Abstract
Prescient in its representation of what is now recognized as typically Romantic themes, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein stands as a signal text for the movement it helped to define and upon which much of its popular legacy depends. David Bowie and Steven Patrick Morrissey have effectively captured the mood, manner, and message of Shelley’s novel in their music, videos, and album-promoting campaigns. While one might too readily associate Morrissey, the “Pope of Mope,” with mood and Bowie, the stylistic chameleon, with manner, each draws on both of these experiential and representational modes to articulate a complex philosophy that returns, time and again, to the ideas Shelley explores: love and loss, hope and despair, beginnings and endings, and the power of language to create and to destroy.
The author is indebted to Veronica R. Ortiz for her assistance in the preparation of this manuscript.
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Notes
- 1.
While typically read as one of Shelley’s sympathetic characters, as an alternative to the embodiments and performances of masculinity her novel so resolutely critiques, this moment suggests that even the Creature has taken on the selfishly invested, masculinist tendencies of his creator: in making this promise, the Creature is speaking for the yet-to-be made companion, effectively silencing her, robbing her of subjectivity, of voice and choice.
- 2.
David Bowie, interview by Roy Hollingworth. Melody Maker, December, 1973. Reprint, Bowie: The Ultimate Collector’s Edition from the Makers of UNCUT, Summer 2015, 36.
- 3.
One cannot help but think of the title of David Bowie’s 1980 album, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), whose song “Ashes to Ashes” lyrically dismisses Bowie’s earlier manifestation, Major Tom of “Space Oddity,” but whose video introduces yet another odd creature, Bowie-as-Pierrot.
- 4.
David Baker, “Bowie’s Covers: The Artist as Modernist,” in Enchanting David Bowie: Space, Time, Body, Memory, ed. Toija Cinque, Christopher Moore, and Sean Redmond (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 105.
- 5.
Barish Ali and Heidi Wallace, “Out of This World: Ziggy Stardust and the Spatial Interplay of Lyrics, Vocals, and Performance,” in David Bowie: Critical Perspectives, ed. Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power (New York: Routledge, 2015), 263.
- 6.
Nick Stevenson, “David Bowie Now and Then: The Questions of Fandom and Late Style,” in ed. Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power, 282, 292.
- 7.
Dene October, “The (becoming wo-)Man Who Fell to Earth,” in ed. Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power, 246.
- 8.
Ali and Wallace, “Out of This World,” in ed. Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power, 271.
- 9.
Bowie’s flirtation with fascism connects his political gestures both to Romanticism and to Morrissey. In The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999), Isaiah Berlin argues that fascism grew in part from Romanticism’s rejection of Enlightenment thought. Like Bowie’s attachment to fascism, Morrissey’s is equally complicated and contested. Widely criticized for appearing to embrace fascism in his song “The National Front Disco” (Your Arsenal, 1992), the singer has just as frequently fueled speculation about his fascist sympathies as he has championed the U.S. Latin American community, all by way of his political statements and representations of immigrants in many of his songs.
- 10.
Tiffany Naiman writes that the cover of The Next Day shows “Bowie [toying] with a particular kind of collective memory of himself” (“When Are We Now? Walls and Memory in David Bowie’s Berlins,” in Enchanting David Bowie, ed. Toija Cinque , Christopher Moore, and Sean Redmond, 315). Ian Chapman considers “the residual image [from “Heroes”] … planted in the mind of the viewer” and suggests that “the white square is, literally, a blank canvas” but adds that because “Bowie has chosen to not offer an updated image, [he allows] the nostalgic one to remain the only visual referent” (“Authorship, Agency, and Visual Analysis: Reading [some] Bowie Album Covers,” in ed. Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power, 208). Stevenson suggests that the cover of The Next Day “represent[s] the ways that identity faces annihilation over time” (“David Bowie Now and Then,” in ed. Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power, 289). Importantly, the white square appeared years earlier as a term in Bowie’s visual lexicon: such an object emerges as the final fade-in/fade-out at the end of the video for “Ashes to Ashes,” there as here covering over one of Bowie’s many discarded images, Bowie as the eternally suspended Major Tom.
- 11.
One image in the booklet accompanying Heathen depicts Bowie, seated at a desk, without a face.
- 12.
David Bowie, “Fashion,” on Scary Monsters and Super Creeps, RCA PL-13647, 1980, compact disc.
- 13.
Eileen Dillane, Eoin Devereux, and Martin J. Power, “Culminating Sounds and (En)Visions: Ashes to Ashes and the case for Pierrot,” in ed. Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power, 36.
- 14.
Ibid., 43. The working title of “Ashes to Ashes” was “People Are Turning to Gold.”
- 15.
Glenn D’Cruz, “He’s Not There: Velvet Goldmine and the Spectres of David Bowie,” in Enchanting David Bowie, ed. Toija Cinque, Christopher Moore, and Sean Redmond, 264. D’Cruz borrows the concept of “hauntology” from Jacques Derrida.
- 16.
Nai man, “When Are We Now?” in Enchanting David Bowie, ed. Toija Cinque et al., 318, 306.
- 17.
Cagle quoted in Michael Mooradian Lupro, “Keeping Space Fantastic: The Transformative Journey of Major Tom,” in ed. Toija Cinque et al., 17.
- 18.
“The Prettiest Star” is CD/MP3 track 7 (LP side B, track 2) on 1973s Aladdin Sane.
- 19.
Lee Brooks, “Ambitious Outsiders: Morrissey, Fandom, and Iconography,” in Subcultures, Popular Music, and Social Change, ed. William Osgerby (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2004), 140.
- 20.
Ibid., 150.
- 21.
Daniel Manco, “In Our Different Ways We are the Same: Morrissey and Representations of Disability,” in Morrissey: Fandom, Representations, and Identity, ed. Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane , and Martin J. Power (Chicago: Intellect, University of Chicago Press), 128.
- 22.
Ibid., 123.
- 23.
Ibid., 121.
- 24.
Ibid., 128.
- 25.
Ibid., 130. Morrissey quoted in Manco.
- 26.
Ibid., 134.
- 27.
Elisabeth Woronzoff, “‘I’m Not the Man You Think I Am’: Morrissey’s Negotiation of Dominant Gender and Sexuality Codes,” in Morrissey, ed. Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power, 275.
- 28.
Andrew Cope, “‘Because I’ve Only Got Two Hands’: Western Art Undercurrents in the Poses and Gestures of Morrissey,” in Morrissey, ed. Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power, 162.
- 29.
So fascinated with scars is Morrissey that he even referenced one in the liner notes for 1992s Your Arsenal: “stomach scar courtesy Davyhulme Hospital.”
- 30.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, ed. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf, 2nd ed. (Ontario: Broadview, 1999), 153. Macdonald and Scherf’s edition is based on the 1818 edition of Shelley’s novel.
- 31.
Ibid., 84.
- 32.
David Bret, Morrissey: Scandal and Passion (London: Robson, 2004), 102.
- 33.
Steven Morrissey and Clive Langer, “November Spawned a Monster,” on Bona Drag, Sire/Reprise 9 26221-2, 1990, compact disc.
- 34.
Stan Hawkins, The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Popular Music, and Culture (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 71.
- 35.
Shelley, Frankenstein, 240.
- 36.
Ibid., 242.
- 37.
Ibid., 139.
- 38.
Ibid., 145.
- 39.
Ibid., 168.
- 40.
Ibid., 241.
- 41.
See, for example, the Smiths’ “Some Girls are Bigger than Others” (1986) and Morrissey’s “Break Up the Family” (1988), “Last Night on Maudlin Street” (1988), and “The End of the Family Line” (1991).
- 42.
Morrissey, Live at Earls Court, Attack 06076-86012-2, 2005, compact disc.
- 43.
See also Madonna’s video for “Frozen,” mentioned above, which features a desert setting as a metaphor for the frozenness of unrequited love.
- 44.
Melissa Connor, “‘My So Friendly Lens’: Morrissey as Mediated through His Public Image,” in Morrissey, ed. Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power, 144.
- 45.
Shelley, Frankenstein, 191.
- 46.
David Bowie, “I Am with Name,” on 1. Outside: The Diary of Nathan Adler, or the Ritual Art-Murder of Baby Grace Blue: A Non-Linear Gothic Drama Hyper-Cycle, ISO Sony 7243 8 40711 2 7, 1995, compact disc.
- 47.
Steven Morrissey and Johnny Marr, “Vicar in a Tutu,” on The Queen is Dead, Rough Trade, D 102692, 1986, compact disc.
- 48.
Shelley, Frankenstein, 244.
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Gladden, S.L. (2018). Manner, Mood, and Message: Bowie, Morrissey, and the Complex Legacy of Frankenstein. In: Rovira, J. (eds) Rock and Romanticism. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72688-5_8
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