I also wondered where in Frankenstein we are told the creature is animated with electricity' nowhere is my guess.
Now it's funny you should mention that ... I've read Frankenstein a fair few times in the last few years and I rather thought the point was that so far as I can recall Shelley doesn't mention how the Creature was animated, not in the novel. It is widely assumed that the Creature must have been animated with electricity because of Shelley's comments elsewhere on reading about Galvani's experiments and discussing them.
The actual animation with electricity comes from the films, and I'd hazard a guess that the films derived the imagery in turn from some of the melodramas. My sense is that the visual imagery derived from the melodramas has been surprisingly consistently maintained over the years, even to the referencing of the burning windmill in Van Helsing (which still, for my money, has the best summary of all the Gothic/fantastic/horror film tropes; shame the rest of the film, bar Richard Roxburgh, was so bloody awful).
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Date: 2008-05-09 07:14 am (UTC)Now it's funny you should mention that ... I've read Frankenstein a fair few times in the last few years and I rather thought the point was that so far as I can recall Shelley doesn't mention how the Creature was animated, not in the novel. It is widely assumed that the Creature must have been animated with electricity because of Shelley's comments elsewhere on reading about Galvani's experiments and discussing them.
The actual animation with electricity comes from the films, and I'd hazard a guess that the films derived the imagery in turn from some of the melodramas. My sense is that the visual imagery derived from the melodramas has been surprisingly consistently maintained over the years, even to the referencing of the burning windmill in Van Helsing (which still, for my money, has the best summary of all the Gothic/fantastic/horror film tropes; shame the rest of the film, bar Richard Roxburgh, was so bloody awful).