Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) by Mary Shelley provides the most potent, characteristic, and uniquely modern myth of science gone fatally awry. The common association of the name Frankenstein, thanks to many popular movies, is with the ugly, lumbering, murderous monster whom the book never names. In his many film versions, this lurching omen reflects the eras of his creation, from the dazed, scorned and feared working-class creature played by Boris Karloff in James Whale's depression-era Frankenstein (1931) to the slyly silent and sexually potent creature played by Peter Boyle in the me decade's Young Frankenstein (1974). But whilemovies have spread the image of Doctor Frankenstein and associated his name with the manlike monster he created, the novel carefully never names his creation which is, in fact, a doppelganger, a dramatic double of the obsessive undergraduate who made him.

The ancient myth of Prometheus took two forms: Prometheus pyrphoros (fire-bringer) and Prometheus plasticator (shaper). In the first the god steals divine fire, emblematic of the combined good and bad potentials of all technologies, for humans; in the second he shapes humans from clay and breathes life into them. In both Zeus makes Prometheus suffer endlessly for his disobedience. In the modern myth, Frankenstein shapes his creation from charnel matter and reanimates it (rather than creating life) with electricity, an occurrence, as Shelley writes in her preface, "supposed by Dr. [Erasmus] Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence." The bounds that Frankenstein transgresses are those of obedience to community. He makes himself a monster in two senses. The price is death not only for himself but for his family and potentially all humanity.

As Gothic novels of the supernatural became stale, authors added a twist, revealing at the end some realistic explanation for the fantastic occurrences. By moving that explanation to the beginning of Frankenstein, Shelley created the genre that has explored human fears of science ever since: science fiction.

This early science fiction is composed of letters from an explorer, Robert Walton, to his sister back in England. He cannot send the letters because his ship is mired in the arctic where he seeks to confirm the ancient Hyperborea myth of a land of warmth beyond the far north, but he writes nonetheless. On a passing floe he discovers the debilitated Victor Frankenstein whom he rescues. During Victor's recuperation, Robert remarks that "I begin to love him as a brother" (1969, p. 27). In some sense, Robert and Victor, too, are doppelgangers.

The book is a series of nested narratives. The outermost, Robert's own, contains Victor's story that tells of his pursuit of greatness and withdrawal into feverish, isolated work. He finally succeeds, but one look at his stirring creation shows him instantly that the creature is evil. He would kill it, but it flees. The reader comes to learn that the creature is the strongest, smartest, most articulate character in the book, a fit embodiment of science. He confronts Victor on a glacier (the ice imagery mirroring the situation of Robert and Victor, all three males surrounded by frozen fertility) and pleads for paternal help, requesting a bride so that he, universally shunned for his ugly exterior, can find community. Victor reports the creature's narrative which includes his plea and his reported story of Felix (happiness) and Safie (wisdom), Christian-Muslim lovers who are promised help against prejudice and the opportunity to marry by Safie's father, but are betrayed by him. The creature learns the lovers' tale overhearing them in a cottage through a knothole in the wall of the outer shed he has been occupying while altruistically providing firewood for the blind old man who lives there. With the couple on the scene, the creature learns to read just by watching their sharing aloud three books: Milton's Paradise Lost, which concerns disobedience and provides Frankenstein's epigraph, fallen Adam's plea to God ("Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould Me man? Did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?) (Book X, lines 743–745); Plutarch's Lives, a classic collection of exemplary biographies; and The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe's famous tale of unrequited love ending in death. The creature, initially the most virtuous character in the book, is driven away when the blind cottager's guests see him. Readers believe him when he says to Victor 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" (line 1470). At the heart of Frankenstein's nested narratives is the betrayal by Safie's father. The rupture of community echoes throughout the book.

When Victor first absents himself to work, his father sends a letter that says, quite rightly, "I regard any interruption in your correspondence as a proof that your other duties are equally neglected" (p. 55). Victor destroys his creature's unfinished bride in sight of the monster, who then begins murdering Victor's family to force him to start again. Instead they chase each other north. While Victor never writes, Robert always writes. Robert heeds his frightened crew and turns back from his quest, saving all their lives. Victor dies, and the monster (from the Latin for warning) carries him further north for a funeral pyre, knowing that with his father dead, his hopes for any family have died, too.

At the heart of Frankenstein is the tension between the power science confers on individuals and the just restraints of community. Frankenstein, both creator and creature, stands not for science in general but for the acquisition of scientific power foolishly pursued without the wisdom of the world. As such, Frankenstein has represented, in the films of the Great Depression, the isolation of the privileged from the suffering of the common person. When the educated Doctor or Baron in his hilltop castle, his title varying from film to film, disdained the peasants swirling up toward him with their angry torches, his doppelganger monster was inarticulate because, the movies imply, the overly powerful never heed the consequences of their power.

That image has entered the very language of the early 2000s. Genetically modified farm crops are bashed as Frankenfoods and contemplated human cloning for spare parts is called a Frankenstein nightmare. Shelley has a character say early on, "One man's life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought" (1969, p. 28). That sounds like Victor, but it is Robert, the seeker who learns the limits of seeking. Frankenstein is the early twenty-first century's greatest cautionary tale.

Autonomous Technology;; Brave New World;; Playing God;; Science Fiction;; Science, Technology, and Literature;; Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft.

Schoene-Harwood, Berthold, ed. (2000). Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. Columbia University Press Critical Guides. New York: Columbia University Press.

Shelley, Mary. (1969 [1818; 1831]). Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, ed. M. K. Joseph. The World's Classics series. New York: Oxford University Press.

Shelley, Mary. (2000). Frankenstein: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical, Historical, and Cultural Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. Johanna M. Smith. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's.

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