It was to my great shame that I had not read Shelley’s work and I had already committed to remedy that when I read Groom’s the Vampire: a New History. Groom said of Frankenstein: “it is a novel that reverberates with vampire thinking”. That it is something which, were it a more modern piece, one might look at to examine if it contained vampire genre tropes, is something I might concede (though it certainly isn’t an oblique vampire story in and of itself, despite Frankenstein using the V word in his description of the being he creates). Yet even that may be a stretch and the media tropes were hardly in place when it was written. Rather the novel comes out of the place where the genre also developed. As such these are more kissing cousins than anything else.
What did astound me, as I read it, was the fact that the creation of the being was not in keeping with the modern view. Frankenstein keeps much of his technique hidden (he tells his tale but refuses to give up his secrets). What we do know if that he is a chemist, first and foremost. We do get a scene relayed of his memory of a tree that is blasted by lightning and many have connected this directly as a clue to the method of creation of the being. Indeed restoration to life through electricity became a literary theme and there is a moment in the later Varney the Vampire where we are given a description of Varney being restored to life through galvanic experiments (though how true this was, is debatable, and the lore in Varney shifted often). Frankenstein describes a process of creating the being (which takes two years) and suggests “The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials”. So, rather than get body parts (a difficult task, given he creates an eight-foot-tall being) it seems he crafts the flesh and bones himself from raw (not necessarily human) materials and then somehow keeps them uncorrupted for up to two years. This makes sense as when he starts to craft the being’s mate he does so “on one of the remotest of the Orkneys”, an island with only five inhabitants and therefore unlikely to be a place brimming with body parts for the creation.
So… vampires. Well the most obvious connection is that Frankenstein states, “I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind, and endowed with the will and power to effect purposes of horror, such as the deed which he had now done, nearly in the light of my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me.” This is really a casual use of the word as an adjective. Interestingly Harriet, the first wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, said of her husband after he left her for Mary, “The man I once loved is dead. This is a vampire”.
Groom points out that blood is a recurring theme in the book – but then, given Frankenstein's goal of creating life, blood would be a theme. That said there are moments of blood reference that does tie into hunger, such as the descriptive threat “I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends”. However, Groom points out the closest connection with the supernaturally strong monster and vampires, given that vampires were a thing of folklore and the genre itself was still forming, was the fact that it strangled victims – an activity folkloric vampires were want to indulge in.
To suggest too much of a connection between Frankenstein and the vampire genre would be foolish. Whilst one might argue that the monster of the cinema is an undead (though not vampiric, normally) creature created out of a patchwork of cadaver parts, this being is alive, imbued with the spark of life. However the mutual genesis of the vampire and the being does make them kissing cousins.
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