Creating Frankenstein Jeremy Kessler - The New Atlantis

Creating FrankensteinJeremy KesslerThe standard Frankensteinread during most of thenineteenth and twentiethcenturies wasthe third publishedversionof the novel.Frankenstein;or, the ModernPrometheusfirst appearedas an anonymousthreevolumeworkon New Year’s Day, 1818, in a run offive hundred copies. In 1823, MaryShelley’s father Charles Godwin publishedanother small run, also in threevolumes, with minor changes madeby Godwin or the publisher. Thethird version appeared on Halloween1831 as a one-volume work whichMary Shelley herself had substantiallyrevised.In recent years, the 1818 versionhas returned to popularity amongboth scholars and publishers. Buta new edition, calling itself TheOriginal Frankenstein, goes still furtherback in the bibliographic record,presenting two fresh versions of thenovel based on a draft manuscriptthat antedates the 1818 version. Thismanuscript is a product of workdone by Mary Shelley and her husband,the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley,between August 1816 and April 1817,work based onnow-lost earlyversions ofthe story thatMary began inJuly 1816.In restoringthe “original”Frankenstein,Charles E.Robinson—anEnglish professor at the Universityof Delaware and author of severalbooks about Lord Byron and bothShelleys—has performed a sort ofsurgery on the 1816-1817 draft. Thefirst part of his book is a version thatincludes both Mary’s original workand Percy’s corrections. The secondpart of the book, the pages of whichare of a differently-colored paper tomark the procedure, excises Percy’sadditions and deletions, leaving astory which “takes us back as far aspossible to the ‘original’ novel thatMary Shelley first drafted duringthat famous and rainy summer of1816 in Geneva.”Just as there are as many versionsof Frankenstein as there havebeen alterations to its text, any oneThe Original FrankensteinBy Mary Shelley (with Percy Bysshe Shelley)Edited by Charles E. RobinsonVintage ~ 2009 ~ 464 pp.$14 (paper)Frankenstein: A Cultural HistoryBy Susan Tyler HitchcockW. W. Norton ~ 2007 ~ 400 pp.$25.95 (cloth)82 ~ The New AtlantisCopyright 2009. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.

Creating FRANKENSTEINversion is a collection of fragments—not only of Mary and Percy’s variouscontributions, but of what ClaudeLévi-Strauss called bricolage: the cobblingtogether of a new story or symbolout of cultural hand-me-downs.This process of piecemeal creationalso characterizes the manufactureof Frankenstein’s creature. Book andmonster are each man-made, bearingthe marks of a human subjectivitywrestling with the constraints ofthe world around it—bending theworld to its will. It may be that thiscontest between interior vision andexterior medium always results ina kind of fractured genesis, a creaturewhose seams must show. MaryShelley herself appreciated the analogybetween book and monster. Whenthe substantially-revised third editionwas released on Halloween 1831,she remarked: “And now, once again, Ibid my hideous progeny go forth andprosper. I have an affection for it, forit was the offspring of happy days.”In the first chapter of Frankenstein:A Cultural History, Susan TylerHitchcock—author of Mad MaryLamb: Lunacy and Murder in London(2005) and the blog MonsterSightings—recounts the story ofthese happy days, when a group ofyoung artists and lovers took shelterfrom the pounding Swiss rain in thesummer of 1816, and pondered thewonders and horrors of nature. Twoyears earlier, Mary Godwin had metPercy Bysshe Shelley, fallen in love,and borne his child out of wedlock.(The baby was premature and did notsurvive.) Percy was still married tohis first wife Harriet; scandal ensued.The rebellious couple eventually fledto the Continent with Mary’s stepsisterClaire, who herself was pursuinganother poet, Lord Byron. InMay 1816, the lovestruck threesomearrived in Geneva, where the alreadyinfamous Byron was summering at alakeshore chateau once frequented byJohn Milton.Despite the unseasonably cool,damp weather, the lakeside communitywas abuzz. As Percy Shelleyrecalled to a friend, “The inhabitantson the banks of the lake oppositeLord Byron’s house used telescopesto spy upon his movements.” Thesevoyeurs were not just driven by simplecuriosity: “They said that we hadformed a pact to outrage all that isregarded as most sacred in humansociety.” The group’s entertainmentsappear to have been more staid thanthe neighbors cared to imagine.Conversation revolved around suchhappy bourgeois subjects as scientificprogress, and evenings were occupiedwith ghost stories.As the rain came down, LordByron and Percy Shelley discussed“the nature of the principle of life”and other “philosophical doctrines.”Conversations about “galvanism” lefta deep impression on Mary; electricitywas a hot topic. Less than twentyyears before, Luigi Galvani had shotanimals through with an electricalSummer 2009 ~ 83Copyright 2009. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.

Jeremy Kesslercharge, causing “disembodied frogleg muscles to move.” Galvani’snephew Giovanni Aldini—a strikinglymodern combination of magician,camp evangelist, and buzzworthyrock star—toured Europe, animatingthe tongues and eyes of ox-heads.Aldini’s most memorable trick wasthe pseudo-resurrection of a killer—asort of reverse execution. A Londonjury had found George Forster (orFoster) guilty of drowning his wifeand son in Paddington Canal, andhe was hanged on January 18, 1803.A few days later, Forster’s body wastaken to a nearby house, where Aldini“connected wires from a massive batteryof copper and zinc to the corpse’shead and anus.” An eyewitness to theexperiment recounted:On the first application of the processto the face, the jaws of thedeceased criminal began to quiver,the adjoining muscles were horriblycontorted, and one eye wasactually opened. In the subsequentpart of the process, the right handwas raised and clenched, and thelegs and thighs were set in motion.It appeared to the un informedpart of the by-standers as if thewretched man was on the eve ofbeing restored to life.A contemporaneous record of executionsreported that “Mr. Pass, thebeadle of the Surgeons’ Company,having been officially present duringthis experiment, was so alarmed, thathe died soon after his return homeof the fright.” Though the periodicalassured readers that in this particularcase full revivification was impossible,it did note that in “cases of drowningor suffocation” Aldini’s method“promises to be of the utmost use,by reviving the action of the lungs,and thereby rekindling the expiringspark of vitality.”At eighteen, Mary Godwin’svision was already darkenedby the inconstant light of life. Hermother had died in giving birth toher, and the year before her trip toGeneva, Mary described her ownprematurely-born daughter as “unexpectedlyalive, but still not expected tolive.” “Animal electricity” or “galvanicfluid,” the vital substance posited asthe source of organic movement andupon which experiments like Aldini’swere said to act, spurred her imagination:“Perhaps the component partsof a creature,” she mused, “might bemanufactured, brought together, andendued with vital warmth.” If modernmedicine had not yet resolvedthe indeterminacy of a child’s birth,modern physics offered to unfangthe frailty of life. Man might masterdeath not through the preservationof life but through its re-creation.The new science that drove Mary’smusings surely attracted the sensibilitiesof the group of young fantasistsat Geneva as much for its aestheticpossibilities as its biological ones.Experiments such as Aldini’s hadthe same jagged contours that the84 ~ The New AtlantisCopyright 2009. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.

Creating FRANKENSTEINRomantics saw in the sublimity ofnature—its deadliness to the humanand its expressiveness of man’s mostpotent inner life. This dark doublenesswas manifested in the imagethat appeared to Mary one sleeplessnight:I saw the pale student of unhallowedarts kneeling beside thething he had put together. I sawthe hideous phantasm of a manstretched out, and then, on theworking of some powerful engine,show signs of life, and stir with anuneasy, half vital motion. Frightfulmust it be; for supremely frightfulwould be the effect of any humanendeavour to mock the stupendousmechanism of the Creator ofthe world.One of the more important storiesHitchcock tells in her Cultural Historyis the evolution of Frankensteinfrom a somewhat befuddled andconscience-stricken experimentalistto the now-familiar image of a wildeyedBabel-builder, featured in countlessmoralistic retellings of the tale.As Hitchcock shows, Mary Shelleydid not originally pen a story tocondemn the excesses of human creativityand ambition. Six years beforeVictoria’s coronation, Shelley’s 1831rewrite reflected changing publicmores—the hubris of the creator isplayed up and the potential goodnessof his creation played down.But not simply public mores: thelater version of the tale may alsoreflect Shelley’s own perspectivechanging with age, as many of theRomantics became more conservativeas the years passed. Mary, Percy,and their friends were all studentagedor not much older at the timeof their ghost-story summer, just likethe figure in Mary’s vision. Theiryouth is too little remarked uponby Hitchcock. Sitting around thechateau, conjuring spooks, arguingabout the origins of life, creating lifein the upstairs bedrooms—thus theyfilled their protracted, sophomoricdays. Just as much as Frankenstein,they, artists all, were after new creations.Still, the earlier Frankenstein doescontain the anxieties about humancreators and their creations thatwould come to characterize the modernera’s mad scientist story. Madscience is a modern satire of reason.In the mad scientist, Western culturewatches the paragon of rationalitygrow drunk on its own technicalprowess. But the mad scientist is nota wholly novel figure: as Frankensteinand its own creation story suggests,the mad scientist is an updated avatarof the classic enemy of reason: thepoet, that creator of new worlds whorejects any limit not set by his ownwill.While Victor Frankenstein allowedMary Shelley to explore the problemof the human creator, whether scientistor poet, his monster exemplifiedthe experience of being created; ofbeing alienated from one’s origins inSummer 2009 ~ 85Copyright 2009. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.

Jeremy Kesslerwild accident or imperious design;of being composite, a thing with nosure center. We humans, creaturesourselves, come to empathize withthe monster’s plight: we too feel thatwhat constitutes us is not of us, thatwhat we are came from outside ofourselves. Whether we are built fromdust in God’s own image, or are amomentary pause in the evolutionof multicellular life, there looms theknowledge that foreign material isat the very center of our existence.We are not self-fashioned and do nothave mastery of our beings.Both The Original Frankensteinand Frankenstein: A CulturalHistory demonstrate the problem ofthe created through an examinationof how Mary Shelley’s novelhas changed over time, both duringits own fraught creation and in theway its story has been received andmodified through the years. Firstpublished anonymously, the novelhas long been dogged by one of thoseliterary whodunnits: the persistentbelief, in some circles, that Percy wasthe primary—even sole—author.Robinson’s scholarship makes astrong case against this idea, scrupulouslydetailing the collaborationbetween Mary and Percy, a collaborationwhich preceded our first availabledraft of the novel:A comparison of the two versions...showsthat Percy deletedmany words in the extant Draftand that he also added nearly3,000 words to the text of thenovel. When we add to theseinterventions the changes thatPercy most certainly made in thetwo missing sections of the Draft,the changes he made at the endof the Fair Copy, and the oneextended passage he likely madein the proofs, we may concludethat he contributed at least 4,000to 5,000 words to this 72,000-word novel.Percy’s “corrections” are almostalways on the side of the florid andLatinate. Where Mary’s originalVictor Frankenstein “had plenty of leisure,”Percy’s amount was “sufficient.”To Percy’s ear, Victor shouldn’t “goto the university,” he should “becomea student” there. Almost two decadesafter William Wordsworth extolledthe poetry of naturalistic speech,Percy changes his wife’s “peculiarlyinteresting” to “almost as imposing &interesting as truth.” Just as the trueauthor of the book was for years keptanonymous for the sake of propriety,the “voice” of the nascent Frankensteinwas thrown—its characters wouldspeak in an archer prose style thanfirst imagined, more familiar to theliterary market of the day, if less trueto life.Hitchcock’s lush history ofFrankenstein’s reception charts howconvention shaped the “original” ifalready composite vision, followingthe transmigration of the monsterstory from book to stage to screen,86 ~ The New AtlantisCopyright 2009. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.

Creating FRANKENSTEINbig and then small. Environmentalinfluence exerts a strong grip onthe story and on the natures of itscharacters. If the steamy lake-housewhere the novel was conceived produceda fraught, ambiguous work,the bustle of a metropolis calledforth different qualities. In the summerof 1823, the play Presumption,or the Fate of Frankenstein opened inLondon, the first dramatic adaptationof Shelley’s tale. As its title indicates,the play traded on a didacticism aliento the early versions of the novel.Tellingly, Presumption began a traditionthat extends to the present dayin rendering Frankenstein’s creationmute. The emphasis thus shifts tothe sin committed—the presumptuousfall—rather than on the ongoingstruggle of creation, as witnessed bya dialogue between creator and created.The Gnosticism of the Romanticsis repossessed by a more familiarapologetic.Similarly, in James Whale’s famous1931 film adaptation starring BorisKarloff, a mute creature’s evil istraced to the substrate of his consciousness:he has mistakenly beengiven the brain of a criminal. Thisliteralization of contemporary psychologicalexplanations for the sourceof sin was and remains a comfort toaudiences. Surely, our brains are not“mismatched.” How could they be?And yet time and again, when webetray ourselves, or when we feel notright for our bodies, this experienceof impure creation returns.Frankenstein’s monster himselfargued that his violence was a productof external forces, though of asocial and not a biological kind:I am malicious because I am miserable.Am I not shunned andhated by all mankind? You, mycreator, would tear me to piecesand triumph. Remember that—and tell me why I should pityman more than he pities me. Youwould not call it murder if youprecipitated me into one of thoseice rifts and destroyed my frame,the work of your own hand. ShallI respect man when he contemnsme? Let him live with me inthe interchange of kindness, and,instead of injury, I would bestowevery benefit upon him with tearsof gratitude at his acceptance. Butthat cannot be; the human sensesare insurmountable barriers toour union.Made of parts of many men, themonster is the unhappy productof inexorable nature and nurture,his very heart a collection of theemotions that have been directedat him throughout his strange life.Our modern debate between natureand nurture—as if they are the onlyalternatives—reveals an essentialpessimism: both are forms of determinism,both denying the freedom oftrue self-composition.In the end, the problem of the creatorand the created are united.The human creator himself creates inSummer 2009 ~ 87Copyright 2009. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.

Jeremy Kesslerpart to dispel the terror of his beingcreated. Herman Melville, one ofthe many nineteenth century writersinfluenced by Shelley’s tale, powerfullyfelt the union of these problems.Hitchcock astutely flags Melville’shomage in Chapter 44 of Moby-Dick,when Ahab storms out of his cabin ina strange fit:For, at such times, crazy Ahab, thescheming, unappeasedly steadfasthunter of the White Whale; thisAhab that had gone to his hammock,was not the agent that socaused him to burst from it inhorror again. The latter was theeternal, living principle or soulin him; and in sleep, being for thetime dissociated from the characterizingmind, which at othertimes employed it for its outervehicle or agent, it spontaneouslysought escape from the scorchingcontiguity of the frantic thing, ofwhich, for the time, it was no longeran integral. But as the minddoes not exist unless leagued withthe soul, therefore it must havebeen that, in Ahab’s case, yieldingup all his thoughts and fanciesto his one supreme purpose; thatpurpose, by its own sheer inveteracyof will, forced itself againstgods and devils into a kind of selfassumed,independent being of itsown. Nay, could grimly live andburn, while the common vitalityto which it was conjoined, fledhorror-stricken from the unbiddenand unfathered birth. Therefore,the tormented spirit thatglared out of bodily eyes, whenwhat seemed Ahab rushed fromhis room, was for the time but avacated thing, a formless somnambulisticbeing, a ray of livinglight, to be sure, but without anobject to color, and therefore ablankness in itself. God help thee,old man, thy thoughts have createda creature in thee; and he whoseintense thinking thus makes him aPrometheus; a vulture feeds uponthat heart for ever; that vulturethe very creature he creates.Ahab displays the classic divided consciousnessof the created being—there are parts of him that he doesnot experience as being his own.There are states he enters which arebeyond his will. There is a vultureinside of him that is beyond him. Andyet, as Melville devastatingly catalogues,Ahab has created this vulture,a symbol of his createdness, throughhis own war against creation. Ahab,like the greatest of the poets, has constructeda world—a ship, a journey,an inimical fiend—as an alternativeto the contingency of his own mortallife. But it is this wild act of creation,this magnificent, obsessive tale, thatconfirms his createdness, and propagateshis dependence. The desire tobe uncreated is the ultimate mark ofthe creature. It is through subsidiarycreations that the creature tries to fulfillthis desire: If I am the creator, perhapsI eclipse the limits of creation.The proliferation of new worldsundermines our certainty in the one88 ~ The New AtlantisCopyright 2009. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.

Creating FRANKENSTEINexternal social or natural world. Thegambit of art is to multiply worldsto such an extent that no singlereality can exert enough force uponus to master us. At the same time,as Hitchcock’s history shows, poeticcreation at its most eccentric isquickly rewoven into the cloth ofconvention. Just like any other creature,an artistic creation does notcontrol its own destiny.Nearly two hundred years after itsfirst publication, Frankenstein servesas an engine for the constant exposureof this process of world-makingand world-conforming. Because thenovel’s subject matter was so ripe forpopular consumption to begin with,showmen have been invested in conformingthe tale to still more conventionalnarratives. The seams in thenarratives show, and by revisitingthese monsters, we remind ourselvesabout the perennial problems of thecreator and the created.Mary Shelley conceived of Frankensteinat a time when science, themodern representative of reason,was moving toward world- makingand away from its traditional worldrepresentingrole. The more powerfulapplied reason became, the morecreative became the rationalists’work. Dr. Frankenstein marks themoment when the work of reasonthreatened itself with success. MaryShelley’s novel stands as a livingcritique of pure reason, in which thevery power of human reason underminesits claim to address a singlereality, unchanged by the manipulationsof individual consciousness.In its Romantic fervor, Frankensteinannounces a new stage in the veryold history of creation, a paradoxicalstage we still stride, where growinganxieties about determinism accompanygrowing suspicions that humansubjectivity, whether exercised bypoet or scientist, is the sole determinantof reality.Jeremy Kessler is a student at YaleLaw School.Summer 2009 ~ 89Copyright 2009. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.