Untitled - California State University, Long Beach

Part of the enduring fascination with Frankenstein is that it contains
many mythic elements: universal signs that exist within the murky realm(s)
of the collective unconscious. In contemporary culture, movies serve as
our mythology. The mythic elements that we see in the psychological
details of the novel are portrayed for us on screen in Technicolor detail—
full of lust, violence, and gore. Of course, the visual medium of film has
promoted the already primal dominance of the visual sense, and critics
and pop psychologists are already tired of deprecating the medium for
its pandering, if they are not quite ready to give up on accusing movie
studios of inflating the obsession. Regardless, several filmic adaptations of
the novel give us glimpses of the mythic elements, and the places where
they differ from the novel certainly defer to the sign, which I deem to be
the co-opting of the gap between the novel’s psychology and the films’
physicality. There is a gap in meaning present here, that cannot be denied,
but it is obfuscated by this new dominant referent.
The core mythic element in Frankenstein is the body. It is appropriate
to start with this concept given the body of works we have today that
relate to “Frankenstein”—and here, I am referring to “Frankenstein”
as a mythology, not as a character in the novel or movies, nor any one
particular work, but the juggernaut concept, packed with the mythic
and expressed through mythos. Anytime I refer to “Frankenstein” with
quotations, I refer to this conceptualizing. I have chosen to go with the
progressive –ing gerund ending here for “conceptualize,” rather than
the more common –ation, to emphasize the active, evolving nature
of myth. Just as the twentieth century mythos is an amalgamation of
cultural scraps, the body of the creature is cobbled together from various
parts; apropos of such, the problem of the absence of physicality will be
illustrated here through linguistic research. The use of a corpus of historic
English will remove us from the confounding elements of plot, theme,
structure, and production, and help deliver us to the universal.
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The Language
Four binary pairs that are paradigmatic of Mary Shelley’s 1818 (and
1836 revised) novel Frankenstein were queried in the Corpus of Historical
American English (COHA). This corpus searches for individual words or
phrases within its database of millions culled from texts across all print
media over the last two centuries. I specifically looked at the two decades
in which the two editions of Shelley’s novel were published, in the 1930s
when James Whale’s filmic adaptation was produced, and the 1990s, in
which Kenneth Branagh made his critically acclaimed adaptation just as
a number of other films with “Frankenstein” elements seemingly culled
from the same charnel house entered the culture. The binaries used in the
study are human/inhuman, creature/creator, man/monster, and natural/
unnatural.
What immediately stands out is that adjectives which appear as
collocates (words that appear within four words of the targeted search
word) have categorically decreased when they describe internal/abstract
characteristics (such as “charming, “gentle”) and increased when they
describe physical attributes (such as “small,” exotic,” “bipedal”) when
comparing the decades of the book’s original publication and revision to
the twentieth century. For instance, three common collocate adjectives of
the word “monster” during the early nineteenth century are “hideous,”
grim,” and “horrid.” In the twentieth century, these words have
decreased significantly: the ratios of usage comparing the decades 1810
and 1830 to 1940 and 1990 stand at 40:1, 28:1, and 20:1 respectively,
while “tiny,” “big,” and “hairy” have increased, with ratios comparing
the latter to former decades of 17:1, 13:1, and 12:1 1 . Additionally,
adjective collocates of the word “man” that decreased the most since the
Romantic era include “benevolent,” “honorable,” and “well-informed.”
In the twentieth century, these descriptors saw a decrease in usage,
having declined by ratios of 127:1, 66:1, and 54:1, respectively, while
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