| Title | : | The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0553576372 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780553576375 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Mass Market Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 440 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1995 |
| Awards | : | James Tiptree Jr. Award (1995) |
The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein Reviews
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First of all, let me say that this novel is well written (although a bit repetitive). The male author produces a very believable female voice which is distinct from the voice of the persnickety “editor” – not many authors can do that.
Readers of many books, for example Marion Zimmer Bradley’s “Mists of Avalon” will be familiar with the Druidic concept of “The Great Marriage”, “Marriage With the Land”, or “The Sacred Marriage” as Dan Brown calls it in “The DaVinci Code”. In this novel, Baroness Frankenstein, mother of Victor and adopted mother of Elizabeth tries to indoctrinate her pre-teen step-siblings into the Druidic mysteries / tantric sex rites / alchemical ceremonies to further “The Great Work” of “The Chymical Marriage”. So, the author describes in great detail how these two kids are encouraged and instructed in how to perform these esoteric sex acts while the adult teachers look on. Somehow this was supposed to further alchemical outcomes, like producing the philosopher’s stone, but I never understood that part.
Elizabeth’s journal tells how she was systematically brainwashed and raped over and over again at the direction of her mother. Think this description is too harsh, that it was in the name of religion and divine mysteries? Just imagine that the leader was the father instead. -
Finally, the truth about Victor Frankenstein's wife! Witches dance naked in the woods, a crone masturbates a teenage boy with the aid of her familiar, bizarre sex rites, and a woman looks into the face of a miscarried fetus and sees the face of the monster Frankenstein. A must read! I can't believe it was written by a man!
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--From Publishers weekly.
How ironic that a woman who wrote as a man should, after nearly 200 years, be given such ardent voice by a man writing as a woman. -
i read the hardcover version years ago, and to this day it is one of my favorite books of all time. such a beautiful concept of the 'flipside' of a classic novel without changing the original story's meaning or character. the story is retold from the view of the mad doctor's wife and is such a compelling and vivid story of her childhood and life leading up to the creation of the monster and the eventual outcome but also manages to feel completely original due to all the non-frankenstein story lines. this is one of the books i recommend to anyone asking for a suggestion of something interesting to read. now a period piece, but with the feel of a true memoir that was written back when. really well written, something you don't want to put down no matter how much you're yawning in bed late at night. 'reliving' this woman's struggle to understand what is happening around her while the reader knows full well what will happen gives this book such a weird feeling of sympathy for what she goes through and a feeling if suspense in how she will discover it and how it will affect her after all the other things she has been put through in life. the story itself is such a brilliant idea that people should give it a read.
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A little strange but entertaining. A fun read.
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This was an interesting book. The reader gets a chance to find out about Elizabeth's life, from her birth to death. I was hoping to get some insight into Victor. What motivated him to do the things he did? But this was Elizabeth's story to tell, her discoveries, her thoughts, her emotions. The book could have used some editing. There was a section of the book that I thought was strange and out of place. But, in spite of that, it was a fascinating look at a story that has endured and captured our imagination for over a century.
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I had high hopes for this. It was an erotic retelling of a classic horror story.
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Where do I begin? It has been some years since I read Mary Shelley's original tale of the monster. Within those pages, I found a man whose hubris to attain god-like power over life and death to be tempered with the anguish of losing those he loved most to death. This, then, was what I took from Frankenstein. Victor was a monster, but one with the best of intentions.
This volume leaves me somewhat disturbed. I'm not sure where exactly he got the idea that anything in his book could be remotely connected to the original story except by the environs and the characters he made use of. While I freely admit that I found the notion of women practicing their own forms of freedom during the Enlightenment quite compelling, and I actually liked having the grandmasters of the movement name dropped throughout the tale to give it some weight as to the era, I simply could not bring myself to associate the story with Shelley's original work. To me, Elizabeth was an innocent that was sacrificed to Victor's hubris. There was nothing to indicate she nor her adopted mother were cunning women. The Victor in the original tale was flawed, but also good-hearted and quite conflicted. The Victor in this story is arrogant, cold, and flails back and forth between knowing he's all powerful and being a raging coward at the end. I also find it hard to believe that he, as originally written, would be drawn at all to the esoteric arts, as much of a man of science as he was portrayed. The rape of Elizabeth, her subsequent miscarriage, and her long sojourn as a wild woman of the woods also threw me -- it seems too fantastical to apply to Shelley's original character.
It was an interesting book, but I think it would have been better had it been the writer's own characters and not those of Shelley's universe. I realize that he is an authority on Shelley, and has many accolades to his name, but this is my opinion of his version of the tale. -
All this book has offered was mansplaining, manipulation, manslaughter. In the most literal sense.
I thought grotesqueness of Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein was enough of a crazy ride to pronounce it the most hilarious and awful adaptation of Frankenstein.
It was until I read this book.
Dark descent was "feminist, empowering" take on Elizabeth’s life full of hilarious plot holes, disturbing takes and anything but strong female characters, written by a woman. This book is again a "feminist, empowering" take on Elizabeth’s life, which we see through gaze of male author, where rape, incest, disturbing practices and madness is seen as the female empowerment. Oh, and children being groomed and brainwashed into horrible, horrible sexual practices is seen as feminist and according to nature too.
The later part of book was… easier to read I think? It was now less about grooming children and more about Elizabeth’s descent into madness (wow so feminist) + basically Frankenstein retold from her perspective. If the whole book was written like the last two parts then I’d gladly give it even 4 stars. However, the disturbing things this book is calling "natural" and "power of women" makes it utter catastrophe.
Was it worse than DD? This one was at least solidly written, but the disturbing stuff is a huge turn off. If we not take those disturbing things into consideration then sure, it’s better than Dark Descent. However I believe the both books deserve to burn in fiery pits of hell and be forgotten about.
To conclude, was this book necessary? It didn’t add anything to Mary Shelley’s book, it didn’t give any conclusion, any pleasure to read. All I got was disgusting male perversion and fantasies of female rape, cult brainwashing and incest. Never again. -
Interesting look at the story from another point of view. Very much about the power of women. My favorite quote "The blood is our strength, for it is the power of the heavens and the Earth within us"
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Masterful use of language! I love this book, if, for no other reason, than it is delicious to read. Theodore Roszak's prose is polished so beautifully, it fairly GLEAMS!! I think Mary Shelley would be proud...
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I agree with the review that said the last 50 pages were the best. The book did not have much to do with the Frankenstein novel.
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I enjoyed it - even though I knew how it would end. I think the author did a great job with his research of the time period, and explaining why people in the original did what they did.
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The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein By Theodore Roszak
This can be viewed as a political novel about the most basic of struggles; The need of humans to own, control, make, and know as opposed to a call-of-the-wild acknowledgement of life and feeling being in everything and humans just a part of it all, more integrated. It is also a psychological study of humans and their interface with the rest of nature. It deals with issues personal and global at the same time, through story, metaphor. Or simply a story about the internal struggle between the thinking self and the feeling self in the individual.
It is the Prometheus story retold from another angle.
To me this is one of these holographic things available on view from varying perspectives.
It’s about different starting points of view of humans place in the earth. The notion that human lives were lived differently before beginning the naming, separation, discrimination, quantification of things done with the aim of the betterment, advancement, and expansion of human life separate and over all other earth entities. Dominion of humans over the earth God bestowed on them is basically the notion in vogue. Ownership an idea of accumulating what flies by. As if it is beneficial to keep it, as if it is even possible. Constant anxiety about scarcity.
The novel is set at a point when ancient feminist ritualistic nature-based technology meets with the rise of modern science and logic. Science being associated with the male impulse.
There is a possibility of the marriage of the two, the Mother Nature with the male logic/science. The memoir is a last testament of the nature side, about to be lost, maybe forever. Yet another fall from Eden.
That’s the big picture overriding the whole thing. Moving in closer there is a young couple that cannot really bond. They cannot bond because he will not bond. He can’t believe, he must know. He can’t imagine, he must fabricate. He goes along up to a point, then withholds. Their ritualized sex is interrupted by his desires, his will.
The novel is written from Elizabeth Frankenstein’s point of view. I have not read Mary Shelley’s book in many years. This novel was therefore taken on its own terms rather than having any personal memory reference to the original material, so I wasn’t upset by anything that might have felt inconsistent with Shelley’s work.
In close-up, the story is a tragedy, a beautiful romance and marriage that could create a beautiful magical powerful world for them. That can never be. A woman, Elizabeth, is longing and ready to learn to really bond, become one, through alchemical magic ritual, but this cannot happen because of something resistant in the man, Victor. In the beginning of the process he really wants to bond, wants to learn the magic pre-science technologies of witchcraft, but even the times are against this. The flow of interest, at the very end of the 16th Century Europe, is moving toward reason, science, rationality, thought, invention, and dominionism, as it continues to be. There are persecutions elsewhere in Europe referred to, burnings of women going on.
The book presents this moment of the path of unity diverging into separation and commodification.
Maybe we are at another fork in the road, or at least we see where this one leads and are looking back to see what happened in search of a direction. The big issues dealt with in the book are now even more with us and feel like they are coming to a head and something must be done. There is a growing number of people interested in more of a connection with something, spirit, nature, something other than the empty competitive consumer world we have inherited from the church of science and religion.
This book was written 25 years ago, but speaks to a counter movement that has grown with the hazards of the domiminist world view.
It turns out that the novel deal with topics and feelings related to the new psychedelic movement which is very much about this attempt to connect to the reality we live in, honoring it’s limits while exploring abandoned paths that could lead (back?) to wonder.
It can be a deep journey to read this beautifully crafted novel. It is a very serious piece within a successfully entertaining structure.
There is a good deal of magic, wiccan, stuff going on early in the novel. There is even a communicative bird entry friend.
It’s bold for a male writer to take on a young female first person like this. Although I can’t say I was with this all the way. There were few passages where I wondered what a woman would think of the portrayal of Elizabeth’s erotic thoughts. Maybe women don’t need to read this, only I and my kind, needed to.
I was very set up to enjoy this. I even found similar thematic connections to the book I read before this, Kangaroo by D H Lawrence. Lawrence hungered for the very same sort of thing, a reintegration. But these issues have always been in the background in my life.
Overall, considering the theme, this is one of the best novels I have read. Theodore Roszak is a great novelist. I read the outstanding Flicker this year. But this one even tops that. Pontfex, his first novel is very good but a victim of its setting 1970 type revolution scene and that makes it feel dated which doesn’t help in getting the point across. The point that is not far from this novel. Roszak’s academic field was something called Ecopsychology. Perhaps this is what I read in his novels. He may be teaching me that. I’m happy that there are two more novels of his I have yet to read. -
Un ouvrage dense et dérangeant par bien des aspects. Toute la partie portant sur la période alchimique m'a dérangée au plus haut point. Je n'ai cependant pu me résoudre à stopper la lecture.
Pour moi, ce livre n'a rien de féministe... les passages décrivant tout le cheminement vers le Grand Œuvre, le mesmérisme et la société secrète des femmes... sortent tout droit des fantasmes masculins de l'auteur.
Je m'attendais à tout autre chose. -
Abandonné au bout de 160 pages. Les femmes sont présentées comme des manipulatrices perverses dont les hommes n'ont pas besoin de respecter le consentement parce qu'évidemment elles veulent être agressées sexuellement, même quand elles disent le contraire... Écœurant. Je ne comprends pas que ce livre soit réputé féministe.
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Honestly, worst book I've ever read! I don't understand why men think that writing rape scenes and having women dancing naked in the forest and having a menstrual cycle ritual is somehow supporting women! I'm sorry but a period is NOT this pagan rite of passage that he writes! He's fucking stupid!
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A very strange book. A little drawn out in my opinion. Not sure that it added anything to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
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What a strange and twisted Gothic tale.
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Frankenstein with a woman's perspective. Filled with Nature and magic.
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Tiptree winner 1995
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I really enjoyed this book. It was so much more than I had thought it would be.
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This book was twisted and unique.
The female characters were done beautifully and I loved this completely different twist on the legend. It is weird, somewhat erotic, and thoroughly unique.
Well worth the read and a book I still think about quite a bit. -
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2324190.html[return][return]Won the 1995 Tiptree Award. I wasn't quite sure what to expect; it's not terribly closely related to Shelley's own Frankenstein (and I'm baffled by the numerous online reviews whining that it's not a "sequel" - most of the book is set before the action of the original novel, so if anything it would be a prequel; but in reality it is an extended meditation on the character of Elizabeth Frankenstein and what might have shaped her life and Victor's to their date with destiny. It provides an unexpected background of the creation of the monster in the obsession of the senior Baroness Frankenstein with alchemy, and her manipulation of Elizabeth (who is presented as Victor's adopted sister, as well as his eventual wife) and Victor as part of her own grand plan, which inevitably grinds to a halt against Victor's interest in science rather than alchemy, though he shares the goal of creating a new form of life (and indeed is more successful). Poor Elizabeth is nastily manipulated by everyone, though I was amused by the outraged scholarly apparatus purportedly provided by an older Robert Walton (who, as everyone forgets, is the narrator of the framing story in Shelley). Inevitably one must compare with Mists of Avalon, which is the same sort of book (reframing of familiar legendary material through perspective of an alternative, more female-centred and largely fictional belief system). I think Roszak is a bit more disciplined than Bradley, but is also drawing on a smaller canvas which may make that easier. -
The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein follows in the footsteps of Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea and Alexander Ripley's Scarlett - it is a sequel to a classic written by a different author. Unlike Rhys and Ripley, this novel is less than a compelling continuation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
The premise of Roszak's novel is that Robert Walton, the narrator of Shelley's novel, continued researching Frankenstein's tale and found the diary and letters of Elizabeth Frankenstein, the bride that died on her wedding night at the monster's hands. I found the idea of telling Elizabeth's story intriguing. It's curious that despite the fact that Frankenstein was written by a female, the only female voice is told through a male lens. However, it's curious that a man was the one that ultimately decided to give Elizabeth voice in this novel.
Aside from the fact that Roszak left out key characters from the original story including Henry Clerval and Justine Moritz, who were both murdered by the monster, I was grossly disappointed with Roszak's take on the novel. Roszak decided to make Frankenstein's mother a practicer of feminine magic who adopts Elizabeth to train her in the arts and create a spiritual union with Victor. This feminine magic involves numerous sordid sexual acts. I was disturbed by the many lurid elements of the novel and I refuse to believe that Shelley would have agreed with Roszak's version, and in fact, would have been appalled. I almost stopped reading this numerous times, but kept hoping the story would improve. It didn't. The structure of the novel and the quality of writing was not to blame. But the content was less than enjoyable. -
I don't know....this book was a little disjointed to me. The first part about all the wiccan, and alchemical stuff was kind of interesting....and not just a little wierd the thing about the mother and laying her beliefs on her kids to the extreme! The second half, where all that stuff drops by the wayside and Victor goes off to school...and Elizabeth, I don't know, she bugged me. I did think it was interesting to read the narrators thoughts on, or the spin he put on what Victor related to him as he lay dying, and what he read in Elizabeths diaries...I also think that, while you're thinking about how there ought to be some kind of law against the stuff Victor was doing....you should see some of the articles in Life Magazines of the 40's that deal with medical research...monkeys with the tops of thier heads taken off with see through helmets screwed into thier heads so you can see the blood vessels in thier brains....that stuff made me think, but as far as the story goes...it didn't quite do it for me.
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Recueillie par la baronne Frankenstein, la jeune Elizabeth est introduite dans le monde secret des sorcières et initiée à l'alchimie, aux lois de la nature et à celles du corps humain.
De son côté, Victor, fils légitime de la baronne, ne jure que par la raison et le savoir : il prétend pouvoir créer une vie qui ne naîtrait pas du ventre de la femme mais de la science.
C'est finalement un monstre que va créer ce nouveau Prométhée...
Après La Conspiration des ténèbres, Theodore Roszak signe là un roman d'une intelligence diabolique, gothique, féministe, dans lequel il rend un vibrant hommage à Mary Shelley.
De l'alchimie au magnétisme animal de Mesmer, le père de l'hypnose, du savoir des matrones aux Rêveries de Rousseau jusqu'au mystère du plaisir féminin, autant de sujets que son hommage élégiaque mais gorgé de sève à Mary Shelley brasse sans rougir. Guillemette Olivier-Odicino, Télérama.
