My Connection.
I chose to adapt Frankenstein because of its atmosphere and because it is, at its heart, a devastating story about rejection and otherness, about the ways cruelty is learned and then passed on. I’m also fiercely drawn to the Victorian era in England: its anxieties about sexuality, gender, class, and commerce. And I find it remarkable that this novel was written by an eighteen-year-old woman.
I’m endlessly fascinated by what happens to a story over time. Few characters in literary history are as recognizable as Victor Frankenstein’s monster, yet the creature most people picture (Boris Karloff’s lumbering, green-skinned giant with bolts in his neck) bears almost no resemblance to the sophisticated, articulate, achingly beautiful creature Mary Shelley actually describes in her novel. Why did that version disappear while the movie monster endured? It’s a question that motivates me.
My relationship with this novel is a long one. Before my junior year of high school, it was assigned as summer reading, and I remember sitting by the pool in the rain at our family condo in Ponce Inlet devouring it. That school year turned out to change the trajectory of my life. My English teacher, Phyllis Wright, ignited a passion for literature in me, and particularly a love for Gothic literature. That same year I read Jane Eyre over Christmas break, and we read John Gardner’s Grendel in class. I don’t remember every discussion, but I remember talking about the sublime, the nature of monstrosity, and I remember the feeling of those electric conversations.
Years later, as an English major at Southern Methodist University, I took a Gothic literature course from the brilliant Dr. Rajani Sudan and returned to Frankenstein again, this time alongside Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.