Creating Frankenstein Jeremy Kessler - The New Atlantis

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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.
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