The Monster Among Us: Frankenstein from Mary Shelley to Mel Brooks

This exhibition traces the evolution of the myth of the Monster from Shelley’s 1818 publication through to Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein”. The story is one of the commodification of horror, the infiltration into our societal consciousness of issues associated with technology, and the ways we as a society have taken the nightmare of a young women and grown it into our first modern myth.

We present about 145 books, dolls, posters, masks, and other items that tell the story of the Creature’s changing relationship to modern culture. Almost all of the materials shown are from the collection of Susan Tyler Hitchcock, author of a recent book, Frankenstein: A Cultural History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company). Where will our sympathies ultimately end up; with the monster, or the creator?

Title-page of the first edition of Frankenstein

Mary Godwin (she would become Mary Shelley) was 19 years old when she wrote Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. In 1816, she and her lover, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, spent the summer on the shores of Lake Geneva, in Switzerland. Lord Byron was a neighbor, and the group around him amused itself during rainy weather by reading—and writing—ghost stories. Frankenstein was Mary Shelley’s response to the contest. The novel was published anonymously in London in 1818 (Shelley’s name did not appear on the title-page of the book until a later edition).

Though the novel received generally unfavorable reviews, it was an immediate popular success. Theatrical versions soon appeared, and it was translated into French. The author published a revised version of the novel in 1831, with a new preface explaining the circumstances of its composition. Well before the end of the 19th century, “Frankenstein” was a common synonym for “monster”—even though, properly speaking, Frankenstein is the name of the man who created the monster, not the name of the monster itself: Mary Shelley never gave her monster a name, variously calling him creature, daemon, devil, fiend, monster, ogre, and wretch.

Boris Karloff as Frankenstein on a 1997 US postage stamp.

The first silent film based on the novel appeared in 1910 (a graphic novel adaptation of that film appears in this exhibition, as well as a copy of a re-mastered DVD version). The 1931 Universal Studios version of “Frankenstein”, directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff, accelerated the process of turning the creator and his monster into a ubiquitous myth. James Whale’s treatment significantly altered the original story (for example, in the novel the monster is created through chemical, rather than electrical, means).