Media Studies

On the two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, this chapter will examine the ways in which this author has been portrayed in popular culture.  Beginning with her characterisation in the prologue of The Bride of Frankenstein continuing through films concerned with the Haunted Summer including Haunted Summer, Rowing with the Wind, and Gothic and culminating with other more fictionalised texts such as Frankenstein Unbound and The Frankenstein Chronicles, it will be argued that rather than offering up this historical figure as an enduring and inventive author, these texts instead act to rob Mary Shelley of authorial agency.  Even as this eighteen-year-old woman was challenged as the progenitor of this seminal Gothic text at the time of publication, so too modern discussions of her inspiration limit her creative impulse to that of one who merely records the events of the world around her rather than allowing for the possibility of her conceiving of a wholly unique literary conceptualisation.  It will further be suggested that these texts act to relegate Mary Shelley to the role of Gothic heroine, a female protagonist negotiating a labyrinthine landscape so as to avoid madness at the hands of nightmarish visions of the supernatural.  Indeed, such representations beg the question as to whether Mary Shelley is finally to be remembered as the author of one of the most inventive, original and persistent of all Gothic texts, or simply a character trapped within the very narratives to which she helped to give life.