What is a monster?
A monster is clearly something that identifies something within us
that we're unwilling to confront.
The monster is created by humans being illiberal,
not being welcoming enough to another way of looking or another way of being.
A monster is everything that a given society holds abhorrent,
projected outside of itself.
The zombie is a Caribbean idea in origin,
from the slave culture in the 19th and 20th century.
A slave is a human without all the rights and aspects of humanity,
without control over their own will, without control over their own children,
a property of someone else, a thing.
Zombies!
They're very clearly associated with the witch doctor.
One of his powers was reputed to be the ability to render rebel slaves invincible,
or immortal, so they would commit acts of great bravery during slave rebellions.
So the zombie sort of carries these resonances all at once
of the rebel slave
and of the danger of slave rebellion,
and of a remarkably placid and controlled slave workforce.
The zombie and the creature in Frankenstein
and several other half-human brute kind of creations
are all speculations on what it means to be alive and to be human.
Mary Shelley probably hadn't ever come across the word "zombie",
but what she did know about was the slave rebels.
And the book is very careful, Mary Shelley is very careful
to play on that distinction between a kind of prejudice against people
whose appearance is different for various different reasons,
and the creature's own assertion as "natural humanity".
The creature doesn't know he's a monster at first.
The word "android" was coined
long before "Frankenstein effect".
That was partly to do with the emergence of these new mechanical toys and automata.
Jacques de Vaucanson was a child prodigy who could do anything with clockwork.
In the late 1730s, he produced this amazing flute-playing device which could reproduce
some of the most difficult human muscular actions in playing the flute.
Even more famous was his mechanical duck,
which had 4,000 moving parts.
The device that we think Mary Shelley probably did see
was the trio of automata that were shown in Switzerland in Neuchâtel
called the Draughtsman, the Writer and the Musician.
The Writer could write, "I think, therefore I am,"
this famous supposed demonstration of being a human.
So there are these three devices that we think she saw in 1816,
just two years before Frankenstein.
The automata were very much connected to notions of Enlightenment philosophy,
so trying to rethink the very notion of the human.
If you could reproduce the human being in a mechanical device,
did that mean that, actually, there was no soul?
We are concerned about robots that are too similar,
that look like us, that are too familiar, that are uncanny.
On the other hand, robots also represent the monstrous "other",
these things that are totally different from us, that are, literally, inhuman.
Automata and robots are emerging
at the time that the Industrial Revolution is coming into being, in the 1780s, 1790s.
You get the beginnings, then, of working-class movements, Luddites and so on,
who are anxious about their labour being replaced.
This is a constant theme in our 200-year history of robotics, really,
this sense that they are our instruments, they're supposed to enhance our capacities
but actually perhaps, in the end, they might replace us.
The Golem is a man made from earth and water,
who is animated by some kind of mystical incantation.
It originates in the Kabbalah, which is a book of Jewish mysticism.
That book is a meditation on creation,
an effort to try to understand the secrets of creation.
In many ways, the Golem is an exact imitation of the human.
He's created from clay, as God created the first man,
and he continues to grow and grow and grow.
So it's quite interesting that the Golem, in some ways, is not monstrous at all.
After Frankenstein was written, we see,
perhaps, the influence of Frankenstein the book on the Golem legend itself.
In later elaborations of the story,
the rabbi forgets to monitor the Golem in the way that he ought to.
The Golem actually runs amok and threatens to destroy the synagogue.
The rabbi manages to finally get control over him and kill him.
At that point, the monstrous aspect of him
is clearly the fact that he is a creature with the physical form of a human,
but no will and no moral consciousness.
The responsibility for controlling him lies with his maker
and it's his maker who has reneged that responsibility.
The rabbi is responsible for the acts of the Golem.
The Golem himself has no will and no ability to make judgements.
In the same way,
Victor Frankenstein is responsible for those monstrous acts of the creature that he made.
Late in the 19th century,
Jews were increasingly the subject of accusations of ritual murder.
At this point, the Golem legend changes slightly
so that the Golem becomes a protector of the Jewish community.
We can even see contemporary versions of that in the figure of Superman,
who was created in the 1930s by two Jewish cartoonists in America,
as a kind of super-protector figure.
The monster, so-called, is an incredibly sympathetic figure
precisely because, I think, that the humans are the monstrous figures in the text.
He gets cast out, therefore becomes this figure of unremitting mechanic vengeance.
So there is a sense in which the text kind of flips
between an immense sympathy for this creation,
that humans could be recreated and could be just as sympathetic,
and on the other hand, this sense that, actually, we can't cope with that idea
and therefore we produce our own monsters.
There are comparatively few representations of the Arctic
in fiction in the 18th and 19th century.
In fact, I can't think of any others!
It's something there about the creature's ability
to go beyond normal human bounds into this white landscape,
of absolute purity, where Victor Frankenstein can't follow him —
showing his superiority, in a way, that he's a superman.
He's not a monster.
Captions provided by Stagetext