guess. Okay, sure. All right. like a Twilight telling of Frankenstein, I guess. Okay, sure.

All right. Yeah, so for those two reasons, basically misogynists decided that Mary Shelley didn't write it, but she did. She wrote Frankenstein. Yeah. And then another thing happens where two more numbers, 1823 and 1831, those are years when there were further editions of Frankenstein published that do credit Mary as the author.

She also did some revisions. It took five years for the public to know that Mary Shelley wrote her own book. And then that got questioned for decades. Right. Yeah, that stinks. Then also for readers, there's a thing of at least like Frankenstein fans debating which version of the book is the best one. According to Mary in her 1831 intro, she only mended the language, leaving the core and substance untouched, end quote. But some scholars say that Mary made significant thematic changes. And I kind of agree with that, having read it. The original book

is more about Victor's crime being cruel to the creature. And then the 1831 book, it's more of a thing where playing God at all is a crime, like he just never should have built it. And that tends to be where the horror goes. But the original book, the creature is just kind of alive and immediately all the problems are how bad of a guy Victor is toward it. Right. And so it's more about like the cycle of abuse versus the other one where it's you shouldn't have built that Jurassic Park. Yeah. Dr. Frankenstein. Yeah. Yeah. And you, the reader or student or whatever, you can just look in the front and see if it's the 1818 or the 1831. 1831 is kind of the most common one out there and is our most, like you said, Jurassic Park version.

So it's interesting that these varieties exist, partly because she needed to republish it to put her name on it. Huh. Interesting. Was there anything that happened in her life? You think that made her sort of alter the theme somewhat? The, yeah, the claim is that once her name was on it, she needed to tone down the like comfort with creating life from dead body parts. Like she needed to make that evil on its face because she was not anonymous anymore. And it's kind of a more extreme book to take that as somewhat normal on its own. Like the intro to the 1818 book, the first lines are about how recent modern science suggests this is possible and not in a totally judgmental way.

And like, I'm writing science fiction. I looked at science kind of way. Yeah. Like the first lines are, I am a lady author and I read science and science says you can bring people back from the dead, which is a good thing. And I hope someday there's birth control. Anywho. Right.

And the men are only mad about the birth control part. Like what? Hold on. Yeah. So the men are only mad about the birth control part. Like, what? Hold on. Yeah. So I think it's amazing where this novel comes from and also how it got altered by its own circumstances. We are going to take a short break and then return to explore how this initially anonymous novel became one of the most famous concepts in the world.

I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places. Yes, I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman,

and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience. One you have no choice but to embrace because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. running in the halls. And we are back and we've begun with this

first 1818 novel of Frankenstein. Our next takeaway is about why you, the listener, have heard of it. Because takeaway number three. Almost all of our cultural tropes about Frankenstein come from a stage play. I think most people know that it's

movies, but the movies were made about a century after the book, and there was an immediate adaptation phenomenon around a London stage play of Frankenstein. Huh. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Because I only know like the black and white movie, the Frankenstein, and then maybe also the Frankenstein's wife movie with the Marge hair and so on. But, uh, you know, yeah, I'm not familiar with any kind of play format. Those are the two ladies with that hair, huh? Marge and the bride of Frankenstein. Marge and Frankenstein's bride. Yeah. Margin and Frankenstein's Bride, yeah.

Yeah, I really thought this was kind of unknown before the movies would have been my guess. And it turns out it was immediately a hit and another medium. Right. And it was also a hit book right away, even anonymous. Huh. Which is another reason she put her name on it. Like, you want to be known for writing an awesome book. Right, right. But like, so it was a hit. Was it like, was the first version of the book really controversial though?

Was the church or, you know, certain like, you know, where people are like, hey, this book is creepy and bad. Oddly, the reviews of the 1818 Anonymous version were better than the reviews of the next versions, probably because people didn't know a lady wrote it initially. The gender of the author is not obvious from the first intro, first version. Right. It's got that sort of, you know, lady energy. It's got that lady energy on it this time, and that's gross. Yes. Yeah. The first reviews described it as like a genderless, amazing demon of a writer wrote this. Right, right. It got a particularly key early review from the famous poet and novelist Walter Scott, later knighted Sir Walter Scott.

The small first printing sold out. A friend of Percy Shelley wrote to him saying, it seems to be universally known and read, end quote. Wow. And the 1818 book was so popular, it got a French translation in 1821. People were already like, we got to get this out there. It's so good. So did they make a play adaptation based on the 1818 version? Yeah. In 1823, a playwright named Richard Brinsley Peake adapts it into a play he called

Presumption! or The Fate of Frankenstein. So I think a lot of people were like, have you seen Presumption? Was how this was described, even though it's obviously called Frankenstein to us. presumption was how this was described, even though it's obviously called Frankenstein to us. It's actually, presumption is actually the name of the doctor, not the monster. Now I'm imagining an appointment with Dr. Presumption. He just tells you what you have and leaves. You don't get to go over it. Yeah. And this was a huge hit play in London. Yeah. And this, this was a huge hit play in London. It's part of why a second edition could get published. Like the people were like, let's do a book off of that great stage play. And Mary Shelley saw the production, said she enjoyed it, particularly enjoyed the actor playing the

creature. And, uh, and also appreciated that the program did not name what the guy played. The program said like dashed lines played by actor's name instead of naming the creature. Oh, interesting. And the adaptation was both considered faithful and considered a lot more thrilling. And in particular, the moment when the creature gets animated. In the book, there's just one line victor saying the creature has come like i animated the creature it worked my experiment worked and in the play they made a meal out of it like we imagine the this dramatist peak is the person who wrote the line it lives it lives and then all versions of that are from him so the premise is still mary shelly but like

every mental picture is from this play yeah that's interesting i guess that is yeah that's like the iconic line because it's like because it gets zapped by lightning does that happen in the book too he gets zapped by lightning there's electricity but the in the in the book he doesn't build it in the cool lab we think of. He builds it in one room of his apartment at a university. I see. It's very like homebrewing beer vibes of setting up and constructing this creature. It's a lot different.

But there is electricity as an ingredient. Yeah. Right. The play kind of sparked those movies and kind of told creators, if you're doing Frankenstein, you need to make a huge meal out of the creature coming to life, which is just a good decision. Like the book really underplays it. Yeah.

So that's the famous line in the movie where he's like, holy moly, I done it. Right. Where he shouts, hamana, hamana, hamana, the famous Victor Frankenstein freakout. Ha, cha, cha, cha. Yeah, and so this lay hand in hand with the book made the story famous and also set the tone for how we tell it.

And so it's a lot of why we've heard of it at all. I don't know if this novel would be famous on its own without other mediums and way before movies. That's really interesting. I mean, it is, it's also interesting that people, you know, like really had such an appetite for like this kind of, you gruesome book uh and like i i think that's just kind of a you know like it was because there's always been like violence in literature and stuff but i think there's kind of a distinction maybe between like violence in books and literature and art and sort of the macabre which is like like the idea of like, you know, playing around with dead things. Yeah.

Chopping up bodies and throwing them around. But like his, I think like Edgar Allen Poe kind of fits in the macabre sort of like, and I'm sure that there's been versions of it throughout history, but it feels like it was very defining in terms of our kind of modern sensibilities in terms of like horror and the macabre of like, you know. Yeah. Really kind of the gritty details of something, the mad scientist creating something, doing something, you know, you quote unquote shouldn't do. Yeah. Like people seem to like really latch on to these concepts like immediately.

But not only that, they're really powerful still in our modern culture. Absolutely. And it was that way from jump in a way I just didn't know before researching this. Yeah. When it comes to movies, there's the most famous first movie in 1931 with actor Boris Karloff credited as the monster. But that was more than 20 years after the first movie of frankenstein people basically tried to make a movie of this as soon as movie technology allowed it and the first one was in 1910 it was a 12 minute silent film

that was made at thomas's studio in New Jersey. People were like, as soon as a camera functions, let's make a Frankenstein story. Like, let's go quick. And in the books, so Dr. Frankenstein never makes the Lady Frankenstein's monster with the hair. Yeah, it is a lot of the story, the creature demanding a female companion on the very reasonable argument that you and all other humans hate me and I need someone to live with and talk to. And then Victor builds it part way, changes his mind and destroys it in front of the creature while the creature is there.

I mean, that's what we would call like a jerk move, right? Because, you know, just say no at the beginning. It's like, you know, this might be a sexist comparison, but if you're baking a cake for someone and then you're halfway through, you're like, no, and you smash the cake on the floor, you're going to piss the person off. But anyways, my whole point of asking this was, was like, where did this concept, cause like there was like the, I thought there was like a movie follow-up, a sequel, a squeakquel to Frankenstein where it's like bride of Frankenstein where,

Frankenstein where it's like Bride of Frankenstein. Yes. Where he does make Lady Frankenstein, which I believe is like a lot, was a lot less good than the original movie. But like, were they just like, wow, the movie's a hit. We got to do a lady version. Yeah. It was like a pretty solid Hollywood idea of like, this is kind of in the book. We can make a sequel where they do build the bride and it's a whole thing. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That, that, that's really originated

by Hollywood and not the play or the book. Interesting. I mean, it makes sense. It's, it's almost like fan fiction in a good way. Like a lot of it is there in the original book and they ran with it. Yeah. It's interesting. Cause when I looking at the Bride of Frankenstein's hair, it's very extra. And I'm trying to figure out why, you know? Yeah, and I mainly know it from Madeline Kahn at the end of Young Frankenstein, but they do just replicate it. Yeah, it's great and it's weird. It's fully Hollywood creativity at that point. Yeah. Also, where did the concept of the creature, Frankenstein's monster, having such a square flat head come from? Yeah.

And that's also movies. And the green skin is movies. And in the book, it's like yellow skin, black hair, black lips, and no bolts on the neck or anything. There's no bolts? No bolts no jerry there's no bolts i do now i'm imagining the frankenstein monster entering rooms like kramer and it really makes sense that's how a being with a new body would enter rooms a huge strength yeah yeah just like kind of jerking around like some ligaments are missing yeah yeah it would just start eating your cereal it doesn't know yeah social mores yeah sure jerry has how's the reanimating me a lady going i i can't i can't do impressions uh but you know i think i nailed it

like mm the creature doesn't need a companion because it's friends with lopez it's friends with bob saccomano it's friends with all kinds of unseen people in the city right frankensteinfeld speaking of modern stories we have one last big takeaway for the main show. And this is another kind of chicken and egg kind of thing. Takeaway number four. A science fiction retelling of Frankenstein helped invent the Internet. There's a 1960s Arthur C. Clark short story called Dial F for Frankenstein that helped kind of science fiction prototype and Internet. OK, I've actually never heard of this story. I hadn't either. I had heard of Arthur C. Clarke mainly for 2001 A Space Odyssey.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Along the way, while being a hugely popular and beloved science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke comes up with a story with a really good premise. The premise is that all of the world's telephone systems get more and more interconnected. And then one day they achieve sentience together. Ah, yeah. Which in the 1960s, before the internet and before like our computers today, that's a really smart idea. Yeah. You know, I mean, neurons are basically like telephones. That was his exact argument. Yeah. Like that's the thing that happens. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now I see it. The story starts with like a neurons firing little coded messages between individual telephones.

And then one day, all of them ring one time together to announce that they are now a global technological intelligence. Cool. Yeah. And then they take over the world and the world ends, is the story. Oh. Oh. I mean, you know, i want one story one story about you were so excited you were like i was so excited for the friendly the happy giant telephone brain where it's like all you have to do is think about wanting to order a pizza and they they order it up. And it's like, you know, and you're like, thanks, giant telephone brain. And they do some kind of cute little ringing in response. I don't know.

Yeah. Because like, I feel like there could be a situation where there's an emerging sentience where they're actually nice, you know? you know and that's one of the most fun like scholarly arguments about the original frankenstein novel is to argue that the only problem is how victor reacts mainly to the appearance of the being and that if they tried to be buddies it would have been fine they and in the later version it's a problem to make life at all i want to see the version where they're buddies it's a problem to make life at all. I want to see the version where they're buddies. It's basically young Frankenstein. It's basically the putting on the red stance number. It's great.

Yeah. You know what? That's you. You're correct. And I, I, that's why I like that movie. It's a really perfect movie. Like it just explores that possibility that they hit it off.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a great movie. Yeah. And, uh, and yeah, and so this Arthur C. Clarke story, the title and the premise are riffing on Mary Shelley. And he's open about it. It's like, oh, instead of a Victor Frankenstein making a creature, it's all of the world gradually making a telephone intelligence creature. Like, same idea, but different and great.

Yeah. It's really interesting because I think a lot of these concepts that really plant themselves in the social consciousness, like Frankenstein, like, you know, other science fiction or horror authors, like, I think it can actually, because like, these are the things that kids read and it inspires people. And then we're like, whoa, we're actually making stuff like this a reality. And I think it's like, well, part of it is that, you know, we, I think respond to our culture, like art. And then that inspires scientists. Even, I mean, of course, like, um, doctors aren't like going like, well,

I read Frankenstein, so I'm going to start sewing body parts together. But there are ways in which our culture of the ideas that are in these kind of books and plays and movies, it inspires people to see, well, could we, you know, say like revitalize neural cells and especially with like this, like these interconnected telephones kind of being very similar in terms of like the internet. Yeah, exactly. And it leads to the two very last things here, because one is that there's an unverified rumor. No one can confirm it or prove it.

But people think on one of her european trips mary shelley might have heard about a guy in germany trying to reanimate dead tissue in the past and there's a castle in germany where they sell tours of they call it frankenstein castle because a guy used to live there and maybe did it yeah but the the more direct inspiration, like you say, because doctors really didn't try to do that, is this story. It gets published in the 1960s, and it's published in Playboy magazine, which was like a leading publisher of great short fiction in the 1960s. I read it for the short fiction. That's right. Hey, put that magazine down.

We're taping. Hey, hey, pay attention. Just huge unfoldings all the time. Anyway. Goils, goils, goils. Yeah. And so despite the naked ladies, one of the readers of that issue of Playboy was a nine-year-old and his name was Tim Berners-Lee. Wow. Tim Berners-Lee later works at the CERN Laboratory in Europe and theorizes a worldwide web and is the closest thing we have to a single inventor of the Internet. And in an interview, he said that one influence on him was the story Dial F for Frankenstein, where all the phones talk to each other, because that's pretty much an Internet. Yeah, that's amazing. the phones talk to each other because that's pretty much an internet. Yeah, that's amazing.

This is kind of a philosophical view, but it's like, I think that innovation, it's like, I think it really affects like the timing of when things come along in like humanity. I think that like certain like things, like certain types of ideas and innovations, I'm not going to say they're necessarily inevitable, but they're very, very likely given the kind of, like just basically the evolution of human society. So like if so-and-so didn't invent it in 19-whatever, such-and-such is going to invent it in 19-such-and-such. Like, you know what I mean? But I do think that it does, like the timing of things too really does, it's, but that makes a huge impact, like how soon we get the internet, at what period of time, during sort of else who does another thing. It's just, it's really interesting to see how those kinds of things play out.

The, the, the, yeah, the influence of art on technology and vice versa. Yeah, a hundred percent. Like, yeah, folks have heard long ago, Sif, about undersea cables. We talk about there being undersea cables as early as the 1850s for telecommunications. It was all telegraph stuff. But yeah, it's like you say, there can be a steampunky different order to these kinds of things, depending on our idea having timing. And Frankenstein was a really big idea. It did it. Yeah. Like electric cars happened even before gas cars. Yeah.

Near the turn of the centuries. I mean, the technology was there. It's just we needed to do a better job of figuring it out. Yeah. And thanks to better telephones and Mary Shelley, we figured out an internet maybe faster than we otherwise would have. It's so cool. Yeah. And society is so much better for it.

Clearly. We all love it, the internet. It's only good. I'm going to chase it into the Arctic as a weird creator. Hey folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, Frankenstein got written within a love pentagon during a summertime volcanic winter. Takeaway number two, Mary Shelley left her name off of the novel Frankenstein in hopes of protecting her kids. Takeaway number three, almost all our dramatic and cultural tropes about Frankenstein come from a stage play. And takeaway number four,

a science fiction riff and evolution of the Frankenstein idea helped invent the internet. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is our book clubbiest thing we taped. It's the three most bizarre decisions by Victor Frankenstein besides building a creature. If you were seeking a little book club about the novel Frankenstein, our bonus is that thing. Check it out.

Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than 14 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things? Check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include the book Romantic Outlaws by Endicott College Associate Professor of English Charlotte Gordon, tons of digital resources from the Atlantic, the Smithsonian, the New York Public Library,

and of course, reading the 1818 edition of Frankenstein and the 1831 edition of Frankenstein. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skadigook people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy. And I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here.

the Americas and elsewhere. Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join that Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord. And hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 83. That is about the topic of doorknobs. Fun fact, medical doctors constantly grapple with something called the doorknob phenomenon, and it might be something you've done. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my

co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature. That name is extra fun in a Frankenstein context. Creature Feature is about animals and science and more. Our theme music is Unbroken, Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members, and thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating, So How About That? Talk to you then. maximum fun a worker-owned network of artists own shows supported directly by you