Frankenstein and the spark of being:: electricity, animation and adaptation

In this essay, I suggest that the animation scene in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein poses interesting and important questions for both adaptations and criticism of the novel. While scholars and film-makers tend to agree that Victor achieves the animation of his creature through a galvanic electric spark, Shelley’s account of the creature’s animation in the novel is altogether more ambiguous, and exploits the obscurity of contemporary understandings of vitality. Shelley’s phrase “spark of being” in particular is associated at the period with phenomena as varied as the soul, electrical science and biological reproduction. I compare a series of theatrical and cinematic adaptations of the novel, from Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein (1823), to James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974), and Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994). However, my focus is Bill Morrison’s film Spark of Being (2010), a silent film produced from found footage. I argue that Morrison’s film acknowledges in a way that other adaptations do not, that Shelley accounts for the animation as an obscure “chemical” experiment. Morrison’s film, like Shelley’s novel, focuses on chemical processes, rather than the galvanic shocks favored by other adaptations and indeed by scholars of the novel.