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In the grip of the monstrous myth

Jon Turney Public Understanding of Science 1994 3: 225 DOI: 10.1088/0963-6625/3/2/006 The online version of this article can be found at: http://pus.sagepub.com/content/3/2/225

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Public Understand. Sei. 3 (1994) 225-231. Printed i n the UK

ESSAY REVIEW

In the grip of the monstrous myth

Jon Turney assesses the contemporary relevance of Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, in its 1993 edition with a new introduction by Marilyn Butler

If we want to improve our feeling for public attitudes to science and technology, and especially toward the life sciences, a close study of Frankenstein is indispensible. Victor Frankenstein and his creature cast a longer shadow over public discussion than any other fictional figures. Their life in popular culture (where the two are generally interchangeable) has been extraordinarily rich and vigorous for almost 200 years. This fine new edition of the novel, with a new scholarly introduction, is a good place to begin discussion of this ur-text for students of public understanding of science. It is a good place partly because it again makes widely available the original text of 1818, rather than the revised version from 1831, and the original points up more sharply various aspects of the books significance. And because Marilyn Butler oRers a new interpretation of the context in which Mary Shelley framed her narrative, an interpretation which emphasizes the importance of contemporary science in provoking her imagination. Why Frankenstein, though? The question almost answers itself. The point is not, of course, that many today actually read the book. No-one needs to. Consider the creation scene in Mary Shelleys original: It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instrument of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning: the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, 1 saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. The image this evokes is part of the common culture, if anything is. Brian Aldiss, who has long maintained that the book is the first true work of science fiction, agrees: For a thousand people familiar with the story of Victor creating his monster from cadaver spares and endowing them with new life, only to shrink back in horror from his own creation, not one will have read Mary Shelleys original novel. This suggests something of the power of infiltration of this first great myth of the industrial age.
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It is easy to make the case for this today. The 1931 James Whale film is still regularly aired-with one national TV showing in Britain in 1993, not long after a first broadcast for an entirely new production which hewed much closer to the novel. The image will be reinforced in 1994, when a new multi-million dollar feature film will appear (Kenneth Branagh as Victor, Robert de Niro as the monster. Branagh directing). In 1993 Jurassic Park-whose plot is basically a blend of Frankenstein with The Island of Dr Moreau-replayed the theme to startling effect. Thus the main medium for propagating the image in this century will go on recharging and reworking it. This kind of currency also means that the F-word is constantly invoked in more formal discussions of science and technology. A very general example might be Theodore Roszak, in full counter-cultural Row in the mid-1970s: To find the cultural meaning of modern science, for Frankensteins monster, read nature at large as we experience it, He underlines the point in the same essay, arguing that our popular culture expresses a legitimate public fear of the scientists stripped-down. depersonalized conception of knowledge-a fear that our scientists, well-intentioned and decent men and women all, will go on being titans who create monsters. The symbolic value of the monster is general enough to apply to most individual fields of science and technology. Maurice Hindle, author of the introduction to the most readily available popular edition of the novel. closes his scholarly account of the book with a combined ecological and anti-nuclear message: A nuclear-weaponsinfested globe readily poised to destroy itself does all too easily seem like a threatening fulfilment of Mary Shelleys prophetic Frankenstein Idea.3 The notion appeared at the dawn of the nuclear age. An NBC radio commentator told his American listeners on the day of Hiroshima: For all we know, we have created a Frankenstein. The term was soon heard everywhere, from street corners to the United States Senate. as Spencer Weart records in his history of nuclear imagery.4 Others maintain that the novels ideas apply equally well to computers. Pamela McCorduck suggests that the book combines nearly all the psychological, moral and social elements of the history of artificial intelligen~e.~ However, the monster makes its most regular appearances in discussion of recent developments in biology, whether recombinant DNA research. in vitro fertilization or transplant surgery. Mayor Alfred Velluci of Cambridge, Massachusetts, seeking to restrain recombinant DNA research at Harvard a couple of years after Roszak wrote, spoke of experiments which could lead to Frankenstein monsters crawling out of the sewers? At least one scholarly commentator saw this as a defining moment of the debate in Boston. A more recent example is a lengthy journalists critique of the human genome programme published in the Guardian in 1991, headed The Frankenstein Factor.x This is an instructive item because the text supplied by the writer does not actually mention Frankenstein. framing the critique in terms of a new eugenics instead. But the Guardian sub-editor has evidently decided that the Nazi spectres alluded to need supplementing with the older vocabulary, and has inserted Frankenstein in both the main headline and the repeat heading when the article continues on a later page. The freight this single term carries reframes the whole piece at a stroke. This kind of allusion is often found in the heat of debate, or of composing a newspaper headline or drawing a cartoon. But there are cooler appraisals which also make use of the monster. The first book on the human genome project by a British science writer mentions Frankenstein on the opening page. although it only makes one further appearance in the text? A more striking example is a long piece in the New
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York Times Magazine in I972 which discusses the development of cloning as a leading instance of how the 'Frankenstein Myth Becomes a Reality', as the heading puts it.'" There is even a complete book about modern biomedical research-based on a TV script for the BBC-which frames the whole enterprise in terms of steps towards realizing Victor Frankenstein's project. Figures as diverse as Christian Barnard and Francis Crick are depicted as 'modern Frankensteins', bent on turning fiction into fact." This is an intriguing document. It offers a potted history of Mary Shelley's relations with Byron and his circle, their summer sojourn by Lake Geneva, the celebrated ghost story competition and the way the central image of the book came to Mary (as she later claimed) in a dream a few days later, and a detailed summary of the plot. But all of these are woven together with accounts of modern scientific and technological developments which, it is maintained, are prefigured in Mary Shelley's novel. It is easy, then, to establish the contemporary resonance of Frankenstein, in the English-speaking world at any rate. But it is also important to remember that the story's popular appeal has been strong ever since its first appearance in 1818. The power of this tale in Western popular culture is far from a creation of Hollywood. There was a time when many did read the book, as well as watching one of numerous stage productions. The first play based on the book, Presumprion, or rhe Fare of Frankensrein, opened in 1823, and prompted a second edition of the novel. In contrast to the rest of Mary Shelley's work, it has been in print ever since. The play itself was a critical and popular success, running for three months, and spawning other productions which were widely viewed throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. The stripped-down melodrama was then an obvious subject for the cinema, and the Edison Company made the first Frankenstein film as early as 1910." There is thus a continuity throughout the prolfieration of Frankensteinian imagery, which took hold unstoppably in the twentieth century. The standard source here for the first three-quarters of the century is Donald F. Glut's obsessively detailed The Frankenstein Legend.'3 As David Ketterer puts it, 'one is dazzled by [Glut's] endless citations of the theme on television; in comic, dramatic, information. variety, musical and cartoon shows. Then follows an even longer list of commercial products that capitalize on the legend'.l4 In her own introduction to the 1831 edition, Mary Shelley half-jokingly, though revealingly, 'bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper'. That it has. These outpourings have naturally directed a good deal of critical attention to the source: to the novel and to the roots of Mary Shelley's narrative. 'While Frankenstein is a phenomenon of popular culture, it is so because it has tapped into the centre of Western feeling and imagination', as George Levine rightly says.15 There is a wealth of material analysing the text from the viewpoint of every school of literary analysis, usefully summarized in another recent edition which includes a series of critical essays." And Anne Mellor's excellent recent scholarly biography of Mary Shelley also discusses the novel at length." As all this work demonstrates, Shelley's complex youthful text is 'famously reinterpretable'. in Butler's phrase." It is marked by her turbulent life: she was the daughter of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, who died immediately after her birth; wife to Shelley: and mother of a premature baby daughter of her own who lived less than two weeks. It is also a remarkable blend of literary and scientific sources, made possible by Mary's unusual education and her later encounters with contemporary
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science. The book synthesizes all these influences, from Faust and the Golem legends to Erasmus Darwin, Galvani and Davy. to create a new myth. It is, above all, a myth of the new science. Mary might have been expected to turn f rhe to alchemy or mysticism for her animating principle. Her father wrote a Lives o Necromancers which included chapters on Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa, and it is indeed the writings of these figures which first seize the imagination of the young Victor Frankenstein. However, when he progresses from self-directed study to the University, the professors scoff at his infatuation with Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus, and he becomes acquainted with modern chemistry. In Aldisss words. Symbolically, Frankenstein turns away from alchemy and the past towards science and the futureand is rewarded with his horrible success. This is one of the keys to the novels resonance, despite James Riegers argument that it is wrong to see it as a pioneer work of science fiction; Its author knew something o f . . . [Davy, Darwin and Galvani] . . . but Frankensteins chemistry is switched on magic, souped-up alchemy, the electrification of Paracelsus. . . . He is a criminal magician who uses up-to-date tools. It is, however, a crucial innovation. It is precisely the electrification of Paracelsus which marks out Frankenstein as a pivotal point in the transition from the supernaturally fantastic to the scientifically plausible. The chemist at the university tells Victor how the ancient teachers promised impossibilities and performed nothing. On the other hand, modern scientists:

. . . penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hidden places. They ascend to the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.
The passage is a pastiche of Humphrey Davys contemporary chemical rhetoric. but echoes of Francis Bacon also come through clearly. It is also the images of science in the book which have been among the most enduring. In the original text, once Victors narrative begins, the creation of the monster is accomplished in a scant 15 pages of this printing, in which space is also found to delineate the background and education of the monsters creator. The scientific details are few. The rest of the text, with its complex moral structure, the implication of the creature as Victors alter ego, the monster portrayed as a Rousseauesque noble savage corrupted by the world, and the dramatic conflict between reason and emotion, is what suffers most in the innumerable retellings of the tale. Yet in those first few pages can be found the seeds of almost all the images of science and scientists which appear in so many variations in later stories. Although it is easy to deride the crudity of many later reworkings of the tale, especially on the screen, in this respect they tend to show a strong fidelity to Shelleys text. Among others, you can find in Frankenstein models for the scientist whose good intentions blind him to the true nature of his enterprise: wealth was an inferior object; but what glory would attend the discovery if I could banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!, Victor proclaims. In contrast, he also begins the lineage of the scientist as Faustian knowledge seeker: the world was to me a secret which I desired to divine, he remembers, and recalls that none but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science. He is also shown as a narrow materialist: On my education my father had

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taken the greatest precautions that my mind should be impressed with no supernatural horrors . . . a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life. Yet, there are also hints that science has some drive of its own. external to the will of the scientist, and eventually overwhelming him. Natural philosophy, Victor reflects sadly, is the genius that has regulated my fate. Amid all the simplifications, deletions and distortions of the original which have occurred, two things have remained inviolate, and one is the identification of Victor as a scientist. Indeed the very lack of scientific detail in the text enables the tale to be more easily overlaid with scientific images drawn from other sources. It may be true, as Christopher Toumey argues in detail, that mad scientists tend to become increasingly amoral as nineteenth century texts are adapted to twentieth century films. but there is plenty of warrant in this particular text for the later images. The second, related continuity is the identification, through Victor, of science as a male enterprise bent on dominating a feminized nature. Again. the links with Baconian rhetoric have been emphasized by recent feminist scholarship. As Mellor persuasively argues. this is the second principal novelty of the Frankenstein myth. Victor creates a new life without female aid, destroys the creatures potential mate, and brings about the death of his own partner before the marriage is consummated. Mary Shelleys own ambivalences about birth, parenting and marriage are interwoven with her attitude to the new science, much as present-day reactions to reproductive technology mobilize the most personal feelings in response to each new laboratory triumph. Men cannot bear children. but they may be able to create life in the laboratory. As the ingredients of the novel are laid out like this, the potency of the narrative begins to become clearer. The attempt to control birth, life and death through male domination of nature continues to evoke such strong responses, it seems, because science still appears to many, now, as it did to Mary Shelley. at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is pointless to ask whether the myth fits the science or whether the science is represented to fit the myth: at some level they are mutually dependent. As 1 have said, this above all is what survives of the original. The voice-over which opens the 1931 film summarizes the elements of so many stories, while underlining the strength of the connections with the early sections of the novel: We are about to unfold the story of Frankenstein, a man of science, who sought to create a man after his own image, without reckoning upon God. It is one of the strangest stories ever told. It deals with the two great mysteries of creation: life and death. It is also in this area that Butler puts her case for a hitherto neglected source for the novel. She argues strongly that Mary and her circle were attending closely to a celebrated dispute between William Lawrence, professor at the Royal College of Surgeons, and his fellow professor and mentor John Abernethy. In this dispute. the younger man was a materialist critic of his seniors vitalism. Lawrence was a friend of the Shelleys. even acting as Percy Shelleys personal physician at one time, and they clearly took his side in what became an intense struggle during which Lawrence was suspended from the college and forced to withdraw his most radical book. Butler argues, intriguingly, that Victor Frankensteins approach to his problem is in fact a satire on Abernethys prescription for the study of living things. The creature is a walking disaster because its creators method rests on a vital spark which can reanimate dead matter. He fails because he is insufficiently materialist. because he is an incompetent scientist. By the time of the third edition, with the revised text of 1831,
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Mary chose to distance herself from this implication. which is radically different from the reading of the story which has dominated popular culture ever since. Numerous textual changes-summarized here in an appendix-and Mary Shelleys new preface moved the whole much closer to the morality tale implied by the prologue to the 1931 film. In the end. Fascinating though this material is. the immediate involvement of the book in this debate is perhaps of little import for later. popular. readings of the story. And to my mind Butler overstates her case for the dependence of Shelleys text on Lawrences. In this. as in so many other respects, the book is ambivalent. It was. in fact. perfectly possible to read even the first edition as supporting Abernethys position rather than Lawrences. More to the point. as Butler concedes: even readers of the first edition might well have remained unaware of its exploitation of the AbernethyLawrence debate: it was masked by so many fleeting references to science at a more popular, less specialized and generally less controversial level. But aside from making the original text readily available once again, this new edition, and the argument of the introduction. does fix our attention once again on the central importance of science. and ideas of science. in the genesis of the novel. I t is this synthesis of images that Mary Shelley achieved, building a composite image of contemporary science into the narrative. w,hich helped give it a life far beyond the particular historical episode which Butler highlights. The book was as much a response to a longer-running debate about life and mechanism-dating back to Descartes and La Mettrie. at least-as to the immediate dispute. Indeed. another very recent historical study places it squarely in that larger context. I t is because tho/ debate still goes on that the story still grips us so. For a creature born asexually, and whose prospective mate is destroyed by its creator. the monster has reproduced astonishingly well, and is still going strong as we approach his 200th anniversary. Trying to understand why should continue to occupy at least part of our effort to fathom how our culture deals with the science and technology whose momentum has increased so much since Mary Shelley dreamed her dream on the shores of Lake Geneva.

References
I Aldiss. 8.. 1975. Billion Yew Spree (London: Corgi Books), p.26. 2 Roszak. T.. 1976. The Monster and the Titan: science, knowledge and gnosis. Scimm and irs Public: the Cllunging Relnrionship, edited by Gerdld Holton and William A. Blanpied (Dordrecht: Reidel), pp.17-32. 3 Hindle, M., 1992. Introduction. to Shelley. M . . Frunkonrein (Harmondsworth: Penguin). p.xliii. 4 Weart. S.. 1988. Nuclear Fear: A Hisrory oflmoges (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), p.104-105. 5 McCorduck. P..1979. Moclina Who Think (San Francisco: W, H. Freeman). 6 Lewin, R.. 1977. The mayor and the monster. New Scienlisl. 6 October. p. 16. 7 Mendelsohn, E.. 1984, Frankenstein at Harvard the public politics of recombinant DNA research. TruiI.~/ornrulion mid Trndirion in rlrr Scinrcm: E..Y~s in Ifonow o f / , Btmzard Col?m.,r (Cambridge University Press). pp.317-336. 8 Tyler, A.. 1991. The Frankenstein factor. Weekend Guardian. 1 6 March pp.8-9.21. 1993, Perilous Knowledge: Tlr H > m Genome Projcci und irs Implicurions (London: Faber 9 Wilkie. T,, and Faber). 10 Gaylin, W., 1972. The Frankenstein myth becomes a rwlity. N e w York Times Mog(l;iize, 5 March. p,l2, I I Hammond. R., 1986, The Modern Frankfnsreiii(Poole: Blandford Press). 12 Florescu, R.,1917. It?S m r 4 ofFranke,rsrebt (London: New English Library): hvalley. A.. 1979. The f Frankensicin. edited by G . Levine and stage and film children of Frankenstein. The Endurance o U. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley: University of California Press).

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13 Glut, D., 1973, The F M ~ W I S I P Lgend(New ~R Jersey: Methuen). 14 Ketterer. D.. 1978, Mary Shelley and science fiction: a select bibliography. SrfeiiceFimort Srudies, 5, 172. 15 Levine, G.. 1979, The ambiguous heritage of Frankenstein. The E,rdurunct ofFrunkmstein. edited by G. Levine and U. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley: University of California Press). 16 Smith, 1. 1992. Frunbiisrsin: Cuse Srudirs ifr Conrcnrporury Criticism (Boston: St Martins Press). 17 Mellor, A., 1988. Mor? Slrclley: Her L@. Iter Fictimr, iwr Moo,isrcrs (London: Routledge). On Bacon see especially Keller, E., 1985, Baconian science: the arts of mastery and obedience. R&criofr.r 011Gotdw mrd S e i m v (New Haven: Yale University Press). pp.33-42 18 Butler, M., 1993, The first Frankenstein and radical science. Tinirr Lilrmry Siippli~nirftt. 9 April, pp.12-14. This !$an edited version of Butlers introduction to the novel. 19 Reiger. J., 1974. lnrrodwtio,r lo Shellq. M..Fru,iP<uisrciir(New York: Bobbs-Merrill). 20 Tourney. C., 1992. The moral character of mad scientists: a cultural critique of science. Sci~mcc. Tcc$zo/ogy and Humon Valucs. 17.41 1-437. ?I Tudor. A.. 1989, Monsters urd Mod Sciorrisrs: CI Culrwol Hislory ofrhr Honor Moi,iu (Oxford Basil Blackwell). p.85. 23 Madish. B., 1993. Tlw Foerrtt Disconriiraity: Tlw Co~rwdz,liou o/ H ~ i o r r mid r Murlrba~r (New Haven: Yale University Press). especially Chap.?.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, edited by Marilyn Butler, 1993 (London: Pickering and Chatto), ISBN 1 85196 028 7,266pp, 24.95

Author

Dr Jon Turney was features editor of the Times Highor Education Suppletncwr. and is now Wellcome Fellow in Science Communication in the Department of the History, Philosophy and Communication of Science, University College London, Cower Street, London W C l E 6BT. UK.
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