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Research essay: a ‘monster’ and its humanity.

Professor of English Susan J. Wolfson is the editor of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Longman Cultural Edition and co-editor, with Ronald Levao, of The Annotated Frankenstein.  

Published in January 1818, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus has never been out of print or out of cultural reference. “Facebook’s Frankenstein Moment: A Creature That Defies Technology’s Safeguards” was the headline on a New York Times business story Sept. 22 — 200 years on. The trope needed no footnote, although Kevin Roose’s gloss — “the scientist Victor Frankenstein realizes that his cobbled-together creature has gone rogue” — could use some adjustment: The Creature “goes rogue” only after having been abandoned and then abused by almost everyone, first and foremost that undergraduate scientist. Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg and CEO Sheryl Sandberg, attending to profits, did not anticipate the rogue consequences: a Frankenberg making. 

The original Frankenstein told a terrific tale, tapping the idealism in the new sciences of its own age, while registering the throb of misgivings and terrors. The 1818 novel appeared anonymously by a down-market press (Princeton owns one of only 500 copies). It was a 19-year-old’s debut in print. The novelist proudly signed herself “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley” when it was reissued in 1823, in sync with a stage concoction at London’s Royal Opera House in August. That debut ran for nearly 40 nights; it was staged by the Princeton University Players in May 2017. 

In a seminar that I taught on Frankenstein in various contexts at Princeton in the fall of 2016 — just weeks after the 200th anniversary of its conception in a nightmare visited on (then) Mary Godwin in June 1816 — we had much to consider. One subject was the rogue uses and consequences of genomic science of the 21st century. Another was the election season — in which “Frankenstein” was a touchstone in the media opinions and parodies. Students from sciences, computer technology, literature, arts, and humanities made our seminar seem like a mini-university. Learning from each other, we pondered complexities and perplexities: literary, social, scientific, aesthetic, and ethical. If you haven’t read Frankenstein (many, myself included, found the tale first on film), it’s worth your time. 

READ MORE  PAW Goes to the Movies: ‘Victor Frankenstein,’ with Professor Susan Wolfson

Scarcely a month goes by without some development earning the prefix Franken-, a near default for anxieties about or satires of new events. The dark brilliance of Frankenstein is both to expose “monstrosity” in the normal and, conversely, to humanize what might seem monstrously “other.” When Shelley conceived Frankenstein, Europe was scarred by a long war, concluding on Waterloo fields in May 1815. “Monster” was a ready label for any enemy. Young Frankenstein begins his university studies in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. In 1790, Edmund Burke’s international best-selling Reflections on the French Revolution recoiled at the new government as a “monster of a state,” with a “monster of a constitution” and “monstrous democratic assemblies.” Within a few months, another international best-seller, Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man, excoriated “the monster Aristocracy” and cheered the American Revolution for overthrowing a “monster” of tyranny.

Following suit, Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, called the ancien régime a “ferocious monster”; her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was on the same page: Any aristocracy was an “artificial monster,” the monarchy a “luxurious monster,” and Europe’s despots a “race of monsters in human shape.” Frankenstein makes no direct reference to the Revolution, but its first readers would have felt the force of its setting in the 1790s, a decade that also saw polemics for (and against) the rights of men, women, and slaves. 

England would abolish its slave trade in 1807, but Colonial slavery was legal until 1833. Abolitionists saw the capitalists, investors, and masters as the moral monsters of the global economy. Apologists regarded the Africans as subhuman, improvable perhaps by Christianity and a work ethic, but alarming if released, especially the men. “In dealing with the Negro,” ultra-conservative Foreign Secretary George Canning lectured Parliament in 1824, “we are dealing with a being possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child. To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical strength ... would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance.” He meant Frankenstein. 

Mary Shelley heard about this reference, and knew, moreover, that women (though with gilding) were a slave class, too, insofar as they were valued for bodies rather than minds, were denied participatory citizenship and most legal rights, and were systemically subjugated as “other” by the masculine world. This was the argument of her mother’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which she was rereading when she was writing Frankenstein. Unorthodox Wollstonecraft — an advocate of female intellectual education, a critic of the institution of marriage, and the mother of two daughters conceived outside of wedlock — was herself branded an “unnatural” woman, a monstrosity. 

Shelley had her own personal ordeal, which surely imprints her novel. Her parents were so ready for a son in 1797 that they had already chosen the name “William.” Even worse: When her mother died from childbirth, an awful effect was to make little Mary seem a catastrophe to her grieving father. No wonder she would write a novel about a “being” rejected from its first breath. The iconic “other” in Frankenstein is of course this horrifying Creature (he’s never a “human being”). But the deepest force of the novel is not this unique situation but its reverberation of routine judgments of beings that seem “other” to any possibility of social sympathy. In the 1823 play, the “others” (though played for comedy) are the tinker-gypsies, clad in goatskins and body paint (one is even named “Tanskin” — a racialized differential).

Victor Frankenstein greets his awakening creature as a “catastrophe,” a “wretch,” and soon a “monster.” The Creature has no name, just these epithets of contempt. The only person to address him with sympathy is blind, spared the shock of the “countenance.” Readers are blind this way, too, finding the Creature only on the page and speaking a common language. This continuity, rather than antithesis, to the human is reflected in the first illustrations: 

In the cover for the 1823 play, above, the Creature looks quite human, dishy even — alarming only in size and that gaze of expectation. The 1831 Creature, shown on page 29, is not a patent “monster”: It’s full-grown, remarkably ripped, human-looking, understandably dazed. The real “monster,” we could think, is the reckless student fleeing the results of an unsupervised undergraduate experiment gone rogue. 

In Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein pleads sympathy for the “human nature” in his revulsion. “I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health ... but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room.” Repelled by this betrayal of “beauty,” Frankenstein never feels responsible, let alone parental. Shelley’s genius is to understand this ethical monstrosity as a nightmare extreme of common anxiety for expectant parents: What if I can’t love a child whose physical formation is appalling (deformed, deficient, or even, as at her own birth, just female)? 

The Creature’s advent in the novel is not in this famous scene of awakening, however. It comes in the narrative that frames Frankenstein’s story: a polar expedition that has become icebound. Far on the ice plain, the ship’s crew beholds “the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature,” driving a dogsled. Three paragraphs on, another man-shape arrives off the side of the ship on a fragment of ice, alone but for one sled dog. “His limbs were nearly frozen, and his body dreadfully emaciated by fatigue and suffering,” the captain records; “I never saw a man in so wretched a condition.” This dreadful man focuses the first scene of “animation” in Frankenstein: “We restored him to animation by rubbing him with brandy, and forcing him to swallow a small quantity. As soon as he shewed signs of life, we wrapped him up in blankets, and placed him near the chimney of the kitchen-stove. By slow degrees he recovered ... .” 

The re-animation (well before his name is given in the novel) turns out to be Victor Frankenstein. A crazed wretch of a “creature” (so he’s described) could have seemed a fearful “other,” but is cared for as a fellow human being. His subsequent tale of his despicably “monstrous” Creature is scored with this tremendous irony. The most disturbing aspect of this Creature is his “humanity”: this pathos of his hope for family and social acceptance, his intuitive benevolence, bitterness about abuse, and skill with language (which a Princeton valedictorian might envy) that solicits fellow-human attention — all denied by misfortune of physical formation. The deepest power of Frankenstein, still in force 200 years on, is not its so-called monster, but its exposure of “monster” as a contingency of human sympathy.  

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Frankenstein : A virtual issue from Literature and Theology

Guest edited by jo carruthers and alana m.vincent.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was first published on 1 January 1818. It ought to be difficult to overstate its cultural influence over the past two hundred years as, arguably, the first novel which contains all the traits of modern science fiction, as an extended meditation on the nature of the human, of creation, and of creative responsibility – but there have been surprisingly few articles about Frankenstein published in Literature and Theology ’s 31 years, an oversight which we hope to see corrected in the near future. Instead, this virtual issue collects articles which the editors read as embodying the spirit or elaborating on the themes found within  Frankenstein .

Shelley’s novel is a deeply ethical, speculative and sensational novel, and has allured and fascinated readers for centuries. It addresses her generation’s adaptation to technological advances but also faces head on issues of spiritual, ethical and religious import. Into the novel is woven strands of the concerns of Shelley’s day, from the everyday politics of gender, difference, and scientific aspiration to issues of social justice that crowded political discussion at the time. The novel interrogates the boundaries, substances, and exceptionalism of humanity as monstrosity is identified in the created and creator, and as much in individual choices as in society’s conventions. Frankenstein takes on the mantle of Faust as he reaches to the heavens and confronts the consequences of defying divine sanction. The division between life and death, and all that matters about it to us, is pulled apart in the novel. It tells of the impulsivity of desperation in the face of grief as well as the despair of mortality in the creature’s separation from humanity. The novel looks at what human beings do when confronted with difference in ways that exposes the difficulty of intimacy for the outsider and the stranger. Each of the articles in this special edition draws on the threads of Frankenstein’s narrative in order to explore issues of: biotechnological progress and the human and what has become known as the post-human and transhuman; historical notions of the monstrous as conceptualized before Shelley’s time; the monstrous as a theme in post-colonial critique; and explorations of response to despair and violence. Whilst not explicitly inspired or drawing on Shelley’s Frankenstein , these articles are nonetheless indebted to its technological, monstrous, ethical, spiritual and political legacy.

Tiffany Tsao’s ‘The Tyranny of Purpose: Religion and Biotechnology in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’ ( Literature & Theology  26.2 (2012), 214-232) picks up on critical comparisons between Frankenstein and Ishiguro’s novel, demonstrating close parallels between the way that each novel treats the fraught relationship between creator and created creature. Tsao then traces the influence of Milton’s Paradise Lost , which is overt in Shelley and more subtle but, she argues, still present in Ishiguro, in order to argue that ‘the seemingly unrelated theological issues raised by Paradise Lost concerning the ethics governing creator–creation relations may provide surprising insight into what Ishiguro’s novel has to say about the problematic assumptions that underlie conceptualizations of religion and biotechnology in our own world’ (215). By showing the way that both Frankenstein and Never Let Me Go point back to Milton’s epic treatise on free will, Tsao is able to use the creature-narratives from Shelley and Ishiguro to interrogate Paradise Lost , showing the subtle ways in which Milton undermines his case for free will by presenting a cosmology structured by divine purpose. Reading Ishiguro against Milton, Tsao concludes that “Any succour that religion may be capable of providing will lie not in its ability to provide a sense of purpose, but rather, its ability to provide freedom from purpose, and the limitations that purpose can set on how we value and cherish life” (226).

Milton is also a key text in Michael Noschka’s article ‘Extended Cognition, Heidegger, and Pauline Post/Humanism’ ( Literature and Theology 28.3 (2014) 334-347). Noschka presents Satan as a cognitive materialist, citing his speech in Paradise Lost 1.254-44 [The mind is its own place, and in itself  Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n], but arguing that ‘By placing this Satanic rationalization within the larger scope of Paradise Lost as a whole, particularly insofar as the poem might function metonymically for literature itself, we are able to recognize the value of literature as a medium which challenges us to see beyond literal fact, beyond ourselves as the creators of such facts, and thereby acknowledge the value of metaphor and exegesis in our hyper-factual age’ (335). Noschka’s article makes a case for the continued value of literature and theology to direct thinkers of post-humanism towards the 'proper intersection between man [sic] and technology', a ‘humble humanism built on an ethics of responsibility’ (336).

It is precisely the absence of an ethics of responsibility from the philosophies that comprise transhumanism which is the major concern of Elaine Graham’s article, ‘“Nietzsche Gets a Modem”: Transhumanism and the Technological Sublime’ ( Literature & Thelogy 16.1 (2002) 65-80). Graham is deeply sceptical of the liberative promises of transhumanism, which she sees as conflating transcendence with disembodiment (72), and therefore failing to adequately engage with ethical questions concerning access to the resources which necessarily enable the technological revolution. Rather than a Heideggerian turn which stresses the revelatory potential of technology, Graham argues for a reconfiguration of ‘the religious symbolic in order to dismantle the equation of religion and “transcendence”’, while also attending to ‘the co-existence of the urged-for transcendence–a surrender of materialism the better to attain quasi-divinity–with the constant stimulation of consumer desires’ (77). It is in the lived, the material, and above all the economic realms that Graham sees both the promise and perils of the biotechnological revolution heralded by Frankenstein .

Andrea Schutz, Daniel Juan Gil and Michael Edward Moore all explore premodern theologies of human identity in order to interrogate meanings of the monstrous or the ‘Other’. Schutz’s article, ‘The Monster at the Centre of the Universe: Christ as Spectacle in Mass and English Civic Drama’ ( Literature & Theology  31.3 (2017), 269-284) argues for a distinction between the distance of audience and monster in modernity and the proximity encouraged in the medieval passion drama in which the world is understood to be ‘held together by paradox and monstrosity’ (272). The medieval world understood sensuous receptivity as a reciprocal process so that what was seen was also experienced and touched (273), softening boundaries between self and other. Christological theologies also work to blur and complicate human identity with a Christ-body that is redemptive, substitutionary and incarnational, and Schutz presents the eucharist and crucifixion as dramatized moments that draw self into other, human into the monstrous, and the monstrous as divinely epiphanic. Schutz returns to theological etymological tracings of ‘monster’ to monstrar , ‘to show’, to argue ‘the function of the monster is to be in the world and disclose truths larger than itself’ (271) so that Christ is a ‘sacred “category crisis”’ (272).

In ‘‘What does Milton’s God Want?–Human Nature, Radical Conscience, and the Sovereign Power of the Nation-State’ ( Literature & Theology , 28.4 (2014), 389-410), Gil reveals in Milton’s reworking of the creation narrative precisely the freedom from purpose or teleology that Tsao had hoped to find. Gil argues for a reading of Milton’s construction of humanity as one of potentiality. Drawing on theories of sovereignty from Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, Gil considers Milton to be presenting human life as dependent upon a sovereign definition of human nature but one that is necessarily historical and contingent. God or the transcendent may be invoked to secure a specific version of human identity, but because of its standpoint outside of that history, God or the transcendent is also a site of potential disruption. The ‘transcendent warrant’ becomes an ethical principle against which human activity can be measured. As such, Gil can come to the conclusion that for Milton, ‘being free means having the resources to transcend the particular definition of human nature enshrined in a particular political order’ (402).

The relation between human identity, creation and the creator is the focus of Moore’s article, ‘Meditations on the Face in the Middle Ages (with Levinas and Picard)’ ( Literature & Theology , 24.1 (2010), 19-37). Moore turns to fundamental questions provoked by the assertion that human identity has its theological anchor in God as creator. He attends to ancient and medieval conceptions of identity and the face in an imagined ‘dialogue in heaven’ (22) between Levinas and medieval theologians in order to consider Levinas’s placing of the other at the very core of identity: ‘According to Levinas, appreciation of “the holiness in the other than myself” at the same time requires an acceptance of godlike responsibility for all of creation and other people.’ (21) In Levinasian terms, the face provokes responsibility. To be found in the image of God is for Levinas ‘to find oneself in his trace’ (25, fn. 54); to be identified in and through a trace is to be the ‘vestige of something absent’ (26). For Levinas, all are strangers so that ‘the only possible humanism is “of the other”’ (26). Moore’s article offers a wealth of theological understandings of humanity conceived as ‘the image of God’, a set of theological debates that – for our purposes in this virtual issue of Literature and Theology – creates a further ‘heavenly dialogue’ between a Levinasian insistence on responsibility to the other and Shelley’s depiction of an irresponsible creator and a neglected creature.

Articles by Sarah Juliet Lauro and James H. Thrall both address the imaginative legacy of Frankenstein –the development of science fiction as a distinctive genre–but also position the tropes of science fiction as uniquely suited for addressing issues of subalternity and post-coloniality. In ‘The Zombie Saints: The Contagious Spirit of Christian Conversion Narratives: A Zombie Martyr’ ( Literature & Theology 26.2 (2012) 160-178), Lauro, inspired by Léon Bonnat's painting ‘Martyr de Saint-Denis’, reads the saint’s legend in parallel to zombie fiction of the sort which has dominated popular television and cinema in recent years. She argues that ‘the tendency of both zombie and martyr narratives to involve seemingly contradictory characterisations of a figure as simultaneously master and slave, or contaminated and cured, illustrates the ambulant dialectic of the living-dead and the saint’ (163). Lauro is attentive to the origin point of zombie tales, in ‘the Jesuit-dominated colonial Caribbean’ (173), and to the role the zombie plays as a figure of colonial resistance.

The potentials of science fiction as a literature of resistance is the main focus of Thrall’s article, ‘Postcolonial Science Fiction? Science, Religion and the Transformation of Genre in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome’ (Literature & Theology , 23.3 (2009), 289-302). Thrall makes explicit the ways in which ‘science fiction's re-enactments of imperial encounters permitted at least some authors to contemplate their own colonial complicity’ (291), focussing on a novel by Amitav Gosh set in a future in which many of the promises of a techno-future explored by Noschka and Graham have come to pass. Gosh’s techno-future is, however, a de-colonised future, in which ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ cosmology have equal weight, where the master’s tools have been consciously put to work to not dismantle, but extensively renovate, the master’s house, so that ‘the religious trope of reincarnation meets the science fiction trope of uploaded consciousness’ and ‘[g]host stories, religious narratives of reincarnation, scientific imaginings of DNA-borne identities, and cyber-constellations of uploaded personalities all draw on overlapping conceptions of the self as transferrable entity’ (300).

Where Frankenstein’s grief leads him to an irresponsible creation of life, and the creature’s wounds lead him to a more obvious violence, articles by Brandi Estey-Burtt and Joel Westerholm offer more positive reactions to precarity. Instead of producing a spiral of violence that wreaks such devastating effects, wounding becomes for these two authors a promissory expansion of humanity, first in Coetzee’s Disgrace and then in the ‘wounded speech’ of Rossetti’s poetry.

Estey-Burtt’s ‘Bidding the Animal Adieu: Grace in J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals and Disgrace’ (Literature & Theology , 31.2 (2017), 231-245) identifies imagination as a vital component of redemption and the working of grace. Grace here is for Estey-Burtt, through reference to theologian Serene Jones’s definition, ‘the incredible insistence on love amid fragmented, unravelled human lives’ (234) and enables a limited and tentative response to both specific traumatic events and the ongoing trauma of South African apartheid. What is significant about the animals in Coetzee’s essay and novel is their ability to express vulnerability. What religious language offers Coetzee’s understanding of human empathy with animals is a recognition of the limitation of the self that ‘acknowledges an unmanageable strangeness in ‘‘the self’’, ‘‘the soul’’’ (238). Drawing on Levinas and Derrida’s concept of the ‘ adieu ’ as the giving to God of the dying and dead, Estey-Burtt recognises in Lurie’s care for dying animals evidence that he is undone and wounded, but also compassionate.

Westerholm, in ‘Christina Rossetti’s “Wounded Speech”’ ( Literature & Theology 24.4 (2010), 345-359) invokes Jean-Louis Chrétien’s theology of prayer as ‘wounded speech’ so that ‘whoever addresses God always does so de profundis , from the depths of his distress whether manifest or hidden, from the depths of his sin’ (351) and that such wounds are not mitigated by prayer but the speaker remains ‘still wounded, even more so’ (345). As with Coetzee’s character, Lurie, so with the speaker of Rossetti’s poem-prayers (as Westerholm names them), we find that wounds produce and articulate a human vulnerability that leads not to the escalation of pain or violence but instead to what Westerholm and Estey-Burtt call ‘grace’. For Westerholm this grace is found in recognition of the creator’s responsibility, a theme repeatedly returned to in this special edition’s selection of articles. This invocation of God’s necessary responsibility is exemplified for Westerholm in Rossetti’s poem ‘Good Friday’, in which the speaker demands of God: ‘seek thy sheep’.

Section 1: Cyborgs and the Post-Human

‘The Tyranny of Purpose: Religion and Biotechnology in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’ by Tiffany Tsao Literature & Theology 26.2 (2012), 214-232.

‘Extended Cognition, Heidegger, and Pauline Post/Humanism’ by Michael Noschka Literature & Theology  28.3 (2014) 334-347.

“Nietzsche Gets a Modem”: Transhumanism and the Technological Sublime’ by Elaine Graham Literature & Theology 16.1 (2002) 65-80.

Section 2: Pre-modern Post-humanism

‘The Monster at the Centre of the Universe Christ as Spectacle in Mass and English Civic Drama’ by  Andrea Schutz Literature & Theology 31.3 (2017), 269-284.

‘What does Milton’s God Want? -- Human Nature, Radical Conscience, and the Sovereign Power of the Nation-State’ by Daniel Juan Gil Literature & Theology 28.4 (2014), 389-410.

‘Meditations on the Face in the Middle Ages (with Levinas and Picard) by Michael Edward Moore Literature & Theology 24.1 (2010), 19-37.

Section 3: Post-colonial Post-humanism

‘The Zombie Saints: The Contagious Spirit of Christian Conversion Narratives: A Zombie Martyr’ by Sarah Juliet Lauro Literature & Theology 26.2 (2012), 160-178.

‘Postcolonial Science Fiction? Science, Religion and the Transformation of Genre in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome’ By James H. Thrall Literature & Theology , 23.3 (2009), 289-302.

Section 4: Wounded Humanity

‘Biddding the Animal Adieu: Grace in J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals and Disgrace’ by Brandi Estey-Burtt Literature & Theology, 31.2 (2017), 231-245.

‘Christina Rossetti’s “Wounded Speech”’ by Joel Westerholm Literature & Theology, 24.4 (2010), 345-359.

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Frankenstein: Texts and Contexts

• Library Resources
• Background Literature
• Suggested Reading on the Romantic Age
• Parents: William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft
• Husband: Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Friend: Lord Byron
• The Literary Response to the Year without a Summer
• Food Scarcity and Bread Riots
• Suggested Reading on Food Scarcity and Bread Riots
• Online Reference Resources
• Suggested Reading on Arctic Exploration
• Suggested Reading on Automata and Mechanical Devices
• Suggested Reading on Life
• Suggested Reading on Franklin and Galvani
• 'Frankenstein' on Film
• Suggested Reading on the Idea of Monstrosity
• The Mad Scientist in Literature
• Suggested Reading on 18th Century Medicine
• Bodysnatching
• Tyburn: Execution and Dissection
• Suggested Reading on Radical Politics
• Suggested Reading on Women in the 18th Century
• Pregnancy and Childbirth
• Suggested Reading on Pregnancy & Childbirth
• Child-rearing
• Suggested Reading on Child-rearing in the 18th Century
• E-books on Post/Transhumanism

Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus: Texts

• 'Frankenstein' (1818 edition) This Planet Ebook edition may be downloaded in ePUB, PDF, or MOBI formats.
• 'Frankenstein': The Pennsylvania Electronic Edition A hypertext version of the 1818 edition. Contains an extensive online collection of supplementary materials and criticism.
• Frankenbook A collective reading and collaborative annotation experience of the original 1818 text of Frankenstein.
• Shelley-Godwin Archive: 'Frankenstein' Manuscripts Draft and fair copy manuscripts from Oxford's Bodleian Library.

Resources on Frankenstein

• 'Frankenstein': Critical Articles A useful selection of criticism from scholarly studies on the novel. From the Pennsylvania Electronic Edition website.
• 'Frankenstein' at 200 – Why Hasn't Mary Shelley Been Given the Respect She Deserves? Fiona Sampson, author of 'In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein', looks at the intellectual and social background of the novel.
• 'Frankenstein' Reflects the Hopes and Fears of Every Scientific Era Author Philip Ball writes that Frankenstein is more complicated than a story of science gone awry; that each era makes Frankenstein in its own image.
• Anonymous Review of Frankenstein-British Library
• British Library: Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians A rich collection of primary sources, articles, themes, images, and works by British Romantic and Victorian authors.
• Charles E. Robinson: Introduction to the 'Frankenstein' Notebooks Robinson discusses the history of the manuscripts.
• Eighteenth Century Collections Online (U Michigan) Searchable database of 18th century texts in HTML.
• The Frankenstein Meme This digital project from the California State University at Fullerton offers "a public, crowd-sourced, searchable database of literary works (novels, short stories, plays, and graphic novels) influenced by Mary Shelley’s novel over the last two hundred years."
• Golems: Mysticism, History, Biology, and More This Kenyon University website examines the Yiddish legend of the Golem, an anthropomorphic figure made of clay or wood, and endowed with life by its creator.
• An Introduction to 'Frankenstein' By Stephanie Forward of the Open University (UK).
• It's Alive! Frankenstein At 200 (Podcast) In this episode of "On Point", 'Frankenstein' is discussed by historian Jill Lepore; physics professor Sidney Perkowitz; and Ed Finn, editor of "'Frankenstein': Annotated for Scientists, Engineers and Creators of All Kinds."
• NYPL: 'Frankenstein', The Afterlife of Shelley's Circle Primary sources, images, and contextual essays on a wide range of topics surrounding 'Frankenstein'.
• The Political Geography of Horror in Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' Fred V. Randel contends that the Bavarian setting of 'Frankenstein' is key to understanding its political dimensions.
• Review of 'Frankenstein' by Percy Bysshe Shelley Published in The Athenaeum Journal of Literature, Science and the Fine Arts, 10 November 1832: fourteen years after the initial publication of the novel.
• The Strange and Twisted Life of 'Frankenstein' Historian Jill Lepore examines the neglected birth and child-rearing aspects of the novel.
• Was ‘Frankenstein’ Really About Childbirth? Ruth Franklin asks if Mary Shelley's experience of pregnancy lies at the heart of 'Frankenstein'.
• Why Frankenstein is Still Relevant, Almost 200 Years after It Was Published This 2017 article by Josh was the first in a series of articles published on 'Frankenstein' in Slate. Provides links to the other articles.
• “Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein” Anne K. Mellor's feminist analysis of the female and the natural in 'Frankenstein'.
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Why Frankenstein matters

Frontiers in science, technology and medicine

By Audrey Shafer, MD

Illustration by Michael Waraksa

“Clear!” At some point during medical education and practice, every physician has heard or given this command. One person — such as a closely supervised medical student — pushes a button to deliver an electric shock and the patient’s body jerks. The code team, in complex choreography, works to restore both the patient’s cardiac rhythm and a pulse strong enough to perfuse vital organs. 

After a successful defibrillation effort, team members do not have time to dwell on the line crossed from death to life. It is even difficult to focus on the ultimate goal: to enable the patient to leave the hospital intact, perhaps to grasp a grandchild’s — or grandparent’s — hand while crossing the street to the park.

Despite these dramatic hospital scenes, many scientists, doctors and patients balk at any mention of the words Frankenstein and medicine in the same breath. Because, unlike the Victor Frankenstein of Mary Shelley’s novel, the reanimators at a hospital code have not toiled alone in a garret; assembled body parts from slaughterhouses, dissecting rooms and charnel houses; or created an entirely new being. Nonetheless, in this bicentennial commemorative year of the book’s publication, it is not only germane, but important to consider the impact of this story, including our reactions to it, on the state of scientific research today.

Shelley’s Frankenstein has captured the imaginations of generations, even for those who have never read the tale written by a brilliant 18-year-old woman while on holiday with Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Dr. John Polidori amid extensive storms induced by volcanic ash during the so-called year without a summer. Mary Shelley (her name was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin at the time) was intrigued by stories of science such as galvanism, which she would have heard through her father’s scientist (then called natural philosopher) friends.

With Frankenstein , Shelley wrote the first novel to forefront science as a means to create life, and as such, she wrote the first major work in the science fiction genre. Frankenstein, a flawed, obsessed student, feverishly reads extensive tomes and refines his experiments. After he succeeds in his labors, Frankenstein rejects his creation: He is revulsed by the sight of the “monster,” whom he describes as hideous. This rejection of the monster leads to a cascade of calamities. The subtitle of the book, The Modern Prometheus , primes the reader for the theme of the dire consequences of “playing God.”

A framework for examining morality and ethics

Frankenstein  is not only the first creation story to use scientific experimentation as its method, but it also presents a framework for narratively examining the morality and ethics of the experiment and experimenter. While artistic derivations, such as films and performances, and literary references have germinated from the book for the past 200 years, the current explosion of references to  Frankenstein  in relation to ethics, science and technology deserves scrutiny.

Science is, by its very nature, an exploration of new frontiers, a means to discover and test new ideas, and an impetus for paradigm shifts. Science is equated with progress and with advances in knowledge and understanding of our world and ourselves. Although a basic tenet of science is to question, there is an underlying belief, embedded in words like “advances” and “progress,” that science will better our lives.

Safeguards, protocols and institution approvals by committees educated in the horrible and numerous examples of unethical experiments done in the name of science are used to prevent a lone wolf like Victor Frankenstein from undertaking his garret experiments. Indeed, it is amusing to think of a mock Institutional Review Board approval process for a proposal he might put forward.

But these protections can go only so far. It is impossible to predict all of the consequences of our current and future scientific and technologic advances. We do not even need to speculate on the potential repercussions of, for example, the creation of a laboratory-designed self-replicating species, as we can look to unintended consequences of therapies such as the drug thalidomide, and controversies over certain gene therapies. This tension, this acknowledgment that unintended consequences occur, is unsettling.

Science and technology have led to impressive improvements in health and health care. People I love are alive today because of cancer treatments unknown decades ago. We are incredibly grateful to the medical scientists who envisioned these drugs and who did the experiments to prove their effectiveness.

As an anesthesiologist, I care for patients at vulnerable times in their lives; I use science and technology to render them unconscious — and to enable them to emerge from an anesthetized state.

But, as the frontiers are pushed further and further, the unintended consequences of how science and technology are used could affect who we are as humans, the viability of our planet and how society evolves. In terms of health, medicine and bioengineering, Frankenstein resonates far beyond defibrillation. These resonances include genetic engineering, tissue engineering, transplantation, transfusion, artificial intelligence, robotics, bioelectronics, virtual reality, cryonics, synthetic biology and neural networks. These fields are fascinating, worthy areas of exploration.

‘Frankenstein’ is not only the first creation story to use scientific experimentation as its method, but it also presents a framework for narratively examining the morality and ethics of the experiment and experimenter.

We, as physicians, health care providers, scientists and people who deeply value what life and health mean, cannot shy away from discussions of the potential implications of science, technology and the social contexts which give new capabilities and interventions even greater complexity. Not much is clear, but that makes the discussion more imperative.

Even the call “Clear!” and the ritual removal of physical contact with a patient just about to receive a shock is not so “clear,” as researchers scrutinize whether interruptions to chest compressions are necessary for occupational safety — that is, it may be deemed safe in the future for shocks and manual compressions to occur simultaneously.

We need to discuss the big questions surrounding what is human, and the implications of those questions. What do we think about the possibility of sentient nonhumans, enhanced beyond our limits, more sapient than Homo sapiens? Who or what will our great-grandchildren be competing against to gain entrance to medical school?

Studying and discussing works of art and imagination such as Frankenstein , and exchanging ideas and perspectives with those whose expertise lies outside the clinic and laboratory, such as artists, humanists and social scientists, can contribute not just to an awareness of our histories and cultures, but also can help us probe, examine and discover our understanding of what it means to be human. That much is clear.

Audrey Shafer, MD

Audrey Shafer, MD, is a Stanford professor of anesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine, the director of the Medicine and the Muse program and the co-director of the Biomedical Ethics and Medical Humanities Scholarly Concentration. She is an anesthesiologist at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System.

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Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

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Critical Articles on Frankenstein

• Frankenstein - Articles The University of Pennsylvania has provided access to over 200 scholarly essays on Frankenstein, which are alphabetically listed and available at the following link.

Frankenstein Editions and Criticism

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• Frankenstein (1818) vs. (1831). Dana Wheeles. Juxta Commons. This edition uses the comparative text tool, Juxta Commons, to align Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein with her 1831 Frankenstein. The tool allows for the user to manipulate the information and view the comparison in multiple formats, including side-by-side and histogram. This comparison edition is also linked from the Romantic Circles edition (ed. Stuart Curran).
• Frankenstein. Ed. Stuart Curran. Romantic Circles Editions. Romantic Circles, May 2009. This edition preserves both the 1818 and 1831 publications of Frankenstein. The novels can be read online as well as compared using a Juxta Commons link. The edition includes a critical introduction and study aids (plot summary, characters, additional materials). An appendix lists more than 280 previous editions of the novel.
• Frankenstein. The Shelley-Godwin Archive. The Shelley-Godwin Archive provides access to digitized manuscripts by England’s first family of writers: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Mary Shelley. The manuscript for Frankenstein can be read in its original manuscript versions or in its first printed three-volume text. Each page is exquisitely rendered and optimized for audience reading, zooming, and comparing. The Shelley-Godwin Archive is a great resource for those interested in exploring Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s collaborative writing process.
• Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818). The New York Public Library Digital Collections. Online page images of the 1818 edition that can be read online in a page-turner version.

• The novels and selected works of Mary Shelley Call Number: Ebook Publication Date: London : W. Pickering, 1996 v. 1. Frankenstein, or, The modern Prometheus / edited by Nora Crook -- v. 2. Matilda, dramas, reviews & essays, prefaces & notes / edited by Pamela Clemit -- v. 3. Valperga, or, The life and adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca / edited by Nora Crook -- v. 4. The last man / edited by Jane Blumberg with Nora Crook -- v. 5. The fortunes of Perkin Warbeck / edited by Doucet Devin Fischer -- v. 6. Lodore / edited by Fiona Stafford -- v. 7. Falkner / edited by Pamela Clemit -- v. 8. Travel writing / edited by Jeanne Moskal.

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The Novel “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley: Critical Analysis Essay

Introduction, walter scotts critique, naomi hetherington’s critique, works cited.

Frankenstein’s work has been criticized by many scholars who have tried to come up with other ideas concerning the Novel. Her book contains critical information which cannot be underestimated in the current contemporary society. Her use of hypothetical questions and fiction in the setup of her ideas can be utilized in recent literary works. This essay discusses two critiques by Professor Naomi Hetherington’s and Walter Scott’s analysis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Walter Scott, who was a British national, wrote the Romantic Circle Critiques. He was born in Edinburg and attended Edinburgh High School. He further went to Edinburgh University to study arts and law (Romantic Circles). He was involved in the Romantic Movement and participated in various occupational Walter was conducted, including poetry, historical novelist, clerk session, and advocate. His first poem was entitled Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Additionally, he published novels like Waverley, Guy Mannering, and Tales of My Land.

Mary’s novel is featured in the romantic fiction of nature which depicts family values and fundamental laws of nature. The author aims to explain the romantic nature by explaining unusual settings and nature components (Romantic Circles). The perceptions which drove Frankenstein, such as the change of species Belle Assemblee are explained. Furthermore, the difficulties and challenges Frankenstein and encounters with demons are illustrated. The changes that occur from life to death and death to stamina are explained. Themes of creation and revenge run across the novel in the urge of Frankenstein to avenge his originator for all the miseries.

Scoots’ analysis goes in hand with the settings and perceptions of Mary’s fiction. The element of imaginary setting and magical narration is the primary focus of the author’s critique. They bring about a better understanding of this novel in a relevant manner. The author supports Mary’s work and critically analysis the novel with matching arguments in a necessary way. He uses romance fiction and the element of vengeance and anger due to demons’ control which generally gives a good narration based on historical events. I agree with the critique since it uses Frankenstein’s ideas and themes which support his arguments. The similarity in the content and the settings are valid and authentic.

Another critique is from Professor Naomi Hetherington, who has a Ph.D. from Southampton University. She has been a teacher in Birkbeck for almost five years at the University of London, where she earned a teaching and scholarship award for her incredible contribution to literature. Naomi’s thesis illustrates that Mary wanted to use myths through fiction, the meaning of being a human being in a universe full of troubles (Hetherington 42). Additionally, she suggests that Mary revised her work to deviate from Lawrence and compare it with Christian Orthodox etiology.

Naomi’s thesis statement is relevant since it illustrates a step-by-step analysis of the novel. The first section of her research relates Frankenstein to Milton’s Paradise Lost and Prometheus legend. On the other hand, the last section describes the book to the religious nature of Mary after her husband dies (Ozherelyev 63). The Miltonic illustrations seen throughout the novel are used to emphasize the origin of evil in the world. The presence of a deity who creates human beings is seen. I agree with Naomi’s Critique since it relates outside resources such as Frankenstein to Milton Paradise Lost and Prometheus legend to support her arguments. She further identifies other themes related to the main content making these resources valid.

In summary, the two critiques by Naomi and Scoot give a better review of the novel provide literature and comprehension of the past event. Factors that contribute to environmental changes are discussed. The themes of creation and vengeance are illustrated to give a clear perspective of Mary’s main aim in writing her book. After the death of her husband, Mary becomes religious and seeks Christian Orthodox etiology ideas. The existence of a deity who creates human beings indicates the origin of life, and its end is seen by death.

Hetherington, Naomi. “Creator And Created in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein .”Taylor & Francis , vol, 12, no. 5, 2022, pp. 32-85

Ozherelyev, Konstantin A. “Philosophical Contexts in Mary Shelley’S Novel «Frankenstein.» Herald Of Omsk University , vol 25, no. 3, 2020, pp. 61-66. Dostoevsky Omsk State University ,

Romantic Circles. “Belle Assemblee Review of Frankenstein. March 1818, Romantic Circles”. Romantic-Circles.Org , 2022, Web.

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IvyPanda . 2023. "The Novel "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley: Critical Analysis." August 20, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-novel-frankenstein-by-mary-shelley-critical-analysis/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Novel "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley: Critical Analysis." August 20, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-novel-frankenstein-by-mary-shelley-critical-analysis/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Novel "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley: Critical Analysis." August 20, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-novel-frankenstein-by-mary-shelley-critical-analysis/.

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‘Dark Matter’ Uses Science to Explore Regret and Desire

In this new Apple TV+ techno-thriller, a portal to parallel realities allows people to visit new worlds and revisit their own past decisions.

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By Chris Vognar

In the new series “Dark Matter,” a physics professor (Joel Edgerton) is abducted off the streets of Chicago and replaced by an alternative version of himself. This version, instead of toiling away teaching distracted undergrads, is a prize-winning scientist who, among his various accomplishments, has invented a box that can superposition people into parallel worlds.

This alternative Jason, despite his riches and renown in his own universe, covets the humbler Jason’s life and family — his loving wife (Jennifer Connelly) and son (Oakes Fegley). So he steals them, leaving the original Jason to negotiate a limbo of parallel realities, hopping from one to another as he tries to find his way home, like a sci-fi Odysseus.

“Dark Matter,” which premieres May 8 on Apple TV+, was created by Blake Crouch, adapting his own 2016 novel of the same title. The series is part thriller, part family drama and part physics primer, enlisting heady concepts like quantum mechanics, superposition and, well, dark matter, to tell a story about longing, regret and desire.

It is the latest project to depict physics as a vital, fraught and even sexy subject, joining the Oscar giant biopic “Oppenheimer” and the Netflix alien invasion series “3 Body Problem,” which is named for a classical mechanics problem. In these stories, physicists wrestle with matters of life and death that, as in reality, are intertwined with matters of love.

They’re human tales about human dilemmas. But they’re also happy to throw some science into the equation.

“More than anything, Blake and I wanted people to be excited in every episode, learn something in every episode, but also maybe cry in every episode,” Jacquelyn Ben-Zekry said in a video interview. She is a writer and producer on the series and has been Crouch’s developmental story editor since the publication of his 2012 novel “Pines” — she is also married to him.

“We wanted you to feel something in every episode,” she continued. “At the end of the day, it’s the story of a man who loves his wife and child. Everything else is just about making it interesting and exciting, and giving us something to talk about.”

And yet, that man is a physicist; in the first episode of “Dark Matter” we see Jason try to explain the quantum superposition experiment of Schrödinger’s cat, which bears directly on the plot, to a classroom full of largely uninterested students. The heroes of “Oppenheimer,” chiefly the title character, and “3 Body Problem,” about a team of Oxford-trained friends tasked with saving the world, are also physicists. (So are the socially befuddled young brainiacs of “The Big Bang Theory,” the hit sitcom that spawned a prequel, “Young Sheldon,” though the science took a back seat to high jinks and catchphrases.)

These series and movies go into technical specifics to varying degrees. “Dark Matter” dangles its central concepts enough to help make the Jasons’ world-jumping seem at least somewhat plausible and to bring some science to the science fiction.

The series is a techno-thriller, a subgenre popularized by authors like Michael Crichton (“Jurassic Park”), whom Crouch cites as a major influence. It is also a cautionary sci-fi tale, the kind with roots digging down to the origins of the genre, including Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” (1818). These are tales of ambition — and often transgression — about the consequences of meddling with the forces of nature. “Oppenheimer,” a historical drama, deals directly with these consequences, asking what it might have felt like to unleash the apocalyptic powers of the atomic bomb (and explaining the concept of fission along the way).

Crouch, best known on TV for the short-lived sci-fi thriller “Wayward Pines” (which was based on his trilogy of novels), is definitely not a physicist. As an English major at the University of North Carolina, he studied geology to fulfill his science requirement.

“Rocks seemed safe, so I did rocks,” he said in a video interview. But he was also a big fan of science fiction, particularly Crichton. “He didn’t invent the techno-thriller, but he made it fun,” he said. “A lot of people think ‘Jurassic Park’ is just schlocky pulp fiction, but it’s really amazing that he wrote a book about dinosaurs and chaos theory. It’s in the weeds on some of that stuff.”

Crouch is pretty comfortable wading in the weeds. He’s enamored of the physicist Aaron O’Connell , and his experiments in superposition. In layman’s terms, superposition refers to the ability of a quantum system to be in multiple different states simultaneously until it is measured. (In the famous Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, a cat in a box is both is alive and dead at the same time, in a quantum theoretical sense.) While writing “Dark Matter,” Crouch also consulted with the astrophysicist Clifford V. Johnson, then a professor at the University of Southern California who, according to his bio there, was “mainly concerned with the development of theoretical tools for the description of the basic fabric of nature.” (Johnson is now a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.)

But for the purposes of the series, as Ben-Zekry put it, “You have to tell a propulsive story. Nobody cares about your science and how smart you are if they’re not entertained and if they’re not excited.”

Viewers might recognize “Dark Matter” as a variation on the multiverse story, made popular in recent years by Oscar winners including “Everything Everywhere All At Once” and “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” (and its sequels). It is a popular conceit in the fantasy franchise world, and a useful way to expand those franchise’s storytelling universes. But for Edgerton, the appeal of “Dark Matter” lies largely in the ordinariness of the characters, the fact that they’re dealing with everyday concerns like life-work balance and raising a family.

“It’s a parallel universe narrative for the average family,” Edgerton said in a video interview alongside Connelly. “Rather than going outward into the galaxies and trying to go through wormholes, it becomes a show that looks more inward.”

The defining question behind “Dark Matter” can be summed up by the title of the first episode: “Are You Happy in Your Life?” “It has its own suburban kind of esoteric, pensive pondering about it that I think is superhuman rather than supernatural,” Edgerton said.

And if you learn a little about a subject that gave you fits in high school, Connelly said, that’s great, too. “I think science is exciting personally,” she said. “If people take that away from it, good. Science is super captivating and sexy.”

While acknowledging their imperative to entertain, Crouch and Ben-Zekry also see a higher purpose in putting science front and center, especially in an age when the very concept of facts is increasingly under attack.

“I hope shows like these will go a long way toward uniting thought and reminding people that we’re all in this together,” Ben-Zekry said. “That you don’t have to believe the same things as me, but science can at least give us some objective reality.”

As Crouch sees it, the current climate is enough to make one feel like they’ve tumbled into an alternative reality. Just like Jason.

“Especially post-2016, it feels like we all slipped into another dimension, with this notion of fake news and the question of what is real anymore,” he said. “There’s a destruction of truth and reality. I think we all still want to understand what reality is.”

An earlier version of this article misstated where the astrophysicist Clifford V. Johnson is a professor. He is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, not the University of Southern California. (He was a professor at U.S.C. when Blake Crouch consulted with him during the writing of “Dark Matter.”)

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