4 Turney in PUS

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DOI: 10.1088/0963-6625/3/2/006

1994 3: 225Public Understanding of ScienceJon Turney

In the grip of the monstrous myth

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Public Understand. Sei. 3 1994)225 231. Printed in the UK

ESSAY REVIEW

In the grip of the monstrous mythJon Turney assesses the contemporary relevance of Mary ShelleysFrankenstein, in its 1993 edition with a new introduction by MarilynButler

If we want to improve ou r feeling for public attitudes t o science an d technology, a ndespecially toward the life sciences, a close study of Frankenstein is indispensible. VictorFrankenstein and his creature cast a longer shadow over public discussion than anyother fictional figures. Their life in popular culture (where the two are generallyinterchangeable) has been extraordinarily rich and vigorous for almost 200 years. Thisfine new edition of the novel, with a new scholarly introduction, is a good place tobegin discussion of this ur-text for students of public understanding of science. It is agood 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 sharplyvarious aspects of the books significance. And because M arilyn B utler oRers a newinterpretation of the context in which Mary Shelley framed her narrative, an inter-pretation which emphasizes the importance of contemp orary science in provoking herimagination.Why Frankenstein, hough? The question almost answ ers itself. The point is not , ofcourse, that many today actually read the book. No-one needs to. Consider thecreation scene in Mary Shelleys original:

It was on a dreary night of November, tha t I beheld the accomplishm ent of mytoils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instru-ment of life arou nd me, that might infuse a spa rk of being int o the lifelessthing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning: the rain pattereddismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by theglimmer of the half-extinguished light, saw the dull yellow eye of the creatureopen; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.Th e image this evokes is part of the common culture, if anything is. Brian Aldiss, whohas long maintained tha t the book is the first true work of science fiction, agrees:

Fo r a thousand people familiar with the story of Victor creating his monsterfrom cadaver spares and endowing them with new life, only to shrink back inhorror from his own creation, not one will have read Mary Shelleys originalnovel. This suggests something of the power of infiltration of this first greatmyth of the industrial age.

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226 J . TurneyIt is easy to make the case for this today. The 1931 James Whale film is still regularlyaired-with on e national TV showing in Britain in 1993, not long after a firstbroadcast for an entirely new production which hewed much closer to the novel. Theimage will be reinforced in 1994, when a new multi-million dollar feature film willappear (Kenneth Branagh as Victor, Robert de Niro as the monster. Branaghdirecting). In 1993 Jurassic Park-whose plot is basically a blend of Frankenstein withThe Island of Dr Moreau-replayed the theme to startling effect. Th us the mainmedium for propagating the image in this century will go on recharging andreworking it.

This kind of currency also means that the F-word is constantly invoked in moreformal discussions of science and technology. A very general example might beTheodore Roszak, in full counter-cultural Row in the mid-1970s: To find the culturalmeaning of modern science, for Frankensteins monster, read natu re at large as weexperience it, He underlines the point in the same essay, arguing that our popularculture expresses a legitimate public fear of the scientists stripped-down . depersonal-ized conception of knowledge-a fear that our scientists, well-intentioned and decentmen a nd women all, will go on being titans who create monsters.Th e symbolic value of the monster is general enough to apply to most individualfields of science and technology. Maurice Hindle, author of the introduction to themost readily available popular edition of the novel. closes his scholarly account of thebook with a combined ecological and anti-nuclear message: A nuclear-weapons-infested globe readily poised to destroy itself does all to o easily seem like a threateningfulfilment of Mary Shelleys prophetic Frankenstein Idea.3 The notion appeared atthe dawn of the nuclear age. An NBC radio commentator told his American listenerson the day of Hiroshima: For all we know, we have created a Frankenstein. T he termwas soon heard everywhere, from street corners to the United States Senate. asSpencer Weart records in his history of nuclear im agery.4 Others maintain that thenovels ideas apply equally well to computers. Pamela McCorduck suggests that thebook combines nearly all the psychological, moral and social elements of the historyof artificial intelligen~e.~However, the monster makes its most regular appearances in discussion of recentdevelopments in biology, whether recombinant DNA research. n vitro fertilization ortransplant surgery. Mayor Alfred Velluci o f Cambridge, Massachusetts, seeking torestrain recombinant DNA research at Harvard a couple of years after Roszak wrote,spoke of experiments which could lead to Frankenstein monsters crawling out of thesewers? A t least one scholarly com mentator saw this a s a defining moment of thedebate in Boston. A more recent example is a lengthy journalists critique of thehuman genome programme published in the Guardian in 1991, headed The Franken-stein Factor.x This is an instructive item because the text supplied by the writer doesnot actually mention Frankenstein. framing the critique in terms of a new eugenicsinstead. But the Guardian sub-editor has evidently decided that the Nazi spectresalluded to need supplementing with the older vocabulary, and has inserted Franken-stein in b oth the main headline and the repeat heading when the article continues o n alater page. T he freight this single term carries reframes th e whole piece at a s troke .This kind of allusion is often found in the heat of debate, or of composing anewspaper headline or drawing a cartoon. But there are cooler appraisals which alsomake use of the monster. The first book on the human genome project by a Britishscience writer mentions Frankenstein on the opening page. although it only makes onefurther appearance in the text? A mo re striking example is a long piece in the New

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In the g r i p of the monstrous myth 227York Times M agazine in I972 which discusses the development of cloning as a leadinginstance of how the 'Frankenstein Myth Becomes a Reality', as the heading puts it.'"There is even a complete book abo ut modern biomedical research-based on a TVscript for the BBC-which frames the whole enterp rise in terms of steps towardsrealizing Victor Frankenstein's project. F igures as diverse as Christian Barnard an dFrancis Crick are depicted as 'modern Frankensteins', bent on turning fiction intofact." This is an intriguing document. It offers a potted history of Mary Shelley'srelations with Byron and his circle, their summer sojourn by Lake Geneva, thecelebrated ghost story competition and the way the central image of the book came toM ary (as she later claimed) in a dream a few days later, and a detailed summary of theplot. But all of these are woven together with accounts of modern scientific andtechnological developments which, i t is maintained, are prefigured in Mary Shelley'snovel.It is easy, then, to establish the contemporary resonance of Frankenstein, in theEnglish-speaking world at any rate. But it is also important to remember that thestory's popular appeal has been strong ever since its first appearance in 1818 Thepower of this tale in W estern popular c ultu re is far from a creation of Hollywood.There was a time when many did read the boo k, a s well a s watching one of numerousstage productions.Th e first play based on the book, Presumprion, or rhe Fare of Frankensrein, openedin 1823, and prompted a second edition of the novel. In contrast to the rest of MaryShelley's work, i t has been in print ever since. The play itself was a critical andpopular success, running for three months, and spawning other productions whichwere widely viewed throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. Th e stripped-downmelodrama was then an obvious subject for the cinema, and the Edison Companymade the first Frankenstein film as early as 1910.There is thus a continuity throug hou t the prolfieration of Frankensteinian imagery,which took hold unstoppably in the twentieth century. Th e stan da rd source here forthe first three-quarters of he century is Donald F. Glut's obsessively detailed heFrankenstein Legend. 3 As David Ketterer puts i t 'one is dazzled by [Glut's] endlesscitations of the theme on television; in comic, dramatic, information. variety, musicaland cartoon shows. Then follows an even longer list of commercial products thatcapitalize on the legend'.l4 In her own introduction to the 1831 edition, Mary Shelleyhalf-jokingly, though revealingly, 'bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper'.Th at it has.These outpourings have naturally directed a good deal of critical attention to thesource: to the novel and to the roots of Mary Shelley's narrative. 'While Frankensteinis a phenomenon of popular culture, i t is so because it has tapped into the centre ofWestern feeling and imagination', as George Levine rightly says.15 The re is a wealth o fmaterial analysing the text from the viewpoint of every school of literary analysis,usefully summarized in another recent edition which includes a series of criticalessays." And A nne Mellor's excellent recent scholarly biography of M ary Shelley alsodiscusses the novel at length."As all this work demonstrates, Shelley's complex youthful text is 'famouslyreinterpretable'. in Butler's phrase." It is marked by her turbulent life: she was thedaughter 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 lessthan two weeks. I t is also a remarkable blend of literary and scientific sources, madepossible 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 legendsto Erasm us Darwin, Galvan i and Davy. to create a new myth.It is, abo ve all, a myth o f the new science. Mary might have been expected to tu rnto alchemy o r mysticism for her animating principle. Her father wro te a Lives of rheNecromancers which included chapters o n Paracelsus an d C ornelius Agrippa, and it isindeed the writings of these figures which first seize the imagination of the youngVictor Frankenstein. However, when he progresses from self-directed study to theUniversity, the profe ssors scoff at his infatua tion with Albe rtus Magnus and Paracelsus,and he becomes acquainted with modern chemistry. In Aldisss words. Symbolically,Frankenstein turns aw ay from alchemy and the past towards science an d the future-an d is rewarded with his horrible success.This is one of the keys to the novels resonance, despite James Riegers argumentthat it is wrong to see it as a pioneer work of science fiction; Its author knewsomething o f . [Davy, Darw in and Galvani] but Frankensteins chemistry isswitched on magic, souped-up alchemy, the electrification of Paracelsus. He is acriminal magician who uses up-to-date tools.It is however, a crucial innovation. It is precisely the electrification of Paracelsuswhich marks out Frankenstein as a pivotal point i n the transition from the super-naturally fantastic to the scientifically plausible. The chemist at the university tellsVictor how the ancient teachers promised impossibilities an d performed nothing. O nthe other hand, modern scientists:

penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in herhidden places. They ascend to the heavens; they have discovered how the bloodcirculates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new andalmost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic theearthq uake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadow s.

The passage is a pastiche of Humphrey Davys contemporary chemical rhetoric. butechoes of Fra nc is Bacon also come through clearly.It is also the images of science in the book which have been among the mostenduring. In the original text, once Victors narrative begins, the creation of themonster is accomplished in a scant 5 pages of this printing, in which space is alsofound to delineate the background and education of the monsters creator. Thescientific details are few. The rest of the text, with its complex moral structure, theimplication of the crea ture as Victors alter ego, the monster portrayed as a Rousseau-esque noble savage corrupted by the world, and the dramatic conflict between reasonand emotion, is what suffers most in the innumerable retellings of the tale. Yet in thosefirst few pages can be found the seeds of almost all th e images of science an d scientistswhich appear in so many variations in later stories. Although it is easy to deride thecrudity of many later reworkings of the tale, especially on the screen, in this respectthey tend t o show a stro ng fidelity to Shelleys tex t.Among others, you can find in Frankenstein models for the scientist whose goodintentions 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 humanframe and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death , Victor proclaims. Incontrast, he also begins the lineage of the scientist as Faustian knowledge seeker: theworld was to me a secret which I desired to divine, he remembers, and recalls thatnone but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements ofscience. He is also shown as a narrow materialist: On my education my father had



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In the g r i p of the monstrous myrh 229taken the greatest precautions that my mind should be impressed with no supernaturalhorr ors 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 ofthe scientist, and eventually overwhelming him. Natural philosophy, Victor reflectssadly, is the genius that has regulated my fate.

Amid all the simplifications, deletions and distortions of the original which haveoccurred, two things have remained inviolate, and o ne is the identification of Victor asa scientist. Indeed the very lack of scientific detail in the text enables the tale to bemore 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 in-creasingly amoral as nineteenth century texts are adapted to twentieth century films.but there is plenty of warrant in this particula r text for th e later images.The second, related continuity is the identification, through Victor, of science as ama le enterprise bent on dom inating a feminized nature. A gain. the links with B aconianrhetoric have been emphasized by recent feminist scholarship. As Mellor persuasivelyargues. this is the second principal novelty o f the Frankenstein my th. Victor creates anew life without female aid, destroys the creatures potential mate, and brings aboutthe death of his own partner before the marriage is consummated. Mary Shelleys ownambivalences about birth, parenting and marriage are interwoven with her attitude tothe new science, much as present-day reactions to reproductive technology mobilizethe most personal feelings in response to each new laboratory triumph. Men cannotbear children. but they may be able to create life i n the laboratory.As the ingredients of the novel are laid out like this, the potency of the narrativebegins to become clearer. The attempt to control birth, life and death through maledomination of nature continues to evoke such strong responses, it seems, becausescience still appears to many, now, as it did to Mary Shelley. at the beginning of thenineteenth century. I t is pointless to ask whether the myth fits the science o r whetherthe science is represented to fit the m yth: at som e level they ar e mutually dependen t.As have said, this above all is what survives of the original. Th e voice-over whichopens the 1931 film summarizes the elements of so many stories, while underlining thestrength of the connections with th e early sections of th e novel:

We are about to unfold the story of Frankenstein, a man of science, whosought to create a man after his own image, without reckoning upon God. It isone of the strangest stories ever told. I t deals with the two great mysteries ofcreation: life and death.

It is also in this area that Butler puts her case for a hitherto neglected source for thenovel. She argues strongly that Mary and her circle were attending closely to a cele-brated dispu te between William Lawrence, professor at t he Royal College of Surgeons,and his fellow professor and mentor John Abernethy. In this dispute. the younger manwas a materialist critic of his seniors vitalism. Lawrence was a friend of the Shelleys.even acting as Percy Shelleys personal physician at one time, an d they clearly took hisside in what became an intense struggle during which Lawrence was suspended fromthe college an d forced to withdraw his most radical book.Butler argues, intriguingly, that Victor Frankensteins approach to his problem isin fact a satire on Abernethys prescription for the study of living things. T he c reature

is a walking disaster because its creators method rests on a vital spark which canreanimate dead m atter. H e fails because he is insufficiently materialist. because he is anincompetent scientist. By the time of the third edition, with the revised text of 1831at Seoul National University on January 2, 2014pus.sagepub.comDownloaded from


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230 J . TumeyMary chose to distance herself from this implication. which is radically different fromthe reading of the story which has dominated popular culture ever since. Numeroustextual changes-summarized here in an appendix-and M ary Shelleys new prefacemoved the whole much closer to the morality tale implied by the prologue to the 1931film.

In the end. Fascinating though this material is. the immediate involvement of thebook 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 onLawrences. In this. as in so many other respects, the book is ambivalent. It was. infact. perfectly possible to read even the first edition as su ppo rting A bernethys positionrather than Lawrences. More to the point. as Butler concedes: even readers of thefirst edition might well have remained unaware of its exploitation of the Abernethy-Lawrence debate: it was masked by so many fleeting references to science at a morepopular, less specialized and generally less controversial level. But aside from makingthe original text readily available once again, this new edition, an d the argument of theintroduction. 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 compositeimage of contemporary science into the narrative. w,hich helped give i t a life farbeyond the particular historical episode which Butler highlights. The book was asmuch a response to a longer-running debate about life an d mechanism-dating backto Descartes and La Mettrie. at least-as to the immediate dispute. Indeed. anothervery recent historical study places i t squarely in tha t larger context. I t is because thodebate still goes on that the st ry still grips us so. For a creature born asexually, andwhose prospective mate is destroyed by its creator. the monster has reproducedastonishingly 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 tofathom how our culture deals with the science and technology whose momentum hasincreased so much since Mary Shelley dreamed her dream on the shores of LakeGeneva.References

Aldiss. 8.. 1975. Billion Y e w Spree (London: Corgi Books), p.26.2 Roszak. T.. 1976. The Monster and the Titan : science, knowledge and gnosis. S c im m and i r s 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.. 979. M o c l i n a Who Think San Francisco: W , H. Freeman .6 Lewin, R.. 1977. Th e mayor a nd the monster. New Scienlisl. 6 October . p. 16.7 Mendelsohn, E.. 1984, Frankenstein a t H arv ard the public politics of recombinant DNA research.TruiI.~/ornrulion id Trndirion n rlrr Scinrcm: E..Y~sn Ifonow o f / , Btmzard Col?m. rCambridge

University Press). pp.317-336.8 Tyler, A.. 1991. Th e Frankenstein f acto r. Weekend Guardian.16 March pp.8-9.21.9 Wilkie. T 993, Perilous Knowledge: T l r H > m Genome Projcci und i rs Implicurions (London: Faberand Faber) .10 Gay lin, W., 1972. T he Frankenstein m yth becomes a rwlity. N e w York imes Mog(l;i ize, 5 March. p, l2,Hammond. R., 1986, The Modern Frankfnsreiii Poole: Blandford Press).12 Florescu, R., 917 It?S m r 4 ofFranke,rsrebt (Lo ndo n: New English Library): hv al le y. A.. 1979. Th estage and film children of Frankenstein. The Endurance of Frankensicin. edited by G . Levine andU. Knoep flmacher (Berkeley: University o f Califo rnia Pre ss).



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I n th grip of the monstrous myth 2313 Glut, D., 1973, The F M ~ W I S I P ~ Rge nd (N ew Jersey: Methuen).14 Ketterer. D 1978, Mary Shelley and science fiction: a select bibliography. SrfeiiceFimort Srudies, 5,5 Levine, G.. 1979, The ambiguous heritage of Frankenstein. The E,rdurunct ofFrunkmstein.edited by16 Smith, 1. 1992. Frunb i i s rs i n : Cuse Srudirs ifr Conrcnrporury Criticism (Boston: St Martins Press).17 Mellor, A., 1988. Mor? Slrclley: Her L @ . Iter Fictimr, iwr Moo,isrcrs (Londo n: Routledge).On Bacon seeespecially Keller, E., 1985, Baconian science: the arts of m astery and obedience. R criofr.r 11Gotdwmrd eimv (New Haven: Yale University Press). pp.33-42

pp.12-14. This $an edited version of Butlers introduction to the novel.

172.G. Levine and U. Knoepflm acher (Berkeley: University of California Press).

18 Butler, M., 1993, T he first Frankenste in a nd radical science Tinirr Lilrmry Siippli~nirftt. April,19 Reiger. J., 1974. lnrrodwtio,r lo S h e l l q . M ru,iP

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