The new Frankenstein is by no means a Christmas movie but we do see lots of ice and snow. The film strays quite a bit from the original novel but apparently the snow and ice is true to the original.
In the 1800s, the Mer de Glace near Chamonix was so big that it almost nosed into settlements in the Chamonix valley as is clear from paintings of the time. People who took the "Grand Tour" across Europe would see it as they headed towards Italy.
Turner painted the scene and Ruskin attempted a photograph. After Charles Dickens visited in 1847, he wrote how the glacier and other sights of Chamonix "are above and beyond one's wildest expectation. I cannot imagine anything in nature more stupendous or sublime. If I were to write about it now, I should quite rave – such prodigious impressions are rampant within me."
In 1816, the famous year without a summer, 18 year old Mary Shelley (then still Woolstonecraft Godwin) hiked to the glacier, now much reduced. She was accompanied by her stepsister Claire Clairemont and soon-to-be husband Percy Shelley, the poet. It would prove to be a major influence when she wrote her famouos novells, providing her with the setting for a pivotal scene between Viktor Frankenstein and the creature.
Setting off on horseback, the trio navigated a vertiginous path with pine trees and snowy hollows. At one point, a mule slipped and they almost fell into the valley. As they ascended, the scenery became ever more barren and dreadful, until they eventually reached Montenvers, where they could walk onto the glacier.
She wrote in her diary, "This is the most desolate place in the world – iced mountains surround it – no sign of vegetation except on the place where we view the scene. It is traversed with irregular crevices whose sides of ice appear blue while the surface is of a dirty white."
Shelley was similarly struck. He wrote later of "a scene in truth of dizzying wonder". And his description of the glacier captured why it had been named a "sea": "The vale itself is filled with a mass of undulating ice. It exhibits an appearance as if frost had suddenly bound up the waves and whirlpools of a mighty torrent …The waves are elevated about 12 or 15ft from the surface of the mass, which is intersected by long gaps of unfathomable depth, the ice of whose sides is more beautifully azure than the sky."
The trip inspired Shelley's 1816 poem Mont Blanc and in one scene in Frankenstein, Mary would place her characters upon the icy ocean's surface.
In Chapter 10 of the 1818 edition, Victor Frankenstein visits Chamonix in search of solace. Struck by guilt following the creature's murder of his brother – as well as the unjust execution of the girl blamed – the scientist climbs to the Mer de Glace in the hope that "the awful and majestic in nature" might salve his woes. Hiking across it, he describes the glacier as "rising like the waves of a troubled sea, descending low, and interspersed by rifts that sink deep". However, a moment later, his solace is punctured when he sees the creature bounding towards him across the ice for a confrontation.
