Frankenstein

On June 16, 1816, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley created one of the enduring myths of modern civilization: the narrative of the scientist who single-handedly creates a new species, a humanoid form that need not die. In her novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818), Victor Frankenstein robs both cemeteries and slaughterhouses in order to suture together a creature composed of dead animal and human body parts, a creature he then animates with the “spark of life.” In doing so, he claims he has renewed life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption. Frankenstein thus realizes the age-old wish of mankind to transcend mortality, to become a god. And like Prometheus, who in ancient myth shaped the human species out of clay and then stole fire from the Olympian gods to give to man, Victor Frankenstein expects to be revered, even worshipped.

But in his hubristic quest to become God, to create an immortal race, Frankenstein constructs a monster that eventually destroys his wife, his best friend, and his baby brother; these events so exhaust Frankenstein that he dies at an early age. Mary Shelley's novel has thus become the paradigm for every scientific effort to harness the uncontrollable powers of nature and the unintended consequences those efforts have produced, be they nuclear fission, genetic engineering, stemcell cloning, or bioterrorism. The popular conflation of the scientist with his monster—such that “Frankenstein” is as often the name of the creature as of his maker—only points to a profound understanding of Shelley's novel in which Victor Frankenstein finally becomes as filled with hatred, revenge, and the desire to destroy as the creature he hunts across the Arctic wastes.

How did the 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Shelley) come to write such a prescient tale of modern science? Two years earlier, on [Page 459]July 28, 1814, Mary had eloped with the poet Percy Shelley to France. Seven months later, Mary gave birth prematurely to a baby girl, called Clara, who lived only 2 weeks, after which she had a recurrent dream that her little baby came to life again, that it had only been cold, and that she had rubbed it before the fire, and it had lived. Immediately pregnant again, Mary gave birth to her son William on January 24, 1816. Four months later, Mary, Percy, and Mary's stepsister Claire left England to join Claire's new lover, Lord Byron, in Geneva. Kept indoors by the coldest summer in a century following the eruption of the volcano Tamboro in the Indonesian archipelago in April (which threw so much debris into the atmosphere that the sun was literally blocked out), reading ghost stories for their amusement, the four friends decided on June 16, 1816, to have a contest in which each would compete to write the most frightening story.

That night Mary had the “waking dream,” or reverie, which provided the germ of Frankenstein. Born from Mary's own deepest pregnancy anxieties (What if I gave birth to a monster? Could I ever wish to kill my own child?), her novel brilliantly explores what happens when a man attempts to have a baby without a woman (Victor Frankenstein immediately abandons his creature); of why an abandoned and unloved creature becomes a monster; of the predictable consequences of her day's cutting-edge research in chemistry, physics, and electricity (most notably the experiments of Erasmus Darwin, Humphrey Davy, and Luigi Galvani); and of the violent aftermath of the French Revolution. Psychologically, Mary draws directly on her own childhood experiences of isolation and abandonment after her mother's death in childbirth and her father's remarriage to a hostile stepmother to articulate Frankenstein's creature's overwhelming desire for a family, a mate of his own, and his subsequent violent anger when he is rejected by all whom he approaches, even his maker. By including an image of the murder of her own son William in the novel, Mary articulated her deepest fear that an unloved (and psychologically abused) child, such as she herself had been, could become an unloving, abusing mother, even a murdering monster.

...