![]() ![]() ![]() All that poetry and those two great cornerstones of Gothic literature set me thinking about a new story built on original characters, my own monstrous creations…was there a fresh, modern way to explore the challenging characters of those familiar literary works?” (qtd. ![]() In describing his process in writing the series, Logan acknowledges both his indebtedness to the precursor texts and his own, original contributions: “It all started with William Wordsworth…which led to Byron, Keats, and finally to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In addition to retelling, adapting, and sewing together these stories in a visual medium, the writer and director, John Logan, also adds to, amends, and extends these characters’ storylines. In doing so, the series must contend with not only the source texts, that is, the novels themselves, but also with the many other cultural retellings of these stories over the past century, so that, for example, we can see elements of later adaptations included (Frankenstein creates a female creature) and elements of later adaptations rejected (the creature is decidedly not similar to James Whales and Boris Karloff’s 1931 imagining of him, either physically or intellectually). Like Shelley’s novel, Penny Dreadful is also self-consciously intertextual because it sews together characters and aspects of storylines from many of the 19th century’s most popular gothic texts, including Frankenstein, but also Dracula, Dr. One recent adaptation that has received considerable attention is John Logan’s television series Penny Dreadful 1. They simultaneously represent the process of “adapting” a creature within the film, and they actively perform the process of “adapting” as they draw on not only Shelley’s novel, but also the influence of later film adaptations, in the creation of their artistic product (139). As Perry explains, each of the over 100 Frankenstein films that Shelley’s novel has motivated, replicates this process as well. In other words, Shelley’s novel represents the sewing together of a new creation from existing fragments in Victor’s creation, but as a writer, she also actively performs the process of adaption in the intertextual nature of her novel. Like Frankenstein, she is an adapter sewing together parts from older texts like the Prometheus myth, Paradise Lost, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Faust, and Caleb Williams…”(Perry 138). For starters, “Intertextuality is the very seed of Mary Shelley’s novel. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a text that has produced “nearly infinite variations in every conceivable popular and highbrow medium,” as Dennis Perry explains, and the novel is a text that is especially suited to adaptation and intertextual interpretations (137). Frankenstein and Penny Dreadful: Adaptation and Intertextualities By replicating and reinterpreting this scene over the course of three seasons, he engages the earlier text in a dialogue that highlights a sentimental rhetorical strategy for generating sympathy in the audience, which is present in both texts. Logan’s series revises this key scene by selecting social spaces and communities that make interesting interpretive sense – whether to appeal to 21st century attitudes, reflect 19th century cultural contexts, or imagine an origin story that Shelley’s story leaves out. He replicates the sequence by emphasizing the creature’s isolation, then placing him within a community that seems uniquely suited and willing to accept him, and then destroying that stability and acceptance each time he gets close to enjoying it. He does so by replicating and revising the plot sequence of a key scene in Shelley’s novel – when the creature is rejected by the De Lacey family. In Penny Dreadful (Showtime/Sky Atlantic, 2014-16), creator John Logan interprets and reimagines one of the central concepts of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)– social exclusion and the desire for sympathy and community. × Current About Archive Submit Editorial Board Salisbury University Content to Suffer Alone: Generating Sympathy in Frankenstein and Penny Dreadful Colleen Fenno Ladwig ![]()
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