Frankenstein

Frankenstein The clanking, bolted Boris Karloff, whose latest incarnation is the parodic Herman Munster, has become the popular image of the Frankenstein monster — in defiance of the illustration — accompanying the 1831 edition of Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, which depicts the creature as a far more human and personable-looking being. The monstrous brood of her creation is a hideous progeny that has found its way into cinema, popular fiction, and critical theory by taking literally the injunction in her introduction to the 1831 edition to ‘go forth and prosper’. The proliferation of the monstrous body is the anxiety that afflicts the mad scientist hero, Victor Frankenstein. His experimentation allegorizes not only the way in which science is not always in control of its metaphors, but also how men can lose control of the monsters they themselves create.

In preparation for his monstrous experiment Victor scours charnel houses, places for vivisection, and graveyards, for parts from which to assemble his New Adam or Modern Prometheus, which is the novel's subtitle. Body snatching was rendered obsolete a year after the third revised edition of Frankenstein by the 1832 Anatomy Act, which made available for dissection the bodies of unclaimed paupers. For this reason, the blasphemy of Victor's nefarious activities has impacted less on the modern reader than on Shelley's contemporaries. The monstrosity of his creation is predicated upon the dilemma that, despite his having selected the most beautiful parts, only God can harmonize the whole. The product of Victor's labours is a creature that is eight foot tall with yellow skin and straight black lips, from which he recoils in horror. Victor's reaction, in regard to skin colour, is replete with racist overtones. His creation is a mirror-image of colonization since, in wanting to reshape the world anew, he plunders the old. His aversion to his ‘hideous progeny’ can also be seen as a post-natal rejection of a newly-born infant by its mother. Some feminist critics have interpreted Frankenstein as an allegory of childbirth which, in this case, is the product of solitary male propagation, being the proverbial scientist's brain child.

Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley's mother, wrote about the importance of a maternal and nurturing presence in the upbringing of a child. Despite having mastered language and the range of human emotions, abandonment and the withdrawal of affection has warped Frankenstein's creation into the actuality of a monstrous self. Taking revenge on Victor, the creature murders his young brother William and pins the blame on a young family servant, Justine, who is eventually wrongly executed for the crime. Later he kills Victor's best friend Henry Clerval and his fiancé Elizabeth Lavenza. At the end of the novel, we are left to assume that he takes his own life in the Arctic wastes following the final confrontation between creator and created — which is foreshadowed by John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) from which the epigraph of the novel is taken. The trail of destruction and waste has been interpreted as a warning of the potential dangers of modern science. Had Victor not abandoned his original mentors, necromancers like Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, and Albertus Magnus, he might have created a harmless homunculus instead of the creature, who exacts revenge upon him.

The monster has been seen by Marxist critics as representing the new social order of the industrial proletariat, the destruction of the body politic by the mob in the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, and a Malthusian dystopia born of a monstrous growth in population (see Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798). The fear of breeding a race of monsters leads Victor to destroy the female mate he has created for his creature by dismembering ‘the thing’ he had put together. The perception of both creature and mate as subalterns, who are subhuman, is integral to the process of colonization and the concept of ‘thingification’ whereby the colonizer assumes a position of power and superiority over the colonized. Once it was known that the author was a woman, the novel become a trope for the monstrosities produced by the female imagination as a source of patriarchal anxiety. For this reason, Mary Shelley may have felt it to be incumbent upon herself to explain in her later introduction, ‘How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?’ (1831).

The impetus for completing the novel is thought by critics such as Marilyn Butler to have arisen from the interest of Mary and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley in current debates between the schools of vitalism and materialism as to the creation of life, experiments in galvanism on executed criminals, and a general vogue for automata. The genesis of the novel, which was first published in 1818, is explained in the preface to the revised 1831 edition, where Mary Shelley describes her participation in the ghost-story competition at the Villa Diodati in 1816. After a nocturnal conversation about Erasmus Darwin's apparent animation of a piece of vermicelli, she has a terrifying waking dream that gives her the idea for the creature.

The real nightmare described in the book, however, is the predicament of a being trapped in a monstrous body, who is sickened by his own image and shunned by human society. The text encourages the modern reader to reconsider the responsibilities of science, particularly in relation to such controversial areas as genetic engineering, cloning, and reproductive technologies. Victor's teratological experiment may even be read as a parable for the dangers of male science, which have escalated subsequently into the nuclear arms race. By questioning our received notions of aesthetics, particularly the way in which the creature is rejected by society on account of his appearance, the novel invites us to consider afresh the relationship we have with our own body and its interaction with the outside world.

Marie Mulvey-Roberts

See also monsters.