Abstract
Whether loyal to the original plot, or divergent to the point of parody, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus is a persistent cultural organism. I argue that the continued popularity of Shelley’s Creature as source material in popular culture is due to the narrative’s suitability as a shorthand for liminality in Anglo-American material cultures: dark creation narratives, monstrosity, fabrication and bricolage, as well as the implications of isolation on the human psyche. I call this phenomenon the Frankenstein meme, building on the meme theories of Richard Dawkins, Susan Blackmore, and Aaron Lynch. This chapter traces the course of Shelley’s original narrative through a sample of popular culture, noting the direct impact of Frankenstein’s crucial components, and examines the fitness of Frankenstein as a meme.
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- 1.
The idea for this chapter developed out of a presentation I delivered on the development of Steampunk subculture at the 2013 conference ‘Neo-Victorian Cultures: the Victorians Today’ at Liverpool John Moores University. I then presented a second paper, specifically on this theme, at the 2014 conference ‘Locating the Gothic’ hosted by Mary Immaculate College and Limerick School of Art and Design. I owe a great many thanks to my supervisors, friends, and colleagues in the British Gothic community for encouraging my Robert Walton-esque journey into uncharted territory.
- 2.
I have supplemented Dawkins’ original theory with the work of Susan Blackmore, Kate Distin, Aaron Lynch, Elliott Oring, and Stephen Shennan. Each of these authors has brought their own disciplinary background to the study. For example, Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine begins from Blackmore’s psychology specialism and works to unpack the possibility that memes are responsible for more than cultural production—that they are responsible for the modern human brain itself, the thing that creates culture (Blackmore 1999: 74–81). However, regardless of which researcher takes up the ‘meme’ mantle, they all agree that, much like genes, memes are selfish in their continued replication and transmission potential.
- 3.
Oring acknowledges that there is data to suggest natural selection as fact, but that it must be remembered that it remains a theory.
- 4.
These particular themes are not the only ones to reverberate across the centuries as part of the Frankenstein meme . They have been selected for this chapter due to the ease with which they slot together. Other themes that I intend to return to in future explorations include adaptation, hybridity, sublime machinery, obsession, the Valley of the Uncanny, and robotics.
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Rollins, S. (2018). The Frankenstein Meme: The Memetic Prominence of Mary Shelley’s Creature in Anglo-American Visual and Material Cultures. In: Davison, C., Mulvey-Roberts, M. (eds) Global Frankenstein. Studies in Global Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78142-6_14
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