The Shadow Knows …
Hitchcock
Photo by Tom Cogill
It started decades ago, one Halloween at the University of Virginia .…
Susan Tyler Hitchcock (PhD English ’78) wore a “lurid green mask” to teach Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. An especially lively discussion sparked, and Hitchcock herself was hooked. She had discovered more than another Romantic writer — her dissertation was about Shelley’s husband, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley — she had found a myth. More than two decades later, in the story of the scientist who fashioned a living creature from corpses, Hitchcock has birthed her own creation, a meaty (pun intended), lively and intellectual examination of why an early 19th-century Gothic romance still resonates.
In Frankenstein: A Cultural History (W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), Hitchcock examines how Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus retained its popularity from its first edition in 1818 through dozens of stage adaptations in Europe and the United States and even became the subject of a 1910 film by Thomas Edison — one of Hitchcock’s favorites — long before Boris Karloff’s 1931 green-headed, bolted characterization of the monster became standard.
Hitchcock’s Frankenstein returns her to her academic roots. “If you take my writing career to have begun in 1978, when I got my Ph.D., it did come full circle in 2005 with the publication of Mad Mary Lamb,” she says. “I returned to literary history and to the Romantic period that so fascinated me as a graduate student.”
Shelley’s Frankenstein has been called the first myth of modern times, says Hitchcock, weaving two contradictory mythological threads. Some myths celebrate the courage to push beyond normal limits and perform the impossible — classic myths of the hero, such as Odysseus or Beowulf — while others caution against such risks, implying that by doing so, humans overstep boundaries created by the all knowing gods. Adam and Eve dared to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and for that humankind has been punished ever since. Frankenstein’s monster comes from an equally deep well of meaning, says Hitchcock, akin to Carl Jung’s archetype of the shadow: the primitive life force, our ideal and rational self’s dark underbelly. In orderly society it may be quiet, but in times of chaos or social change, it reveals itself. Interestingly, as Hitchcock’s book hit the shelves, Broadway was hosting two Frankenstein-based shows.
Hitchcock’s ties to the University are multifaceted and nearly continuous. After receiving her doctorate, she chose to write for the general public rather than pursue an academic career. “Instead of a job, I got a book contract,” she says. Gather Ye Wild Things appeared in 1980.
For many years, “the majority of my writing was for and about the University,” she says. She served as founding editor and writer for Of Arts & Sciences, the alumni newsletter from which this magazine developed. She wrote or edited articles and newsletters for the Alumni Association; the law, nursing, engineering, education and commerce schools; the Career Planning, Development and News offices; and the Health System. She also authored the popular The University of Virginia: A Pictorial History (University of Virginia Press, 1999 and 2005).
At the same time, Hitchcock taught in the engineering school’s Humanities Division (now Science and Technology Studies), where the fateful intersection with Frankenstein occurred in her course, “Man and Machine: Images of Technology in Literature.”
Beginning with Mad Mary Lamb in 2005, she says, “My career allowed me to write about what I knew and loved and studied as a student. The Frankenstein book continues that trend — and I am beginning work on my next book, which will be about John Milton and Paradise Lost — which I reread for the sake of writing the Frankenstein book and found newly fascinating, not only the poem itself but also the family setting within which it was written.
Read an excerpt of Frankenstein: A Cultural History
To learn more about Susan Tyler Hitchcock, visit:
http://www.susantylerhitchcock.com/.
