Reversing the Gothic: Joseph L. Mankiewicz's People Will Talk and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

This essay extends to analyze Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1951 movie "People Will Talk" in relation to Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and the tradition of its cinematic adaptations. The discussion will focus in particular on the many significant intertextual connections between Mankiewicz's film, Shelley's novel and James Whale's 1935 "Bride of Frankenstein". It will show how "People Will Talk" articulates a positive and optimistic treatment of themes that play a crucial role in the original literary archetype and its cinematic offspring: the Promethean ambition of the modern medical scientist, the conflict between science and nature, the protagonist's troubled relationship to the feminine and the maternal, the transgression of the boundary between life and death.