Figure 1. Cerveteri, 1970. Photograph by A. C. Goodson.
Goodson, A.C. (Alfred Clement) 1946Frankenstein in the Age of Prozac
Literature and Medicine - Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 1996, pp. 16-32 - Article
Subjects:
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1791-1851. Frankenstein.
Abstract
Goodson seeks to reform "our habit of considering the environment as something
external to ourselves." By tracing the mood trajectory of literature written since the
Romantic period, the author posits that "depressive pain is the native environment of
romantic poetry." Through a close reading of actor/director Kenneth Branagh's film
version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Goodson suggest that Branagh's film version of
the text is true to the depressive mood of the 1990s. He notes that Frankenstein is a
medical student, a suicide, and a poète maudit. According to this reading the monster is
both a symptom and a product of depression.
Literature and Medicine 15.1 (1996) 16-32
Access provided by Webster University
Frankenstein in the Age of Prozac
A. C. Goodson *
A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief
In word, or sigh, or tear.
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Dejection" 1
The poète maudit, or writer cursed by fate and fortune, is a romantic original and a modern
stereotype. From William Wordsworth and company to Emily Dickinson and Anne Sexton,
psychic desolation has been the poet's dominant note, practically a signature of the calling.
Typically--as in our images of Friedrich Hölderlin, John Keats, and Gérard de Nerval--the
romantic personality is stressed out, undermined by fatal attractions, afflicted by obscure
longings. Kindred spirits from Lord Byron to John Berryman have survived on brittle
enthusiasm. Romantic irony, exhilarating but finally despondent, is often the only defense
such writers have been able to muster. Their lives have become notorious, their verses
public gossip. 2 Inspired desperation has characterized the poet's high vocation for two
hundred years now.
In the emerging global village that is the internet, the poète maudit remains a sort of
cave painter. But the cave paintings of the stone age are counted among the greatest
wonders of human culture, while modern cave-dwellers still plumb the abysses of
personal affliction. A single instance should suggest what I mean: a scrap of verse in which
Paul Celan envisions an excavated Etruscan necropolis, outside the present-day village of
Cerveteri, as the overgrown ruins of a Nazi concentration camp. In its delphic compression a
holocaust narrative is born: [End Page 17]
DIE EWIGKEIT altert: in
Cerveteri die
Asphodelen
fragen einander weiss.
Mit mummelnder Kelle,
aus den Totenkesseln,
übern Stein, übern Stein,
löffeln sie Suppen
in alle Betten
und Lagern. 3
[ETERNITY ages: in
Cerveteri the
asphodels
ask each other white.
With mumbling ladle,
out of the death kettles,
over stone, over stone,
they spoon soups
into all the cots
and chambers.]
Dejection, desolation, holocaust: such is the inner life of the verse of the later enlightenment,
at least the verse that gets a hearing. Its intensities are authentic. It is playing for keeps.
Celan, the assumed name of a Rumanian Jew born Antschel whose parents were
exterminated in a death camp (Lager), is one among many modern writers who took his own
life--in a river, twenty-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz. 4 George Steiner has
recently considered him as the most distinguished European poet since the great tragic
visionary, Celan's prototype, Hölderlin (1770-1843). 5 What are we to make of his eloquently
drowning voice? What is the environment of this brilliantly imaginative despair, the cave of
modern poetry?
Environment is a deliberately provocative way of putting it. It evokes nature more than
culture, hard to figure as applying to modern poets, those creatures of civilization par
excellence. We are accustomed to thinking of the environment as a containing set of natural
conditions. Yet there are natural conditions that do not envelope so much as they rise up
within us. We might speak for instance of genetic environments. The naturally occurring
climates popularly characterized by testosterone, say, or Down syndrome, are as
environmental as the weather. It is one purpose of this paper to reform our habit of
considering the environment as something external to ourselves. If our health, personal and
also collective, depends on our finding ways to work harmoniously within the environment
we call nature, I want to add that it is crucial to begin by understanding how that nature is
already our nature, something we own before we ever arrive at a concept of it. What we
make of health depends very much on what we bring to it from this deeply personal
experience. Such is the case of Victor Frankenstein, a medical student, a suicide, and also,
as I will be suggesting, a sort of poète maudit. In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Kenneth
Branagh's 1994 take [End Page 18] on this popular modern icon, Frankenstein is seen
desperately struggling with something that turns out to be himself, whatever else it might
include. The film leads us to ask the question I have just posed of the romantic writer: what
is the environment of his despair?
Society and/or History have been the usual answers when the question has been asked so
openly of modern despair. "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same
time a document of barbarism," as Walter Benjamin put it famously, with the Nazis on the
horizon, his own suicide a matter of months away. 6 This is an irresistible line of
commentary, deeply modern in its conviction that society is a jungle. Jean-Jacques
Rousseau's antisocial attitude underwrites the case: romantic rebellion against modern
arrangements is the standard of our cultural politics. This standard has often been
challenged--by Irving Babbitt, T. S. Eliot's teacher at Harvard, and by the apologists of
modernity generally--but it has never been effectively dismissed because there is such
heartfelt consolation in bearing witness to "what man has made of man." 7 Yet it is not clear
that civilization and its discontents make up the real environment of poetic desolation, even
if they provide a large target and plenty of occasion for revulsion. The death chambers of
Cerveteri stand for something besides the Holocaust. They begin as signs of ETERNITY.
The horizon of history comes into the picture subliminally.
I want to associate the dimension of eternity in romantic and modern writing with something
that lies within the poète maudit, something too familiar to be entirely strange to our way of
thinking, yet strange enough to be difficult for practiced readers of literature. Depression is
the name it goes by now, in medical discourse and increasingly in public idiom. Depression
is not a disease of the 1990s, yet its current celebrity owes something to recent advances in
neuropharmacology, and in particular to the phenomenal popularity of Prozac, a serotonin
uptake-inhibitor whose name has become part of the decade's cultural sign system. Earlier,
tricyclic antidepressants had alleviated symptoms. Prozac was not just more effective, it was
transformative. To psychiatrist Peter Kramer in his best-selling book, Prozac was a
revelation, its successes irresistibly suggestive about the biochemistry of personality. 8
Depression began to turn up in mainstream journalism, first as an index of hard times on the
homefront, then as a medical syndrome for which a remedy was at hand. 9 An organization
devoted to this proposition appealed publicly, in a full-page ad in the New York Times, for
donations to promote advanced research to put an end to the elusive and lethal "pain inside
the mind" that is clinical depression. 10 An [End Page 19] epidemiologic study published in
the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry in 1993 showed just how pervasive depression was
(eleven million cases a year), and how costly ($43.7 billion, on a par with heart disease). 11
Prozac became a fad among college students at Dr. Kramer's home institution, Brown
University, according to faculty there. Prozac jokes proliferated in Britain, where its moodbrightening properties were satirized as the new American feel-good wheeze. Behind the
buzz lay the lethal hush of depression and growing recognition that it was a medical
problem, not a social position, poetic credo, or world-historical attitude.
What this has to do with poetry is the subject of a recent study by Kay Redfield Jamison,
Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. A professor of
psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Jamison had already coauthored an exhaustive medical text on depression. 12 Without summarizing, I will elaborate
on some of her findings as they bear on the argument I want to make here. Depression is
the neurochemical environment of much of the literature of the past two hundred years as
we have canonized it. In the English-speaking world, literary romanticism in particular is
pervasively manic-depressive, not only in its characteristic preoccupations but in its
expressive urgency. What we call romanticism was not known by this name among its
original practitioners. It came to be recognized under this title by generations of readers, and
it continues to be made, and remade, in the image of our changing cultural needs.
Romanticism has usually been distinguished from contemporaneous writing--the novels of
Jane Austen, the drama, anything humorous or conventionally ironic--as if it represented
something sui generis. It has always appeared to be different from other literature in the
period, a discordant note even in the literary tradition that spawned it. Considered by
Jamison's lights, romantic writing as we have assembled it amounts to a modern cult of
depression.
From Frankenstein to Alfred Lord Tennyson, from Walden to the reticent verses of the postwar English poet Geoffrey Hill, the romantic text is a site of mourning and melancholia,
psychic cognates of depression. 13 Its eloquence might be compared with that of funerary
inscriptions on classical stelae. From such typical performances as Wordsworth's "Ode:
Intimations of Immortality Recollected from Early Childhood" to the magisterial In Memoriam
of the Victorian Poet Laureate, the epitaph is a covert model of romantic discourse.
Romantic mourning has been recognized by astute readers of Wordsworth's curious verse
epitaphs. In postmodern criticism, such readings are associated with deconstruction, [End
Page 20] especially with the critical idiom of Paul de Man. Deconstructive readers are mute
about the inside sources of their responsive mourning; they are content to remain within the
impersonal conventions of the cult. It is in the choice of significant texts that their deep
motives come clear. Wordsworth has been their culture hero, as Hölderlin was for Martin
Heidegger, for special reasons. Both poets have provided vehicles for an obscure pain,
deeply inward, in search of an expressive outlet.
Jamison considers depressive pain the native environment of romantic poetry as we have
come to know it. This pain in the mind had hardly been considered more than a literary
sensibility, poetic grousing of the sort Eliot admitted he had indulged in The Waste Land,
until she put a clinical name to it. Nature has always been considered the special province of
the romantics. If the word is to include enough to remain significant for us now, it must be
extended to include the natural predisposition to depression, for Jamison's study reveals not
only the name of the brain fever that fires literary romanticism, but its remarkable
persistence within families over generations. This too is nature. The predisposition to
depression represents a degree of personal variance that is recognized by the medical
community, yet habitually overlooked or dismissed as trivial by academic readers, perhaps
because it is so pervasive in the literatures that we think of as our own.
For just this reason, it is worth dwelling on the gripping portrait of depressive pain in
Branagh's film. After all the artless cinematic travesties of Shelley's tale of terror, here is one
that discovers in her arch-romantic narrative the desolation that Jamison identifies with the
artistic temperament. Branagh's film is true to its time and condition. Its affective
environment is the depression-haunted 1990s, not some sci-fi cloud-cuckoo-land. It makes
sense of Victor Frankenstein and his creature in ways that open up Shelley's text to
postmodern reading, as I shall be suggesting. The film deals in self-understanding as no
other rendition of the master narrative has. The innovations that Branagh introduces are not
entirely successful, perhaps; outraged reviewers have disliked the torching of the creature's
bride, among other things. Yet the film's effect is psychically terrifying. Its rhythms rise to the
obsessional pace of a protagonist driven by an inner pain that he recognizes only as
"madness"--a pain in the mind that he cannot alleviate.
This Frankenstein, as well as being a medical student, is a writer, a diarist of his secret
project to rid the world of death. His mania is not written off to the peculiarities of the Mad
Scientist, as it usually has been. As Branagh construes the role, Frankenstein's frenzy has
something [End Page 21] to do with his family, something to do with his temperament. The
science is only an avenue of escape from psychic pain. The film plunges viewers into the
living nightmare of Frankenstein's condition, challenging them to cope with the
overwhelming feelings that engulf him. Branagh invites us to see Frankenstein's world from
within a depressed mind. Through these eyes, the sublime and beautiful alpine environment
provides a chilling commentary on the darkness of human feeling. Nature is no refuge, in the
conventionally romantic sense. An arctic ice floe, a faceless massif: the elements are a far
cry from shelter. They are natural equivalents of Frankenstein's own wild nature, as desolate
as his feelings.
A child of privilege, Frankenstein disrupts the serene world into which he was born, savagely
destroying the family he loves for the sake of a creation that consumes his mind, his will,
and finally his life. His creation is something born of himself, something he rejects but knows
to be his own, something that passes away with his passing. It is distinct from him yet overtly
identified with his state of mind. Frankenstein's creature is a stark figure of his personal
desolation. By the lights of Branagh's film, it is a creature of his depression. Critics since
Barbara Johnson have understood Frankenstein's monster as a projection of one aspect or
another of his creator. 14 We grasp this primitive splitting of personality most fully by
recognizing how the monster is a symptom, and also a product of depression.
The Black Sun of Melancholy 15
What modern medicine calls depression is one of the most venerable disorders on the
books. Its biological symptoms are recognized plainly in early Greek medicine. Contention
about its etiology, currently raging in the clinical literature and in U.S. public health-care
debates, actually dates back some 2500 years, to Hippocrates and Aristotle. So does its
notorious association with men of learning and influence. 16 Robert Burton's Anatomy of
Melancholy (1621), a literary compendium that looks back on this classical legacy,
represents it as a kind of plague: "And thence it comes to passe that in City and Country so
many grievances of body and minde, & this ferall disease of melancholy so frequently
rageth, and now domineeres almost all over Europe amongst our great ones." 17 Feral
means both wild and deadly. It takes melancholy, as the disease had long been known,
back to the wild body and [End Page 22] its four innate humors. The body's revenge on the
overcharged mind remains a good working definition of the depressive condition. 18 This
feral disease calls us back to our primordial environment, whose claim on us is that of nature
itself. There is no health in us outside it, no real understanding of our natures that does not
begin from it.
Burton recognizes melancholy as a somatic condition whose cure lies within the body.
Among the regimens he prescribes is exercise, including all sorts of physical stirring from
the idleness common to gentry then as now. Walking in particular would become the home
remedy and also the usual literary signifier of "this ferall disease." William Cowper's daily
rounds from his refuge in the vicarage at Olney look forward to the endless expeditions of
Wordsworth and Coleridge in the Quantock combes and along Bridgewater Bay, and later in
the high fells of Cumberland. Protracted into days and weeks, often in dangerous seasons
and changeable climates, walking of this extravagant kind was more than a recreational
habit. It was a constitutional sign.
Such compulsive walking figures powerfully in Frankenstein in settings that characterize the
derangement of Shelley's hero. It is on the disconsolate walk home after his brother's
murder that Victor Frankenstein is first confronted by the creature he has made. This
phantasmagoric encounter is etched by lightning on Mont Blanc, and it recurs with variations
throughout Shelley's tale, typically during Victor's solitary expeditions on foot. Branagh's film
dwells on the romantic association of walking with psychic release. In the opening scene, a
grizzled character comes in from the cold of an arctic blizzard to tell his story and die. It is
the final lap of a marathon of anxious pacing, much of it through glacial wilderness. Victor
Frankenstein's long march to self-destruction is replayed in flashback as he rehearses his
life to a kindred spirit, the captain of an ice-bound ship.
The creature that haunts his footsteps is a trekker, too. Its stutter step has long stood in the
popular imagination for its repulsive condition. The creature begins life in a viscous stupor,
as Branagh translates the tale. It sloshes clumsily around in the amniotic fluid spilled from
the vat of its birth, unable to stand, hanging on its creator's reluctant arms. As played by
Robert De Niro, the creature is a figure of raging dejection, its heavy stalking a sign, like the
face, of something human yet strange, unnatural. If we are terrified of this monster, it may be
because its desolation looks strangely familiar. Frankenstein's creature is his unnatural
child, born not from a womb but from a lab, every inch the father's son. Its stalking is
monstrous but also human, the sin of the [End Page 23] father and sign of the father's state
of mind. What is obsessive in the creator's frantic researches turns compulsive in the
creature's serial killing.
"There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand," Frankenstein pauses to
observe, sinking fast but still on his feet. 19 That something, I will propose, is the black bile of
melancholy, taken in a complex sense from Jamison's study of manic-depressive illness and
the artistic temperament. In putting it this way I want to insist on the neurological specificity
of Frankenstein's condition without simplifying its fundamental mystery. The disfigured
creature displays the depressive personality worn inside out, its inner and invisible dejection
translated as slashed flesh and bone. Frankenstein's incomprehension, and his creature's
effort to learn to speak, to connect with other humans, are two faces of the same psychic
process. The medical student expresses his desolation as a quest for knowledge; his
creature-son, closer to the heart of the matter, as a quest for love. Both suffer grievously
from something bred in the bone. Both are driven to desperate measures of accommodation
with this unknown thing. Both are finally destroyed by it, consumed in a raging pyre, victims
of each other's inner mayhem.
What is at work in this divided soul is the open question posed by Branagh. His approach is
heuristic: he begins from Victor's dying confession, from the beginnings of his double life.
The terrible circumstances of the creature's breeding are a reverse image of his creator's
idyllic childhood. Birth is a grisly mess, as Branagh himself, in the role of Frankenstein, tells
the tale on screen. The breach birth of his brother William takes his mother's life. Branagh's
vision of her broken body, a bloodbath, images the natural violence lurking beneath the
surface of the family romance. This excursion into the horror of childbirth is an original touch;
in the novel Victor's mother dies of scarlet fever. It exposes dark undertones in Shelley's
rosy picture of little Victor's home life back in Geneva. As she tells it, life's opening scenes
had been reassuringly normal. Young Frankenstein was his mother's darling, his father's
hope, the family prodigy who would one day go off to Ingolstadt to make his reputation.
Unsettling touches disrupt the domestic stage-setting even in Shelley's benign telling. The
adoption into the family of an orphan of the plague, Elizabeth Lavenza, leads Victor's mother
to hope for the girl's eventual union with her son. This barely disguised incest motif provides
Branagh with material for much heavy breathing. As played [End Page 24] to the gothic hilt
by Helena Bonham-Carter, Elizabeth is a precocious sister-lover whom Victor adores but
also keeps at bay, as though he feels the force of a taboo. She keeps up with him, tracks
him to his laboratory when he loses himself in his researches, insists that he reveal the
secret that is driving him crazy. He cannot tell her about his creation--about the part of his
life she doesn't know. She competes for his attention until she is destroyed (in bed, on their
wedding night) in a second bloodbath, her beating heart wrenched from her body by the
vengeful monster. The gruesome spectacle dramatizes the implications of her death-atconsummation. There is something amiss at the heart of this marriage, something anaclitic,
too hot. Transgression is in the air. We can feel this violation coming. The bleeding heart
cuts to the root of it.
The family romance, as Branagh imagines it, is the seedbed of Frankenstein's obsessive
researches. His mother's death drives him to create life, for reasons he rationalizes but
cannot quite make clear to his friend Clerval. Why should creating life solve the trauma of
her extermination? At a very basic level, the displacement of old by new life is nearly
instinctual. The elder son is charged with continuing the family name. Victor is only doing
what is expected of him. But he construes procreation literally, to mean creating life instead
of propagating it naturally. With Elizabeth awaiting him back in Geneva, something in
Frankenstein leads him along this dangerous high road to personal continuance. For
Shelley, it is science that calls him to transgress the settled order of nature: he is the Modern
Prometheus, with an archaic emphasis on the human costs of speculating the elements. In
Branagh's take on the master narrative, such a conclusion is not so simple. Science, in the
persons of Professors Waldman and Krempe, provides inspiration but not the deep
motivation that drives Frankenstein.
Instead of going home, he remains at university in Ingolstadt, burrowing into Waldman's
secret diary, trying to vindicate his martyred mentor's reputation, and with it the values of
modern medicine. This Promethean motive conceals another one, however; so long as he is
creating life in Ingolstadt, he cannot return to Geneva to marry and propagate normally.
Elizabeth's tempestuous scenes to get him to abandon the laboratory dramatize the choice
that he is making. In effect, he observes the incest taboo by completing his doctoral work.
Branagh brings the matter forthrightly into the film through Elizabeth's passionate
declaration that she is his sister, in a love scene at a dancing party. The family romance is
consuming yet deeply repellent, though [End Page 25] Frankenstein never faces the
problem head on and in fact allows himself to be drawn back into it by honoring his
engagement to Elizabeth.
Nothing in the film explicitly links Frankenstein's manic energies and depressive collapse
with the family double cross--the injunction to marry his sister and the undercurrent of
maternal obsession drawing him back into the family circle. We cannot speak of an etiology
being constructed here. Yet the association is an inevitable one in light of Alice Miller's
developing work on incest and depression, which finds primal trauma at the bottom of the
depressive drama. 20 Is Frankenstein an afflicted child who takes it out on kids? Is Shelley's
text in denial? Another child is savagely done away with in the story; a child-like person is
brought to life only to be abandoned by its creator, then beaten senseless by a family he
tries to befriend, vilified, and eventually driven by neglect to self-destruction. These do not
appear to be related events, and the critical literature has not put them together. Yet they do
add up to something distinctive, as the film would lead us to see.
On such a reading, what Victor really feels about life on the home front is plainly indicated in
his creature's choice of victims. The murder of little William, the brother whose birth
destroyed his mother, is sentimentalized in Shelley's tale. In the film, the story tracks the
monster's trick of blaming the boy's nurse, and the wild lynching of this guileless girl, whose
only fault is to have grown too close to this cursed family. The brutal murder of Elizabeth
intimates a deep rage that dare not declare itself openly--one that could no longer be
suppressed once the consummation of her marriage to Victor was in view. In both cases, the
monster may be said to be doing the dirty work for his creator. Frankenstein's grief for his
bride may be authentic, but it is only part of the story. Branagh does not dwell on it. His
Frankenstein is no better at expressing sorrow (or remorse) than at expressing anger, or
love.
If the incest taboo is construed anthropologically to mean marriage rules--leaving aside, that
is, just which degrees of kinship are disallowed in any particular culture--then Victor's
creation has a whiff of incest about it, as well. For marriage rules regulate lines of descent,
and a creature with no mother has no place in human society. This is the monster's problem:
lacking kin, he has no home--the last word in the film and a significant one, as I will suggest.
The overwhelming guilt that prostrates his creator at the sight of his monstrous son is the
affective center of Shelley's tale, on which all else turns. Frankenstein runs from the
laboratory, lapses into a depressive coma, and is gradually [End Page 26] revived by the
intervention of his friend Clerval. Meanwhile, the child of his mind is out in the world, trying to
make a life on its own. Shelley explains its creator's guilt as a cognitive reaction to what he
feels to be a violation of the natural order. But the incest taboo, that social depth charge,
provides an inside explanation of his sudden plunge from manic elation into depressive
despair.
Incest prohibitions stand for social legitimacy and control. These are the real stakes of
Shelley's tale, and of Branagh's film. Frankenstein is out of control. His science violates the
order of things, as Shelley sees it. Natural philosophy, as science was still being called,
demanded a respect for the limits imposed on inquiry by the laws of Nature itself. This
remains an issue for every environmentalist, and it accounts at least in part for the
persistence of Shelley's tale in the modern climate. Branagh takes Frankenstein's erratic
behavior another route--back to the family romance, as I have suggested, into the affective
disturbances associated with depression. His temperamental intensity and creative drive,
the reckless self-assurance involved in his creation of life, the single-minded pursuit of his
personal goals at any cost, even his long bouts of sleeplessness in the laboratory can be
related to standard diagnostic criteria for hypomania. 21 This syndrome is recognized in the
film's dialogue when Elizabeth, trying to bring him home, asks pointedly, "Are you totally
obsessed?" The word rings true to the case. It links Branagh's portrait of the character in his
historical costume with a medical condition and modern parlance.
Frankenstein's illness is not entirely of Branagh's own devising, as the many psychoanalytic
readings of Shelley's tale would insist. 22 It is clearly indicated in the book, even duplicated in
the personality of Robert Walton, the ship's captain to whom the protagonist turns at the end
of his life. "Do you share my madness?" Frankenstein asks him meaningfully as the
confession commences in the film's opening scene. On the basis of this strange kinship,
Frankenstein entrusts Walton with his story. What Branagh accomplishes in refabricating
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a transformation of her structure of explanation. It is the
madness that interests him in the natural philosopher--an alluring madness, not merely
culpable, as society at large would have it. His Frankenstein is a modern Hamlet, struggling
darkly with the family romance, full of a rage whose sources remain obscure to him. The
mystery at the bottom of his personal ordeal may be monstrous, but it is of real scientific
interest. With Walton at his side and the creature knocking at the door, Frankenstein's
ordeal is not his alone. It is true to the human condition, terrible but known at last for what it
is. [End Page 27]
The figure of walking depression links Branagh's film to older notions of melancholy; his
elaboration on the incest motif links the film with anthropological ideas about the rules of
kinship, and with psychological ideas about the consequences of their transgression. I want
to conclude with a look at a third link between this version of Frankenstein and the
phenomena of depression. Writing comes into the film in ways that would identify the
medical student as a sort of poète maudit. Young Victor is given a blank diary on his
departure for Ingolstadt. It is his mother's legacy to him, replete with hope and possibility.
This diary figures in contexts that associate writing with creation, but also with compulsion.
Frankenstein makes use of it to keep track of his scientific caper instead of writing home.
From the diary the creature will one day learn the facts of his life, and he will exact his pound
of flesh accordingly. For his creator, writing is the maternal muse, and a source of growing
self-awareness. But what it leads him to know is terrible, for the diary discovers the truth of
its author's condition in the creature that he conjures, and this creature will destroy him.
Branagh's association of writing with self-awareness is of course deeply romantic. Writing of
this intense kind, driven by traumatic experience and aimed at fixing things in an act of
nearly divine vindication, rings true to the careers of Percy Shelley, contributing author of his
wife's book, and of his ally in desperation, Lord Byron. Both were present at the tale's
hatching. 23 Frankenstein's diary, as Branagh writes it into the story, signifies the personal
sources of creative imagination as well as the dangers involved in self-exposure. His film
makes romanticism heroic again, if less Promethean than it appeared to Mary Shelley. At
once star-struck and terrified, she could not resolve her feelings about the romantic
personalities whom she knew at such close range. Her Modern Prometheus is a romantic
computer hacker, a boy wonder run amok.
Less fearful of the implications, Branagh makes Mary Shelley's Frankenstein tell a more
explicitly personal tale than she could perhaps risk. It warns of a reality principle lurking
within the romantic character. Like the writers on whom he is based, Victor Frankenstein
fights to the death the something within himself that he does not understand. The victory
foretold in his name is a triumph of natural philosophy, of the self-understanding that science
enables, over conventional wisdom. His death is tragic, but his example is liberating. It
sends his alter-ego, Walton, home--the film's emphatic final word--a sadder but a wiser man,
released from the ice pack of his personal ordeal. 24 [End Page 28]
A Cancer of the Mind?
Since its original publication in 1818, Mary Shelley's tale has usually been regarded as a
potboiler, at best as a curiosity. Only in the current generation of romantic interpreters has it
come into its own. In part this revival reflects fresh interest in the cultural politics of gothic
fiction, and especially in writing the feminine. Yet Frankenstein exceeds these critical
occasions: it has been read far and wide, and made to yield startling, often irreconcilably
plural meanings. Its deep ambiguities have made it a screen for postmodern critical
projections of every kind. In representing Branagh's film as informed by a conception of the
depressive personality, I have tried to distinguish his hand from those of the original authors.
But for all the modifications the actor-director works on his material, this is a distinction
without a difference. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is true to its title. It discovers something
strange in the tale, of a piece with our renewed preoccupations with the body and with
health, something we are only beginning to understand. Victor Frankenstein is more than an
ambitious medical student, speculating the elements in the spirit of a Promethean Dr.
Faustus. His nature is the romantic writer's depressive nature, and his inside story is one of
an obscure drive to create life where death was. The obscurity is essential. It points to
fathomless mystery--a mystery that has made the tale a living legend.
Frankenstein's crusade for life is deeply personal. Working from Branagh's conception, it
must be reckoned a desperate effort to save himself from a nameless pain in the mind. Film
and novel both dwell on a motivation so compelling that it drives him to charnel houses by
night in search of bodies to dismember. A fear amounting to terror wells up when he is
confronted by his old friend Clerval about this secret life at a moment when it might possibly
burst upon them:
I trembled excessively; I could not endure to think of, and far less allude to, the occurrences
of the preceding night. I walked with a quick pace, and we soon arrived at my college. I then
reflected, and the thought made me shiver, that the creature whom I had left in my
apartment might still be there, alive and walking about. I dreaded to behold this monster, but
I feared still more that Henry should see him. Entreating him, therefore, to remain a few
minutes at the bottom of the stairs, I darted up towards my own room. My hand was already
on the lock of the door before I recollected myself. I then [End Page 29] paused, and a cold
shivering came over me. I threw the door forcibly open, as children are accustomed to do
when they expect a spectre to stand in waiting for them on the other side; but nothing
appeared. I stepped fearfully in: the apartment was empty, and my bedroom was also freed
from its hideous guest. I could hardly believe that so great a good fortune could have
befallen me, but when I became assured that my enemy had indeed fled, I clapped my
hands for joy and ran down to Clerval. (pp. 59-60)
The sudden transport of terror, concealing fears about himself that he cannot voice, is
consumed by an equally extreme transport of relief. Branagh refabricates this volatile state
of mind in a series of exchanges with Elizabeth, and he stakes their future on it, dramatizing
what is left largely undeveloped in the master narrative. Yet it is clearly present there, a
signature of the afflicted personality that Branagh finds in the role.
On the basis of his virtuoso interpretation Branagh confirms the real vocation of the tale.
Frankenstein is our collective depression narrative, a modern Hamlet for mass consumption,
full of the tricks of popular fiction without the verbal complexities of the Bard. If Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein failed at the box office, it may be because it evokes the fathomless
world of depression, one we will do anything to avoid. Branagh's acting in the lead role,
understated to the point of unexpressive, is true to the poker face of the depressive
personality. A portrayal of this kind is as sure not to please as depression itself. Yet the face
preserves the essential mystery of the situation, a mystery that Branagh the actor construes
as madness even as Branagh the director constructs deeper contexts for understanding
Frankenstein's ordeal. Is this madness a cancer of the mind, as the actor believes--the
disease of the scientific mentality, one shared by kindred spirits such as Walton? Or is it a
role forged in the cauldron of the family romance? Is depression a case of genetic destiny
and the artistic temperament that finds means to accommodate it? Or of regression to
primitive feelings that cannot be controlled, only acted out? Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
invites a complex appreciation of the depressive personality, cutting too close to the bone for
popular assent. Like Hamlet, it commends itself to an audience willing to assume the burden
of the mystery.
A. C. Goodson is author of Verbal Imagination: Coleridge and the Language of Modern
Criticism and of Coleridge on Language and Understanding. Work in progress includes a
monograph about Foucault's lectures on classical polis theory ("L'histoire de la vérité") and a
book on literature and depression. At Michigan State University he is Professor of English
and Director of the graduate program in Comparative Literature.
* The author gratefully acknowledges the contributions of Linda Blohm, Paula Bank, Gary
Handwerk, and Stephen Rachman to the argument.
Notes
1. Quoted, in this form, by John Stuart Mill in his Autobiography (1873). The lines, Mill wrote,
"exactly describe my case." "A Crisis in My Mental History," as this chapter is called, has
become canonical for its association of instrumental rationality with depression, and of
poetry with the cure.
2. For his first wife's account of John Berryman's ordeal in the grip of this Cain-like curse,
see Eileen Simpson, Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1982).
3. Paul Celan, Fadensonnen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1968), 71, translation mine.
Asphodel, an indigenous Mediterranean lily, was thought to have covered the Elysian Fields,
a pastoral region of the underworld where the virtuous went after death.
4. For details of Celan's exile in Paris and 1970 suicide there, see John Felstiner, Paul
Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1995).
5. George Steiner, "A Lacerated Destiny: The Dark and Glittering Genius of Paul Celan,"
Times Literary Supplement, 2 June 1995, 3-4. For Celan's reliance on Hölderin's example,
see Felstiner, 172-73, 281-82, and passim.
6. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1950), in Illuminations, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 256.
7. Irving Babbitt's influential polemic, Rousseau and Romanticism (New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1919), remains a landmark from which later apologists would take off. The citation is
from William Wordsworth.
8. Peter D. Kramer, Listening to Prozac (New York: Viking Penguin, 1993).
9. See, for instance, Kathy Cronkite, On the Edge of Darkness: Conversations about
Conquering Depression (New York: Doubleday, 1994).
10. See the advertisement placed by narsad (National Alliance for Research on
Schizophrenia and Depression) in New York Times, 18 July 1993, E7.
11. Daniel Goleman, "Costs of Depression Are on a Par with Heart Disease, a Study Says,"
New York Times, 3 December 1993, A25.
12. Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic
Temperament (New York: Free Press, 1993); and Frederick K. Goodwin and Kay Redfield
Jamison, Manic-Depressive Illness (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990).
13. For clinical identification of the traditional categories of melancholia simplex with
nonpsychotic depression and of melancholia gravis with psychotic depression, see Goodwin
and Jamison, 37-40. The association of mourning with melancholia is familiar from Freud's
famous paper of 1917, "Mourning and Melancholia." As Peter Gay summarizes,
"Melancholia, Freud argued, resembles mourning in being marked by loss of interest in the
outside world, persistent low spirits, indifference to work and love. But beyond that,
melancholiacs load themselves down with self-reproaches, display low self-esteem, and in
delusional ways anticipate some sort of punishment. They are in mourning, but in a
particular way: they have lost an object to which they have been greatly attached and with
which they identify" (Freud: A Life for Our Time [New York: Norton, 1988], 372).
14. Barbara Johnson, "My Monster / My Self," Diacritics 12, no. 2 (1982):
2-10.
15. "Le soleil noir de la Mélancholie," from Gérard de Nerval's poem "El Desdichado" (1853),
in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jean Guillaume and Claude Pichois, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard,
1989).
16. See Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to
Modern Times (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1986); and, for a medical gloss on this
tradition, Goodwin and Jamison, 56-59.
17. Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K.
Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 2:68.
18. See Alexander Lowen, Depression and the Body: The Biological Basis of Faith and
Reality (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin, 1972).
19. Mary Shelley attributes these words not to Victor but to Walton, the ship's captain, who,
as Branagh's transposition implicitly recognizes, serves almost as Victor's alter ego or
psychic medium (in Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus [rev. ed. 1831; reprinted New
York: Signet, 1965], 20-21). Subsequent quotations are from this edition and will be cited in
the text.
20. See Alice Miller's classic study, originally published in German, of the genesis of
narcissistic personality, Prisoners of Childhood: The Drama of the Gifted Child and the
Search for the True Self (1979), trans. Ruth Ward (New York: Basic Books, 1981); and her
associated later studies, including For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and
the Roots of Violence (1980), trans. Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1983); and The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity
and Destructiveness, trans. Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum (New York: Doubleday, 1990).
The last includes important material on Celan.
21. See Jamison, 265, for such a list.
22. See the early and still valuable reading by Marc A. Rubenstein, "'My Accursed Origin':
The Search for the Mother in Frankenstein," Studies in Romanticism 15 (1976): 165-94.
23. See Jamison's discussions of both men (pp. 149-90 and passim), and Richard Holmes's
detailed biographical account of the hatching of Frankenstein (Shelley: The Pursuit [New
York: Dutton, 1975], 328-41). Percy Shelley's dramatic repartee, Prometheus Unbound,
related to Frankenstein in conception though ideologically at odds with it, represents just
such an effort of grandiose resolution.
24. In characterizing Walton in the language that Coleridge applied to the ancient mariner, I
follow Walton's suggestion that "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" had fired his adolescent
imagination (p. 20). Coleridge's poem provides the novel with its framing plot (a voyage of
self-discovery), its dramatic setting (terror at sea), and its powerfully figurative rhetoric of
transgression and redemption. Lord Byron and Percy Shelley had been occupied with
Coleridge's Christabel, just published at Byron's prompting, at the time when Mary Shelley
was composing her tale in their company (Holmes, 328-29). The novel is profoundly
Coleridgean, from its interest in the human consequences of scientific method to its
conviction of a deep mystery at the heart of nature, especially human nature. (fig. 1)