Mary Shelley s Frankenstein On January 1st, 1818, Mary Shelley, at age
nineteen, published the gothic novel Frankenstein.
It has become a classic of English literature.
She was in a privileged position to craft this rich cultural-historical document because
her father William Godwin was a leading enlightenment philosopher, her mother Mary Wollstonecraft
was a pioneer English feminist who defended the rights of women, and her husband Percy
Shelley was a leading romantic poet.
Thus was this precocious and gifted writer poised to dramatize the clash of two cultures
the Enlightenment that celebrated reason and science and the Romantic age that celebrated
passion and art.
She was also energized by a series of personal traumas that fueled her feverish story: ten
days after her birth her mother died from puerperal fever, at seventeen she eloped with
Percy who abandoned his wife, the following year her premature illegitimate child died
shortly after being born and her half-sister Fanny Godwin committed suicide, a couple of
months later Percy s wife committed suicide, and just before the publication of the novel
Mary gave birth to a daughter, indicating that during a good part of the novel s composition
she was pregnant and in mourning, overloaded with images of birth and death.
Mary began the novel one stormy night in the Swiss Alps when her husband Percy and his
friend Lord Byron each undertook to write a ghost story.
By morning Mary had outlined hers.
It centered on a quintessential mad scientist Dr. Victor Frankenstein who, with the best
of intentions of restoring health and prolonging life, undertook to create an eight foot tall
human being made of body parts collected from exhumed graves.
The novel s subtitle, Or, the Modern Prometheus, evokes the first great scientist of Greek
mythology who in various versions teaches medicine and science, steals fire from Zeus
and gives it to humanity, or creates a human being from clay.
For those actions Zeus punishes him by having an eagle pluck out his liver every night.
In the novel, Frankenstein creates life and thereby challenges God (instead of Zeus) and
is punished by having his creation kill a number of his close relatives and friends,
including his bride on their wedding night.
Frankenstein instilled life in his creation by some unspecified means, but hints in the
novel suggest that it was probably in accord with the laws of electricity and Galvanism
as they were known in his time.
The creature s appearance with watery eyes and pale yellow skin was frightening, and
Frankenstein fled in horror.
The novel dramatizes the clash between the eighteenth-century enlightenment and nineteenth-century
romanticism.
Shelley targeted the enlightenment idolatry of reason and mechanistic forces by attacking
the idea that man was a predictable and rationally controllable machine.
She counters this position with a quotation from Percy s poem Mutability that rebuts her
father s mechanistic determinism and opposition to free will Man s yesterday may ne er be
like his morrow; / Naught may endure but mutability.
The novel also makes veiled reference to the French Revolution with hints that the personality
turn of the creature mirrored the turn in the French Revolution from the early hopes
for liberty, equality, and fraternity to the subsequent dark days of the Reign of Terror.
As Frankenstein reflects, dreams that had been my food and pleasant rest for so long
a space were now a hell to me; and the change was so rapid, the overthrow so complete!
While the Enlightenment viewed nature as benevolent, the romantics saw it as awe inspiring but
potentially threatening.
Shelley captures the romantic sensibility of such sublime beauty by setting her story
in rugged regions of the Swiss Alps with cascading waterfalls and jagged snow-covered peaks where
Frankenstein and his creature coincidentally bump into each other and clash.
The story has been the basis for dozens of films including the 1931 classic that erroneously
has Frankenstein give his creation a criminal s brain.
The iconic horrifying face and overall story suggest that the monster is the quintessence
of evil, although in the novel the creature s vengeful turn is caused by the reaction
of others to his frightening countenance that was not his fault.
The story bears on current moral debates about cloning and the responsibility of a scientist
for his discoveries.
Frankenstein creates a human being, and as a result he and his family are destroyed by
it.
But the dark consequences of Frankenstein s actions do not stem from his brilliant science
per se but by the emotional reaction of him and others who all respond negatively to the
creature s frightening appearance.
Still, an underlying message of the novel is that the creation of a human being by unnatural
means is a dangerous undertaking fraught with perils from human emotions and sensibilities
if not from the displeasure of a god.
Shelley s novel is ultimately, however, a celebration of the most ambitious scientific
undertakings, even though the two men who first undertake to carry them out fail to
do so.
Its first narrator, Robert Walton, begins his narration in a series of letters to his
sister from aboard a ship that he is captaining on a journey to discover the North Pole.
He is full of high-minded intentions in the spirit of the Enlightenment to discover the
ultimate origin of the longitudinal lines and of the magnetic force that governs the
workings of a compass.
While he searches for the ultimate origin of navigational space, he meets Frankenstein
who had sought the ultimate origin of life.
Walton never gets to the North Pole, and Frankenstein dies trying to kill his creature.
But both of those projects are carried to fruition, in a sense, by the creature who,
in the end, is heading to the North Pole, and we have no doubt that he will reach it,
where he will kill himself in a suicidal blaze.