Profs & Pints Baltimore: The Life of Frankenstein

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “The Life of Frankenstein,” on the birth, evolution and impact of a tale of man-made monstrosity, with Bernard Welt, an emeritus professor of arts and humanities at George Washington University who frequently lectures on Frankenstein in literature, cinema, and culture.

[Doors open at 3. The talk starts at 4:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-frankenstein ]

Guillermo del Toro’s lush and lovingly produced film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is just the latest of many iterations of the story to capture the public’s imagination. People have watched Victor Frankenstein give life to his monster in numerous films, on television, and on stage, and even perform “Putting on the Ritz” with him thanks to the comic genius of Mel Brooks.

Mary Shelley did not just tell a tale. She spawned the modern genre of speculative fiction and gave rise to a myth that would crop up in debates over nature versus nurture and other matters. Even today it stokes anxieties over the potential impacts of robotics, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering, by evoking the image of a monster turning on its progenitor.

Come gain a new appreciation of Mary Shelley’s creation with the help of Dr. Bernard Welt, who has studied the relationship between nightmares and the horror genre and is the author of Mythomania: Fantasies, Fables, and Sheer Lies in Contemporary American Popular Art.

Dr. Welt will start by telling a literary origin story almost as famous as Frankenstein itself, of how an 18-year-old, then Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, started writing Frankenstein in 1816 while staying in a villa on Lake Geneva with two of her era’s leading poets, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, her lover. Housebound by foul weather, the three read Gothic tales of ghosts and monsters and challenged each other to produce something even more terrifying. Mary dreamed up a story of a man who defied death by creating a living being out of scraps of deceased men harvested from graveyards and anatomy labs.

The resulting novel, Frankenstein, published anonymously in 1818, would by that century’s end become a touchstone in philosophical discourse on the nature of humanity and in political discussions of imperialism and populism. By the 21st century, Mary Shelley (as she became) had earned a more significant place in the literary canon than either her husband or Lord Byron.

We will examine how this grisly tale became a landmark of modern thought and look at the part played by numerous film adaptations from the first years of cinema to the present day. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: From a Theodor von Holst engraving in an 1831 edition of Frankenstein published by Colburn and Bentley of London.