Creating The Creature

Creating the creature: on the anniversary of the writing of Frankenstein

Picture the scene

It is May 1816. An unmarried Mary Godwin, her lover Percy Shelley and their son William travel to Geneva to stay in a rented house near another ostracized Romantic genius Lord Byron. He currently resides at the Villa Diodati, an impressive house on the hills overlooking the southern shore of Lake Geneva. The cast list reads like a who s who of gothic literature: Lord Byron himself, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin (soon to be Shelley), John Polidori (Byron s doctor and author of The Vampyre the progenitor of all vampire novels) and other occasional visitors such as Matthew Monk Lewis (whose novel The Monk had been a runaway best seller when it was published in 1796).

It will be another two years before Frankenstein is finally published, and then it will be anonymously, but it is here that the tale which will become one of the most culturally iconic novels of all time first sees the washed light of a gloomy day.

The genesis of Frankenstein

Fifteen years later, Mary Shelley recalled that it was a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house. In fact, the weather was so bad that 1816 became known as the year without a summer . To while away the time the guests talked at length and on a variety of subjects, including the experiments of the natural philosopher and poet Erasmus Darwin (said to have brought dead matter to life) the electrical experiments of Luigi Galvani and the possibility of returning a corpse to life. They also read German ghost stories, and this led Byron to suggest they each write their own tale of the supernatural. Shortly afterwards in a waking dream, so she claimed, Mary Godwin conceived the idea for Frankenstein:

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.

With her husband s encouragement she began writing, and was later to describe it as the moment when I first stepped out from childhood into life .

The nineteenth century scientific imagination

Frankenstein came at a time of phenomenal scientific and exploratory advance. Knowledge of the extent and nature of the world was expanding at a rapid pace as scientists redrew the scientific map in the same way as explorers such as James Cook and Charles William Barkley had done the geographical map. And so it is interesting to consider the impact of Frankenstein on subsequent literary portrayals of science and on perceptions of the relationship between the arts and the sciences.

Scientists who make important theoretical breakthroughs are often portrayed as heroes with almost superhuman intellectual capability, whilst those pursuing less desirable experimentation are labelled as unethical monsters . Such ideas are, of course, very fruitful when we consider Shelley s representation of Victor Frankenstein and are even used by Victor himself as he sees the power of this very dichotomy at work within himself and his counterpart, Captain Walton.

In 1903 the novelist George Gissing standing at the opposite end of the Victorian era from Mary Shelley and contemplating the gathering storm clouds that were to culminate in the First World War wrote:

I hate and fear science because of my conviction that, for a long time to come if not forever, it will be the remorseless enemy of mankind. I see it destroying all simplicity and gentleness of life, all the beauty of the world& I see it restoring barbarism under a mask of civilization& I see it darkening men`s minds and hardening their hearts.

Shelley s view of science in Frankenstein is not so pessimistic. Her contemporaries and their successors the Victorians were fascinated by the strange new worlds that science was opening to them. Exotic plants and animals poured into Europe from every corner of the globe, while revolutionary theories, such as the radical idea that humans might be descended from apes, drew crowds to heated debates. Men and women of all social classes avidly collected scientific specimens for display in their homes and devoured literature about science and its practitioners. Frankenstein, in other words, emerged from a society excited by science, and many artists the young Mary Godwin included demonstrated a lively interest in the latest scientific discoveries. Coleridge took an active part in the third meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which may have also attracted the young Tennyson. As the Victorian era shaped itself, popular periodicals such as Macmillan`s Magazine, Household Words, the Fortnightly Review, Cornhill Magazine, and the Nineteenth Century, published serious scientific articles alongside literature and criticism. In 1848 the Victoria Theatre staged E L Blanchard`s pantomime Land of Light, or Harlequin Gas and the Four Elements in which Science appeared as a personified hero, and in Household Words, Charles Dickens published a sequence of stories based on Michael Faraday s lectures to the Royal Institution.

Frankenstein and science

Often peddled as a ghost story or horror tale, Frankenstein is in fact something far more sophisticated. As soon as we move away from images of a bolt-necked Boris Karloff and into the actual content of the narrative we see Shelley s young and enquiring mind engaged in deep philosophical consideration of the nature of human knowledge and the place of scientific experimentation within this scheme. Sub-titled The Modern Prometheus, the novel taps into classical models of forbidden knowledge and the right and proper extent to which humanity should explore natural (and supernatural) phenomena, but it is by no means a straightforward moralistic tract. Frankenstein s zeal for scientific knowledge is an ambiguous, not a morally reprehensible force, in Shelley s hands. True, his youthful studies, unchecked by an over-indulgent father, do not divert his attention from the sad trash he is reading in the works of Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus& it is apparent, however, that with appropriate guidance Frankenstein could have employed his scientific work to more useful ends. It is the scientist and not the science that is at fault, and Shelley is alert to this. She traces a careful line, using the balancing figure of the adventurer and explorer Robert Walton to demonstrate how and where Frankenstein s own desires have misled him. In the midst of her tale she is never piously moralistic, nor does she seek to condemn scientific experimentation in and of itself.

For some Frankenstein has become a potent image of the mad scientist in the popular imagination. For others his name has wrongly been transferred on to the creature. In this way, Shelley s serious ethical exploration of science has too easily become lost in the powerful gothic images (never realized in the novel itself, though manifestly present in its many film adaptations) of the raiding of charnel houses, the gory stitching together of body parts and the reanimation of the dead. An 1823 stage adaptation of the play leadingly entitled Presumption: or, the Fate of Frankenstein by Richard Brinsley Peake no doubt had much the same effect in William IV s England, focusing as it does on the explicit horror of Frankenstein s actions rather than the implicit and much more subtle critique of science that the novel in fact offers. Peake s play was a staple of the early Victorian repertoire, too, appearing frequently well into the 1850s.

Conclusion

C. P Snow (scientist and novelist of note) famously used his Rede Lecture of 1959 to lament the intellectual divergence and mutual hostility between the two cultures of the arts and the sciences. Frankenstein written 200 years ago when its author was only 19 year old is living testament to the fact that scientific and artistic endeavour cannot and should not be so easily separated in our minds. That way danger lies.