Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and the Creation of the Modern Man
Take a journey to the dark side of the Enlightenment
It’s nearly Halloween again, which means people may be looking for a few good horror movies or scary stories to get into the mood. By current standards, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is not the spookiest tale you could read, but in many ways it is the original, both the first horror and the first science fiction novel. It is also, simply put, a great work of literature. The book is worth checking out because it centers on a terror that still haunts many of us today: Modernity.
Frankenstein was written by Mary Shelley and published in 1818. There are multiple versions of the text, but I’ve been advised the leaner original is the best. The book’s origins are legendary: In the summer of 1816, Shelley (only 18 at the time) and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley visited their friend Lord Byron at Lake Geneva. One evening, after reading a collection of German ghost stories, they challenged each other to write their own. Shelley struggled at first, but one evening, following a conversation about the possibility that a corpse could be re-animated with the recently harnessed power of electricity, she had a nightmare about a student who constructed a monstrous human body and brought it to life. Originally planned as a short story, Shelley was encouraged to expand her work into a novel, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Shelley employs a clever narrative frame to draw us into her tale. The novel opens with a series of letters sent by a Captain Walton to his sister relating the events of a scientific mission he is taking to the Arctic (a “country of eternal light”) to “discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle.” This establishes the captain as an enlightened man searching for an awesome scientific power in an uncharted part of the world. During his voyage, Walton spots a gigantic man on a dog sled crossing the frozen sea. Hours later, his crew rescues a fatigued man who has been stranded on an ice floe. This is Victor Frankenstein, who tells Walton he is in pursuit of the monstrous man who had earlier passed by their ship. Frankenstein sees in Walton someone who “seek[s] for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did” but hopes Walton’s scientific journey turns out better for the captain than it did for him. With the ice closing in around the ship, Frankenstein begins sharing his life story with Walton along with the consequences of his own fateful pursuit of a kind of powerful but forbidden knowledge. This then is a cautionary tale whose lessons Walton would be wise to heed before it is too late.
Frankenstein was born into a prominent Genevan family and lived a happy childhood with nurturing parents and amiable companions. His friends included the chivalric and passionate Clerval (he was said to have written a fairy tale at the age of nine) and his adopted sister (and future wife) Elizabeth, who loved poetry and regarded the world not as something to “discover” but “to people with imaginations of her own.” Frankenstein, however, was somewhat different by nature. Less romantic than his peers, Frankenstein viewed the world as full of secrets waiting to be learned, and therefore began studying “natural philosophy.” He hoped to uncover something that might improve the human condition, perhaps “banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death.” Little did he know how deadly his own scientific undertakings would become.
At university, Frankenstein devoted himself to a study in search of the “causes of life.” The contrast between the scenes set at the university and his days in Geneva establish the strongest theme of the novel. His home life in the beautiful environs of the Swiss Alps is one of cheerfulness, good health, and affectionate companionship; at one point, when he rejoins his family in Geneva, he notes “the peasants were dancing, and every one we met appeared gay and happy.” In the rational world of the university, however, Frankenstein grows isolated. He quits corresponding with his friends and family, turns pale and emaciated, and loses track of time and the passing of the seasons. No longer primarily a “son” or “friend,” he morphs into an arrogant egotist, proclaiming “I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret” as the cause of life. An individual now untethered to the community that had previously given his life context, meaning, and moral structure, Frankenstein’s scientific pursuits grow twisted. Rather than ask if he should be exploring the causes of life, he instead pursues the question for its own sake to see if its discovery is possible. His manipulations of nature ultimately leave him “insensitive to the charms of nature,” odd for someone who grew up in such a beautiful and awe-inspiring locale. Shelley seems to be saying here it is better to simply appreciate the mysteries and wonder of the natural world than seek to understand them.
The distinction Shelley draws between the university and Frankenstein’s bucolic home in Geneva maps onto the difference between the Age of Enlightenment (which had arisen in the 17th century and burnt itself out over the course of the French Revolution [1789-1799] and the Napoleonic Wars [1803-1815]) and the Romantic Era (which was in full swing at the time Frankenstein was published.) Rationality and reason served as the foundation for the Enlightenment. Following in the footsteps of Isaac Newton, Enlightenment thinkers believed the world operated according to universal scientific laws that could be discovered through reason, and that these laws might apply not only to the natural world but to humans and society as well. The discovery and application of these laws they believed might also lead to significant scientific and social progress for humanity. As the source of reason, the Enlightenment placed the individual rather than God or state authority at the center of its philosophy and touted individual liberty as a central moral value. The preamble to the United States’ Declaration of Independence is an outstanding example of Enlightenment moral thinking, and the Constitution of the United States—with its Newtonian system of “checks and balances”—demonstrates how Enlightenment thought shaped the design of human institutions. Other key Enlightenment thinkers include John Locke, Voltaire, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant.
Romanticism, on the other hand, was a counter to the Enlightenment. It both inspired and was a reaction to the French Revolution, which was said to have embodied Enlightenment principles when it deposed the French monarchy but devolved into massive social unrest, a reign of state-sponsored terrorism administered with the guillotine, and a crusade to export the values of revolutionary France to the rest of Europe via Napoleon’s conquering armies. Romanticism rejected the Enlightenment’s embrace of rationality and instead emphasized emotional expression, which was considered a purer reflection of the human soul. Romantics found man happiest and in his natural state not as an isolated individual but in small communities surrounded by kin and likeminded peers. This led them to reject the universalism and cosmopolitanism of the liberal Enlightenment for the bonds of nationalism and provincialism. Romantics also regarded nature as a powerful and fearsome force rather than something that could (or should) be harnessed with science. They looked upon the emerging Industrial Revolution, which marshalled scientific advancements and regimented human labor to produce goods at an unprecedented scale, with dread; the bleak industrial cities that upended traditional life and drained the countryside of residents were also regarded with despair. If the Enlightenment promised progress and looked to the future, romanticism instead looked to an idyllic past as shelter from the Enlightenment’s nightmarish plunge into a newly modern world.
Above: Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich (1818) This painting, which finds the emotional soul of the hiker reflected in the wild mystery of nature, is an excellent example of Romantic era art.
The man who straddled the thought of both the Enlightenment and Romantic eras was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who, like Victor Frankenstein, was a native of Geneva. Like many Enlightenment thinkers, Rousseau believed in natural rights and that government authority was derived from the consent of the governed. But Rousseau also believed the advent of society, science, and the arts had diminished mankind by forcing them into unnatural and undesirable social, economic, and political relationships. If someone like Locke argued mankind achieved greater security and freedom by exiting the state of nature to live under a social contract with others, Rousseau insisted mankind was far better off when they were not shackled to the constraints of civilized society. “Man is born free,” Rousseau famously wrote, “and everywhere he is in chains.” Since humans would never be able to return to their natural primitive state, Rousseau recommended instead that people live in small communities of likeminded people, communities presumably like Geneva.
Frankenstein echoed Rousseau’s sentiments about freedom and bondage long after his scientific endeavors had gone awry, telling Walton, “Sometimes, indeed, I dreamt that I wandered in flowery meadows and pleasant vales with the friends of my youth; but awoke, and found myself in a dungeon.” His dreams of freedom here—in nature rather than a laboratory, with his friends rather than alone—are Romantic. Science—Enlightenment—is not only his prison, but the means of his destruction and, once it is loosed upon the world, the ruin of everything he should have held dear. “How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow,” he laments. Later, he adds, “If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affection, and to destroy your taste for these simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.”
Frankenstein’s study, of course, generated a monster. (It’s obligatory when writing about Frankenstein to remind readers it is the monster’s creator—not the monster himself—who is named Frankenstein.) The monster is a mockery of the Enlightenment, rationality and science run amuck. He is a composite human made of the remains of many different people rather a single, integral being from a particular place and bloodline. (One gets a whiff of racism and ethno-nationalism in describing the monster this way.) His skin is nearly translucent (yellow, actually, rather than green, as he often appears today) so he becomes an ugly study in anatomy rather than a paragon of beauty. And he is a physical brute, simultaneously subhuman and superhuman, a mighty proto-proletarian who comes to learn just how powerful and deadly he can be. The spookiest parts of the book are when the monster performs feats normal humans cannot. In this passage, Frankenstein spots the monster as Frankenstein returns home:
I perceived in the gloom a figure which stole from behind a clump of trees near me; I stood fixed, gazing intently: I could not be mistaken. A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy daemon to whom I had given life….I thought of pursuing the devil; but it would have been in vain, for another flash discovered him to me hanging among the rocks of the nearly perpendicular ascent of Mont Saleve, a hill that bounds Plainpalais on the south. He soon reached the summit, and disappeared.
In another scene, after Frankenstein climbs a mountain and is overcome by the “sublime ecstasy” of nature before crossing over onto a massive jagged glacier, the monster appears to him again.
I suddenly beheld the figure of a man, at some distance, advancing towards me with superhuman speed. He bounded over the crevices in the ice, among which I had walked with caution; his stature also, as he approached, seemed to exceed that of a man.
Interestingly, Frankenstein’s monster—who is far more intelligent and articulate than those who are only familiar with him from popular culture—knows he is a perversion of humanity. Those he does encounter recoil from him. He blames his creator for his deplorable state and kills those Frankenstein loves—those most devoted to the old pre-Modern way of life—out of revenge. He is not naïve and does not demand acceptance from the wider world, but is rather fully conscious of his inhuman condition. What he does want is what Frankenstein should have been content with: A companion and a place of his own in the world (albeit one far removed from civilization in the jungles of South America.) Ironically, he hopes to return to nature despite his completely unnatural being.
One thing that surprised me about the novel was how quickly Frankenstein rejected his creation. Frankenstein had spent two years assembling the being, and the monster had barely flinched before Frankenstein was overcome with horror and fled. Frankenstein did not try to talk with or comfort the monster, didn’t try to help or nurture him. Instead, the instant the monster came to life, Frankenstein was filled with repulsion. Where was his curiosity? Did he not anticipate how he might react in that moment, or what his responsibilities might be to his creation?
While Shelley makes the monster a character we can sympathize with, I am left here and throughout the novel with the impression that she fundamentally regards the monster with contempt. There is even the sense that Frankenstein is right not to create a companion for the monster, since that would only bring greater horror into the world. (Alternately, might that not have given the monster some measure of comfort? Or was Frankenstein afraid they might procreate?) If Frankenstein is the novel’s tragic character, a man led astray by the false promise of the Enlightenment, then the monster in Shelley’s view is the result of Frankenstein’s moral failure, a plague the forces of modernity have unleashed upon the world. While we may feel sad for the monster, even possibly relate to it on a human level and understand its feelings and motivations, Shelley does not want us to pity it. It is a wretch, a deformity of human nature. Shelley wants this godforsaken byproduct of the modern world to become the object of our scorn.
That strikes me as uncompassionate. Modernity—and more specifically, the Enlightenment—at least opened the door to toleration (even if some of its most notable proponents, such as Thomas Jefferson, were far from tolerant.) Yet here Shelley is regarding the results of modernity—even those we might call its victims—as deplorable. Certainly these monstrosities of modernity deserve more than our disdain, particularly since many of those caught up in the currents of modernity do not have the luxury of living as Romantics. (The Realists—I’m thinking Charles Dickens here—might offer a bit of a corrective.)
Contemporary readers may be inclined to interpret Frankenstein as a cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific advancement. The obvious parallel today is with AI, but we can look back at other technological developments and wish perhaps that humankind had thought twice before introducing them to the world: Facebook, the nuclear reactor, the internal combustion engine, gunpowder. Even fire: The novel, after all, is subtitled The Modern Prometheus.
I would urge readers, however, to look beyond the connection to Prometheus, the rogue Greek god who not only created humankind but ruined it by stealing the secret of fire and gifting it to humanity. Instead, dwell for a moment on the significance of the word “modern” in that subtitle. With Frankenstein, we see humanity degraded by modernity, by modes of thought that rob us of community and leave us isolated as individuals, and that replace the warm bonds of affection with cold, rational detachment. As contemporary readers, it is worth asking what sort of “monsters” we create today as we rush headlong into an ever more modern world, and what it might take to create a less monstrous future.
Frankenstein is one of the first works of literature to confront the horrors of the modern age. The Enlightenment promised progress in areas like government, economics, and the sciences, and on many fronts it succeeded. Many would argue its work remains undone. Yet there was a scary side to it as well, one those who take the Enlightenment’s core values for granted still struggle to reckon with. Mary Shelley was cognizant of the Enlightenment’s shortcomings, however. It is therefore fitting that her critique of the Enlightenment ends not in the “eternal light” of the Arctic nor with a character in the company of others but with the monster, having just visited his deceased creator on Walton’s ship, jumping overboard to become “lost in the darkness and distance.”
Photo credit: Bernie Wrightson. Wrightson drew this image as part of a wraparound cover for a 1983 Frankenstein comic book published by Marvel Comics. Here’s the full image:
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Exit music: “Heartattack and Vine” by Tom Waits (1980, Heartattack and Vine)