“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine,” says Prospero of the witch-born and malevolent Caliban in The Tempest. What does he mean? That he owns Caliban? That he takes responsibility for him? That he has given occasion for Caliban’s resentment and bad behaviour? Or that Caliban is his emanation — the outward form of Prospero’s own inner darkness?
Our literary and artistic monsters are ours, especially in the fourth sense of Prospero’s acknowledgement. A giant squid has a being apart from us, but Grendel and Dracula and Dr. Frankenstein’s monster do not: they are what we make them, they mean what we say they mean. They are emanations of our human nature, which includes our uniquely human ability to tell imagined tales.
The monstrous quasi-human being created by Mary Shelley in her astonishing 1818 novel, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, has had many lives since his advent — particularly in films, where he’s been reduced to a malevolent ghoul of scant intellect. And he has had a great many meanings ascribed to him, from the socio-political to the psychosexual.
My poem cycle, Speeches For Doctor Frankenstein, sticks to the original novel. Doctor Frankenstein, in the throes of scientific discovery, obsessed with the idea that he can create human life and make a new-and-improved version of man, calls down fire from heaven (like Prometheus) in the form of electricity, thus animating dead matter (like God). His frightening creation is at first innocent and well-meaning, but it finds itself rejected, not only by everyone it meets but also by its creator, who refuses to make it a mate of its own kind. Out of revenge and lonely despair, it goes on the rampage and murders Doctor Frankenstein’s bride and also his best friend. Frankenstein then pursues the monster into the frozen Arctic, bent on destroying his handiwork, but he perishes in the attempt.
The poems chart the process of the monster’s creation as it emerges from the mind and through the hands of Frankenstein. In the last poem, set in a polar landscape, the monster escapes from Frankenstein and defies him. The two of them — as in Mary Shelley’s novel — are joined in a chilling love/hate twinship. They areaspects of each other:both things of darkness that must be acknowledged by the other.
I wrote this poem cycle in the mid-1960s, when I was immersed in the study of nineteenth-century literature, including various modes of the Gothic. My friend, Charles Pachter, illustrated and printed it in an edition of fifteen copies in 1966. It also appeared in the poetry collection, The Animals In That Country, 1968.
— Margaret Atwood, 2012.
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Speeches For Doctor Frankenstein
PoetryIn 1966, before they were international sensations, Margaret Atwood and Charles Pachter teamed up to create Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein — now a unique piece of cultural history. In a book that has only existed as an artist book of fifteen cop...
