Toward a “Hybrid” Study of Literature and Film: The Frankenstein Case

Abstract

Film and literature are two different art forms, each with its own narrative strategies and techniques, and we have to ask different questions to different media. As each form has so much to explore within itself, the problem of the relationship between the two media naturally becomes a much more daunting task. Therefore, the usefulness of film “adaptations” in literature courses needs to be carefully considered and evaluated and in so doing, the crudely utilitarian conception of literature and film？literature as an end and film as a means？should definitely be avoided. This paper offers one way of integrating literature and film by attempting to give a “hybrid” study of them. The hybrid view of studying and teaching film and literature stems from the desire to combine literary criticism and film studies, the desire which moreover aims to destabilize and curtail the tendency to believe that the origin text is of primary importance. The objects chosen here for my case study are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Kenneth Branagh’s film May Shelley’s Frankenstein. I argue that the two texts of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein are deeply at odds against each other and the tension between them has been brilliantly exploited by Branagh as the central creative source for his visual realization. More specifically, I propose a psychoanalytic reading of the both the novel and the film which pivots on Caroline Beaufort’s death scene, seeing her death both as her husband’s doing and as her own wish for self-erasure. Both Branagh and Shelley desire in their respective work to terminate the triangular relationship of father-mother-child and turn it into the binary relationship of father-child. Freud's dual concept of the Oedipus complex has been used as the theoretical basis on which my reading of Shelley’s novel and Branagh’s film is built.