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FRANKENSTEIN: IMPRESSION OR REFLECTION?

Introduction

For several reasons, in 2000 I got in contact again with some written

materials and thoughts over Dorme, Dorme, Frankenstein (Sleep Tight

Frankenstein), a dance-drama play created by me in 1990.

I read several critical essays on the famous 1816 Mary Shelley’s novel,

Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus. In particular, one of them by David

Le Breton, entitled Frankenstein Syndrome, suggests the novel is a romantic

criticism to the ever larger industrialisation process of modern society as well as

to whatever noxious it was bringing to the man of that period. Nevertheless,

another literary critic, Harold Bloom, among other points, focus on the

appropriateness between the romantic work and the Promethean myth.

This myth is regarded as a synthesis of the struggle men-deity. It

represents the active, industrial, intelligent, and ambitious being that wishes to

even his powers to the divine ones. According to this point of view, the

technological improvements that begun with the industrial revolution around the

time the novel was written still goes on nowadays, and represents men's desire

to have equal powers to those of the gods, as well as his expectation to obtain

them by taming the environment and the forces of nature, and ultimately, by

creating life and delaying death. Just remember the present discussion about

cloning, trunk cells, environmental utilisation, transgenic products,

developments in communication, new methods of healing, etc., and you will

agree that pursuing knowledge which, though not forbidden may hold unknown

dangers and continues to be a current behaviour of our kind. Thus, such

improvements caused and still cause a sense of well being as well as strike

terror into men because it is always possible that the newly-conquered

advances originated from technological improvement turn back against

mankind. Then, we frequently ask ourselves: Will men be punished for

profaning places, and creating possibilities inaccessible to him before

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industrialisation? This terror of the unknown - similar to those seen in the sea

voyages of 500 years ago - is conveyed in literature, horror, and science fiction

films, short stories, and books about adventurous explorations of the unknown

such as, The Secret of the Mummy; Alien, The Eighth Passenger; I, Robot; The

Deep Range; The Continent Makers, The Island of Dr. Moureau; The Strange

Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Frankenstein; 20.000 Leagues Undersea; Star

Trek; Jaws; E.T.; Jurassic Park; Raiders of the Lost Ark; King Kong, The Call of

the Wild, The Time Machine, Moby Dick, Tarzan, and many others.

Good and Evil

In Sleep Tight Frankenstein, my interpretation of the novel was based on

another point. Making use of my right to poetic freedom, I firstly perpetuated the

confusion between the creature's, and the creator's names, once Frankenstein,

instead of being the name of the creator’s, is to almost all of us, the creature's

name, which is nameless in the novel.

I, then, focused on “Frankenstein's” sorrow and solitude once he was

abandoned by his creator and by mankind because of his hideous ugliness that

caused horror and repulsion in whoever saw him. Therefore, the monster

rebelled against the involuntary loneliness to which he was doomed. After being

prejudiced when trying to approach his creator, as well as other people, he

says: ‘evil thenceforth became my good’.

I also focused on the explicit opposition the novel draws between the

creature's character trait and appearance. Despite him having monstrous looks,

being huge, extremely powerful, and physically intimidating (2.40 metres tall

and proportionally wide), having a disgusting aspect, and a filth origin (pieces of

human corpses furtively collected by his creator in fresh tombs, pieces of

bodies of vivisected animals, or of animal bodies from slaughterhouses), he

was docile, gentle, amiable, and essentially benevolent. In other words,

“Frankenstein” deserved to be welcomed and loved, and not rejected and

hated.

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So, I turned the monster, the main character of Mary Shelley’s novel, into

the character of an extremely lonely boy, Frank, brought up without family or

friends in a tyre repair shop, a setting that, for me, simultaneously expresses

welcome and rejection once it has both: soft objects such as inner tyre tubes,

and a bathtub full of water, as well as hard, sharp, and heavy objects such as

hubcaps, wheel rims, mallets, crowbars, etc. I also turned his creator into the

character of another boy, or Stein, who unlike the protagonist, was not at all

lonely.

At the beginning of the play, Stein is unaware of being watched by Frank.

Nevertheless, they soon come closer to each other and become friends.

However, later on they are violently set apart by Stein’s mother who catches

them in the act of taking a bath together in the bathtub of the repair shop while

they are fully naked and, perhaps out of curiosity, touch each other. At that, she

immediately drives Frank away, humiliates him, and not even consideris her

dear little son’s complicity. Stein, in turn, fixes on Frank the whole responsibility

for what they had just done, and lets him pay the piper alone. Because of this

traumatic separation, as well as of Stein’s coward omission, and most of all,

because he fully accepted all that was projected on him during his lifetime, the

protagonist comes to believe himself to be morally filthy, hideously ugly and

disgusting (as the monster of the novel); but, at the end, unlike Mary Shelley’s

novel, he is redeemed by another character, an old and wise man, that

understands Frank, and shares his own life experiences with the boy. This old

man tells Frank while he is sleeping, that the evil is only the seed of the good.

To make a long story short, after going through this painful process,

Frank, integrated as a whole being, is renamed Frankenstein.

In psychological terms, when I created this work, I was thinking about

mourning, separation, and transformation processes. Right now, I will address

only the transformation processes that occur with the recognition, and the

appropriation of one’s own power and knowledge. Then, the word self-esteem

comes to my mind.

Self-esteem

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Nathaniel Braden, at the beginning of his book The six pillars of self-

esteem, gives a first and quick definition of self-esteem. According to it self-

esteem is:

1. Trust in our ability to think; trust in our ability to meet life basic

challenges; and

2. Trust in our right to succeed and be happy; a sense of worthiness,

and the sense that we can express our needs and wishes as well as reach

our aims and reap the rewards of our efforts.

When subdividing self-esteem into several components he says that self-

valorisation, or self-respect, brings the expectation of friendship, love, and

happiness as a natural consequence of our deeds.

Thus, Frank is transformed, or better speaking, is psychologically healed,

only when he feels that he is worth of love and respect, and when in order to be

able to accept these feelings, in the first place, he devotes them to himself.

Besides believing that Sleep Tight Frankenstein expresses an increase

in self-esteem, I spot other important points in it when I read its 1991 press

release over again. They are:

a) The existence of an intermediate space between reality and fantasy,

and the important role it plays to a healthy mental development,

b) The purpose of the play to offer the audience a possibility of

identification with the monstrous that dwells within each of us, or still with our

power to inflict pain upon others,

c) The numerous reflections that have made me follow this path,

d) My concern with suffering and our ability to overcome it, in other words

“to get healed”.

Now, the first point (a) justifies the use of art as a means of health

precaution or healing because art lies exactly in this singular space so

necessary to a healthy mental development; the second point (b), justifies the

relevance of the theme once it allows the audience to get in contact with the

negative contents that men usually forget and/or project upon the outcast, and

the different. Thus, one of the objectives of the play when approaching this

theme is to interrupt this mechanism of psychological defence called projection.

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Both, the second and the third (c) points, show that it has been a long time

since reflections about outcast, difference, and suffering take place in my mind.

Finally, the fourth and last point (d) reflects my personal concern with healing,

dealt with in the play, because it represents this process as it was experienced

by its central character.

Frankenstein and Me

Although Sleep Tight Frankenstein is a fictional play, when I look back at

it I cannot help noticing that Frank had half of his body deformed, and spookily

enough I got half of my body partially paralysed one year after I performed this

piece. Would it be a premonition then?

Maybe, because it is not uncommon for artist to depict in their works

something that nobody knows that is going to come true, not even them.

Although I am not going to discuss that here, I believe it is because they

unconsciously feel something that is already in the air, as a latent disease in my

case.

Furthermore, while on the novel the monster commits suicide, on the

play my professor and artistic director would reject such an ending, and insist

that I should create an open and positive one. In case she was right in

considering that what goes on stage is not totally disconnected from real life, I

did as she wished. Nevertheless, my ending was so open that I still do not know

exactly what it meant. Perhaps, that hope springs eternal either in real life or in

the fictional one. Anyway, in my piece Frank overcomes the hard times he went

through, and ever since that has definitely strengthened me in the hard times I

have faced in real life.

Conclusion

All in all, I do not know whether the play is a vague impression of

anything, a foreknowledge of the sort, or rather a premonition. What I know

though, is that be it the story of a fierce and monstrous character in a novel, or

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of a sad yet funny little boy in a play, the works related to the flaws-and-all

character indeed seem to clearly reflect a time as well as the inner world of the

artists that created them. However, those things would turn them into forms of

expression, would they not?

References

BLOOM, Harold. (1985). Postscript: In SHELLEY, Mary. Frankenstein ou o

moderno Prometeu. Porto Alegre, LP&M.

SHELLEY, Mary. (1995). Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus. Oxford,

Oxford University Press.

BRANDEN, Nathaniel. (1997). Autoestima e seus seis pilares. 3 ed., São

Paulo, Ed. Saraiva.

LE BRETON, David. (1995). A Síndrome de Frankestein. in: SANT’ANNA.

Denise Bernuzzi de (org). Políticas do Corpo. São Paulo, Estação Liberdade.