Huntington Library Quarterly Volume 83.4 Winter 2020
Special Issue: Frankenstein and Its Environments, Then and Now
Edited by Jerrold E. Hogle
ARTICLES
This
prolegomenon to a collection of eleven essays provides a setting for
them all by explaining the ongoing significance of Mary Shelley’s
original Frankenstein two hundred years after it was first published; the theme of multiple “environments” that imbues Frankenstein and
its offshoots and that is common to all these essays; the novel’s
emergence from a generic environment of fiction (the Gothic) that
established itself in the 1760s and continues to this day; the history
of interpretations of Frankenstein generated by the various
theoretical environments in which it has been analyzed; and how all of
the following essays, including the particular environments of Frankenstein they treat, both advance that history and fit into the overall scheme of this special issue.
Of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus—as
the or (appositive or alternative?) may suggest—origins are in such
oversupply, such over-determination, as to make a question of origin
itself. Its complex multiples extend to a report from the decade in
which Frankenstein is cast, the 1790s: J. M. Itard’s De l’éducation d’un homme sauvage (1801),
about a feral boy of mysterious origin. Susan Wolfson investigates the
several origin-stories for, in, from, and around Mary Shelley’s durably
dynamic novel, including the question of “monstrous” assignments and the
riddle for Enlightenment thought about whether primitive existence is
ideal innocence, or savagery.
The
volcanic period of 1816–18 is the most recent and vivid case study we
have for worldwide climate catastrophe, evident from archival and
geological records of sustained extreme weather, including drought,
floods, storms, and crop-killing temperature decline. The signature
literary expression of this historic climate crisis occurred in
Switzerland, where teenage Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in
the midst of the disastrous “Year without a Summer,” 1816, a season of
floods and food riots caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora thousands
of miles away. This essay, combining climate science with historical and
literary sources, reexamines the literary legend of that direful,
stormy summer, which Mary Shelley spent on the shores of Lake Geneva
with the poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, with a new and original
emphasis on its climatic context. The writers huddled indoors and wrote
ghost stories, while the cataclysmic weather and humanitarian emergency
unfolding around them weaved its way into Mary Shelley’s imagining of a
tragic monster brought to life.
The goal of this essay is to read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as
a “bioethical” novel that draws upon several Romantic-era discourses
that powerfully combined medical environmentalism, ecology, and
political reform to criticize the “biotechnology” of her era. In her
novel, Mary Shelley engages in a critique of the selective breeding that
farmers of her era used to create new biological beings, as Victor
Frankenstein does, by building on the role that new breeds of livestock
played in the industrialization of late eighteenth-century British
agriculture and the greater consumption of animal food in England. At
the same time, Frankenstein also points up the problematic
links between such breeding schemes and two other factors of the same
period: the greater mobility of peoples and animals made viable by
wide-ranging, seagoing trade, and the multiplicity of different-colored
races made more apparent by how this mobility enabled the possibility of
more human, as well as animal, crossbreeding.
A
white, wealthy, educated male, Victor Frankenstein spends a good
portion of Mary Shelley’s novel complaining about being a slave to his
Creature. Victor’s laments draw attention to Frankenstein’s
engagement with debates about race, slavery, and abolition. The novel
seems to ask what a slave is and thereby challenges notions about racial
difference and the ideals of cultural/intellectual superiority that
support enslaving populations. Foundational studies by H. L. Malchow and
others on race in Frankenstein have defined the views of
Shelley’s father, William Godwin, as well as the pervasive ideas of the
era, to clarify the ways in which the Creature is racially coded to
align with stereotypes about Blacks in particular. Using these studies
as a starting point, Maisha Wester specifically examines the ways in
which Shelley’s text engages the anxieties born out of slave
insurrections and Britain’s abolition of the slave trade. To this end,
she explores Shelley’s depiction of the turbulence in British society
arising from these issues, showing how the Creature’s attacks
metaphorize the insurrections that disturbed the era’s notions of racial
difference. Ultimately, her essay explains how Victor is, indeed, a
“slave”—as are many others like him.
This essay argues that Romantic-era concepts of regulation help us to understand both how and why Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein provided
a critical commentary on the sciences and political theories of its
time and why the novel has continued to serve as a cultural touchpoint
for understanding the implications of new technologies (for example,
genetic engineering). Concepts of regulation appear at key points in Frankenstein,
including in Robert Walton’s hopes that his trip to the North Pole will
result in a scientific discovery about magnetism that can “regulate a
thousand celestial observations” and in his and Victor Frankenstein’s
reflections on the relationship between their education and their
identities. Concepts of regulation were also central for many
eighteenth-century and Romantic-era natural scientists, philosophers,
political economists, and political theorists (including Antoine
Lavoisier, Immanuel Kant, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Godwin), and
they were paramount to the development of “liberal” economic theory,
which aimed to use the science of political economy to limit the power
of the state. Robert Mitchell argues that Frankenstein takes up
these concepts of regulation in order to critique this linkage of
liberalism and the sciences, with the end of encouraging its readers to
reimagine the components of liberalism in more equitable forms.
Only recently, with the rise of critical animal studies, have readings of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein begun
to do full justice to the hybrid nature of Frankenstein’s Creature,
constructed (as Victor tells us) from materials found in the
“slaughter-house” as well as the “dissecting room.” Yet even
animal-studies scholars view the Creature’s brain as “human,” in the
absence of any supporting evidence from Shelley’s text. Here, Alan
Richardson traces the Creature’s horrific effect to dual anxieties that
came to ferment during the early nineteenth century, both of them amply
documented in the brain science of Shelley’s era and in published
reactions to it. First, the line between human and animal was becoming
notably porous, in natural history, in comparative anatomy and
physiology, and even in such areas as the controversy over vaccination.
Second, a new discourse of instinctive and innate mental tendencies had
come to compete with both creationist and tabula rasa accounts of the
human mind—a development that further eroded the border between human
and animal. Frankenstein’s Creature, a literally monstrous hybrid, both
embodies these anxieties and exaggerates them, as a fully material and
yet rational humanoid entity with body parts, and perhaps neural organs
and instincts, traceable to animals.
This
segment consists primarily of a transcript of the question-and-answer
exchange conducted at the Huntington on May 12, 2018, between Nick Dear,
the author of the 2011 adaptation of Frankenstein first
presented by the National Theatre of Great Britain, and Dr. Anne K.
Mellor, Distinguished Research Professor of English at UCLA. The
interview was then and is here preceded by general remarks from Mr.
Dear, for which he provides the following abstract: “I first remind our
readers that I am a playwright, not a scholar, and that I identified a
‘gap in the market.’ Whilst there are many movie versions of the novel
in existence, there has not been, to my knowledge, a stage version that
was a good play. I wanted to do justice to Mary Shelley’s ‘handbook of
radical philosophy’; at the same time, I stress that it’s a fairy tale,
not a work of science. I then focus on the decision made with the
director, Danny Boyle, to reframe the narrative from the Creature’s
point of view. I go on to discuss some of the issues that this raised
and the dramaturgical decisions that were subsequently made (for
example, losing the framing narrative in the novel of Robert Walton on
the ship). Finally, I talk about the difficulties of ending the story
onstage—and my solution—given the ambivalent ending of Shelley’s novel.”
Frankenstein presents
us today with two different stories and two different lessons. The
book, especially in the 1818 first edition, tells the story of Victor
Frankenstein’s neglect of his parental duties and the harms that
followed. The more lasting myth that succeeded the novel, however,
became popular as early as the 1823 production of the first theatrical
piece based on the book, Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein. This play’s different lesson is that Frankenstein dared
too much, presumed to divine powers, and thus instigated the harms that
followed. Modern bioscience affords us many unprecedented and
disconcerting possibilities through, among other tools, genetics,
neuroscience, stem-cell biology, and assisted reproduction. Which
lessons should we apply to those possibilities, and from which of the
two Frankenstein stories? Henry T. Greely argues that we should
mainly fulfill the novel’s views of our duties of care. We should
indeed, in Bruno Latour’s words, “Love our Monsters,” though we also
need to heed the allure to the public of the myth of presumption.
Looking back over the essays in this collection, as well as the two-hundred-plus years since Frankenstein was
conceived and published, this postscript asks us to recall that Mary
Shelley’s own life experiences, especially childbirth, were sources for
her story, even as it incorporated many other ingredients from her
milieu. And today, the possibilities for creating artificial life that Frankenstein reflects
on and prefigures so vividly are echoed directly in much bioscience.
Shelley’s tale haunts our minds when we learn of the development of the
Non-Invasive Prenatal Diagnosis, which can genetically scan a pregnant
woman’s blood to make detailed predictions about her fetus, and
especially CRISPR technology, which could be used to edit the genes of a
human embryo. More than Victor Frankenstein did with his creation, we
must take responsibility for both the intended and the unintended
consequences of human germline engineering.
Submitted by Paul Chase, Penn Press Journals
