Mary Shelley, the author of the gothic horror/sci-fi
novel Frankenstein, could be said to
have been a child of the Modern Age in more ways than one. Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, the
author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” (1792), one of the first
modern feminists, if not the very first, as well as a defender of the ideology
of the French Revolution who deliberately ended her history of this event in
its first year in order to avoid talking about how the Reign of Terror had
ensued from it. Shelley’s father,
William Godwin, had been trained as a Nonconformist clergyman, but seduced by
the antichristian doctrines that had been brewing in the salons and cafes of
eighteenth century France, turned to a career in writing, in which he
enthusiastically endorsed every new philosophical idea and the most radical
form of republican liberalism, while long labouring to destroy the Christian
faith he was once appointed to preach.
Mary Wollstonecroft Godwin was truly her parents’
daughter and embraced their radicalism from her earliest childhood. When she was seventeen, she began an affair
with Percy Bysshe Shelley, a disciple of her father’s, Lord Byron’s best
friend, and a Romantic poet in his own right.
Nineteenth century Romanticism was primarily a rejection of the
classicism that had undergone a major revival in Europe during the Renaissance,
and then again in the eighteenth century.
In the eighteenth century, classicism reached its apex, being embraced
both by the orthodox, such as Dr. Johnson, and by the radicals of the Enlightenment. Similarly, Romanticism had both its left and
right wings. The latter included those
who started out with radical religious and political sympathies but who matured
into Tories – the Lake Poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey and
William Wordsworth come immediately to mind – as well as life-long reactionary
Tory Sir Walter Scott. Shelley, like
Byron, most definitely belonged to the other side of the movement.
When Shelley met Mary Godwin, his first wife Harriet
was pregnant with their son, but this did not prevent him from seducing Mary,
using the blackmail of empty suicide threats to do so. They would meet in secret at the grave of
Mary Wollstonecraft, which most people would regard as rather morbid, until
William Godwin found out about it. Then
they ran off to France together, taking Mary’s stepsister Claire along as an
interpreter, and embarked upon a tour of Europe, returning home when they ran
out of money, with Mary now pregnant.
Their daughter was born premature and died within two weeks. After Mary, whose health had been weakened
by the pregnancy recovered, they took off again, this time to join Lord Byron
at Lake Geneva, Switzerland for the summer.
By all accounts it was a miserable, rainy, summer, but it was an
incredibly productive one for the trio of writers. Lord Byron’s Don Juan, Percy Shelley’s Hymn
to Intellectual Beauty, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, all had their origins in that summer together,
although only the second of the three was actually completed that year and none
were published prior to the following year.
Upon their return to England after that trip. Mary’s older sister Fanny
and Shelley’s first wife Harriet, both killed themselves, (1) and the couple
celebrated by getting married.
What’s that? I
don’t think much of the Shelleys? I don’t
know where you would have gotten that idea.
Mary Shelley’s first and most famous novel was first
published in 1818, two years after the summer at Lake Geneva where she first
conceived the idea. The title was likely
taken from Frankenstein Castle in Germany, which the Shelleys would have seen,
if they didn’t actually visit, when travelling down the Rhine on their first
trip to Europe. In the novel Frankenstein
is the last name of the protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, who belongs to a
wealthy and noble family from Geneva and studies science at the University of
Ingolstadt in Germany, where he becomes obsessed with the idea of artificially
creating life. Constructing an
oversized human body he successfully brings it to life, but immediately rejects
his creation because of its ugliness.
The monster responds to this rejection, by murdering his brother. The monster confronts his creator, relates
his experiences since awakening and his rejection by everybody due to his
hideousness, and demands that Victor create for him a bride. Victor initially agrees to do so, but at the
last minute reneges and the monster responds by murdering Victor’s own bride
Elizabeth on their honeymoon. Victor
then pursues the creature, seeking its destruction, all the way to the North
Pole, only to succumb to the elements after being found by Captain Robert Walton
to whom he relates his story. Walton
also encounters the monster, repentant over the fate of his creator, who vows
to rid the world of his own existence. The
story is told in the form of a series of letters from Captain Walton to his
sister.
The story has been adapted numerous times. The image we all have of what Frankenstein’s
monster looks like comes from the 1931 Universal Studios film in which Boris
Karloff portrayed the monster. It is
from the same film that we get the idea of Frankenstein robbing graves,
stitching the parts together to form the body, and animating it using
lightening. Shelley was much more
ambiguous, although the filmmakers expanded upon some hints she had dropped
here and there. My favourite “adapation”
is Mel Brooks’ 1974 Young Frankenstein,
featuring Gene Wilders as Frederick Frankenstein, the American grandson of
Victor, initially embarrassed at the association, but who later re-creates the
experiment at the family estate (relocated to Transylvania). Marty Feldman steals the show with his performance
as Frederick’s hunchbacked assistant Igor (“It’s pronounced Eye-gore”).
Did Shelley intend any particular message by her
story? Is there any larger significance
to it than what she did intend?
The subtitle of the novel would seem to suggest that the
answer to the first question is yes.
That subtitle is “The Modern Prometheus.” Prometheus was a figure in Greek
mythology. He was one of the Titans,
the race that had overthrown the Elder Gods, before themselves being overthrown
by the Olympians. In the war between
the Titans and the Olympians, Prometheus, foreseeing that the Olympians would
win, sided with Zeus. Later, however, he
would perform a series of tricks on Zeus, each of which benefited mankind in
some way. In the last of those tricks
he stole fire and gave it to man. Zeus
then chained him to a rock, where a vulture would pick away at his liver, which
would regrow each day. Hercules
eventually sets him free, and he reconciles with Zeus by providing him with the
information that the nymph Thetis, whom Zeus and Poseidon have been competing
for, is destined to give birth to a son who will overthrow his father, as Zeus
had overthrown Kronos, and Kronos had overthrown Uranus. (2)
What did Mary Shelly mean by giving her novel this
subtitle? Who is the “Modern Prometheus”
alluded to?
It seems fairly obvious that Victor Frankenstein is
the character who is supposed to correspond to Prometheus. The structure of the title certainly
indicates so, and the parallels are striking.
As the original Prometheus gave fire to mankind, so Victor Frankenstein
gives life. The original Prometheus
trespassed against Zeus to do so, Victor Frankenstein commits a form of
blasphemy by taking upon himself the divine prerogative of giving life. Both figures bring torture and anguish upon
themselves for their hubris. In this,
Mary Shelley, despite her associations with the leading figures of the Romantic
Movement, was a classicist, for her Victor Frankenstein is Aristotle’s tragic
hero, brought down by his own arrogance.
One interpretation which seems to jump out from all of
this is Frankenstein as a kind of
warning against the attitude towards science on display in Sir Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis. In
this unfinished utopian novel, a scientific foundation which has as its end or
purpose “the
knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the
bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible” by the
pursuit of the same end creates an ideal society on the island of Bensalem. Frankenstein
seems to present a scenario in which someone with very much the same ideas and
attitude as Salomon’s House in Bacon’s novelette, brings about his own
destruction.
Yet it is hardly likely that Mary Shelley had any such
meaning in mind when she wrote the book.
Such an interpretation would run contrary to the entire way of thinking that
she had imbibed from her father and shared with her husband.
Consider how Percy Shelley had himself handled the
myth of Prometheus in a play he was working on when Frankenstein was first published, and which came out two years
later. He took the title of Prometheus Unbound
from a non-extant play of Aeschylus, one of a trilogy of tragedies of which
only one, Prometheus Bound, survives. Only fragments of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus The Fire-bringer have come
down to us, but we know more-or-less, the story they tell, including Prometheus’
eventual reconciliation with Zeus.
Shelley presents a story that is the direct inversion of this. In his play, Jupiter (Zeus) is challenged
and defeated by Demogorgon in the third Act, bringing about the release of
Prometheus. While the inversion of
Aeschylus is in part a reflection of Shelley’s politics, a revolutionary
radicalism as opposed to Aeschylus’ conservatism, his meaning was more than
just political. His Prometheus
represents the human will and spirit, and the message of his play is that of
the Modern Age – the triumph of the human will and spirit over all that would
bind and confine it, especially the divine.
The same message is evident in Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, which ends in
the Ragnarok of Gotterdammerung with
the burning of Valhalla, as man takes the place of the gods. Even Alfred Lord
Tennyson, in his poem Ulysses, takes
the tale of Ulysses’ last voyage, as first recounted by Ulysses himself in the
torments of hell in Canto XXVI of Dante’s Inferno,
and portrays what in Dante was the hubris that brought damnation down upon
Ulysses’ head in a heroic light. What
is being lionized in all of this literature, is the driving spirit of the
Modern Age, the idea that knowledge serves the human will, and that man should
recognize no limits in his pursuit of that knowledge and the triumph of that
will. This is the spirit of modern
science, which is why Oswald Spengler correctly identified the spirit of Modern
Western Civilization as Faustian, after Goethe’s version of Faust, the scholar
who sold his very soul to obtain boundless knowledge (in Goethe’s nineteenth
century re-telling of the story, Dr. Faust gets a happy ending, unlike
Christopher Marlowe’s sixteenth century play which ends with his dismemberment
and damnation). (3)
Since the Shelleys shared a similar, Modern,
progressive, outlook, it is unthinkable that the author of Frankenstein intended a message so contrary to that of Prometheus Unbound. Nevertheless, the message that man should
beware scientific hubris because his own inventions may turn on him and destroy
him, is the message that has come across to a great many readers. Without endorsing the postmodern
deconstructionist total divorce of a text from its author’s intent, this is,
perhaps, a case of a story with a meaning much larger than what its author
could see.
The view that science was the path to a man-made
Paradise on earth was strong in the nineteenth century and even up until World
War I. This optimistic view was
shattered by the atomic bombs which brought the Second World War to an
end. At that point, the message which
Mary Shelley had not intended, but which many have derived from her best-known
novel, began to resonate with people, and the concept of a world devastated by
man’s scientific and technological hubris, became a standard feature of
dystopian literature.
Today, all those who want us to obey every draconian
and totalitarian “public health” order issued in the name of saving us from the
Bogeyman of COVID-19, which orders are turning our countries more and more into
something that resembles Orwell’s 1984,
tell us to “follow the science”.
What if the science they are telling us to follow
turns out to be Frankenstein’s monster?
(1) Harriet Shelley was found drowned. The inquest ruled suicide and that is the most likely explanation, considering that she left a suicide note, although there is some slight evidence of foul play on the part of William Godwin. In the case of Fanny Imlay, Mary’s older sister from an affair Wollstonecraft had with an American diplomat before meeting Godwin, there is no doubt that it was suicide by laudanum overdose, although her motivation for doing so has been the subject of endless speculation.
(2) This is the beginning of the background story of the Trojan War. Zeus and Poseidon, based upon Prometheus’ information, agree to give Thetis up and marry her off to Peleus, king of Thessaly. This is the wedding, to which all the gods except the goddess of discord are invited. She shows up anyway, and tosses the apple of discord between Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena which starts the chain of events that eventually leads to the Trojan War. Thetis does indeed give birth to a son destined to be greater than his father – Achilles, the greatest of the Greek heroes of said conflict.
(3) The legend is based on an actual person, a German parlour magician, alchemist, and astrologer who lived in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and whose end, at least in terms of how he departed this earth, without speculating as to where he went after, corresponds more closely with Marlowe’s account rather than Goethe’s.
