WITH regard to your reference to ‘Frankenstein’ in Thursday’s edition, the American biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, in one of his collections of essays, points to the way in which the original conception has been distorted.
In Mary Shelley’s book, the creature is shown as someone of considerable intelligence.
Escaping from his creator’s clutches, he hides near to a small village, the language of whose inhabitants he is able to learn, simply by overhearing their conversations.
Initially, the creature sustains himself by pilfering from the villagers’ food stores.
However, coming to understand the hardship he is causing the villagers by doing so, he abandons the practice, in favour of living off various roots and berries found in the wild.
He hopes to gain the confidence of the blind man, and use that confidence to introduce himself to the village as a whole.
Unfortunately, his plans go wrong, forcing the creature to retreat from the hatred of the locals, reluctantly abandoning his hope of peaceful co-operation.
In the films, of course, all of this is set aside in favour of an image of a barely articulate monster smashing everything in its path, warning people of the danger of ‘tampering with God’s law’.
I would agree that the book contains a warning, but it surely has more to do with an unreasoning fear of the new, or the strange, than the message that those who are so eager to use the term ‘Frankenstein’ would wish us to take.
PETER DAVEY, Barrie Road, Bournemouth
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