Title: Wither on the Vine; Or, Strickfaden’s Monster
Author: Nathan Carson
Date of Publication: 2016
Place of Publication: Eternal Frankenstein
Type: Short story
Characters: No Character
Themes: ANDROID; BYRONIC HERO; MAD SCIENTIST/MONSTER; RACE/POLITICS; RETRO SF; SYMPATHETIC MONSTER
Critical Summary: A young amateur electrical laboratory scientist, on the way home to Santa Monica from his training in WWI, finds himself in the short-term employment of a rather wealthy man who requires electrical assistance for a suspicious project that will be a machine. Initially, he knows nothing about the true goals of the task, but he asks no questions and is more than willing to provide aid for the courteous stranger. His curiosity for the project is sparked further when he realizes the project is in collaboration with famed engineer and inventor, Nikola Tesla. However, his employment lasts for only a couple weeks when the task is due to be finished. He decides that he must see it through for himself after he uncovers secrets regarding the wife of his employer as well as the wives of other wealthy men, who are also in affiliation with and partaking in the ambitious aim this project will undergo.
Kenneth Strickfaden, the young protagonist, discovers by accident that the construction of the machine is meant to help his employer’s wife, Fanny, and her sister, Mary, who are conjoined twins, and Mary happens to be deathly ill. Apparently, they have been kept secret and locked away on account of their condition, which given the time was still seen as foreign and strange both socially and in the medical field. This alludes to the theme of Android because Fanny and Mary want to be healed and separated so as to feel more ‘human’ due to their fear of being unaccepted in the outside world. Even though they are human and are not artificially ‘man-made’, they feel much of the same inferiority as the Creature in Frankenstein.
The machine is meant to heal and repair parts of the body and rejuvenate the skin. All this is run by Nikola Tesla, who can be seen as the Byronic Hero and Mad Scientist in the novelette: he is the brilliant inventor/engineer who initially came up with the idea for the machine, and who everyone looks up to and respects; but he manages to lose control of his own experiment on the conjoined twins, as well as on the wives of the other wealthy gentlemen who also happen to have deformities of their own. More than that, he refuses to take responsibility for it similar to how Victor refused to do so when consequences arose from his neglect of the Creature, who also only wanted acceptance. It is this detail that allows us to sympathize with the women who were the ‘guinea pigs’ in a failed experiment. In a way, they were all sympathetic monsters because, naturally, we wanted the experiment to work so that they could have a chance in society, but to no avail.
Administrative Notes: Tori Venegas, CSUF; Lee Koehler, CSUF (editing)