ABSTRACT
Name a Luddite novel: Odds are you’re thinking of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Everyone knows the electrified monster and the mad scientist who created him in a fit of hubris. Everyone has a sense of the plot, if only from one of the many film versions, or from TV, comic books, commercial advertising, Halloween decorations, the whole heap of Frankenstein artifacts collected in the popular culture. The prefix “Franken-” is now attachable to almost any noun, rendering anything “monstrous” in a familiar way, even a breakfast cereal (“Frankenberries”). The 1818 novel now appears retroactively in the light of recent popular-culture usage. People can’t help but read Mary Shelley with the images from James Whale’s and Mel Brooks’s movies
in mind. Clichés about Frankenstein have taken on lives of their own, just like Shelley’s monster:
Some things man was not meant to know. Blind progress gives birth to technological monsters. Dehumanized technology will inevitably “bite back” against humanity.
