|
FRANKENSTEIN |
|
Introduction There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand. (Captain Walton, in Frankenstein) As a cautionary tale warning of the dangers that can be cast into society by a presuming experimental science, Frankenstein is without equal. Mary Shelley's cleverly inspired theme of an uncontrollable creature wreaking vengeful destruction upon the heads of his monomaniacal scientific Creator and his world is sustained in a way that makes the book a powerfully unique presence in English literature. Much of the book's power came from being conceived, worked out and partially written while the author was living in the awesome surroundings of the Swiss Alps in the exhilarating and challenging company of Romantic poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Its arrival was also helped along by Mary's desire to make her mark as a writer: she succeeded, but at the cost of making her hero-villain and his unnamed Creation (the two have been mythically woven into one by the modern popular mind) more famous than herself. She set out in her story to 'speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror'. Notwithstanding her youth and inexperience, the novel that resulted, based on her dream of 'the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together' (Author's Introduction, p. 55), has become the most enduring 'ghost story' of all lime, if not (in Northrop Frye's words) 'a precursor of the existential thriller', When the book first appeared in 1818, it excited mostly hostile responses from the critics. The Quarterly Review declared that the novel 'inculcates no lesson of conduct, manners. or morality ... it fatigues the feelings without interesting the understanding: it gratuitously harasses the heart, and only adds to the store, already too great, of painful sensation ... the reader [is left] after a struggle between laughter and loathing, in doubt whether the head or the heart of the author be the most diseased'. [1] Such venomous comment came, not because the book failed to inculcate a lesson of 'conduct, manners or morality' -- its moral lesson that pride must have its fall should be obvious to the most indifferent reader - but because Frankenstein's anonymous publication was 'respectfully inscribed' to William Godwin, Mary Shelley's father and infamous philosophical radical of the anarchist Left. In fact, most reviewers assumed the work's author to be Percy Shelley, Mary's husband, since to the world he was Godwin's best-known literary disciple. But Frankenstein is far from being a straightforward celebration of 'Godwinian rational principles'. Implicit in the novel's moral, if not overtly political, message are the questions: What kinds of action can be defended as reasonable? What are we to make of the discrepancy between the 'mad' scientist's reason, and the 'Godwinian' reason exercised by his 'hideous progeny'? Such philosophical subtleties were lost on most critics, who preferred to see in Frankenstein, as Mrs. Piozzi did (understandably perhaps), nothing more than 'a wild and hideous tale'. At any rate, Frankenstein became an immediate bestseller. When the second edition appeared in 1823, the critics were quite thrown to find that the author had been a woman. Blackwood's exclaimed: 'For a man it was excellent, but for a woman it was wonderful.' [2] Even Lord Byron, not noted for his great admiration of intellect in young women (he made an exception in Mary Shelley's case), told his publisher John Murray: 'Methinks it is a wonderful work for a girl of nineteen -- not nineteen, indeed, at that time.' Mary Shelley herself in her 1831 Author's Introduction repeats the question 'so very frequently asked' before attempting to answer it: 'How I, then a young girl, came to think of and to dilate upon so very hideous an idea?' The answer she gives is more detailed and candid in its way than one probably has a right to expect from an author. Yet it still tells us little about the young Mary Shelley herself. For one critic it is the fact of her youth that supplies the clue to Frankenstein's power. Muriel Spark, in her study of the author, Child of Light (1951), says of the novel that 'perhaps the wonder of it exists, not despite Mary's youth, but because of it. Frankenstein is Mary Shelley's best novel, because at that early age she was not well acquainted with her own mind.' Because of her youth at the time of her writing Frankenstein, some 'admirers' of Mary Shelley have somehow managed to praise her work only by presenting her talent as a fortuitous refraction of the 'genius' possessed by her then virtually unknown love-partner and companion, Percy Shelley. We shall see later that in more ways than one, there is indeed much of Percy Shelley 'in' Frankenstein. The book remains, however, the product of Mary Shelley's own intuitive genius, even if biographical, literary and philosophical factors influencing her outlook were left indelibly 'fixed' in the story. It was her astonishing ability to synthesize these factors into a vital whole, without the normal novelistic burdens of self- consciousness and vain presence intruding themselves, that makes the achievement so remarkable. To one of these factors, the biographical, we now turn. Mary Shelley's life up to the writing of Frankenstein Mary Shelley was born on 30 August 1797 at 29 The Polygon, in London's Somers Town district, near what is now Euston. Both of her parents were famous radicals of the day. Mary Wollstonecraft, her mother, was a pioneer feminist writer who had made her name with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), despised by the public at large for the attention it drew to women's second-class status in society, and admired for the same reasons by the radical intelligentsia of the day. William Godwin, Mary Shelley's father, was an ex-Dissenting minister turned atheist who had leapt from obscurity to fame with his celebrated attack on 'positive institution', Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). So influential were Godwin's political and moral Ideas for a period that the essayist William Hazlitt was to comment later that 'he blazed as a sun in the firmament of reputation; no one was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after, and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off'. [3] Both Godwin and Wollstonecraft had been heavily influenced by the ideals of the French Revolution and were part of that small radical group centred on Joseph Johnson's publishing house (it included such people as Blake and Thomas Paine) known as the 'English Jacobins'. Mary Shelley, the offspring of a famous (some thought infamous) union, would later remark: 'It is not singular that, as the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, I should very early in life have thought of writing.' After seeming to fly in the face of their own views on marriage as 'a system of fraud' sustaining 'the most odious selfishness' (Godwin), Mary Shelley's parents married. Mary Wollstonecraft was pregnant and Godwin wished to protect her happiness, 'which I have no right to injure' since otherwise nothing 'could have induced me to submit to an institution which I wish to see abolished'. [4] But the partnership in which both fiercely individualistic members seemed to have found an unexpected happiness was short-lived, for, a little over five months after they married, Mary Wollstonecraft died of puerperal poisoning contracted following the birth of their daughter, Mary. Godwin, at the height of his powers, reputation and happiness, was utterly bereft. The trials of birth and death so central to Frankenstein were to become living torments for nearly half of Mary Shelley's life too, with the early deaths of three of her children and the losses of Percy Shelley and Byron compounding successive agonies into a feeling of unendurable isolation that only the nurture and thought of her one surviving son, Percy Florence, would relieve. Though Godwin was never to recover the zest for life he had found in the company of Mary Wollstonecraft, he nevertheless felt that a substitute mother should be found for 'the poor children', since he himself was 'totally unfitted to educate them'. He was openly frank (or was it a veiled defence of patriarchal motives?) about the 'scepticism which perhaps sometimes leads me right in matters of speculation [but] is torment to me when I would attempt to direct the infant mind. I am the most unfit person for this office; she was the best qualified in the world.' In other words, as with most men who claim 'unfitness to direct the infant mind', he felt an urgent concern about providing life proposals and solutions in the abstract, but shrank from getting too involved in the tiring and emotionally challenging (as well as hazardous) occupations of child rearing at close quarters. Two years later, at the age of forty-five, the philosopher and novelist decided to marry his next door neighbour, Mrs. Mary Jane Clairmont, who, we are told, boldly wooed the famous man with the words, 'Is It possible that I behold the Immortal Godwin?', irresistible to a man with flagging self-esteem. However, she and one of her two daughters, Jane, were to be the bane of Mary Shelley's life for many years. Mary had never known a mother, and she would not find a caring or thinking one in the new Mrs. Godwin. But from the start, Mary was made aware of being the unique progeny of extraordinarily gifted and famous parents. To her father she became exceptionally attached, and this feeling remained throughout her life even though (as we shall see later) she had decidedly reserved views on revolutionary, or even 'liberal', politics. In letters to friends she talked of 'my excessive and romantic attachment to my father' and said that 'Until I met Shelley I could justly say that he [Godwin] was my God ... I remember many childish instances of the excess of attachment I bore him.' Unfortunately, as she also mentioned, her father was nearly always emotionally cool and distant with her. Even so, he had high expectations of her, as she quickly learnt: 'To be something great and good was the precept given me by my Father,' she wrote in her Journal; 'Shelley reiterated it.' If the emotional side of her rearing was neglected, intellectual stimulus for what her father considered her 'considerable talent' was not wanting. She grew up, and remained, a bookish person, believing that 'we are sent here to educate ourselves, and that self-denial, and disappointment, and self-control, are a part of our education'. It seems likely that such a 'self- controlling' outlook was to a large degree the necessary product of her father's rigorous, Methodist-influenced philosophy; that, and a life which became replete with 'disappointments' and 'self-denials'. Although declining in popularity as the new century grew less and less enamoured of Godwin's brand of rational philosophy, his house was yet visited by some of the most famous writers and artists of the day. Mary Godwin would have listened keenly to her father's conversations with such people as William Hazlitt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Humphry Davy and Charles Lamb, whose Tales from Shakespeare was published by the Godwins' small publishing house, run from their new home in Skinner Street, near Holborn. It is told that when Mary and her step-sister Jane hid behind a sofa to hear the poet Coleridge recite his Rime of the Ancient Mariner (a poem that greatly influenced Mary's Frankenstein story), and Mrs. Godwin threatened to pack them off to bed, Coleridge intervened, pleading that they be allowed to stay and listen. But though Godwin practised to the best of his ability his famous 'benevolence' with Mary, her upbringing, though successful in terms of intellectual growth, was for the most part a peculiarly detached affair. Mrs. Godwin seems to have added her own brand of distant caring, for Mary wrote at the age of seventeen: 'I detest Mrs. G. She plagues my father out of his life.' It must have been with great joy then that she experienced the relief of some extended periods away from Skinner Street and its pressures. The opportunity for true companionship and freedom away from her bookish existence and 'distant' family came when an admirer of Godwin's, a wealthy merchant called William Baxter, invited Mary for a long stay with his family, at their home near Dundee, in Scotland. She made her first great friend here in young Isobel Baxter and it was the place where, as she says in Frankenstein's Introduction, she discovered an 'aerie of freedom ... the pleasant region where unheeded I could commune with the creatures of my fancy'. In a letter to Mr. Baxter, Godwin gives us a good idea of Mary's character: 'I am anxious.' he begins, 'that she should be brought up ... like a philosopher, even like a cynic. It will add greatly to the strength and worth of her character. I should also observe that she has no love of dissipation, and will be perfectly satisfied with your woods and your mountains.' But Mrs. Baxter should be warned of her tendency to 'formation of castles in the air: I wish, too, that she should be excited to industry. She has occasionally greater perseverance, but occasionally, too, she shows a great need to be aroused ...' [5] In another letter, Godwin contrasted Mary with her 'indolent' step-sister, Fanny Imlay (the off- spring of a liaison Mary Wollstonecraft had had before meeting Godwin), by describing the former as 'singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible. My own daughter is, I believe, very pretty ...' When Mary returned to the Godwin household in 1814, she came face to face with the man who, after her father, was to exercise the greatest influence over the rest of her life -- Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley, a hot-headed but eloquent Romantic of nineteen, had attached himself to Godwin as a disciple, often visiting Skinner Street with his young wife Harriet. His ardent hatred of tyranny and idealistic political notions had caused him to be drawn as though by a magnet towards Godwin's Political Justice, and thence to the ageing philosopher's own house. The half-forgotten philosophical radical turned children's story writer must have more than welcomed the attentions of a young atheist who considered him 'a luminary too dazzling for the darkness which surrounds him'', [6] for, as well as helping to reactivate the philosopher's flagging ego with his 'reverence and admiration', this well-born young man's sincere wish to follow Godwinian principles of property-sharing meant that he would be more than ready to donate much of his forthcoming baronet's fortune to the ever-needy Godwin. The boundless generosity of 'the heir by entail to an estate of £6,000 per an' (as he announced himself in his initial letter to Godwin) was to be tried severely in future years, for though Godwin demanded and accepted much money from Shelley, he could never accept the fact of his daughter's elopement with a married man and their life as 'vagabond' exiles on the Continent. But that is what happened. In May 1814 Percy dined at Skinner Street to discuss money matters with Godwin. The blooming but poised intellectual young woman of sixteen that Mary Godwin had become attracted him from the first. By the end of June, Percy was a daily visitor to the Godwin house, with Harriet his wife virtually abandoned (she later committed suicide). On their frequent walks to Mary Wollstonecraft's graveside at St Pancras Churchyard, Mary and Percy, sometimes accompanied at a distance by Jane Clairmont, began to declare their love for each other. Shelley's 'child of love and light' was to have a profoundly tranquillizing and settling influence on his turbulent and volatile existence. There is no doubt that he was awed by her unusual combination of qualities -- sharp intellect, intuition, generosity, strength of determination -- awe that developed into an abiding love, as the following extract from the lines dedicating his poem The Revolt of Islam 'To Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley' (they married in December 1816) shows:
On 28 July 1814 Mary and Percy eloped to the Continent. With them went Jane, now styling herself 'Claire' Clairmont. Though Claire only came along for the adventure, Mary and Percy had been forced to escape from a Godwin outraged by his daughter's amorous entanglement. The following year was later to be described by Mary as 'acting a novel, being an incarnate romance'. But the 'adventure' was a miserable affair. Though Mary turned this Continental exploration to useful literary account in her History of a Six Weeks' Tour Through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland (1817), the threesome found little enjoyment as they wandered from European town to town, friendless and with little money. Moreover, Mary found the presence of Claire virtually intolerable. Towards her middle age she wrote: 'Now, I would not go to Paradise with her for a companion -- she poisoned my life when young ... she has still the faculty of making me more uncomfortable than any human being.' At the end of the summer they returned to England, Mary and Percy taking up lodgings which Shelley hardly lived in, pursued as he was by creditors (his father having withheld his allowance), and Mary estranged from her own family. In February 1815 Mary's first child was born prematurely, dying a few days later, unnamed. It was the first of many deaths that were to cast a dark shadow over her existence. Some days after the baby died, Mary wrote in her Journal: 'Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived.' There are uncanny echoes of resemblance here to the dream-inspired Frankenstein Creature, who also 'came to life' from the dead. In August Mary and Percy moved to Bishops Gate, Windsor, where in January 1816 their son William was born. He was only to survive for a further three and a half years. Just under a year later, Mary, Percy and Claire set out on their second Continental trip, this time with William. They headed for Geneva, settling there at Campagne Chapuis, a cottage on the shores of Lac Leman and adjacent to the rather grander Villa Diodati, where Lord Byron, having quitted England for good, had also decided to set up house. We get a good indication of Mary's state of mind at this period from a letter she wrote early in her Alpine sojourn: 'You know that we have just escaped from the gloom of Winter and London; and coming to this delightful spot during this divine weather, I feel as happy as a new-fledged bird, and hardly care what twig I fly to, so that I may try out my newfound wings.' During the fine days of early June, the Diodati and Chapuis house-parties spent much time together, in the evenings sailing on the lake, 'which is delightful', Mary reported, 'whether we glide over a glassy surface or are speeded along by a stormy wind'. But the fine weather did not hold. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Introduction tells us that it eventually 'proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house'. It was during one of these 'confinements' spent, as had become customary, talking late into the night at Byron's villa, that all the elements came together in the mind that was to produce Frankenstein. The group, consisting of Mary, Percy, Byron, Claire and Polidori (Byron's personal physician), had been reading German ghost stories in French translation when Byron suddenly announced: 'We will each write a ghost story.' All agreed. Percy started a tale about his early life, which apparently soon fizzled out. Byron began a story about a vampire, which Polidori later finished, publishing it in the poet's name without telling him. Polidori's own story concerned a skull-headed lady looking through keyholes, which the rest of the group rather scorned. Only Mary and Claire could not think of anything. Inspiration did not come easily to Mary: 'I thought and pondered -- vainly. I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations. "Have you thought of a story?" I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.' But revelation was at hand. Among the topics of conversation during those nights following Byron's proposal, one in particular seems to have caught her imagination. The ever-reticent Mary recalls that one or the 'many and long conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener', turned upon the 'nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated'. Polidori's diary entry for 15 June -- 'Shelley and 1 had a conversation about principles -- whether man was to be thought merely an instrument' -- is further evidence that thoughts concerning the mysterious powers animating life were prominent in the minds of the Diodati and Chapuis residents that summer. In her Author's Introduction Mary Shelley says that talk of Dr. Erasmus Darwin's experiments and 'galvanism' led to speculations that 'the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together and endowed with vital warmth'. With such thoughts in her mind Mary went to bed, but 'When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie.' That summer's intense intellectual excitements now arrived at a historic climax as young Mary Godwin witnessed the fruition of her own mental labours in a scene that showed a gruesome congruity with her efforts:
She then goes on to utter words (cast, be it noted, in a religious vein, contra Shelley and Godwin) to the effect that we, teetering on the verge of a thermo-nuclear Third World War, cannot help but see as shockingly prophetic, if not prescient: 'Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would he the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.' Towards the end of this essay I shall comment further upon the 'presumptions' of science and its dominantly masculinist promoters, but for now it should merely be noted that in Mary Shelley's vision she proposed that the success of her scientist-hero in animating a corpse
'With speculative eyes': the Creature wants to know, just as we want to know, where he has come from and why he is here. Mary did not know, but was so terrified that she 'wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around'. This she did and opened her eyes, but 'I could not so easily get rid of my phantom'. According to her description in the Author's Introduction, she did not immediately connect the horrific 'waking dream' with her need to invent a ghost story -- evidence, if any were needed, that this subject-matter was entirely new, different from the outworn stock-in-trade themes and imagery in 'Gothic' novels of the time. But suddenly, 'Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. "I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow." On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story. I began that day with the words, "It was on a dreary night of November," making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream.' The full text of this first sentence of the original story starts Chapter 5 of the edition printed here: 'It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.' Percy Shelley was delighted that his Mary had started to put together a story of promise and, as she wrote on, encouraged her to develop it to novel-length. This she did, and except for the Preface, and the few additions and stylistic modifications to the text made by Percy, the book that was finished in May 1817 after they had returned to England and finally published nearly a year later in March 1818, was all of her own making. Indeed, in an 1817 pre-publication review of Frankenstein (which actually appeared only posthumously in 1832) Percy Shelley himself expressed wonder and bafflement concerning the book's conception, feelings which there is no reason to suppose were anything other than genuine and candid;
Themes, sources and influences in Frankenstein A reliable measure of the general mood from which Frankenstein emerged in that 'ungenial' Swiss summer of 1816 is provided, not by Mary Shelley, but by Lord Byron. In a letter he wrote to a friend six months later: 'I was half mad ... between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, love unextinguishable, thoughts unalterable and the nightmare of my own delinquencies.' Polidori, another witness to this heightened mood, confided to his diary in the midst of it that the whole company 'talked, till the ladies' brains whizzed with giddiness, about idealism'. There seems little doubt that, as P. D. Fleck has asserted, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein expresses 'her view of the idealism that whizzed giddily about her head' that summer and that it is a novel which 'contains in an imaginative form her criticism of [Percy] Shelley'. [8] The Romantic idealism of Shelley and his 'overreaching' heroes was, like all idealisms, based on a faith in man's, or more correctly, men's 'divine' or creative powers. It is Mary Shelley's critique of where such highly abstracted creative powers can lead when put in a 'realizing' scientific context and then driven along by 'lofty ambition' and 'high destiny' (p. 250) that we see in the pages of Frankenstein. A number of passages in the book seem to reveal Percy Shelley as the initial model for its ultra-ambitious hero, quite apart from the fact that Victor, Frankenstein's first name, was the name Shelley took for himself a number of times in boyhood and later. Captain Walton, the novel's narrator and himself cast as an overreacher voyaging out for the glory of discovering 'the wondrous power which attracts the needle' and the 'undiscovered solitudes of new countries', finds Frankenstein to be a 'divine wanderer' whose 'eyes have generally an expression of wildness, and even madness' (p. 71). But as with Shelley's other, more sublime, side, 'no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions, seems ... to have the power of elevating his soul from earth' (p. 74). We know well from Mary's (and others') descriptions of her life with Percy that 'Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery and be overwhelmed by disappointments, yet when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit that has a halo around him, within whose circle no grief or folly ventures' (p. 74), A technique habitually employed by Percy for creating this halo was one shared by Frankenstein: 'I lay at the bottom of the boat, and as I gazed on the cloudless blue sky, I seemed to drink in a tranquillity to which I had long been a stranger' (p. 196). It is curious that in, a letter Percy wrote to Mary Shelley during their time in Italy (he was often 'away from home' during their eight years' partnership) he referred to Frankenstein as 'fruits of my absence', for, as Christopher Small has pointed out, he did more than urge Mary on in her writing of the book (answering that 'need to be aroused' claimed for her by Godwin). 'He provided the subject.' [9] Yes; the 'subject' in terms of Percy Shelley's characteristic 'passion for reforming the world', and the 'subject' of his 'mad' enthusiasm', science (in particular, chemistry) -- both are brought together in the person of Frankenstein, or the 'Shelleyan Idea', as Christopher Small puts it. If we are never given a physical description of Frankenstein (apart from his 'wild eyes'), his whole presentation as Shelleyan Idea clearly comes through, if not through the pen of Mary Shelley herself, then more directly by the insertions and changes made by Shelley and adopted by the author. (Some of these, the longest dealing with 'scientific' and 'political' sequences, appear in the Notes to this edition.) It is the forcefulness of this Shelleyan Idea in Frankenstein that probably led to Shelley's disclaimer on Mary's behalf in the Preface: 'The opinions which naturally spring from the character and situation of the hero are by no means to be conceived as existing always in my own conviction ...' Shelley's friend Hogg says that in his youth Percy bought and experimented with Chemical apparatus and materials and read 'treatises on magic and witchcraft as well as those more modern ones detailing the miracles of electricity and galvanism'. [10] He further recalls that at Oxford, Shelley
It is almost as if Shelley were providing film-makers of the future with that 'thunder and sparks' image of electrical reanimation of the creature which has become so standard a feature of Frankenstein films. His interest in such things never waned, science in particular attracting what we might call his 'alchemical spirit'. In his visionary Queen Mab we are told that 'Happiness / And Science dawn, though late, upon the earth ...' [12] But the same poem reveals another interest which will tend to become a dark obsession, one that Mary is well aware of. 'How wonderful is Death ... the gloomy Power / Whose reign is in the tainted Sepulchres ...' [13] For Mary, this atmosphere of gloomy fascination was reinforced as she transcribed the third Canto of Byron's Childe Harold for him in July 1816. But if Byron's production had this effect, Shelley's Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude presents us with a theme remarkably similar to that of Frankenstein, and we can be sure that the latter's composition was influenced by it. The heroes of Shelley's poems (as with Lord Byron's) are often hardly distinguishable from their creator, so that in Alastor we meet a youthful poet who 'drinks deep of the fountains of knowledge, and is still insatiate'. He is gripped, as was Shelley, by the idea that the 'principle of life' is somehow to be found by probing into what he considers the chief 'mystery of nature' -- death and decay. He addresses his beloved Mother Nature, saying:
When we go on to read: 'In lone and silent hours, / When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness, / Like an inspired and desperate alchymist / Staking his very life on some dark hope, / Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks / With my most innocent love ...' [14] we can be sure that a good part of Frankenstein's ambitious persona has its origin here. Mary Shelley has Frankenstein say, in his more 'scientific' vein, that 'To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death' (p. 95). He thus determines to 'observe the natural decay and corruption of the human body'; but 'to examine the cause and progress of this decay' he is 'forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses' (p. 95). Of course, the 'lone ghost' produced by Frankenstein's meddlesome researches and experiments turns out in the end to be a rather unwelcome 'messenger', a visible reminder of his own 'enthusiastic madness'. Mary Shelley was not alone in having doubts about what she called Percy's 'abstract imagination', for the writer Hazlitt thought of his poetry as 'a record of fond conjectures, a confused embodying of vague abstractions -- a fever of the soul, thirsting and craving after what it cannot have, indulging its love of power and novelty ... [15] It seems highly likely that the epistolary form of Frankenstein, which adds so much to its stark drama, was adopted by Mary Shelley through her reading of the originator of that novelistic form, Samuel Richardson. In 1815 she had read his seven-volume Clarissa Harlow (1748) and in 1816 she read the 'latter part' of it again, as wall as two other novels, Pamela (1741) and Sir Charles Grandison (1754). Another favourite writer of Mary's was Madame de Genlis, whose Nouveaux Contes moraux et nouvelles historiques (1802) she was reading on the evening following her momentous visit with Percy Shelley to the Mer de Glace in Chamonix Valley, in July 1816. One of the dramatic sketches in the book is 'Pygmalion et Galatee, ou La Statue animee depuis vingt-quatre heures', which Burton Pollin assumes to have stimulated Mary Shelley's 'inspirational nightmare'. [16] As well as being a story in which the figure that Pygmalion has sculpted is animated into life, the pure and ingenuous Galatea learns (as Frankenstein's Creature is later to learn), about the shocking realities of slavery, tyranny, extremes of poverty and wealth, and deception. [17] It follows, from Mary's having read 'La Statue animee', that we need look no further than the novel's sub-title -- The Modern Prometheus -- to discover Frankenstein's main theme: the aspiration of modern masculinist scientists to be technically creative divinities. Who was Prometheus? There are two versions of the Prometheus story, which Mary Shelley manages to combine into one. The first and most famous is that in which the Prometheus of Greek mythology, a rebellious Titan, steals fire from Olympus with which to succour and save humankind. It was these two aspects of the story -- his revolt against the gods, against 'destiny', and his desire to be the benefactor and saviour of humanity -- that drew both Byron and Percy Shelley, but especially the latter, to the Promethean legend. Mary, Percy and Byron had all read Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, and in 1816 Byron wrote his own Prometheus. But Shelley took the story to heart in a monumental way, developing to a fine pitch the Romantic notion of himself and his heroes as suffering champions of humanity. In Prometheus Unbound and other poems he was to elaborate this essentially religious feeling of election to saviourhood into his own version of socialist aspiration. Mary Shelley had no great love for radical political views, but it was not this element in her husband's Weltanschauung that called forth the novelistic response of Frankenstein. The later, Roman, elaboration of the Promethean legend rendered by Ovid (whose Metamorphoses she had been reading in 1815), has Prometheus as plasticator, a figure who creates and manipulates men into life, rather than 'saves' them:
Rather than take up Ovid's 'ethereal energy' speculation, Mary Shelley chose to focus on the 'particles of heavenly fire' aspect, the means whereby Prometheus quickened his clay images into life. As we know, the 'real' means by which she imagined life could be bestowed on an assembled corpse in her book was through the 'galvanizing' use of electricity. Humphry Davy, an early scientist and radical, was a famous chemist whom Percy Shelley revered, as he did the poet-botanist Erasmus Darwin, and who had been a visitor to the Godwin household in Mary's childhood. It was a book by Davy, either the Introduction to his Chemical Philosophy (1812) or an earlier publication, A Discourse, Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry (1802), that Mary was reading in October and November of 1816. The tone and content of some of Davy's views will repay attention, as they embody much the same message that Frankenstein was so entranced by in the momentous 'panegyric on chemistry' delivered by Professor Waldman at Ingolstadt University. Davy claims that 'science has done much for man, but it is capable of doing still more'. [19] More specifically, Waldman feels that 'chemistry is that branch of natural philosophy in which the greatest improvements have been and may be made' (p. 93). When he claims that the modern masters of science have acquired 'unlimited powers', Frankenstein's whole being is numbed, as if by sudden religions conversion:
Familiar rhetoric to watchers of Frankenstein films today, but quite new in Mary Shelley's day. The voice of the 'real' scientist, Humphry Davy, is not far behind (or rather, in front) in its enthusiasm:
From the evidence of Frankenstein, of course, we know that Mary Shelley was not ambitious in that way, for one, and in fact sought to warn the world away from those dangers inherent in the type of attitude Davy was espousing. It was, then, the Promethean 'maker', 'artist', 'shaper' of men in a scientist-hero guise that interested Mary Shelley, and which should preoccupy us: for is it not the modern experience of feeling manipulated by forces larger than ourselves (which are nevertheless humanly managed) -- Big Science, technology, the 'machinery' of State, international business empires, the mass media, and so on -- that links the lay person's predicament with that of Frankenstein's Creature, he who has been put together from dead human parts and then infused with 'a spark of being', without having any say in the form or purpose of his own genesis? As the product (Mary Shelley was living In the 'new age' of capitalist production) of a proud Creator, the Creature is not unlike Adam in Milton's Paradise Lost, who reproaches God with his handiwork:
These lines of supplication, the epigraph to the 1818 edition of Frankenstein, are a major clue to the atmosphere of the book, just as Milton's re-working of the Biblical 'Fall' story is a felt presence and underlying reference throughout it. Mary Shelley had grown up in a house where Milton was required and revered reading, had read Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained twice during 1815 and 1816, and Byron's Villa Diodati, where the 'half mad' talk of the Geneva Summer sowed the seed, of her story, was a house where she knew Milton had actually once stayed. It is perhaps not surprising that a woman of Mary Shelley's intuitive capacities, living in a rapidly changing society, should call on Milton for guidance and inspiration, for he was a man who had himself lived through a historical period of enormous religious, political and existential turbulence, and written an epic poem in response to it. In using the Promethean motif for her novel, she had virtually declared herself to be dealing with a problem that had an enormously long and deep provenance in the West, stretching back to fifth-century-BC Greece. But the Miltonian scheme of God-man estrangement reaches back nearly as far, to the beginnings of Christianity. As long ago as the third century, the Manichaean Adam, like those of Milton and Mary Shelley, had uttered a wail of recrimination at discovering his own 'creatural' mortality:
When Frankenstein's Creature, baffled by his own existence, asks: 'My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?' (p. 170) he is unable to find an answer. Not only this, but even the plight of Milton's Satan seems mild compared to his, for 'Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage him, but I am solitary and abhorred' (p. 172). For the second-century Valentinian gnostic, a psycho-spiritual 'escape route' was available: 'What liberates is the knowledge of who we were, what we became; where we were, whereinto we have been thrown; whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what birth is, and what rebirth.' [23] 'He who possesses the Gnosis, knows whence he is come and where he is going.' [24] This route, to the Unknown Father of Light is not there for the utterly rejected and unnamed Creature of Frankenstein: in fact, through reading Frankenstein's Journal, which he has pocketed after quitting his Creator's house, he discovers that the 'disgusting circumstances' of his 'accursed origin' (p. 171) reveal more of a Father of Darkness at work. All he really knows of any consequence to his future is that 'I am malicious because I am miserable' (p. 186). The formulation Mary Shelley has given the Creature to utter is not gratuitous, however, but derives from two other sources -- Rousseau and, in particular, Godwin, to whom Frankenstein was dedicated. Mary Shelley had read Rousseau's Confessions (1782), but went through Emile (1762) and the Nouvelle Heloise (1761) several times between 1815 and 1817. It was Rousseau who had secularized the idea of an unfallen state of innocence, that which Frankenstein's Creature supposedly enjoys before becoming corrupted by the evil ways of society and its people. The idea was then taken up in England in a slightly different form by William Godwin in his Political Justice. He believed that 'positive institutions' like government, the law and marriage tended to insinuate despotic practices into people's lives, but that a new system, based on 'universal benevolence', could create a just and virtuous society. But where would this 'virtue' come from? He insisted it would naturally emerge from the exercise of reason and free will, as developed in an 'enlightened' society. Such an enlightened society would have shed the superstitions of religion, the despotisms of government and the property fetishes attached to marriage and inheritance, for all these tended towards the establishment of selfishness, division and malevolence. Godwin, contradicting the seventeenth-century Hobbesian view of human nature as fundamentally 'self-interested', held that virtue and happiness could only spring from socially considered and constituted aims: 'the true solitaire cannot be considered as a moral being ... His conduct is vicious, because it has a tendency to render him miserable.' If this is true, then it is no wonder that the most solitary of 'solitaires', Frankenstein's Creature, abandoned by his Creator and rejected by the society around him, considers himself (echoing the Satan of Paradise Lost) 'the fallen angel' become 'a malignant devil ... I am alone' (p. 259). Like 'son', like 'father': It has been Frankenstein's gross error to decide with idealistic pride that he alone can put the world to rights through scientific experiment and the pursuit of knowledge: by 'building in' this disenfranchisement of the 'others' and the contributions and needs they bring to living reality, the Creature's subsequent isolation becomes a foregone conclusion, for, as the Creature tells Frankenstein, 'you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us' (p. 141). In a passage which reveals Godwin's own insight into the dangers of putting the pursuit of knowledge before collective responsibility and happiness, he makes his own prophetic contribution to a matter that is more urgent today than ever before: 'knowledge, and the enlargement of intellect, are poor, when unmixed with sentiments of benevolence and sympathy ... and science and abstraction will soon become cold, unless they derive new attractions from ideas of society.' [25] Six central chapters of Frankenstein are given over to the plight of Frankenstein's Creature. He tells the story of his outcast existence to his Creator following their encounter on the Mer de Glace. It is ironic that the Creature's narrative, so vital to the moral underpinning of the whole work, has been ignored in the numerous theatrical and filmic re-workings of the story. Like the Godwinian philosophy which fell from favour so quickly after receiving feverish applause from the radical community, the moral-political argument of Mary's story has simply been left out, unwanted by an audience which prefers the more frightening (and 'simpler') grunts of a threatening monster. But the Creature's explanation of himself and his doings is a key demonstration of Godwinian social-psychological theory, and in turn derives from the influential philosopher John Locke, another Frankenstein source to whom I shall refer more fully below. At the end of his tale, the Creature tells the person he considers his 'natural lord and king' (p. 141) that 'My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor, and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal' (p. 188). He repeatedly asks for 'justice' in this Godwinian sense: 'Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind' (p. 141). In a fit of compassion, Frankenstein promises to make the Creature a female companion, but then destroys this new creation, convinced that 'a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth' (p. 206). The Creature avenges this betrayal, murdering both Frankenstein's best friend Clerval and his new wife, Elizabeth; the rest involves Frankenstein's mad pursuit of the Creature across icy wastes, where they both eventually meet their deaths. Besides using Godwinian ideas in her story, Mary Shelley very carefully applied the psychological sensationalist notions developed by John Locke which had been taken up with such zeal by French philosophes of the eighteenth century like Diderot and Condillac. Condillac was the most extreme exponent of sensationalism, while another materialist philosophe, La Mettrie, proposed in L'Homme machine (1748) 'a machine which can no longer be regarded as impossible, especially in the hands of a new Prometheus'. [26] During the year she was working on Frankenstein, Mary Shelley devoted much of her reading time to Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). From November 1816 to January 1817 she imbibed Locke's tabula rasa theory of knowledge and applied it to the way the Creature attained to a 'knowing' personhood. The Creature plays out the Lockean theory to perfection by gaining all his ideas from sensation or reflection, seeking or avoiding the causes of sensation according to whether they produce pleasure or pain. In telling his story to Frankenstein, he explains:
But when he gets used to light (a 'sensation' we shall have more to say about shortly) he finds he can 'perceive objects in their right forms' (p. 145). In the last words of the Creature, spoken to Captain Walton at the end of the book, we find ample evidence of the author's use of sensationalism: 'I shall no longer see the sun or stars or feel the winds play on my cheeks. Light, feeling, and sense will pass away' (p. 260). Cleverly (some might think not so cleverly), Mary Shelley manipulates the plot to her Lockean view by having the Creature learn the language, history, ideas and morals of the world by eavesdropplug upon the fortuitously placed De Lacey household and reading Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives and the Sorrows of Werter, other fortuitous finds. He learns, along with the Arab girl Safie (quite probably named after the Sophie of Rousseau's Emile), of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty; of rank, descent, and noble blood' (p. 161). Such learning makes him reflect on his own position in, or rather outside, society. When he puts his new 'class consciousness' to the test by declaring himself to the blind De Lacey, one's hope for the Creature are raised, only to be interrupted and then dashed as the horrified eyes of Felix, Safie and Agathe (recalling the Agatha of Lewis's The Monk?) 'light' upon him. Ironically, it is the sensation of light and sight which at first so delights the Creature that now turns him into a vengeful murderer, for 'from that moment I declared ever-lasting war against the species, and more than all, against him who had formed me and sent me forth to this insupportable misery' (p. 177). Had Felix and his friends been able simply to listen to the Creature with understanding, without being overcome by his appearance, then we would not have had the Frankenstein Mary Shelley actually wrote. Is Mary Shelley then asking us to think more carefully about a society which values appearance above a 'seeing' that should take into account the Other's feelings and needs? At any rate, if 'appearance' was to become a complex moral problem to negotiate in a society habitually unconcerned with 'seeing' the wants, needs and aspirations of other people, it, and especially the medium by which it reaches us, light, was nevertheless all-important to the Romantics of Mary Shelley's time, including herself. It is reputed that, on his death-bed, the English land- and seascape painter J. M. W. Turner declared: 'The sun is god.' The preoccupation with light did not end with Romantic painters and poets either, for Humphry Davy's approach to chemistry and life was based upon beliefs concerned with light and heat, as his famous paper 'An Essay on Heat, Light, and the Combination of Light' makes clear. According to David Knight in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Davy believed that 'light within and without us is the source of perception, thought and happiness'. He also suggested that 'electricity might be condensed light, given off at the poles as auroras' (my italics), which not only explains why, at the beginning of Frankenstein, Captain Walton aspires to visit the North Pole where he believes 'the sun is forever visible' (p. 59), but once again provokes the thought that perhaps some yearning kinship exists between the gnostic poet-mythologists of antiquity and those of Mary Shelley's epoch. [27] In both periods, light was an exalted term denoting Divinity, for the gnostics an 'Unknown God', for the Romantics a presence 'known' through Nature: with the 'divine spark' of gnosis being the spiritual equivalent to the 'animating principle' which gave Frankenstein's Creature his 'light of being' via galvanic electricity. In a Journal entry made in February 1822, five months before her beloved Percy drowned at sea, Mary Shelley vowed that she would 'fearlessly descend into the remotest caverns of my own mind, carry the torch of self-knowledge into its dimmest recesses; but too happy if I dislodge any evil spirit or enshrine a new deity in some hitherto uninhabited nook'. *** The remaining principal literary sources for and influences on Frankenstein should be mentioned. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, to which Captain Walton attributes his 'passionate enthusiasm for ... the dangerous mysteries of ocean' (pp. 65-6), is alluded to throughout the novel. Like the Mariner, Walton sets out for 'the land of mist and snow', but assures his sister Margaret that he 'shall kill no albatross' (p. 65): this task is reserved for Frankenstein, since it is he who has the deadly weight of guilt hanging round his neck. The whole purpose of Frankenstein's narrative is of course to dissuade Walton from pursuing a 'fatal' course that will assuredly bring him his own burdensome albatross: he hopes that Walton will 'deduce an apt moral from my tale' (p. 75), and tells him, 'Learn my miseries and do not seek to increase your own' (p. 249). A stanza from Coleridge's poem, one that is said to have caused Percy Shelley to faint in terror, is quoted by Frankenstein as he wanders in a nightmarish daze following his Creature's 'birth'. He feels 'Like one, that all a lonesome road / Doth walk in fear and dread, / And having once turned round walks on, / And turns no more his head; / Because he knows, a frightful fiend / Doth close behind him tread' (p. 103). This episode establishes the grim and relentless theme of pursuit between Creator and Creature that occupies the rest of the book. It seems plain that this pursuit theme was influenced very heavily by Mary Shelley's reading (for at least the third time) in 1816 of her father's famous Caleb Williams (1794). Percy Shelley was the first to notice the influence. In his posthumous review of Frankenstein he wrote: 'The encounter and argument between Frankenstein and the Being on the sea of ice, almost approaches, in effect, to the expostulations of Caleb Williams with Falkland. It reminds us indeed, somewhat of the style and character of that admirable writer, to whom the author has dedicated his [sic] work, and whose productions he seems to have studied.' Frankenstein does indeed seem to embody the characteristics of many of Godwin's sinful heroes, Caleb Williams himself claims that 'My offense had merely been a mistaken thirst for knowledge'; while his antagonist-pursuer Falkland suffers 'an impatience of imagined dishonour', an 'eminently mischievous' fault that leads him from pure motives of love into destructive hate. Does one not detect here some very basic novelistic pattern, one that begins with another book which produced, as with Frankenstein, a mythical character -- Cervantes' Don Quixote (1604)? Both Don Quixote and Frankenstein start out with the noble intention of helping their fellow-creatures, but their aspirations are doomed by their pursuit of a 'single vision', one that takes them further and further away from satisfying the moderate needs of the community, and nearer and nearer to a personally tragic denouement. This theme of a hero lured into existential danger by the abstract torment of 'metaphysical desire' is one brilliantly formulated and treated by Rene Girard in his Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1965). It will come as no surprise to learn that Don Quixote was one of the books Mary Shelley was reading during the composition of Frankenstein. Walter Scott noticed in his review of the book that 'Frankenstein is a novel upon the same plan with St Leon', Godwin's 'alchemical' novel, whose hero, a man of Faustian ambitions, makes a pact in which he takes the curse of immortality in exchange for the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir of Life. He discovers, predictably, that he has doomed himself to a life of eternal solitude. Charles Brockden Brown was a writer much affected by William Godwin's ideas, and whose Wieland, or The Transformation (1798), read in 1815 by Mary Shelley, seems to have influenced the form of Frankenstein. In the novel, Carwin, a ventriloquist whose ambitions and 'monsterish' appearance make him a kind of composite Frankenstein-creature character, exercises his talent to such an extent that it produces frightening consequences. Wieland believes that the 'voice of God' Carwin has 'thrown' commands and authorizes him to commit murder -- which he does repeatedly, until Carwin's conscience compels him to cure Wieland hypnotically with his 'voice': 'Shake off this phrenzy, and ascend into the rational and human. Be lunatic no longer,' he commands. In Frankensteinian vein, he is led to the reflection: 'had I not rashly set in motion a machine, over whose progress I had no control and which experience has shown me was infinite in power?' Mary Shelley almost certainly used another of Brown's ideas from his Arthur Mervyn (1799) -- a virulent epidemic -- as the central idea for her futuristic and monumental novel The Last Man (1826). It would be appropriate to pause at this point, in what can easily become a 'hunt the source for Frankenstein' game, and consider (adapting an observation of Christopher Small's) that Mary Shelley never borrowed any specific elements for her story from the many authors she had read, but, rather, was ready to accept what her imagination offered her, influenced, as it must have been, by her literary experiences. Science, politics and the 'Frankenstein Idea' Frankenstein -- Gothic novel or science-fiction story? There is little doubt that Gothic tales had an important impact on Mary Shelley's sensibility, just as they did on Percy's. Quite apart from the Gothic-influenced novels of her own father and those of Brockden Brown, we know from her Journal that between 1814 and 1816 she read Mrs. Radcliffe's The Italian (1797) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), M. G. Lewis's The Monk (1796) and his Romantic Tales ('Monk' Lewis also visited the Shelley-Byron group in August 1816), two of the Rev. Charles Maturin's novels, and William Beckford's Vathek (1786), to mention only the more famous Gothic storytellers she looked at. It seems clear that one 'authority' at least, the author of Vathek, itself a Gothic 'classic', would have been reluctant to admit Frankenstein into the ranks of the genre, even though it borrowed somewhat from the theme of his own book, 'insatiable curiosity'. Beckford wrote on the fly-leaf to his copy of Mary Shelley's novel, 'This is, perhaps, the foulest toadstool that has yet sprung up, from the reeking dunghill of the present times.' This repugnance of Beckford's for Frankenstein obviously relates to Mary Shelley's unadorned style of realistic description, something that produced a new and far more loathsome horror than the type of Gothic horror effects Beckford had been used to. But his appalled reaction also lends us a clue in our search for a definition of Frankenstein's literary type: whereas Beckford's villain-hero (Vathek) has an 'insolent desire to penetrate the secrets of heaven', Shelley's protagonist possesses 'a fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature' (p, 84 - my italics). In the traditional Gothic tale, the supernatural element remains intact, and is the means by which the violator of accepted rules is punished, usually being consigned to 'eternal damnation', as in Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer. But with Frankenstein, the all-embracing 'Nature', which eighteenth-century Europe had so much revered, gets disturbed and plundered. The 'New Promethean' is no mere schemer or plotter of intrigues urged on by the promises held out by forbidden lusts and powers (as In Lewis's The Monk, for instance). It is Frankenstein's desire 'to penetrate the secrets of nature' (the sexual metaphor is no accident, as we shall see presently) through the appliance of the new masculinist-made god, Science, so that he can achieve his long-held desire to 'banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death' (p. 85), that so sets him apart from his hero- villain forebears. In Frankenstein the old God who for Newton had been the author and controller of Nature now falls silent in the overbearing presence of glory-seeking 'Victor' (so aptly, though ironically, named). He spells out in terms that have not dated since 1818 (rather the opposite) the attractions that belief in and commitment to the new deity can bring: 'None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science. In other studies you go as far as others have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know: but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder' (p. 94). But if science goes on, even after the trail-blazing efforts of Frankenstein are cut short (on his death-bed, he makes the almost unbelievable comment, 'I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed'), Victor, by the joint control of Gothic-tale convention and the hand of Mary Shelley, must owe his demise to some almighty force -- what shall it be? It is, simply, the trap of human guilt, so deeply embedded yet ever-sprung for self-punishing action in the Judaeo-Christian spirit -- but with the comfort of the Divine Protector removed. This guilt is doubly burdensome for Frankenstein, for, since renouncing his soul and the 'Father of Heaven' (after, a little like Luther and his devils, 'grappling with a palpable enemy') in the pursuit of 'one thought, one conception, one purpose', he becomes a 'father' himself; but his child becomes his 'sin', a rejected fleshly being. Thus he is physically trapped by a self-imposed patriarchy-within-a-patriarchy, he being the primary victim. If, as Mario Praz has claimed, 'an anxiety with no possibility of escape is the main theme of the Gothic tales', [28] then Frankenstein certainly qualifies for the genre, since both antagonists in the book are 'inescapably' doomed to pursue each other to the death: Frankenstein in order to expiate the guilt arising out of his presumptuous 'act of creation', the Creature to avenge his absolute rejection by all. In the end, of course, the fates of both Creator and Creature become more and more intertwined, their identities merging as they approach death: hence the so-called Doppelganger motif of the story. One is perhaps inclined eventually to agree with Muriel Spark that Frankenstein is the 'first of a new and hybrid fictional species ... a fusion of the ways of thought of two epochs', resulting in 'that fictional genre which was later endorsed by H. G. Wells and M. P. Shiel'. [29] That the Creature is nameless, and denied any kind of individuality or recognition because he is a product of and belongs wholly to his Creator, signifies to a recent interpreter of Frankenstein, Franco Moretti, that the story is one born of 'the fear of bourgeois civilization'. [30] Moretti's ingenious and intriguing Marxist analysis sees Frankenstein as a 'disfigured wretch', symbol of the emerging industrial proletariat of the early nineteenth century. 'Between Frankenstein and the monster,' he says. 'there is an ambivalent, dialectical relationship, the same as that which, according to Marx, connects capital with wage-labour.' Be that as it may, it was not long after Frankenstein first appeared that Mary Shelley's Creation was being appropriated ('by the appropriators', Moretti would no doubt say) by Tory radicals enthusiastically seizing upon the 'godless monster' theme as a propaganda tool against the atheistic and revolutionary tendencies of the time. Fraser's Magazine of November 1830 said: 'A State without a religion is like a human body without a soul, or rather like an unnatural body of the species of the Frankenstein monster, without a pure and vivifying principle.' The use of the 'monster' metaphor for political ends became frequent in the 1830s, when the demands for democratic reform in England intensified. But conservatives had been using 'monster' imagery to warn of the dangers of reform since the French Revolution of 1789 and its aftermath, the Terror. Edmund Burke had been one of the first to use such imagery, denouncing, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), armed insurrection as a pernicious monster set free by experimenters and reformers. [31] During their systematic efforts to understand the Revolution and its outcome in Napoleonic despotism, Mary and Percy Shelley read not only the works of radicals like Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, but also conservatives and anti-Jacobins, among them Burke and Abbe Barruel. They would have read Burke's Reflections and imbibed the melodramatic shape and tone of his narrative, extremely effective in an age of 'sensationalism'. To give an example that in its florid imagery startlingly recalls that of the semi-paranoid antique gnostics, Burke warns that military democracy is a 'species of political monster, which has always ended by devouring those who have produced it'. Burke's Gothic sense of a 'radical intrinsic' spirit of evil at work in society could well be describing the emergence of Frankenstein's Creature when he goes on to say that, during the French Revolution,
Mary Shelley's parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, were notorious targets for political attack in which monster imagery was employed. Between 1796 and 1802, when the conservative reaction against him started to wane, Godwin was depicted as an odious and terrifying devil, bent on the destruction of society by attempting to reform it using 'godless' principles. Burke described Godwin's opinions as 'pure defecated atheism ... the blood of that putrid carcase the French Revolution'. It appears entirely consistent, of course, that the Gothic-minded Burke, who saw a 'monster' behind every threat to the status quo, also wrote in his Philosophical Enquiry (1757): 'Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible ... is a source of the sublime.' Horace Walpole, 'originator' of the Gothic-novel format (The Castle of Otranto, 1764), must then have found something 'sublime' in Godwin's work, for he considered him to be 'one of the greatest monsters exhibited by history', while the leader in anti-Godwin/Wollstonecraft loathing, the Anti-Jacobin Review, execrated their disciples as 'the spawn of the monster'. Finally, Thomas de Quincey recalled in 1837 that 'most people felt of Mr. Godwin with the same alienation and horror as of a ghoul, or a bloodless vampire, or the monster created by Frankenstein'. Though the 'monster tag' began slipping away from Godwin 'as his fame receded, it did not disappear, but began to be applied to those collective forces gathering to challenge the dominance of the upper classes in Parliament -- the working class. From the time of Frankenstein's publication in 1818, when Regency England faced 'the most widespread, persistent and dangerous disturbances, short of actual revolution and civil war, England has known in modern times', [33] the 'Frankenstein Monster' image was appropriated repeatedly to signal the threat 'revolting mobs' posed to an increasingly affluent bourgeois class. The image was commonly projected during the 1830s, a period of revolutionary scares and agitation for political reform. It re-surfaced in 1848-9 when the Chartist movement was at its height, was evoked again in the late 1860s as some of the working class became enfranchised, and the 1880s saw a revived use of the monster metaphor in a political cartoon depicting 'The Irish Frankenstein', a giant ape-like figure (no accidental usage this, given the contemporary disgust with 'atheistical' evolutionary theory) threatening the Irish Nationalist leader Charles Parnell with a knife. Exploiting the master- lave reversal theme of Shelley's novel, Tenniel the cartoonist has the cringing figure of Parnell gasp out: 'The hateful and blood-stained Monster ... yet, was it not my Master to the very extent that it was my Creature? ... Had I not breathed about my own spirit?' If 'Frankenstein's Monster' was so readily pounced on and used by Manichaean-minded conservative commentators, are we to suppose that Mary Shelley was herself a 'reactionary'? Things are by no means that simple, as Frankenstein, in many ways an enigmatic book, bears witness. Part of the answer to that enigma may be contained in the following extract from her Journal:
As well as perceiving the dangers of abstract idealism, Mary Shelley had in her own life been stung by the deaths of many close to her, so it is not surprising that she saw the possession of domestic happiness and good friends as something to be cherished above all else. Her moderate and peaceful ambitions are announced in The Last Man, when the autobiographical Verney says: '''This'', I thought, "Is Power! Not to be strong of limb, hard of heart, ferocious and daring: but kind, compassionate and soft.'". In his important book Fathering the Unthinkable, ex-nuclear physicist and science historian Brian Easlea detects in Frankenstein 'Mary Shelley's indictment of masculine ambition' and an exposure of 'the compulsive character of masculine science'. [34] This would indeed seem consonant with the Mary Shelley/Verney statement about 'power' quoted above. Easlea focuses much of his attention upon the sexual and parenting metaphors used by 'probing' scientists right from the natural philosophers of the sixteenth century up to the high-energy nuclear physicists of the present. He notes that Francis Bacon, the 'Patriarck of Experimental Philosophy', called on his fellow men to inaugurate with him 'the truly masculine birth of time', so as to achieve 'the domination of man over the universe'. [35] Easlea's point that such a universe was and still is seen as a 'resisting female' who must be 'aggressively penetrated' and 'conquered' can hardly be denied. He quotes science historian Carolyn Merchant's description of how, from Bacon's time onward, 'official' attitudes towards Nature altered: ''The constraints against penetration associated with the earth-mother image were transformed into sanctions for denudation. After the Scientific Revolution Natura no longer complains that her garments of modesty are being torn by the wrongful thrusts of man.' [36] Humphry Davy, the Romantic New Scientist figure already encountered here, seemed rather excited at Chemistry's prospects, for: "The skirt only of the veil which conceals these mysterious and sublime processes has been lifted up and the grand view is as yet unknown. [37] Mary Shelley demonstrates her intuitive grasp that Frankenstein's presumptuous act of creating life marks an incestuous violation of what Easlea calls 'the mother nature his seventeenth-century predecessors declared dead and buried', in the scene where the Modern Prometheus's attempts to sleep after he has fled from the hideous Creature he has created become 'disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprized, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms ...' (p. 102). This startling image is perhaps an appropriate point at which to close, for it seems to contain the essence of a warning that we ignore today at our peril. The 'incestuous' violation of life on this planet has reached epidemic proportions, and much of the blame for this state of affairs must be laid at the feet of those who find an endless thrill of excitement in scientifically 'penetrating' the 'secrets of nature', taking little or no responsible account of the damaging implications 'theory' might have for 'practice'. Too often it seems the lure of power, profit and a so-called 'security' of nations obscures any elements of 'real disinterestedness, toleration and a clear understanding' that may have been present at the beginning of a theoretical scientist's practical researches. We should perhaps hope that the 'sexy' lure of scientific penetration need not have the cold kiss of death waiting behind it. A nuclear-weapon-infested globe readily poised to destroy itself does all too easily seem like a threatening fulfillment of Mary Shelley's prophetic 'Frankenstein Idea'. But alternatives exist. The author of Frankenstein would surely have echoed the words of her father William Godwin: 'Real knowledge is benevolent, not cruel and retaliating.' [38] Maurice Hindle _______________ Notes: 1. Quarterly Review, March 1818. 2. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, March 1823. 3. 'William Godwin', in William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, ed. E. D. Mackerness (Collins, London, 1969), pp. 35-6. 4. C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries (1876),
Vol. 1, p. 240. 5. Quoted in Jane Dunn, Moon in Eclipse: A Life of Mary Shelley
(Weldenfeld & 6. Kegan Paul, William Godwin, Vol. 2. pp. 213-14. 7. P. B. Shelley, 'On Frankenstein', Athenaeum, 10 November 1832. 8. P. D. Fleck, 'Mary Shelley's poems and Frankenstein', Studies in Romanticism, VI, 4 (1967). 9. Christopher Small, Ariel Like a Harpy: Shelley, Mary and 'Frankenstein' (Gollancz, London, 1972), p. 101. 10. From T. J. Hogg, Life of Shelley, quoted in Small. Ariel Like a Harpy. p. 104. 11. From Hogg, Life of Shelley, quoted in Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (Quartet Books, London, 1976), pp. 44-5. 12. P.B. Shelley, Queen Mab 8, 11. 230-31. 13. Ibid., I, 11. I-10. 14. P. B. Shelley, Alastor, 11, 20 -34. This poem was published a few months before Frankenstein was started. 15. William Hazlitt, 'Review of Shelley's Posthumous Poems', Edinburgh Review, July 1824. 16. Burton R. Pollin, 'Philosophical and literary sources of Frankenstein', Comparative Literature, XVII, 2 (1966), p. 100. 17. Ibid., p. 101. 18. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Dryden, quoted in Pollin, 'Philosophical and literary sources of Frankenstein'. 19. Humphry Davy, A Discourse, Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry (1802), p. 17. 20. Ibid., p. 16. 21. John Milton, Paradise Lost 10, 11. 743-5. 22. Theodor bar Konai, Liber Scholiorum XI, tr. A. Yohannan, in A. V. W. Jackson, Researches in Manichaeism (New York, 1932). Quoted in Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Beacon Press, Boston, 1959), p. 87. 23. Clement of Alexandria, The Excerpta ex Theodoto, ed. and tr. R. P. Casey (1934). Quoted in Jonas, p. 45. 24. Gospel of Truth, ed. and tr. Malinine, Puech and Quispel (1956). Quoted in Jonas, p. 89. 25. Wiliam Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. F.E.L. Priestley (Toronto, 1946), 1, p. 311. Quoted in M.A. Goldberg, 'Moral and myth in Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein', Keats-Shelley Journal, 8 (1959), p. 34. 26. Quoted by Marlo Praz to his Introductory Essay to Three Gothic Novels (Penguin, 1968), p. 29. It is interesting to note that the term 'modern Prometheus' was in use long before Frankenstein appeared. As early as 1709 Lord Shaftesbury (whom Mary Shelley did not read until 1825) talked of 'our modem Prometheus's, the Mountebanks', and in the late eighteenth century the philosopher Immanuel Kant dubbed pioneer scientist of electricity Benjamin Franklin 'the new Prometheus'. 27. The American scholar Paul Cantor has recently made a similar observation: 'The parallels between authentic Gnostic and Romantic myths are often so striking that one is tempted to assume direct influence.' Paul A. Cantor, Creature and Creator: Myth-making and English Romanticism (CUP, 1984). p. x. 28. Mario Praz, in his Introductory Essay to Three Gothic Novels, p. 20. 29. Muriel Spark, Child of Light (Tower Bridge Publications, 1951), pp, 128, 133. 30. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders (Verso Editions and NLB, London, 1983), p. 83. 31. My source for this discussion or the use or 'monster imagery' in politics is Lee Sterrenburg's thought-provoking essay, 'Mary Shelley's monster: politics and psyche in Frankenstein', in George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (eds.), The Endurance of Frankenstein (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1982). 32. Quoted in Sterrenburg, 'Mary Shelley's monster', p. 154. 33. Frank Darvall, Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Regency England (Oxford University Press, London, 1934), p. 306. 34.Brian Easlea, Fathering the Unthinkable: Masculinity, Scientists and the Nuclear Arms Race (Pluto Press, London, 1983), pp. 28, 35. 35. Quoted in ibid., p. 19. 36. Ibid., p. 22. 37. Ibid., p. 28. 38. Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1, p. 461.
|