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Essay On A 58th Anniversary
I will begin this brief essay with just a passing recollection of my four undergraduate years, during which I attended a small college, lived in dorms on its bucolically beautiful campus, and was constantly reminded of the circumstances that prevented a more favorable social acceptance: my parents were not degreed; I enjoyed c.b. radio, and was proud of my (then) handle, Starwatcher; I did not pledge a fraternity (no matter that, six years after graduation, I was admitted to the world's oldest fraternity, Freemasonry); and I believed that Mary Shelley's literary accomplishment was neither a fluke nor a ruse, but was a highly valuable contribution to English literature.
I first met Mary Shelley through the Aurora Plastics Company's figure of Frankenstein's Monster (its face was more Glenn Strange's then Boris Karloff's) on December 25th, 1963 (which is why the Four Season's song, "December '63" always tugs at my heart strings. (And yes, we just passed my 58th anniversary of making her acquaintance through the means of the plastic model.) The following month, on the Friday closest to my Father's birthday, I was awakened by my parents around midnight to view a late night, Shock Theater, broadcast of the film, The Bride Of Frankenstein, 1935, in which I viewed, for the first and not the last time, the incomparable performance of Boris Karloff. Being a sleepy kindergartener, I was only able to remain awake for a part of the film. During third grade, one of our local UHF channels began to broadcast a Saturday afternoon Shock Theater---exclusively featuring the Universal Studios' horror films of the period 1931-1945. In 1967, my birthday fell on a Saturday, and, as if giving me a birthday surprise, that Shock Theater broadcast Son Of Frankenstein, third of the seven films in the series, and Karloff's last appearance as the Monster in a feature film. That following Christmas, I received from my cousin Jeannie (she of the tremendous beauty, endlessly fascinating legs, tan RT stockings, and a very militant shoelessness) a copy of the novel itself. In my naive excitement, I believed that the story lines of the seven films were to be found in the novel. NOT! In March of 1968, Life Magazine published a very scholarly, ten page article by Samuel Rosenberg, entitled "Happy Sesquicenteniel, Dear Monster," in which he reconstructed the events that led to the original inspiration, with a good deal of background about Mary Shelley. I learned that, like me, she was a lonely child; and that her father had established high expectations which she was bound to fail, in the same way my mother set such expectations for me. I learned that the Monster's great monologue, in the almost mathematical center of the novel, was Mary's condemnation of her father's unreasonable demands. At the same time, I began to recite the novel's epigraph, sometimes aloud, and sometimes just to myself: "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / to mold me man? Did I solicit thee / from darkness to promote me?” (John Milton, Paradise Lost, X) I especially like to recite this, loudly, while bathing, and my mother always provided a sufficiently shocked and offended response; for what reason, I do not know, but it sure did piss her off, so I recited it as often as I could.
On October 13, 1975, I decided that I wanted to be a poet, and Milton's poetry---to which I had been introduced through Mary's novel---was the first that I ardently studied.
In the Spring of 1977, my freshman year, I took a course on "pastoral literature," and chose to write my paper ob the nature imagery in Frankenstein. My professor attempted to discourage this, but I reminded him that the literary source to be explicated in the paper was taken at the student's choice; and my choice was Frankenstein. Although I received a B plus in the course, my paper did not fare that well. When I showed it to my High School mentor, who was the Chairman of the High School's English Department, she said, "I have never---ever---seen a paper so savagely marked." Mary Shelley's reputation, at my college, was, in those days, very poor.
In several of the college's departments, including mine, History, majors were required to compile both a sophomore project and a senior thesis. The sophomore project was to compile a bibliographic list, properly cited (and with index cards) of at least one hundred secondary monographs, articles, or essays on the subject matter of the student's choice; however, these could not be biographical. I decided to trace the historical critical response, good and bad, to Frankenstein, beginning with iniial reviews in 1818, and ending in the early seventies. I compiled well over a hundred items---including an article disclosing that, after Bram Stoker published his novel, Dracula, his own mother declared that Frankenstein was the better written. During the three weeks given for the completion of the assignment, I was "taken aside" by several persons in authority recommending a change in subject. I adamantly refused. Mary Shelley had never abandoned me, and I was not about to abandon her. (I did not write of her in my Senior Thesis; I wrote about Eusebius Pamphilius, Bishop of Caesare, presiding bishop of the first council of Nicea, and the first scholarly Christian historian.)
After I graduated in 1980, I visited my college only sporadically. However, twenty-one years after graduating, I was invited to a private department reunion, very well served with a sumptuous buffet lunch. My former faculty advisor, whom I had not seen in all those twenty-one years, met me in the foyer of the dining room, and his first words to me were, "Is Mary Shelley still your girl?" to which I answered, "You know that she is."
Fifty-eight years, as of this past Saturday, Christmas Day: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, you are still my girl!
Starward
