Frankenstein/Headscratchers

Every adaptation of this just bugs me. In the original, the monster is very eloquent, delivers long monologues, teaches himself how to speak fluently (in two languages!) simply by eavesdropping on a family for half a year, and reads books like Paradise Lost - in general, he is very intelligent. But whenever the original novel is adapted, the monster comes out speaking You No Take Candle.
- It's Adaptation Displacement. The movie with Boris Karloff was so famous that it's what comes to mind in regards to Frankenstein's Monster, hence why FM is frequently shown as a simple if tragic, brute.
- But don't those adaptations make more sense about it? I mean, it's a bit of a stretch to think a creature of any intelligence would pick all that up just by eavesdropping. That's not how learning languages work. It's not a question of how smart he is.
  - Some adaptations presume that the creature wasn't so much learning speech as remembering languages once known to the person(s) who'd contributed its secondhand brain.
- Hey, Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein is a 20-year-old college kid; his age change in movies is even worse than Hamlet's! Have any adapters actually read the book?
- Not always true. There is a stage adaptation which stays not only truthful to the novel, but has Mary Shelley and Lord Byron as characters as the story is being written. The monster is only seen through actions during Act I (the execution of Justine). In Act II, when the monster finally meets Frankenstein, he delivers an eight-page long monologue that details his life story up to that point, with many portions being acted out.

Back to Frankenstein