FRANKENSTEIN:
AST English 10 – Mr. Allen
Tuesday 11 October 2011
Penetrating the Secrets of Nature
In 1816, an Englishwoman still in her teens,
Mary Shelley, conceived the story of a
scientist obsessed with creating life. Shelley's
scientist, Victor Frankenstein, succeeds. But
while Frankenstein's creature can think and
feel, he is monstrous to the eye. Spurned by
all, including Victor Frankenstein himself, the
embittered creature turns into a savage killer.
In 1818, Shelley's story was published as Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus. This story — both in the original novel and shaped into new forms,
such as plays, films, and comics — has captivated people ever since, exposing
hidden, sometimes barely conscious fears of science and technology. As scientists
have gained new powers, the Frankenstein story remains, like a warning beacon,
throwing its harsh, unsettling beam upon human efforts to penetrate the secrets of
nature.
This presentation looks at the world from which Mary Shelley came, at how popular
culture has embraced the Frankenstein story, and at how Shelley's creation
continues to illuminate the blurred, uncertain boundaries of what we consider
"acceptable" science.
The Birth of Frankenstein
Hollywood did not give birth to Frankenstein;
Mary Shelley did. More than a century before
actor Boris Karloff, helped by make-up artists,
made the monster in his image, came Shelley
and her creation.
The mother of Frankenstein came from the
rarefied reaches of the British artistic and
intellectual elite. While Mary Shelley drew her
inspiration from a dream, she drew her story's
premises about the nature of life from the work
of some of Europe's premier scientists and
thinkers. The sophisticated creature that
billowed up from her imagination read Plutarch
and Goethe, spoke eloquently, and suffered
much.
Mary Shelley
A Dark and Stormy Night
In the summer of 1816, nineteen-yearold Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her
lover, the poet Percy Shelley (whom she
married later that year), visited the poet
Lord Byron at his villa beside Lake
Geneva in Switzerland. Stormy weather
frequently forced them indoors, where
they and Byron's other guests
sometimes read from a volume of ghost
stories. One evening, Byron challenged
his guests to each write one themselves.
Mary's story, inspired by a dream,
became Frankenstein.
When I placed my head upon my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. .
. . I saw — with shut eyes, but acute mental vision — I saw the pale student of
unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous
phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful
engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it
be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the
stupendous Creator of the world.
— Mary Shelley, from her introduction to the third edition of Frankenstein.
A Writer's Life
Mary Shelley came from a rich
literary heritage. She was the
daughter of William Godwin, a
political theorist, novelist, and
publisher who introduced her to
eminent intellectuals and
encouraged her youthful efforts as
a writer; and of Mary
Wollstonecraft, a writer and early
feminist thinker, who died shortly
after her daughter's birth.
At fifteen, Mary met the poet Percy Shelley, who
was married at the time. Two years later, she
ran off with him to France. They were married in
December 1816, two weeks after Percy
Shelley's first wife drowned. By then Mary had
already borne him two children.
Boundary Crossings in 1818
In her novel, Mary Shelley is silent on just how Victor Frankenstein breathes life into
his creation, saying only that success crowned "days and nights of incredible labor
and fatigue;" Frankenstein offers no monster-making recipes.
But Shelley's story did not arise from the void. Scientists and physicians of her time,
tantalized by the elusive boundary between life and death, probed it through
experiments with lower organisms, human anatomical studies, attempts to
resuscitate drowning victims, and experiments using electricity to restore life to the
recently dead.
When Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet,
drowned in London in 1816, rescuers
took her lifeless body to a receiving
station of the London Society. There,
smelling salts, vigorous shaking,
electricity, and artificial respiration — as
with the resuscitation bellows shown
here — had been used since the 1760s
to restore drowning victims to life.
Harriet, however, did not survive.
Restored to Life?
In March 1815, Mary
Shelley dreamed of her
dead infant daughter held
before a fire, rubbed
vigorously, and restored to
life. At the time, scientists
would not have wholly
dismissed such a
possibility. Could the dead
be brought back to life?
Could life arise
spontaneously from
inorganic matter?
Physicians of the day
treated such questions
seriously — as the
treatises they wrote, the
methods they employed,
and the contrivances they
built all testify.
James Blundell, a London physician troubled by the
many women who died after childbirth from massive
bleeding, introduced blood transfusion between
humans, using the simple apparatus shown here.
Reproduction of an illustration from The Lancet, 1828.
Galvanism
During the 1790s, Italian physician Luigi Galvani demonstrated what we now
understand to be the electrical basis of nerve impulses when he made frog muscles
twitch by jolting them with a spark from an electrostatic machine. When
Frankenstein was published, however, the word galvanism implied the release,
through electricity, of mysterious life forces. "Perhaps," Mary Shelley recalled of her
talks with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, "a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism
had given token of such things."
Illustration of Italian
physician Luigi Galvani's
experiments, in which he
applied electricity to frogs
legs; from his book De
Viribus Electricitatis in Motu
Musculari (1792).
Electricity's seeming ability to stir the dead to life gave the word
galvanize its own special flavoring, as this 1836 political cartoon
of a "galvanized" corpse suggests.
Body Parts
To make his creature, Victor
Frankenstein "dabbled among the
unhallowed damps of the grave" and
frequented dissecting rooms and
slaughterhouses. In Mary Shelley's
day, as in our own, the healthy
human form delighted and intrigued
artists, physicians, and anatomists.
But corpses, decaying tissue, and
body parts stirred almost universal
disgust. Alive or dead, whole or in
pieces, human bodies arouse strong
emotion — and account for part of
Frankenstein's enduring hold on us.
As this early book illustration
suggests, nature's own "monsters"
— sharp deviations from normal
human development — fascinated
anatomists of Mary Shelley's day
and before.
Preface
Mary Shelley subtitled her novel "The Modern Prometheus." According to the
Greeks, Prometheus stole fire from the gods. As punishment, he was chained to a
rock, where an eagle each day plucked at his liver. Haughty Prometheus sought fire
for human betterment — to make tools and warm hearts. Similarly, Mary Shelley's
arrogant scientist, Victor Frankenstein, claimed "benevolent intentions, and thirsted
for the moment when I should put them in practice."
Frankenstein endures not only
because of its infamous horrors
but for the richness of the ideas
it asks us to confront — human
accountability, social alienation,
and the nature of life itself.
These passages illuminate
some of them.
Prometheus Bound, 1611-1612.
Peter Paul Rubens
Paradise Lost
Did I request thee, Maker,
from my clay
To mould me man? Did I
solicit thee
From darkness to promote
me?
Lines from John Milton's
Paradise Lost
From the title page of
Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheuse, 1818
In Frankenstein, the intelligent and sensitive monster created by Victor
Frankenstein reads a copy of Milton's Paradise Lost, which profoundly stirs his
emotions. The monster compares his situation to that of Adam. Unlike the first
man who had "come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature,"
Frankenstein's creature is hideously formed. Abandoned by Victor
Frankenstein, the monster finds himself "wretched, helpless, and alone."
Surrounded by Ice
A sledge . . . had drifted towards us in the night, on a large fragment of ice. Only
one dog. remained alive; but there was a human being within it. . . . His limbs were
nearly frozen, and his body dreadfully emaciated by fatigue and suffering. I never saw
a man in so wretched a condition
- Robert Walton to his sister Mrs. Saville
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheuse, 1818
Frankenstein opens with a series
of letters written by Arctic explorer
Robert Walton, engaged in a
personal quest to expand the
boundaries of the known world. It
is Walton who first encounters
Victor Frankenstein in the Arctic
desperately searching for the
monster he has created. The
explorer becomes the only person
to hear Victor Frankenstein's
strange and tragic tale.
The Spark of Life
A wood engraving of a tree stump that was struck
by lightning. The Blasted Stump, 1984. Barry
Moser
I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and
beautiful oak . . . and so soon as the dazzling light
vanished the oak had disappeared, and nothing
remained but a blasted stump. . . . I eagerly
inquired of my father the nature and origin of
thunder and lightning. He replied, "Electricity."
Victor Frankenstein to Robert Walton
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus,
1818