Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul: Appropriation and Performance as Trauma Narrative/Cure in Çağan Irmak’s Creature (2023)

Abstract

Çağan Irmak’s 2023 Netflix series Yaratılan (Creature) is an adaptation inspired by Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein. Çağan Irmak reappropriates the novel into the nineteenth-century Ottoman context. The series presumably has the cholera outbreak (1840s or 1890s) as the triggering point of one of the main characters’, Ziya’s (Dr Frankenstein’s equivalent), search for immortality, and falls in line with the questions raised by the novel, as well as the traumatic history of not only the nineteenth century dynamics but also the human helplessness in the face of pandemics/epidemics, including COVID-19. Ihsan (the creature) as an unusual doctor, who quite extraordinarily becomes the “monster” of this adaptation, helps raise questions concerning (bio-)ethics as well as trauma and recovery. He is re-educated and regains his memory through his encounter with a theatre troupe and heals through his interactions with others who are social outcasts like him. Thus, performance (acting and narrating) functions as a way of facing and dealing with traumatic memories. In the context of cultural adaptation and appropriation of a classical novel, this paper aims to discuss how the act of adaptation itself and the choice of theatrical rehearsal, performance, and storytelling serve as a LaCapraesque acting out and working through to help deal with fictional and non-fictional traumas.

Keywords

• Çağan Irmak’s Creature
• Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
• cultural appropriation
• transcultural adaptation
• trauma narratives

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