Mediating Monstrosity: Media, Information, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

ANDREW BURKETT Mediating Monstrosity: Media, Information, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein O VER THE COURSE OF THE LAST TWO DECADES, ROMANTICIST SCHOLARship addressing interactive electronic hypertext environments has re­ lied heavily upon Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein {1818, 1831) in an al­ most uncanny manner. In 2001, for example, Eric Sonstroem and Ron Broglio began collaborating to create FrankenMOO, an immersive elec­ tronic environment derived from Shelley’s novel and hosted on the Ro­ mantic Circles website at the University of Maryland. Like any MOO, or “Multi-User Dimension, Object Oriented,” FrankenMOO is designed to employ the internet to offer real-time interactions between multiple writ­ ers, readers, and users. As Sonstroem describes them, “MOOs offer the freewheeling interactivity of a connected set of chat rooms, but they frame this unstructured interaction within a relatively fixed and hierarchical tex­ tual landscape.”1 Sonstroem and Broglio designed FrankenMOO to be much more than simply a recreation or critical and theoretical interpreta­ tion of Shelley’s novel and certainly something other than simply a MOO whose themes are derived from Frankenstein.2 Equipped with an Encore Xpress HTML interface, the Romantic Circles Villa Diodati MOO relies heavily upon the precise use of the original language from Shelley’s novel for character, location, and object descriptions, and FrankenMOO's interac­ tive figures actually utter lines directly from the various versions of her original text.3 In an even more recent example, in April 2009, Stuart Cur­ ran’s Romantic Circles Electronic Edition of Frankenstein went live online 1. Eric Sonstroem, “Do You Really Want a Revolution? CyberTheory Meets Real-Life Pedagogical Practice in FrankenMOO and the Conventional Literature Classroom,” College Literature 33, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 150. 2. Sonstroem, “Do You Really Want a Revolution?,” 152. 3. Sonstroem, “Do You Really Want a Revolution?,” 152. SiR, 51 (Winter 2012) 579 580 ANDREW BURKETT after fifteen years in the making. Collaborating with Jack Lynch, Sam Choi, Laura Mandell, and a number ofother scholars, Curran has produced with his multimedia hypertext “Pennsylvania Electronic Edition” of Shel­ ley’s novel one of the most comprehensive single editions of any text in any form, print or electronic, to date.4 But why have recent Romanticist research and scholarship come to fo­ cus attention so heavily and specifically on Shelley’s Frankenstein in the pro­ duction of these immersive electronic environments, hypertext online re­ sources, and digital humanities initiatives? Is there something unique about this novel which allows it to be employed for such projects or, perhaps, ac­ tually draws or even prompts scholars to turn to it while pursuing this type of work? A related question might be the following: why have scholars not turned as often in this form of research to other equally rich and complex texts from the Romantic era such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798, 1817), William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1799, 1805, 1850), or Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Queen Mab (1813) to name but only a few possible alterna­ tives? Indeed, while electronic editions of rather expansive and complex texts ranging from Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature (1803) to Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798-1805) certainly exist, few, if any, electronic resources come even close to approximating the scope and scale of projects involving Shelley’s Frankenstein.5 Sonstroenr perhaps sums up the magnitude of such Frankenstein-bused projects best: “We hoped [with FrankenMOO] to create a monster that was beyond our control.”6 The creators of FrankenMOO and the collaborators of the “Pennsylvania Electronic Edition” ofShelley’s novel have provided some answers to these and other related questions concerning the reasoning behind turning to Frankenstein for the source of their various research projects. Lynch, for ex­ 4. Jack Lynch, “Unexplored Regions: The Pennsylvania Electronic Frankenstein as Vario­ rum Edition,” in Literature and Digital Technologies: W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Mary Shelley, and William Gass, ed. Karen Schiff (Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press, 2003), 50. 5. Electronic texts that allow for dynamic collation (such as 'The Temple of Nature and Lyri­ cal Ballads) are available on the Romantic Circles website. See Erasmus Darwin’s...