Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel that always brings me back. For me, it is the very best of what literature can be.

I first read it for a university class. In the end, I don’t believe we discussed it in the tutorial. Romantics, for a week or maximally two, would have been more poetry focussed, and more male.

The novel isn’t really the primary mode of expression for the Romantic era, except perhaps Goethe’s Leiden des Jungen Werther. By the time we get to Mary Shelley in 1818, the literary movement seems to have crystalised somewhat and is actually obliquely referred to in the novel itself.

In the second letter of Robert Walton, captain aboard a vessel trying to discover, implicitly, a Northwest Passage through the Arctic sea ice. Walton’s character is bound up with the poetic impulse, which in this era has much in common with scientific pursuit, as brilliantly expounded upon in Richard Holmes’s book The Age of Wonder. In particular, he makes reference to Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

For Romantics like Walton, what is key is not the breadth of reading but depth:

 At that age I became acquainted with the celebrated poets of our own country; but it was only when it had ceased to be in my power to derive its most important benefits from such a conviction that I perceived the necessity of becoming acquainted with more languages than that of my native country. Now I am twenty-eight and am in reality more illiterate than many schoolboys of fifteen. It is true that I have thought more and that my daydreams are more extended and magnificent, but they want (as the painters call it) keeping; and I greatly need a friend who would have sense enough not to despise me as romantic, and affection enough for me to endeavour to regulate my mind.[1]

Poetry’s “most important benefits” are not easily discernible and cannot be accessed without delving deeper. One’s languages and vocabulary can only get you so far; to go further is the Romantic approach to poetry, to derive the deeper, less immediately accessible meaning.

The other occasion on which the word “romantic” appears is in the mouth of Frankenstein himself, and here it is really used as a synonym for “picturesque” in relation to Edinburgh,[2] which he visits briefly after a letter of introduction to the leading lights of the Scottish Enlightenment in furtherance of his project to create a female Creature. Edinburgh, by contrast, is a key location of Guillermo del Toro’s new screen adaptation of the novel.

Yes, instead of Geneva and its environs providing the stage for most of the action, del Toro’s Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) lingers in the Athens of the North. Here, he is introduced to his benefactor, Heinrich – a character entirely unique to the adaptation, played by Christopher Waltz.

Whereas Shelley’s novel has Victor as the lone genius, del Toro’s protagonist assembles a crack team and is endowed with infinite resources by his patron. In a seeming nod to the heavily Frankenstein-inspired Poor Things, Heinrich makes a shocking request of his beneficiary. He wishes his brain to be transplanted into the body of the man Victor is assembling from the corpses of fallen soldiers.

Rejecting this as absurd and unconscionable on practical grounds, Heinrich has syphilis, infamously a disease that, in its late stage. affects the brain. Victor ends up in a physical confrontation, which leads to his addled sponsor falling to his death. While adding human drama and spectacle to the plot, this is just one example of many which rather confuse the clarity and purity of Shelley’s original story than enhance it.

It takes a long time for Frankenstein to make his Creature in this film, both in terms of screentime and diegetically – his work-in-progress sits slumped unnaturally on his laboratory table with its spine exposed to better access the lymphatic system, apparently key to achieving re-animation and, in del Toro’s case, perpetual animation.

Broadly, the film does take the same structure as the novel. We open on the arctic wastes. Unlike in Shelley’s novel, the Creature is almost instantly revealed. Surprisingly, the ‘Horisont’ is manned by Danish sailors, and a good 10 minutes of the film is exclusively in that language.

Another change is instantly apparent in the setting in time. Instead of a vaguely 18th-century setting – Shelley leaves it at 17—, the action is transplanted to the mid-19th (1857 to be precise). Gone, then, are Walton’s direct connections to the English Romantics and the Enlightenment throughline of Shelley’s work.

Not that this adaptation is really grounded in a historical time period or actual locations. Its characters are an American fantasy of the European aristocracy (I know del Toro is Mexican, I mean the continent). In del Toro’s adaptation, the only connection to Switzerland is Victor’s mother’s ancestral seat, and that is in reality only a nod. Victor’s childhood home is basically Versailles, and his father is vaguely Prussian, as can be deduced from the unsubtle uniform. Barring the fact that Victor is not of noble birth in the novel – his father is a syndic, a type of public officer bearer – neither is he identifiably Swiss. This seems to be an obvious omission in a novel so embedded in the Confederation.

See Chapter 6’s letter from Elizabeth:

The republican institutions of our country have produced simpler and happier manners than those which prevail in the great monarchies that surround it. Hence, there is less distinction between the several classes of its inhabitants; and the lower orders, being neither so poor nor so despised, their manners are more refined and moral. A servant in Geneva does not mean the same thing as a servant in France and England. Justine, thus received in our family, learned the duties of a servant, a condition which, in our fortunate country, does not include the idea of ignorance and a sacrifice of the dignity of a human being.  

The family arrangement in the film is reconfigured with Elizabeth (Mia Goth) being Heinrich’s niece and not Victor’s adopted sister, which does remove the strange incestuous tension and psychosexual subtext inherent in their relationship. All that it nicely reduced to Victor’s fancying his brother’s (William is aged up in the film, as is Victor) fiancée. Frankenstein of the novel has no hint of desire for Elizabeth. He weirdly appears to go along with the idea of his marriage to, effectively, his sister in fulfilment of his mother’s dying wish, despite both his father and Elizabeth herself giving him opportunities to extricate himself from the arrangement.

There is an amusing scene in Edinburgh’s St Giles Cathedral (whose interior is in fact Glasgow Cathedral!) where Victor none-too-subtly hints at his feelings to Elizabeth in a confession booth, notwithstanding the presence of such a facility being an egregious anachronism within the seat of the Scottish Reformation.

The character of Elizabeth in the film, instead of being the quasi-angelic and remote presence of the novel, is the film’s moral core in a way. One of the most striking differences is the aftermath of the Creature’s immediate genesis. Unlike the novel, where Victor’s reaction is instantaneous revulsion, del Toro’s Frankenstein keeps the Creature in the bowels of the colossal watchtower-cum-laboratory where he has been manufactured for an extended period. He attempts to teach him to speak, but the Creature can only utter one word, “Victor”.

Del Toro gives Victor a more explicit psychological motivation to create and treat the Creature as he does. There is a clear link between his mother’s untimely demise and his desire to create life/conquer death. There is also a rather obvious repetition of his father’s own brutality towards him, inflicted on the Creature during their lessons.

To me, this is another example of muddying the waters, where the novel is much clearer as a thought experiment. Shelley’s Frankenstein is motivated by science first and foremost, the Enlightenment drive to uncover the secrets of nature. Her Creature does not suffer his direct abuse and torment.

Del Toro’s Creature, by contrast, does not at first attempt to reason with Victor. Instead of their re-encounter taking place high in the Swiss Alps in a mountaineering hut, it happens on the wedding night, not of Victor, but his brother William. The Creature’s tale, the final third of the film, is told in the presence of the Danish Walton equivalent aboard the Horisont while becalmed on the Arctic ice.

For me, the most egregious thing is this speed-running of one of the book’s most fundamental thematic notes and plot points – the Bride of Frankenstein.

In the film, the Creature asks Victor to create another being of his nature of the female sex. Here Victor’s refusal is instant. The ‘race of devils’[3] line is said, and so begins the chase that has its fast-forward termination on the ice sheets of the frozen north. Couldn’t more time have been spent on the crucial nature of this betrayal out of the film’s two and a half hour runtime?

One of the novel’s most disturbing scenes is when, on the cusp of completing the task of creating a female Creature, Victor observes his living creation watching on, and he destroys his work.

As I looked on him, his countenance expressed the utmost extent of malice and treachery. I thought with a sensation of madness on my promise of creating another like to him, and trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged. The wretch saw me destroy the creature on whose future existence he depended for happiness, and with a howl of devilish despair and revenge, withdrew.[4]

Del Toro lingers on the macabre and introduces plenty of body horror, which suits the visual medium, yet he fails to adapt this most crucial of scenes. This is not to mention that he leaves out my direct connection to the novel – the location of the second creation is an unspecified island of Orkney.

To conclude, let us discuss the Creature himself. One element that del Toro introduces unnecessarily is the idea that he is immortal. Not simply more resistant to harm than an ordinary man, but immortal in a Captain Jack Harkness sort of sense. To prove this, in what is, in isolation, an impressive scene, the Creature attempts to blow himself up with a stick of dynamite, unsuccessfully.

Whereas Shelley’s Creature has more-than-human strength, speed and stamina, del Toro’s creature is to all intents and purposes a demigod. Prometheus, if you will.

Stylistically, this doesn’t really work. There is abundant cartoonish CGI of him literally ripping through dozens of Danish sailors, throwing them aside like ragdolls. A clear image of the Creature’s violence in Shelley’s novel is the black marks left on the necks of his victims of asphyxiation. A careful and powerfully employed image is here substituted with gratuitous computer-generated clobbering.

Besides stylistically, though, when you have an entirely artificial being imbued with intelligence but then also add in immortality, you have a whole host of moral questions that come up in addition to those already posed. Shelley’s Victor is on a quest to destroy his creation after he fulfils his promise to render his life a living hell and murders his bride. Here, we know that this is not possible. The Creature cannot make the same bargain to fly to the remotest corner of the earth and live out his natural end in the jungles of South America.[5] Thus, the ending self-immolation after Victor’s death from terminal fatigue is debarred.

What we have, instead of the Creature arriving too late and delivering his final speech to Walton, is a deathbed reconciliation with the Creature forgiving and Victor naming him his son.

It all feels so fundamentally unearned and lacks the pathos and finality of the novel. The film’s final frame is the Creature out on the wastes once more, and we are left to wonder what will become of him. The implication appears to be that he will return to the benevolent Father Christmas figure he adopted as the ‘Spirit of the Forest’ for the family he tends to following his escape from the lab. But why would he do so without any hope of reconciliation with humanity? An eternity of loneliness?

The story presents itself as if it were as wrapped up as one needs to be for an arctic expedition, but really, we are being set up for The Adventures of Frankenstein 2. In this age of the eternal revival, valuable IP cannot be allowed to die.

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[1] Letter 2

[2] Chapter 19

[3] Chapter 20

[4] As above

[5] Chapter 17