Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, November 4, 1994 TAG: 9411040067
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DOUGLAS J. ROWE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
The latest celebration of the fabled creature is Kenneth Branagh's sumptuous movie, ``Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,'' starring the Irish-born auteur himself as Victor Frankenstein and Robert De Niro as his stitched-together creation.
The film arrives in theaters today as the umpteenth adaptation of Shelley's 1818 gothic novel.
While the story still concerns a man who creates a being from cadavers and brings it to life, Branagh's rendering focuses more on romance and aims to be a gothic fairy tale. It's also quite faithful to the original text by giving us a highly articulate creature who reads Milton and is ultimately maddened by the world's - and his maker's - rejection.
The creature's suffering lends a universality to this ripping yarn and is one reason it endures.
But its attraction goes beyond mere sentiment: It tweaks our fears of death as well as science and technology; touches forbidden desires; illustrates how life has ramifications - like it or not. And recently, it's been stoked by feminist (and other) interpretations.
``Mary Shelley hit on a myth that's endlessly reinterpretable,'' said George Stade, a Columbia University English professor who teaches ``Frankenstein'' as part of a fiction course. ``People talk about the Frankenstein of modern science.''
He thinks the story is more popular than ever before ``because the feminists have seized on Mary Shelley and `Frankenstein' as a novel of female protest'' - partly because Shelley's mother was a feminist pioneer who wrote an early feminist tract.
Stade noted how the creature says in the book that if Europeans had been willing to emigrate gradually to the New World, American Indians wouldn't have been decimated. And feminists have seized on that component, too.
As usual in gothic tales, the victims typically are women and children; the nice character Clerval is associated with nature and, instead of becoming a scientist, studies Oriental languages and cultures ``which are presented as a kind of gardenhouse of domestic bliss,'' Stade said.
Stade cited a version of ``Frankenstein'' in which the creature is handsome, with long-flowing golden locks, and clearly ``rough trade'' - serving as a parable of societal rejection of homosexuals.
``It's a good myth in that it contains its potency under different times, and different things can be grafted onto it,'' Stade observed.
by CNB