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Book Review: The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Kiersten White

The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Kiersten White

Delacorte, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-0525577942

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

 

Elizabeth Lavenza is the ultimate example of the “cool girl”  described by Amy Dunne in Gone Girl: she is never herself, always what someone else (usually a man) needs her to be. An orphan purchased by the Frankenstein family to be solitary Victor’s friend, she knows her status is always endangered unless she can demonstrate how much she is needed. From the very first, the observant Elizabeth is aware that there is something not quite right with Victor, that she is needed to help him become socially acceptable on the surface, while covering up and erasing his more disturbing behavior, and she does everything she can to make certain he needs her as much as she needs him. Her only friend is Justine, a girl she rescued from an abusive mother and was able to have installed as governness for Victor’s younger brothers– but even Justine does not know the extent of what Elizabeth has done to make herself essential to Victor and his family. At the same time, knowing that he can be erratic, unreliable, and sometimes even dangerous, she alters herself  in his absence to appeal to Henry Clerval, a bright and optimistic young man of the merchant class who is mesmerized by both Victor and Elizabeth. As duplicitous as Elizabeth is, she knows she cannot keep it up indefinitely, and she is at a desperate disadvantage in Victor’s absence once he leaves for university and stops responding to her letters. Finding him, saving him, and covering up his disturbing actions while also trying to avoid knowing exactly what he’s done is essential to her continued status as a ward of the Frankenstein family.

In the original novel, Elizabeth is an afterthought as Victor Frankenstein tells his story– she doesn’t even have a speaking part, and while he is completely involved in his obsession, she totally disappears from the story. White fills in some of those blanks by placing Elizabeth at the scene of Victor’s crimes and experiments in Ingolstadt and making her complicit in covering them up. The abusive nature of the Frankensteins’ relationship with Elizabeth is such that she is able to even deceive herself about horrific events that it is clear to the reader were caused by Victor’s activities. Anyone who has read Frankenstein knows what happens to Justine and Victor’s younger brother, William, but it’s after this that the novel takes a left turn. Learning that Victor did successfully create a monster, Elizabeth overhears a conversation between the monster and Victor that leads her to believe that something terrible is supposed to happen on her wedding night. Rather than being smothered as she is in the novel, Victor reveals his terrible acts and future plans to immortalize Elizabeth. When she reacts in horror and threatens to expose him, he has her committed to an asylum, diagnosed with hysteria. This was an outstanding move on the author’s part. Few YA readers are probably aware of the injustice that allowed women to be committed to asylums based only on their husband’s or father’s assertion that they were mentally disturbed (since most won’t read “The Yellow Wallpaper” until college) but it did actually happen and is a very clever way of getting Elizabeth out of the way so the Frankenstein story can advance further.

I totally understand wanting to give Elizabeth a voice, flesh out Justine, and add another female character to the story (Mary Delgado, a bookseller from Ingolstadt and Elizabeth’s rescuer, the most sensible and likable person in the book). It’s not just unsatisfying but infuriating that in Shelley’s novel Elizabeth and Justine basically exist to be fridged. And I appreciate that White worked hard to create an Elizabeth of her times, who was invalidated and gaslighted by the men in her life in a way that forced her to navigate social and gender roles seamlessly in order to believe she could have a place at all. There is some great writing here, especially in scenes where she takes an active role in witnessing, encouraging or covering up Victor’s deeply disturbing actions (there is a scene with a bird’s nest at the beginning and another with Victor’s brother that will stick with me for a long time), on her wedding night, and in the asylum. But somehow, as a whole, the book doesn’t quite ring true for me, and I feel that it’s longer than it needs to be. I want to like it, and it could just be that after a year of reading about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein I’m worn down,  but Elizabeth as a character doesn’t stand on her own, and I don’t think her voice successfully carries the story on its own, either. Just as Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne can’t tell the entire story of her twisted marriage on her own, Elizabeth needs another voice to balance hers in telling her story. Recommended for Frankenstein-lovers, if they haven’t burned out after a year of adaptations, retellings, critical studies, and biographies, and for teens who enjoy complex characters and have strong stomachs.

Editor’s Note: The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Kiersten White is on the final ballot for the 2018 Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel.

 

Frankenweenie as a Gateway to Literature and Life Lessons

We watched Frankenweenie last night (I explained to the kids that some parts would be sad or scary and they voted to try it) and both during the movie and this morning it was interesting to see what they had picked up. I don’t think Tim Burton was trying to teach my kids about the literature and movies of the horror genre, or offer them life lessons, but Frankenweenie opened up opportunities to talk about these things.

Most people probably don’t have kids who immerse themselves in everything they can find out about monster movies and stop motion animation. But I do have one of those kids. To be clear, he hasn’t seen the Universal monster movies, but he is fascinated by them and reads everything he can find. He’s watched a lot of the Japanese monster movies and cheesy science fiction movies of the 1950s and 1960s, and has managed to see many of the movies Ray Harryhausen worked on. He also has started to notice plays on words, and he saw a lot of things in Frankenweenie that he picked up on right away, like, say, a main character named Victor Frankenstein who digs up a body in a graveyard and brings a creature back to life during an electrical storm. “This movie is like Frankenstein! The name is the same!” He noticed that Victor’s dog is named Sparky, “like electricity has sparks, and Sparky has electricity.”  The turtle that comes back to life is gigantic “like Gamera”! It’s also named Shelley “because turtles have shells”. I told him that Shelley was also the last name of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. “Oh yeah! That’s cool! The name is both of those things!” We also talked about how Elsa’s last name, Van Helsing, is the name of the vampire slayer in Dracula, and that she gets kidnapped by a bat; that the mayor is called the Burgermeister, like in Rankin-Bass’ stop motion Christmas special “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town”; that the movie, which is a stop-motion animation movie, starts with Victor showing a stop-animation film; that the movie is black and white, like the original Frankenstein movie; and that the science teacher looked a lot like Vincent Price. That’s a lot to unpack from an animated children’s movie.

The movie had a much different effect on my daughter. The attack of the reanimated pets on the town really scared her and I had to leave the room with her for awhile. She asked “did anybody get hurt”? Well, the attack is scary, but nobody is really hurt, and parts are even a little funny. Then she wanted to know why the animals turned out differently from Sparky. So we talked about how Victor decided to bring Sparky back because he loved him, but the other kids brought their pets back because they wanted to win the science fair. That was something the science teacher had talked about, the importance of doing science with love, and doing the right thing. Then she asked if bringing Sparky back, even out of love, was the right thing. At that point in the movie, Sparky had escaped from Victor’s house and returned to the cemetery. It seemed like that was where he wanted to be, at rest in the cemetery. “Sparky wasn’t ready to die. But he did, and he wants to be at rest, so maybe he should be at rest. Victor should let him.”  Smart little girl.

Later, both kids asked why the parents made the science teacher leave, because “it’s important to learn science”. It’s hard to explain to kids that adults don’t always want to understand the world, or want their kids to understand. “But science is good”! I reminded them that the science teacher had said that science is neither bad nor good– and that’s why you should be careful with how you use it.

That message gets somewhat lost at the movie’s ending, because after Sparky saves the day at the expense of his own life, and Victor is able to finally let go of his grief, his parents convince the rest of the adults in town to bring back Sparky once again. The same unthinking adults who got rid of the science teacher out of fear reanimate a dead dog without any further thought as to whether it’s right or wrong (I didn’t discuss this part with my kids). In spite of the pasted-on happy ending, though, Frankenweenie, quite unexpectedly, offered a lot of food for thought as well as entertainment value.

Although most people aren’t watching scary movies to improve their cultural literacy or provide them with opportunities for deep philosophical discussions, we can watch out for those teachable moments. It doesn’t take forever to point out a literary or cultural reference when you see it, and if your kids are interested, the Internet makes it easy to explore further. If your kids come up with a question that they really want to talk about, take it seriously and do your best to help them figure things out.  In Frankenweenie, Tim Burton provided a gateway, but I held my kids’ hands as we walked through to a larger world.

Here are a few other scary movies for kids that might lend themselves to more than just entertainment. As always, not every movie is appropriate for every child.

 

Toy Story

Monsters, Inc

Spirited Away

The Neverending Story

Coraline

 

 

 

 

 

Monster Movie Month: Frankenstein and Other Mad Scientists

Why is it that so many people are drawn to the tales of mad scientists? Their obsessions drive them beyond caring about notions of right and wrong; they go far beyond in testing the limits of what it means to create or alter life and humanity. From Victor Frankenstein to Dr. Moreau, mad scientists appear in literature and film again and again, warning us of the dangers of seeking knowledge out of selfishness and arrogance, and giving us visions of the horrors that can emerge from experiments gone awry.

The archetypal mad scientist is Frankenstein- the man, not the monster- who, once he has brought his terrifying creation, stitched together from stolen body parts, to life, abandons his responsibility to the frightened, innocent creature. The story behind the origins of the Frankenstein story is enough to capture the imagination, and since then, it has gone through many incarnations and interpretations. One of the most famous of these is the 1931 Frankenstein produced by Universal Pictures, reviewed here, but there are many more books and movies based on or inspired by Mary Shelley’s original novel. There are also many other resources on Mary Shelley and Frankenstein available.

But Frankenstein is hardly the only mad scientist in the movies. During the same time period that Universal produced Frankenstein, it also released Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man, and The Island of Lost Souls. Since then, audiences and readers have been treated to a variety of mad scientists in both movies and books, and as long as science has the potential to lead to disaster for humanity, that trend seems certain to continue.

For a list of Frankenstein-inspired movies, check out this page from Wikipedia.

For a list of “mad scientist” movies of varying kinds visit this page from Wikpedia

Here’s an entertaining entry on the Mad Scientist trope from TVtropes.com, and here’s a more thoughtful piece from Strange Magazine.

 

For watch-alikes and read-alikes to three great mad scientist movies released by Universal Studios, look below. And note, this is a great way to get someone hooked on the classics, on the screen and on the page.

Frankenstein(1931)

Watch-alikes: Bride of Frankenstein(1935), Son of Frankenstein(1939), The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

Read-alikes: Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley, His Dark Endeavor by Kenneth Oppell (young adult), Angelmonster (young adult) by Veronica Bennett, The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein (nonfiction)

 

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932)

Watch alikes: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941),  Mary Reilly(1996), The Invisible Man (1933)

Read-alikes: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin, The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells

 

Island of Lost Souls (1933)

Watch-alikes:  The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), The Fly (1986), Jurassic Park (1991)

Read-alikes: The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells, Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

 

Enjoy your visit, but don’t stay too long… you might not escape!