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Dear friends,
It’s time to talk about Frankenstein. And not because it’s October, and Halloween approacheth. The truth is, I’m not that into Halloween - it has always scared me for the wrong reasons. Spending the first 18 years of life under the nightmarish rules of someone else’s denial has had a lot of consequences, and one of them is that I really don’t like to put on a costume. In every situation, I must insist on showing up as myself. But don’t feel concerned for me (I can feel the Costume Pushers closing in)…as long as I can eat the candy and light the candles, I’m doing great. The real reason it’s time for Frankenstein is because, earlier this year, I read Mary Shelley’s classic novel for the first time, and it left me with some musings I can’t seem to shake. So when I learned that Guillermo del Toro has directed a visual version, due out this month, I knew it was the right moment to merge and integrate two artistic ‘viewings’ into one. “To examine the causes of life we must first have recourse to death.” - Mary Shelley, The Original Frankenstein I read Shelley’s earliest version of the book, an 1816 manuscript she wrote before her husband made significant edits. But the story is the same: Victor is the young doctor with the secret obsession to bring forth life from death. The so-called monster he created was never given a name, so for simplicity - and for conclusions I’ll come to later - I’ll call him ‘the creation.’ Knowing I had my own preconceptions about such a well-known story, I was still a bit shocked by two details: first, the innocence of the creation, brought into consciousness without consent or agency, and immediately abandoned; and second, how Victor enacts that abandonment, how his every decision seems cloudy with disassociation and willful ignorance. At times it’s almost as if he can’t speak, like his silence is some kind of curse. “How mutable are our feelings and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery.” - Mary Shelley, The Original Frankenstein Shelley was on a summer holiday, in the first year of grieving the loss of her baby, who died shortly after birth, when she wrote Frankenstein as the answer to a challenge among peers to write the best ‘ghost story’ they could come up with to frighten and entertain the others. To me, the most maddening thing to witness is the sequence of Victor’s continually bad decisions. I got the sense that the creation’s behavior made more sense than Victor’s, because at least he was acting on his emotions, which were clear - a need for love and companionship in the terrifyingly beautiful void he had woken up in - while Victor was shut down, his emotions disconnected from his actions, his silence sealing the tomb on the rest of his waking hours. When Victor turned away from what he created, it kept crashing over him in waves of increasing destruction and terror. In this sense, he’s a cautionary tale for those who refuse to acknowledge their grief - an emotion that Shelley was certainly under the influence of while she was writing. But there remains, for me, a duality to the creation that keeps winding its vines around me, holding me captive. “I trod heaven in my thoughts - now exulting in my powers - now burning with the idea of their consequences.” - Mary Shelley, The Original Frankenstein To make something with the wish that it be immortal is a folly. Yet we do it all the time, bringing life into the world with the insistence that we will focus only on the living part. The story of Frankenstein is so compelling because Victor’s creation was death brought to life. But life is inseparable, in its circle, from death. Our children will no more live forever than we ourselves will. While Victor was working with both at the same time, he made the fatal error of insisting on the separateness of the two. I recognized in him a source of my own creative block: the temptation to turn away from what I create because I fear its power and ugliness, to turn it into a spectre before I’ve even gotten to know it. I think it’s common to be terrified of our own insides - our impulses, ideas, desires, and obsessions - and what they might reveal about us. As Amy Fusselman writes in her unforgettable, memoir-ish, Savage Park, “…my understanding is that creativity, in its fullest, most cherry-blossom-ish flowering, wants to piss on your grave. Creativity is like this because it is a force; it is powerful, overwhelming, fiery, insatiable…Creativity is like this because creativity is part destroyer, and in my limited experience, this is why real creativity does not get many party invitations.” Frankenstein helped me recognize something important about working through my creative blocks, and connecting with my writing on a spiritual level: that what I make in the world is only as terrifying as my refusal to take ownership of it. “My heart was made for love and sympathy and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred it did not endure the violence of the change without torture” - Mary Shelley, The Original Frankenstein When we take the creation for its surface appearance, it might mean that we can only see a monster. Going deeper into the story is to be heartbroken at the thought of the creation entering consciousness in a fully grown body, greeting a world that descends into chaos at the sight of him. Frankenstein is, for me, like Halloween itself - easy to dismiss on first glance, but when I look deeper at the spiritual ancestry of Samhain, the Gaelic festival of the harvest season, and a celebratory acknowledgement of the coming darkness of winter, I can’t help wondering what might have been different if Victor had only taken his creation by the hand, given him nourishment and a cozy bed to sleep in. Would he still have sought loving companionship beyond Victor? Would he still have craved freedom and self actualization? Probably. Maybe there is no happy ending possible…only the willingness to keep writing the story. “He is dead who created me and when I die the remembrance of me will be lost forever.” - Mary Shelley, The Original Frankenstein …. I’m waiting for my own creation to come to life - Imagine a Woman will be published on June 9, 2026 - and every month that I send this newsletter is a jolt of electricity toward its making. I can’t leave you without dropping a Halloween-y easter egg: if there is a ‘Frankenstein’ poem in the book, it’s probably “Mother Daughter Complex,” a duplex that hasn’t been published yet (though its sister poem, “My Mother’s Teeth,” sure has). See you in November.
Thank you for reading, D.
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