SCHELLEY Mary, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus

In mid-August this year I was wandering in the Quartier Latin in Paris when I see a poster with the name Mary Shelley. The association with Frankenstein and Prometheus was immediate.
In the poster you could read: “Her greatest love inspired her darkest creation”. “Mary Shelley: The life that inspired Frankenstein”. I decided then to see the film that had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 9, 2017 and on August 9, 2018 in Paris.
The film, in turn, propelled me to read again Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus. More than 55 years had passed since I read it for the first and only time. To which it would be added several films which were in fact what more marked my “vision” of Frankenstein.
I was surprised by the fact that it was not me who read the book. It was the book that read me, as would have said Umberto Eco in his work Lector in fabula. La cooperazione interpretativa nei testi narrativi (Milano: Bompiani, 1979).
Thus I was able to contrast my adolescent reading with my current reading as a young dinosaur.
And this comparison prompted me to read two of the three editions of the book –1818 and 1831–, as well as the analysis of different specialists on the text and on the artworks in several domains (literature, movie, theater, painting, photography…).
After this travel, Frankenstein –that is not the name of the ‘monster’ but of the doctor who ‘created’ it– is a character that embodies and manifests the deepest problems, questions, concerns and challenges of the multidimensional human condition, that is to say, of all of us: biopsychosociological, philosophical, ethical, political, economical, religious…
Then, as I use to do after reading the most diverse sources and points of view, I decided to share with you this bookish journey and introduce Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus to those who have not read it to discover him in its maximum splendor, as well as to those who have read it or have seen him in films or in theatre plays in order to compare and enrich your vision thanks to other points of view on our hero, who do nothing more than to make visible the enormous multidimensionality of all of us.
I wish you and enjoyable, insightful and fruitful travel with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (born Godwin, because her father was William Godwin, a political philosopher considered to be a precursor of the anarchism; and her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, author and leading advocate of women’s rights, one of whose books I present in the bibliography).

Alfonso LIZARZABURU