Gothic Remixed

Monster Mashups and Frankenfictions in 21st-Century Culture

Megen de Bruin-Molé

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350103078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Longlisted for the 2022 International Gothic Association's Allan Lloyd Smith Prize The bestselling genre of Frankenfiction sees classic literature turned into commercial narratives invaded by zombies, vampires, werewolves, and other fantastical monsters. Too engaged with tradition for some and not traditional enough for others, these 'monster mashups' are often criticized as a sign of the artistic and moral degeneration of contemporary culture. These hybrid creations are the 'monsters' of our age, lurking at the limits of responsible consumption and acceptable appropriation. This book explores the boundaries and connections between contemporary remix and related modes, including adaptation, parody, the Gothic, Romanticism, and postmodernism. Taking a multimedia approach, case studies range from novels like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club series, to television programmes such as Penny Dreadful, to popular visual artworks like Kevin J. Weir's Flux Machine GIFs. Megen de Bruin-Molé uses these monstrous and liminal works to show how the thrill of transgression has been contained within safe and familiar formats, resulting in the mashups that dominate Western popular culture.

1

Frankenfictions

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

(Shelley [1831] 2015, 48)

It has been over two hundred years since the publication of Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel Frankenstein, and since the birth of her infamous monster (described by Victor Frankenstein in the epigraph above). Although he may not be as mutable as the vampire or the zombie, Frankenstein’s creature remains one of the most immediately recognizable figures in horror fiction, and he finds a spiritual successor in the cyborgs, androids, and other artificial life forms that populate contemporary science fiction. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the name ‘Frankenstein’ has gained broader currency, becoming a euphemism for a wide variety of different practices and products, from genetically modified plants, proteins, or animals, to unnatural-but-powerful combinations of objects and ideas, or simply ‘a thing that becomes terrifying or destructive to its maker’ (Oxford Living Dictionary, s.v. ‘Frankenstein’).

Frankenstein’s monster is an adaptation of the human form – an appropriation or re-compilation of its basic components into something new – and uncertain. From the late twentieth century, the ‘Franken-’ prefix has been applied to hybrid food, storms, animals, Stratocaster guitars, and now to the amalgam of classic and contemporary narrative that is described in this book: ‘Frankenfiction’. The Frankenfictions I discuss in this book are commercial narratives, which insert zombies, vampires, werewolves, and multiple other fantastical monsters into classic literature and popular historical contexts. More broadly, Frankenfiction is also a hybrid genre at the intersection of adaptation and remix, which both disciplines consider to be peripheral and ‘monstrous’.

Frankenfiction was first defined rather narrowly, with the 2009 novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. This novel reproduced roughly 85 per cent of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), using the remaining 15 per cent to turn the Regency romance into the story of a zombie uprising (Grahame-Smith and Austen 2009, 3). Because Austen’s novel was in the public domain, both the act of appropriation and the millions in revenue the mashup produced were entirely legal, but its popularity provoked concerned responses from many critics. In a market already flooded with increasingly loose adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, zombies were a step too far. Could this even be counted as an adaptation? Was it acceptable to disfigure Jane Austen’s work in this way, and did the mashup’s success among readers of diverging classes and tastes somehow signal the aesthetic decline of Western culture? To these questions, proponents of the mashup responded by gesturing towards adaptations like Helen Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) and the Bollywood musical Bride and Prejudice (2004). Were such texts more acceptable as reimaginings of Pride and Prejudice than a cut-and-paste horror novel? Where do popular culture and contemporary criticism draw the line between adaptation and appropriation, and why? This book sets out to address such questions in critical and conceptual detail.

Although I often use the term ‘Frankenfiction’, I also conceptualize this genre as ‘historical monster mashup’ or ‘gothic remix’. As the following sections will make clear, however, the terminology of remix studies is often inadequate in describing the practice of Frankenfiction. In this book I occasionally privilege remix terminology over adaptation terminology because of the deliberately derivative way these professionally produced Franken-narratives insert fantastical monsters into public domain texts. Frankenfictions are rarely secretive about their appropriations, though the type and range of texts they appropriate are incredibly diverse. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was followed by a brief ‘literary mashup’ craze, and though this particular mode of fiction soon lost its marketing appeal, the range of texts that perform a similar recontextualization of past fictions and figures continues to grow, and to raise similar questions about the ethics and aesthetics of mashup. Frankenfiction includes direct appropriations of classic literature, like the bestselling Quirk Classics novels, but also literary-historical dramas like the Sky/Showtime TV series Penny Dreadful (2014–16), or the depiction of monsters through an historical aesthetic in Travis Louie’s paintings.

In every instance, Frankenfictions lead us to revisit scholarly definitions of adaptation, historical writing, irony, and ‘literary fiction’. Too traditionally literary to be of interest to remix studies, and not literary enough for adaptation studies, Frankenfictions tend to be used as peripheral examples in both fields. No other study has yet attempted to collect these texts into a new (if still liminal) category. Considering the gap in current scholarship, this book seeks to provide a rationale for why Frankenfiction should be considered a hybrid but distinctive genre, at the intersection between mashup, remix, adaptation, and appropriation.

Gothic remixed

As part of the growing popularity of the fantastical monster in contemporary culture and fiction, we find Frankenfictions – adaptations, remixes, mashups, and other ‘monstrous hybrids’ – that resurrect old texts and narratives specifically to feed a pervasive, commercial desire for the monstrous (Gunkel 2016, 163). This popular, mismatched genre is particularly apposite to current fears and concerns, encouraging familiar questions about authenticity, historicity, appropriation, and the nature of art in the age of popular monstrosity. It also presents a question of specific relevance to Gothic studies: what does it mean that our historical monsters have moved from the margins to the mainstream?

On the face of it, this statement seems like an oxymoron. How can the monster, a figure that traditionally represents marginality, ‘difference made flesh’ (Cohen 1996a, 7), become an emblem of the dominant ideology? David McNally suggests that in a global capitalist society, artists’ and creators’ fears shift from the threat of outside difference to that of monstrous sameness:

What is most striking about capitalist monstrosity, in other words, is its elusive everydayness, its apparently seamless integration into the banal and mundane rhythms of quotidian existence. […] In such circumstances, images of vampires and zombies frequently dramatise the profound senses of corporeal vulnerability that pervade modern society, most manifestly when commodification invades new spheres of social life. (McNally 2012, 2)

McNally suggests that it is precisely the popular and the mainstream that are the ‘monsters’ in our twenty-first-century neoliberal culture, as concerns over the rise of conservative meme activism, the decline of traditional literacy, the prospect of a ‘post-truth’ society, and ‘the angry swamp monster of right-wing populism’ all converge (Hartcher 2017, para. 1). Our fictions project similar fears about the future of historical and personal integrity, truth, civil liberty, and originality. The growing popularity of Frankenfiction – a monstrous genre that uses the tropes and conventions of literature and historiography to happily parody the distaste that these disciplines conventionally exhibit for the popular and the commercial – seems to confirm this assessment. In many ways, then, Frankenfictions are the face of a new age in popular storytelling.

Of course, the manifestation of the monster as the uneducated masses can also be readily found in nineteenth-century fiction. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, we read the following:

The actions of the uneducated seem to me typified in those of Frankenstein, that monster of many human qualities, ungifted with a soul, a knowledge of the difference between good and evil.

The people rise up to life; they irritate us, they terrify us, and we become their enemies. Then in the sorrowful moment of our triumphant power, their eyes gaze on us with mute reproach. Why have we made them what they are; a powerful monster, yet without the inner means for peace and happiness. (1849, 189)

Here, Gaskell’s first-person narrator identifies the monster with the popular, and with the products and consumers of mass culture. They may possess ‘many human qualities’, but they lack ‘a soul’ or moral compass, bestowed through a humanist literary education. Without this ‘inner means for peace and happiness’, the masses are framed as powerful, but directionless and monstrous. This image is strongly echoed in twenty-first-century intellectual discourse surrounding Brexit or the election of Donald Trump as US president – a discourse which The Guardian’s David Runciman described as ‘just another version of the old fear of the credulity of the untutored masses: they will believe anything’ (2016, para. 22). Once again, the ‘new’ phenomenon of Frankenfiction and monster mashup reveals an older parentage, and the thrills, fears, and cultural crises they embody point back to a much longer tradition of popular appropriations and revivals.

Like Frankenstein itself, Frankenfictions owe a debt to the Gothic fictions of the eighteenth century. In many ways, Frankenfiction is simply a new iteration of these older trends. In her 2006 monograph Contemporary Gothic, for instance, Catherine Spooner describes Gothic fictions through various metaphors that show how readily this mode of historical revival reflects the context of adaptation, remix, and Frankenfiction. ‘Gothic’, writes Spooner, ‘has throughout its history taken the form of a series of revivals’, and ‘like Frankenstein’s monster, these revivals seldom take exactly the same shape they possessed before’ (2006, 10–11). From this perspective, Frankenfiction is simply another iteration in a long line of Gothic hybrids. Although its appropriative tendencies have increased with each generation, Spooner compares contemporary Gothic pastiche to ‘Ann Radcliffe’s liberal quotation from Shakespeare and Milton, or Horace Walpole’s collection of medieval curios’ (2006, 12). The Gothic, in other words, is a genre already well suited to discussions of the ethics and aesthetics of historical appropriation. It has been concerned with these subjects since its inception.

In the second edition of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the first work of fiction to receive the label ‘Gothic’, Walpole outlines the emergence of a new, hybrid genre that is clearly echoed in Frankenfiction. Otranto, writes Walpole in the author’s preface, represents:

[A]n attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former, all was imagination and improbability: in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success. Invention has not been wanting; but the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict adherence to common life. But if, in the latter species, Nature has cramped imagination, she did but take her revenge, having been totally excluded from old romances. The actions, sentiments, and conversations, of the heroes and heroines of ancient days, were as unnatural as the machines employed to put them in motion. ([1765] 2004, 21)

Like Frankenfictions, Gothic fictions are concerned with the uneasy juxtaposition between conflicting audiences, tastes, and generic conventions. Jerrold Hogle describes Walpole’s ‘choice of the Gothic label for this uneasy marriage’ of two romances as ‘a marketing device designed to fix a generic position for an interplay of what was widely thought to be high cultural writing (epic, verse romance, tragedy) with what many still regarded as low by comparison (servant-based comedy, superstitious folklore, middle-class prose fiction)’ (2002, 8). Frankenfictions like Penny Dreadful or Kevin J. Weir’s GIFs (short for graphical interchange format) perform a similar manoeuvre. Like Gothic fictions, Frankenfictions are often associated with the demands of the bored or uneducated for ‘artificial excitements’. E.J. Clery goes so far as to suggest that the Gothic ‘originates in the problem of boredom and satiety […] in which the rapid growth of the reading habit in the middle class breeds obscure longings for novelty’ (2002, 29). This mirrors accusations levelled at Frankenfictions like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Moreover, the multimedia nature of many Frankenfictions echoes that of early and Victorian Gothic fiction, which was considered to include ‘an array of media – novels, plays, poetry, paintings, opera and optical technologies’ (D.J. Jones 2011, 12). As we will see in Chapter 4, the way some mashup artists paint onto, reproduce, or digitally layer existing artefacts resembles techniques pioneered by the magic lantern – a projection technology developed in the seventeenth century, which had an impact on ‘the cultural life of Western Europe’ that is ‘difficult to overemphasise’ (D.J. Jones 2014, 13). David J. Jones argues that the magic lantern ‘and other optical media were Gothic artefacts […] from their very inception’ (2011, 17), not only because many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century lantern shows adapted Gothic stories and themes, but also because of the way such technological affordances allowed for ‘many Phantasms and terrible Appearances’, ‘projections of painted Figures’, and other special (and spectral) effects (Defoe 1840, 352; cited in D.J. Jones 2014, 14). Similarly, nineteenth-century Gothic’s status as ‘an intricately interrelated network of evolving media’ with ‘complex synergies which linked and help these in tension’ invites comparisons to our contemporary, networked culture (D.J. Jones 2011, 12).

While I recognize Frankenfiction’s debt to the Gothic tradition, however, I am also hesitant to unequivocally label all Frankenfictions as ‘Gothic fictions’. In part, this is because Frankenfiction often problematizes the use of the term ‘Gothic’ to describe what is, essentially, highbrow contemporary horror. I discuss this problem at length in Chapter 3. What truly separates Frankenfiction from earlier, Gothic texts is its position between the postmodern ‘end of history’ and the digital recycling revival. As I argue throughout this book, Frankenfiction, like Gothic fiction, addresses Romantic visions and concerns. It simply does so with a (post)postmodern set of tools.

Monstrous adaptations

The critical debate about the semantics, ethics, and aesthetics of what I define as Frankenfiction mirrors discussions currently taking place in two distinct academic disciplines: remix studies and adaptation studies. Ostensibly, these two disciplines have much in common. Both consider how existing objects and ideas are recycled and revised. In practice there are numerous, if subtle, distinctions between them. Where adaptation is an older, well-established critical concept, remix seems newer and more popular. In the past two decades, scholarly interest in remix practices and cultures has intensified noticeably. In 2005, William Gibson – a pioneering author of science fiction, steampunk, and cyberpunk – argued that ‘the recombinant (the bootleg, the remix, the mash-up) has become the characteristic pivot at the turn of our two centuries’ (2005, para. 11). In 2006, Henry Jenkins likewise described a fundamental ‘change in the way media is produced and a change in the way media is consumed’ that he termed convergence culture: ‘the flow of media across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment they want’ (2006, 16, 3). Audiences select and reassemble the media they consume in their own individual ways, irrespective of source, and producers expand their texts across multiple platforms in the hope that they will be ever more accessible to new and diverse sets of consumers. These remixed media are the ‘monsters’ of contemporary culture, both in terms of their massive size and scope, and in terms of the challenge they issue to foundational concepts like authorship and international copyright. Frankenfictions disturb the idea that texts can have a sole author or owner. They appropriate the pieces of other texts and the authority of other authors, pilfering familiar ideas and images while never directly breaking copyright law. Is this what stops some critics from identifying them as adaptations? To create a mashup novel like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies may be insolent or even unethical, but it is perfectly legal. While Frankenfictions may sidestep questions of copyright by working with material in the public domain, then, they raise familiar questions about the ethics and aesthetics of artistic appropriation. At the same time, they seem to lack the critical challenge of postmodern remixes from earlier decades, instead suggesting that postmodernism’s ethics and aesthetics may be obsolete in the face of twenty-first-century capitalism and convergence. This is a point I will expand on in Chapter 3.

This book takes the questions raised by Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as a point of departure, applying them to a broad range of derivative monster narratives. Some of these narratives can be read as adaptations of classic monsters, while others are more appropriately conceptualized as monstrous mashups of classic texts. For both adaptation studies and remix studies, Frankenfiction offers a useful illustration of the politics of appropriation – and, by association, the politics behind the conceptions of originality and authenticity on which both of these academic disciplines are based. In the context of this book, Frankenfiction is perhaps best described as monstrous adaptation: monstrous because it often features fantastical monsters, and also because it transgresses many of the discipline’s preconceptions about what it means to be faithful to an ‘original’ text. In this sense the concepts I discuss throughout the book are applicable well beyond adaptation studies. Frankenfictions are also a kind of monstrous historical fiction: monstrous because they deal even more freely with the ‘facts’ of the past than most fictional historiographies. This may seem like a strange way to approach any body of work, but especially one that is the subject of an academic study. After all, who cares about bad adaptation, and fantastical history? Even Frankenfictions themselves often dismiss their value and real-world significance as limited. I suggest, however, that fantastical histories are important precisely because the fantastical and the ‘real’ often bleed into each other in popular an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1. Frankenfictions
• Chapter 2. Adapting the Monster
• Chapter 3. Mashing Up the Joke
• Chapter 4. Remixing Historical Fiction
• Chapter 5. Appropriating the Author
• Conclusion: The Monster Always Escapes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint