Haunting the Stage: Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein and the Gothic Drama of Modern

Subjectivity

13 December 2013 Osborne 1

Introduction: Positioning the Gothic in Modern Life

Recent critical literary interests in Gothic narratives and mythologies have made it so that the Gothic itself has become almost inseparable from modern and postmodern literary genealogies. From Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Toni Morrison’s

Beloved, Gothic traces are often found in modern and postmodern texts, lingering somewhere between the shadows and the unspoken. Thus literary critics have made efforts to theorize the Gothic on “a continuum with such twentieth-century movements as

‘high’ modernism and surrealism” (Hurley 129-30) and conceding that traditional Gothic terms have been renegotiated in the modern period to operate as technologies that conjure up anxieties found within the modern self (Spooner 40). In a review of Edith Birkhead’s

The Tale of Terror (1921), Virginia Woolf comments on her modern contemporaries writing, “It is at the ghosts within that we shudder, and not at the decaying bodies of barons or the subterranean activities of ghouls” (307). What Woolf highlights is “a modernist understanding of the Gothic as interior drama rather than dramatic spectacle,”

(Spooner 39) making the line that has historically been drawn between Gothic and modern texts essentially disappear.

Just as literary critics find it difficult to demarcate literary periods from each other, defining what Gothic is proves to be equally, if not more difficult. It is obvious that specific tropes found in texts that have been traditionally understood to be Gothic are often considered undisputedly Gothic. For instance, with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or

The Modern Prometheus (1818; revised 1831) or Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), one can imagine the particularities of these texts and accept them as examples of the Gothic.

However, it is too simplistic to define the Gothic as the presence of horror, fantastical Osborne 2 creatures, or castles on darkened hills. Gothic narratives suggest complexity and like other literary genres, offer a serious engagement with the political, culture, and humanity; these engagements usually involve the “transgression of natural and moral laws, aesthetic rules and social taboos” (Botting 1). When explored, Gothic elements and engagements can be found within vast amounts of nineteenth and twentieth century texts (or 1880 to the present to be more specific), and therefore illustrate the extent to which “the Gothic and Modernism influence each other and share certain developments” (Riquelme 587).

This means that both Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can be read as displays of and commentary on contemporary life and anxieties, anxieties specific to the modern period, that in the case of Frankenstein, are arguably reinscribed through its many adaptions both on screen and in theatre. To think about the Gothic, modernism, and postmodernism, within the context of Shelley’s Frankenstein is to think about the development of modern subjectivity and the social alienation that this development bred.

The Gothic in this equation then, is found through its relation to the modern and postmodern.

Principally this paper will investigate Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein (2011) as a cultural product arguing that the production reinscribes Frankenstein’s mythology within radical modern and postmodern experiences of instability and alienation. For its uses in this paper, the term “text” is understood broadly to incorporate theatre, supporting and furthering the notion that in the modern period, one is immersed and constituted by text.

Literary and philosophical conceptualizations of the Gothic, the modern, and the postmodern are primarily utilized in this paper to inform the theatrical and acknowledge Osborne 3 the extent to which Boyle’s play reworks Shelley’s Frankenstein to be a Gothic drama of the modern and postmodern self.

Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein, Mythology, and Modern Imaginings

Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein was first presented on the Olivier Stage of the

National Theatre, London, on February 2011 (Dear 1). Boyle directed the play, with a stage adaption written by Nick Dear. The production stars British actors Benedict

Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller who play both The Creature and Victor Frankenstein respectively. The play opened to packed theatres (Tiehan 71) and in 2012 won

Cumberbatch and Miller the Olivier Award for Best Actor, making the excitement surrounding this new rendition indicative of a deep cultural investment with the mythology of Frankenstein.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has existed within Western modern imagination for quite some time. Originally written in 1818 and given two titles, Frankenstein or The

Modern Prometheus, it is usually interpreted and understood as a modern creation story that replaces God with science (Tiehan 47; Dear 2011). Due to the rapid technological advances that characterize the modern period, it is clear that one of the cultural anxieties of Shelley’s time was the death of God and its outcome, the emergence of man as ruler over the natural world. The source of Frankenstein’s modernity can be cited as the fact that “there is no divine source for the rules, no final moral answer, no divine authority to judge, punish, or reward” (Hitchcock 6). However, as Tiehan suggests, labeling

Frankenstein as a simple creation myth erases its complexity and its mythology in terms of its politics and cultural critique (44). Osborne 4

Frankenstein is likewise understood as symbolizing a collective fear of progress

(Tiehan 44). With the consequences of Victor’s unbridled scientific innovation taking the form of a monster, Frankenstein becomes a text that does the cultural work of a cautionary tale; retold for modern ears apprehensive about the value of stem cell research or the reliance on computers. But this interpretation is also simplistic, taking for granted and or naturalizing the specific procedures of modernity itself that recast the modern identity as decidedly masculine, rational, and individualized. There is no doubt that the above interpretations of Frankenstein’s mythology circulate throughout the nearly countless adaptions of the novel for theatre, film, and television; however, it is clear that

Dear’s adaption involves a deeper signification as it reflects the modern subject back onto his or her self.

In an interview with The National Theatre, Nick Dear states that he and Boyle specifically wanted to tell the story from The Creature’s point of view. Both the moment of creation and nearly the first half of the play center The Creature and his quest to find his creator. “We do start with the moment of creation, but not told from the perspective of the scientist, which is how it’s usually told. We tell it from the perspective of the experiment, rather than the experimenter” (Interview 2011). Boyle and Dear also wanted

The Creature to have a voice (he literally uses language), which had been stripped from him in almost all of the other adaptions. Not only is this centering of The Creature more loyal to Shelley’s novel, but it also illustrates the extent to which the production captivates a modern world indebted to claims of marginality and disempowerment.

The relationship between The Creature and Frankenstein is also emphasized in

Dear’s adaption (Tiehan 73). Casting Victor as a young man rather than as a middle-aged Osborne 5 scientist as he is in many other renditions made it possible to see both Victor and The

Creature as sharing a level of immaturity about their world; however, The Creature’s immaturity is largely predicated on his dislocatedness from his creator as opposed to

Victor’s obvious egotism. The Creature and Victor’s relationship is also deepened through the actors’ alternating roles. This creative mechanic operates both within the confines of play and as the play’s metanarrative. In an interview that the National Theatre previewed before the encore screenings, both actors discuss the various ways in which their individual performances of each role would “spill” over and into each other (Tiehan

93). In other words, each subsequent performance made one actor’s interpretation of

Victor spill more and more into his interpretation of The Creature and vice versa. One could argue that this created a dynamic between and within the actors that allowed for the perception that these two characters were much closer than one would believe.

As a metanarrative, the idea that there was an element of similarity, perhaps sameness, between The Creature and Victor can be found in the National Theatre’s promotional posters1 and trailers. Image effects that leave Cumberbatch and Miller as either The Creature or Victor appearing to unite into one figure or a trailer that overlays

Cumberbatch and Miller’s voices as they recite their lines for both roles together make it as if The Creature and Victor represent one persona that is divided.

“We can only go forward. We can never go back.” Forming Modern Subjectivity:

The Self in Dark Modernity

The Gothic imaginary is usually in the service of bringing forth the “dark side of modernity” (Botting 2), that is the anxieties associated with scientific advances, social

1 See attached packet of images Osborne 6 change, racialization, and nationalism which traditionally characterize modernity.

Boyle’s Frankenstein captures this “dark side” through its display of modernity as primarily an internal experience that more often than not leaves the experiencing subject lost in a world they have struggled to know or ambitiously tried to master. In other words, with its bare bones stage designs and costumes, Boyle’s production centralizes The

Creature and Victor in ways that dramatize the struggle of modern and postmodern subjectivity to either rectify or celebrate his or her epistemological alienation in a godless world. More specifically, The Creature and Victor represent two separate but ultimately imbricated experiences of modernity, that of desiring or having to be God (of oneself over nature) and alienation from industrial society. In Boyle’s Frankenstein, efforts to fold The Creature and Victor into each other illustrate that this new story is truly a story of one experience.

“Do you see them? Little men, with little lives”: Victor as “King of Science”

Boyle’s Frankenstein situates Victor as a young man who is captivated by the essence of life. In a dream (or hallucination) where he converses with his dead younger brother William, Victor says, “School was so boring! I wanted to find out why things exist—how things exist—not absurd divinity, idiotic music. The laws existence!” (Dear

55). Victor is incredibly ambitious, often perceiving nature as if he was its (or more interestingly “her”) master. When discussing the innovations of the alchemists, Victor says, “All modern medicine comes from them—I too wished to penetrate nature, to lay bare her deepest mysteries. So I studied mathematics.” (Dear 56). This use of gendered language and the specific way that masculinity is equated with mathematics or science

(Victor has to study mathematics in order to penetrate a female-gendered nature), Osborne 7 establishes Victor as modern man made over in masculinist discourses of the

Enlightenment, rationality, and science.

Victor’s relationship with Elizabeth, the woman he is to be married to, also illustrate the ways in which Victor is constituted by these masculinist discourses. Always in opposition to Elizabeth’s domesticity (Dear 47-9) and viewing her almost as a distraction (Dear 49), Victor comes to view himself as more powerful than God (Dear 57,

67-8) but eventually realizes that his control is marred by The Creature’s resistance. It is clear from his first encounter with The Creature that Victor’s status as master is in question. The Creature finds his abandonment to be evidence that Victor is a failure

(Dear 37-41). Similarly, Victor’s power to give life is isolating for him; however they are of special interest to The Creature:

Victor: You must understand—the work is hard—

Creature: You alone can do it. You alone have the skill.

Victor: I alone—in the whole world—and no one to share the secret! –Look down

there. He points down the mountain. Do you see them? Little men, with little

lives.

Creature: excited Little houses! Little men!

Victor: I am different.

Creature: You are a king! The King of Science! Build me a woman. Please! A

bride. (43).

Victor understands his isolation as positive; his modernity is posited on his internal, solitary contemplation of the outside world, coupled with his ability to mold that world.

Victor, the “King of Science,” is the modern man who makes his own truth. Osborne 8

“I feel the bile rise in my throat, and it tastes like Satan’s bile”: The Creature and

Modern Marginality

There is no guess as to why The Creature represents social marginality. However, his alienation from industrial society is just as important as Victor’s God complex in the display of the modern/postmodern condition and suggests that alienation prefigures

Victor’s frantic apotheosis. Since the production privileges The Creature’s perspective, his “coming of age” is a large portion of the play. It begins with him bursting from a constructed womb and ends with him raping Elizabeth and declaring, “Now I am a man”

(Dear 72). In between those important moments however, The Creature is positioned as abandoned, without a name, home, or nation. Prostitutes, beggars, and vagabonds throw bottles at him if his cloak mistakenly reveals too much of his face; he is literally nothing, as Victor tries to convince him (Dear 41). At their first encounter The Creature tells of his existence in Victor’s universe:

Creature: Remorse? When I walk through a village, the children throw stones.

When I beg for food, they loose their dogs. What is the function of remorse?

Victor: I’m sorry, I—

Creature: Sorry? You’re sorry? You caused this! This is your universe

Frankenstein! (40).

His literal separation from industrial society is a metaphor for the ways in which the modern subject is alienated from nature and increasing his or her labor.

The Creature eventually does find kindness in someone, a blind man who, more likely due to his lack of sight, takes The Creature in and teaches him to read and write.

The Creature then begins to secretly help the blind man’s son and daughter-in-law with Osborne 9 their farm and other house chores, but he never reveals his relationship to that labor and when the blind man’s son finally sees The Creature he precedes to whip him with his belt

(Dear 27). This rejection leads The Creature to burn down the blind man’s home, killing the blind man, his son, and his son’s wife. This ultimately leads The Creature to a path of violence; he later kills both Victor’s brother and Elizabeth.

Together, The Creature and Victor represent two defining features of modern subjectivity, that with the lack of the divine and/or the lack of intelligibility of all Truth claims, turns inward (like The Creature) or turns outward seeking the mastery of Nature and therefore Truth (due to empiricism, all knowledge is assumed to reside outside of the self, necessitating its objectification). In this scheme, The Creature and Victor’s eventual and perpetual revulsion at each other represents the internal drama or struggle the modern subject has with itself. In the last scene of the play The Creature, believing that Victor is dead, whispers, “Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me alone. You and I, we are one.” (Dear

76). As Victor comes to, The Creature prances ahead of him wishing Victor to follow after him. He says, “Come, scientist! Destroy me! Destroy your creation! Come!” (Dear

77). It is clear that Victor is not going to ever kill him, instead he intends to follow The

Creature for as long as he can; the play thus closes incomplete.

A Radical Decentering: Postmodernity and the Gothic

If modernity can be described as harboring “the belief in linear progress, absolute truths, the rational planning of ideal social orders, and the standardization of knowledge and production” (Harvey 9), then the end of Boyle’s Frankenstein betrays these presumptions. However, it is clear that both The Creature and Victor represent various aspects of modernity and the struggle embedded in such a condition. It seems instead that Osborne 10

Boyle’s Frankenstein inhabits a radical (or dark) modernity that is in many ways striding toward or on the edge of what many would call the postmodern. How then does the

Gothic imagination consider postmodernity?

Literary scholars of Gothic literature have so far assumed that the Gothic

(whatever it is) at least presupposes a “radical decentering” of the modern (Punter 1). The

Gothic can thus be located in the silences and contradictions of traditionally modern texts

(Punter 1). It essentially haunts modern texts and lives as the ghost who occupies the margin. As Punter suggests, “in the context of the modern, Gothic is the paradigm of all fiction, all textuality”(1). The Gothic challenges history (hence the difficulty in demarcating it from literary modernism) and therefore “brings us face to face with an origin which is no origin” (Punter 1). Likewise, postmodernism challenges a linear model of history in celebration of the unintelligibility of origins. “Fragmentation, indeterminacy, and intense distrust of all universal or ‘totalizing’ discourse” (Harvey 9) characterize postmodernist intellectual and cultural preoccupations. The Gothic then, inhabits the postmodern in the extent to which it conceptualizes “horror” in the modern context to be this precise instability of knowledge and truth, the very fears associated with losing social order. While postmodernism celebrates this instability, perhaps the Gothic underwrites this celebration with the thrill associated with experiences of anxiety, fear, and uncertainty.

While the end of Boyle’s production is uncertain, it is clear however, that both

The Creature and Victor come to view the other as their only purpose, making their union the final actualization of their subjectivities, forever binding them as one. Their oneness though is not quite concrete, representing instead a postmodern subjectivity that is Osborne 11 constituted by discourses and therefore multiply determined. While The Creature and

Victor are to be understood as one, there is no doubt that they are two; this fragmentation therefore acknowledges the extent to which the Gothic imaginary already inhabits the postmodern, and perhaps always has. Specific moments of the play’s ending also acknowledge this relationship between the Gothic and postmodernism.

In a monologue The Creature says, “The son becomes the father, the master the slave.” (Dear 75). Here, he references the ways in which his relation to Victor has been turned upside down; The Creature is now the father, while Victor is now the slave. In this scene, The Creature recognizes that the previous relation of power or social order has been transgressed; perhaps he is revealing it to have been contradictory in the first place, with the kinship between the son and father becoming queered or the relation between the master and slave becoming confused through dislocated operations of power. The

Creature then acknowledges his difference and laments that he had tried to be the same and fit into society (Dear 75). At this point Victor is slipping in and out of consciousness, attempting to capture The Creature but to no avail. They will continue in this way forever. The play attempts to close, but an attempt to close suggests an assumption of transparency and this play can only be described by its opacity.

Conclusion

This paper has argued that Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein reinscribed Frankenstein mythology within modernist and postmodernist theoretical and creative frames. The

Creature and Victor signify the radical modern subjectivity in a godless, industrialized world, whose efforts to overcome alienation and the lack of absolute truths results in a struggle over, between, and within the self. Furthermore, the Gothic imaginary in this text Osborne 12 can be traced along that of the modern and postmodern, with Gothic itself inhabiting a dark space where the concept of order is not easily mapped, where individuality is an internal drama, and where otherness is what it means to exist in and experience modernity.

The success of Boyle’s production is no doubt due to the ways in which the play is really about its audience. Being one of the few attempts to stage Frankenstein, it engaged with the humanity of the story, even while this engagement with humanity was more about a struggle rather than triumph, it offers an opportunity to conceptualize theatre’s ongoing relationship with cultural politics and contemporary life.

This paper represents an attempt to engage popular culture with a postmodernist framework and acknowledge the ways in which cultural products both reflect and construct modern reality; deploying terms like Gothic, modern, and postmodern in the context of a popular text acknowledges that this relationship is wrought with a level of ambiguity, but ultimately is a relationship whose demystification is vital.

As argued earlier, The Creature and Victor occupy subjectivities that both have the potentiality of being God, but are alienated from his Form. Ultimately, conceptualizations of the modern, postmodern, and the Gothic culminate in the precariousness of the subject’s potentiality and consequences of his or her alienation.

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