About Frankenstein

Enlightened monsters

by Michael Saler

Roseanne Montillo

THE LADY AND HER MONSTERS

A tale of dissections, real-life Dr. Frankensteins, and the creation of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece

336pp. William Morrow. $26.99.

978 0 06 202581 4

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

THE ANNOTATED FRANKENSTEIN

Edited by Susan J. Wolfson and Ronald Levao

400pp. Belknap Press. £22.95 (US $29.95).

978 0 674 05552 0

Published: 13 May 2013

T he child may be father to the man, but how did a girl become mother to the monster? We continue to ask that of Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) before she turned twenty. It is a startling work from someone so young, combining profound philosophic disquisitions with melodramatic blood and thunder. Some see it as the first science fiction novel, but as Roseanne Montillo shows in The Lady and Her Monsters, Shelley’s narrative of a scientist’s quest to discover and harness the “principle of life” was less an extrapolation into the future than a faithful representation of contemporary practices. Indeed, Frankenstein is one of the earliest horror novels about modernity, directly confronting the instabilities provoked by the scientific, Industrial and French Revolutions. Shelley seemed predestined for this task: she was the daughter of the Enlightenment philosopher William Godwin and the radical critic and early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as the wife of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The novel’s power stems from its young author’s often ambivalent wrestling with Enlightenment and Romantic responses to modernity, as well as her own traumas involving issues such as parenting and childbirth. (Her mother died eleven days after giving birth to her, and Shelley herself lost her first child shortly before commencing the book.)



Frankenstein is one of the earliest horror novels about modernity

Montillo’s narrative history of Frankenstein gestures at its philosophical dimensions, but is more interested in coupling Shelley’s biography with the wider scientific and medical contexts of the period. Her book is gripping, as she is drawn to the many sensationalistic aspects surrounding Frankenstein’s gestation and Shelley’s tempestuous, often tragic, life. She details how Victor Frankenstein’s ambition to discover the secret of existence mirrored the aims of contemporary natural philosophers no less than ancient alchemists. In the late eighteenth century, Luigi Galvani’s demonstrations that dead frogs’ legs twitched when stimulated by electric currents led to attempts to resuscitate corpses by similar means. Shelley was familiar with “galvanism” through the intellectuals who visited her father, such as the chemist Humphry Davy, as well as through Percy Shelley, an enthusiast of both contemporary science and ancient alchemy. (Most undergraduates have messy rooms, but Percy turned his at Oxford into a messy laboratory. A friend charitably explained that “the young chemist, in order to analyze the mystery of creation, had endeavored first to re-create primeval chaos”.) To pursue these experiments in re-animation, physicians required corpses, which were in short supply owing to strict legal regulations. Body-snatching consequently became a lucrative profession, its seedy practitioners awaiting commissions at pubs like the Fortune of War, located near Shelley’s home on Skinner Street. As Montillo reveals, the pillaging of fresh bodies could be stymied by popular deterrents to grave-robbing, ranging from iron cages surrounding coffins to explosive booby traps. Montillo also discusses more proactive figures like Burke and Hare, who avoided the fuss of grave-robbing by the simple expedient of murder. Their solution, soon adopted by other “burkers”, convinced legislators to make legitimate corpses easier to obtain in 1832.



Montillo’s eye for ghoulish detail spices an already potent brew. One set piece involves the cause of Mary Wollstonecraft’s fatal infection, at the hands of the doctor who delivered her daughter. At other times, however, Montillo’s prose shifts from Grand Guignol to soap opera. Lord Byron, we are informed, “was never amused by woman’s antics or their girly talk, and even less by their suggestive smiles and batting eyelashes”. Her book is no more sophisticated as literary criticism. It’s hard to reconcile Montillo’s early, simplistic assertion that Frankenstein “creates a soulless automaton” with her somewhat more nuanced description of the loquacious and sensitive monster later. The Lady and Her Monsters is an enjoyable introduction to Frankenstein, but largely a superficial one. It whets the appetite for a more sustained engagement with the novel’s complexities.



The Annotated Frankenstein is an ideal vehicle for this purpose; it should appeal to scholars familiar with the novel as well as those exploring it for the first time. The editors, Susan J. Wolfson and Ronald Levao, situate the novel in its philosophical, literary, biographical and historical contexts, and provide apt illustrations and useful appendices (including examinations of the revised edition of 1831 and a timeline which juxtaposes the novel’s episodes with concurrent historical events). Its expansive, cream-coloured pages and generous margins render the volume a world unto itself, while emphasizing the worldly issues Shelley addressed in her uncanny tale.



In contrast to Montillo’s focus on the sensational and macabre, Wolfson and Levao show that the first edition of Frankenstein of 1818 was packaged as a philosophic novel. Published anonymously, and dedicated to William Godwin, it features more references to the Prometheus legend and Paradise Lost than to such Gothic tropes as perverse sexuality and spectral hauntings. The monster may be stitched together from human and animal parts, yet he is more memorable for being an autodidact who pleads for affection: “his humanity is the most surprising, most disturbing, and ultimately most moving aspect of his character”. When he is viciously rejected, the monster engages in a murderous rampage – but Shelley blames this on his egotistic creator and an uncaring society that refuses to empathize with a suffering fellow “creature”.



Shelley’s contemporaries would have associated the monster’s terror with the Terror of the French Revolution

As the editors note, Shelley’s contemporaries would have associated the monster’s terror with the Terror of the French Revolution. Conservatives likened the Revolution to a monster created by Enlightenment rationalism, whereas radicals perceived it as a justified response to a monstrous ancien régime. The novel raised questions about social justice and reciprocal obligations in a modern, secular age, in the process also condemning slavery. In addition, Shelley criticized gender relations, just as her mother had done in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). Frankenstein’s creation of life was not simply an act of scientific hubris, but an exposé of patriarchy. By arrogating the creation of life solely to himself, Frankenstein’s deed of giving birth results in the death of everyone he loved, culminating in his own mortal struggle with his creation in the sterile frigidity of the Arctic.



The first edition of this rich and ambiguous work didn’t fly off the shelves. But it was resurrected in 1823 – this time published under its author’s name – as a result of a popular stage adaptation that promoted the monster rather than the philosophy. Shelley herself pursued this lucrative strategy in her “Introduction” to a revised edition of the novel in 1831, which immediately became a bestseller. Here she situated the work’s genesis in the ghost-story tradition, recalling the summer of 1816 when she joined a party visiting Lord Byron in Switzerland. After several dark and stormy nights spent reading ghost stories, Byron suggested they write their own. Shelley retrospectively claimed she intended to write one that would “awaken thrilling horror”.



The 1831 edition was no longer dedicated to her father the Enlightenment philosopher. Instead, it featured the first book illustration of the nameless “monster”. Shelley bid her “hideous progeny go forth and prosper”, which it did, especially after the release of James Whale’s film version in 1931. Boris Karloff delivered a poignant performance as the monster, now saddled with a “criminal brain” and rendered inarticulate. Shelley’s confrontation with modernity was briefly effaced: but it would never remain buried for long.









Michael Saler is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. His most recent book, As If: Modern enchantment and the literary prehistory of virtual reality, was named one of the best books of 2012 by the Huffington Post.