of Pre-existence
Or, the Reanimation of Literary Corpora
Written by Mae Liu
“To some, Barbie is a similar perversion of the familiar—a patchwork of loosely sewn, flimsy feminist theory grafted onto an infamous brand image—and while we may resonate with its individual elements, the sum of its parts can come off as uncanny, unsatisfying, or cringeworthy.”
“If Frankenstein can be read like a tale of conception, writing itself is like a legacy—like offspring, it functions as an extension of person and reputation. Authors become synonymous with the work they leave behind—raised, momentarily, from the dead each time we deem something Orwellian or Kafkaesque.”
Despite never revisiting this idea in lecture, my British Lit professor’s words remained underlined, in blue ballpoint, at the top of my notes each class. I couldn’t help it—as Frankenstein’s monster once said, the very concept “[clung] to the mind, when it [had] seized on it, like a lichen on the rock.”
Claiming that the act of writing holds a candle to grave-robbing and necromancy sounds as morbid as it does melodramatic—treating the “mad scientist” figure like a version of the “suffering artist” trope. Yet when you entertain the grim metaphor: stitching together concepts salvaged from other bodies of work, breathing new life into your creation before its release to the masses, its resonance becomes fascinating. Can we read Victor Frankenstein and his monster as an allegory for literary creation—the birthing of ideas that morph and take on new forms as it interacts with the world? How might we extend this to question the dynamics between creator, creation, and audience?
The first time Frankenstein reckons with what he’s conceived is loaded with emotional locutions that reinforce themes of disillusionment and revulsion: he characterises his initial “desire” behind his work as “an ardour that far exceeded moderation,” now replaced by a “breathless horror and disgust [that fills his] heart.” What he initially describes as “the beauty of the dream” has spiralled into a nightmare, introducing the overarching theme of creations that fall short of or become distorted from their creators’ intentions. The passage illustrates this degradation by contrasting Frankenstein’s once-dignified dreams of “infusing life into an inanimate body” with disturbing ones where he holds the “corpse of [his] dead mother” in his arms. “How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form?” His helpless tone behind these rhetorical questions, coupled with extreme word choices like “catastrophe,” “wretch,” and “infinite” further heighten his sense of emotional turmoil.
Throughout the span of literary history, two groups are notorious for reacting just as violently to creations that do not align with their expectations—authors (towards fanwork) and audiences (towards adaptations of familiar ideas). 2023 in particular has been quite a year for reanimating corpses, with the live action Little Mermaid, Avatar II, and the Super Mario Bros movies all resurrecting stories from popular culture to varying degrees of success and backlash. Films like Everything Everywhere All At Once and Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse made headlines for their self-conscious, self-referential worldbuilding—especially as mainstream storytelling veers in the direction of everything meta and postmodern. Barbie in particular sparked mass discord between those who condemned it as a superficial narrative pandering to white feminism, and those who stood by its deceptively simple execution as a means to illustrate something more.
Regardless, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is the attempted amalgamation and reanimation of disparate female experiences, from feminist schools of thought to collective memories of “girlhood” —and the reactions it stirred is emblematic of the visceral discontent we feel when the representation of a concept fails to align with the image we have preconceived in our minds. “Beautiful! —Great God!” Frankenstein’s incredulous tone, followed by the stylistic choice to describe the monster’s body parts one by one, produces the effect of scanning with our own eyes in slow horror—first at his “yellow skin” that “scarcely [covers]” the muscles and arteries beneath, then its hair, teeth, and finally “watery eyes” set in “dun-white sockets.” Recognisable signs of beauty, like his “lustrous black…flowing” hair and the “pearly whiteness” of his teeth are juxtaposed with his “shrivelled complexion and straight black lips,” a physical manifestation of Frankenstein’s aforementioned ambitions—alluring in theory, yet utterly vulgar in practice. To some, Barbie is a similar perversion of the familiar—a patchwork of loosely sewn, flimsy feminist theory grafted onto an infamous brand image—and while we may resonate with its individual elements, the sum of its parts can come off as uncanny, unsatisfying, or cringeworthy.
On the flip side lies the question of authorial control: how much authority can a creator claim over how their work is interpreted? How can we even enforce these rules in a digital age, where the dissemination of fanwork has become the crux of media popularity? George R. R. Martin, for instance, is notoriously vocal about his antipathy towards fanfiction, while J.K. Rowling has fomented her share of Internet wars over changing a character’s race or sexuality post-publication. This possessiveness over the integrity of their intellectual property, or authority over the canon, is a striking parallel to the domineering belief Frankenstein has towards his own creations: “happy and excellent natures” who would exalt him as their “creator and source” and “owe their being to [him],” a “gratitude” he “so completely…[deserved].”
Nevertheless, both the plot and real life tend to prove these expectations futile. The monster’s first encounter with books explicitly highlights the subjective interpretations he chooses to make: “as I read…I applied much personally to my own feelings and condition.” Paradise Lost, in particular, became “a true history” in his mind, “many times…[considering] Satan as the fitter emblem of [his] condition” over the traditionally benevolent Adam.
This distinctly mirrors the universal reading experience: gleaning wildly arbitrary conclusions based on what resonates most, regardless of authorial intent. We see how creations—and the fan cultures they give rise to—easily overpower their creators, with fanwork and popular opinion bleeding into the canon itself. See the infamous provenance of Fifty Shades of Grey as Twilight fanfiction, or when shows engage in “fanservice”—catering to fan theories that, regardless of canonisation, have become integral in the fandom’s consciousness. Frankenstein finally acknowledges the ultimate powerlessness of a creator when making the female monster: one “of whose dispositions [he] was alike ignorant,” and who “might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation.” Frankenstein’s creation morphs in ways he cannot hope to control—much like how artwork is constantly in flux with the world it interacts with, independent of the preconceived “compacts” of their authors’ intentions.
To what extent, then, is an author responsible for the legacy their work leaves behind? Should the authority a creator claims be proportional to the responsibility they take for their creations’ influence?
Frankenstein makes his culpability clear: “I had begun life with benevolent intentions…now all was blasted…I had been the author of unalterable evils.” Moreover, despite the separation of art from artist being more nebulous in real life, authors of controversial pieces have—more often than not—been persecuted alongside their work. If Frankenstein can be read like a tale of conception, writing itself is like a legacy—like offspring, it functions as an extension of person and reputation. Authors become synonymous with the work they leave behind—raised, momentarily, from the dead each time we deem something Orwellian or Kafkaesque.
Frankenstein illustrates a blurring of the relations between creator, creation, and society—through the monster’s vengeful efforts to bring Frankenstein to his level of solitary wretchedness, but also in the paratextual ways his name has become irrevocably attached to the monster’s image in our popular consciousness. Art, it seems, may well have the potential to do the same, rewriting the reputations of their creators—until both author and abstract are, as Shelley concludes her tale, “borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and in distance.”