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Monsters And The Women Who Create Them

One of literature’s and the movies’ most enduring and loved monsters was created by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly after a stormy night of social discourse, debauchery and boredom in Geneva, Switzerland when she and her hubby to be, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelly, along with England’s prime romantic poet-hedonist Lord Byron and his friend and doctor John Polidori, while sitting around the fireplace one summer in 1816, bet one another - famously recognized literati they were - could write scary stories better that the purveyors of cheap scary literature of the day known as “Penny Dreadfuls”. Bryon started a vampire story, naming his villain after the fellow who cut down his trees at his ancestral Nottinghamshire home Newstead Abbey, but grew quickly bored. His traveling companion Polidori later finished and published the story as a short novella “The Vampyre”. Percy Shelly scribbled some middling haunting verse. But 19 year old Mary, who had never had a novel published before, invented Frankenstein. A man of science so infected by his power of knowledge and ego, made a man from the parts of the dead, only to have the result of his over-reaching ego destroy him and those he loved. Inspired by the social arguments between Byron and Shelly, a nightmare "dream" influenced by the experiments of Luigi Galvani who had recently stimulated dead muscle tissue with electricity, and her young romantic trysts with Percy Shelly (then married) in the graveyard of St. Pancras Paris Chuch in London (see Mary Shelly London "Birth" of Frankenstein), Mary Shelly created one of the enduring works of gothic literature.

The novel of Frankenstein sets the hero coming from Switzerland to study and work at the University at Ingolstadt, (see Big Guns and Fat Uniforms) one of the first centers of learning in old Germany, in the walled city 30 minutes north of Munich in Bavaria. But the monster’s name and castle of the author’s imagination came from a tiny village in the Rhineland-Palatinate region about 40 minutes between Kaiserslautern (near where Ramstein and Landstuhl military bases are located) and Mannheim. The ruins of Castle Frankenstein, destroyed by the French, stands clinging to a rock over-looking the small town with the infamous name. The main rail line to Kaiserslautern runs through a tunnel right under the ruins and one can just picture the angry villagers with pitchforks storming the castle while Boris Karloff rages from the burning battlements. And if peering close, one can almost see the face of the monster in the rocky crag to which the castle ruins cling, which might have inspired a young woman author surrounded by men of notoriously monstrous talent and egos.

There is a beautiful castle overlooking the Rhine River - Burg Gutenfels that some tour operators are referring to as Castle Frankenstein (it fits better on the boat tour) but was actually built by the von Falkensteins (see RHINE CASTLES EHRENFELS AND SOONECK - The Mice Who Ate the Bishop). Also the Castle ruins in Darmstadt called Frankenstein with legends of a murderous doctor has also claimed the literary Frankenstein inspiration mantle (see Darmstadt Frankenstein Castle). Legends grow in mysterious ways. © Bargain Travel Europe

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For Bargain Air Travel to Central Germany
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See also:

FOOTSTEPS OF THE BROTHERS GRIMM

A GERMAN KING'S FANTASY CASTLE

LUFTWAFFE MEMORIES - A STROLL DOWN HEINKEL LANE

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