Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
powers against a repressive regime, whether of Zeus, the Church, or pub-
lic opinion. This is the Faust of German Romanticism, of Klinger,
Goethe, and Lessing. Scientists are still regularly characterized across a
similar range, depending on prevailing social and moral support for the
intrinsic value of knowledge or for the contrary view that it should be
subsidiary to the public interest and, if necessary, suppressed.
4.2 Frankenstein
Mary Shelley's character Frankenstein has become an archetype in its
own right, universally referred to and providing the dominant image of
the scientist in twentieth-century fiction and film. Frankenstein is the
prototype of the mad scientist who hides himself in his laboratory,
secretly creating not an elixir of immortality but a new human life, only
to find he has created a Monster. Not only has his name become virtually
synonymous with any experiment out of control, but also his relation
with his creation has become, in popular misconception, complete iden-
tification: Frankenstein
is
the Monster. The power of the Frankenstein
story can be attributed to the fact that, in its essentials, it was a product of
the subconscious rather than the conscious mind of its author and thus, in
Jungian terms, draws upon the collective unconscious of the race.
The circumstances of the composition of
Frankenstein
, as described
by the author in her Introduction to the 1831 edition, are almost as well
known as the story itself and have themselves inspired other fictional ac-
counts including a film and an opera
3
. Yet it is worth stressing that, ac-
cording to Mary Shelley, the story was produced by the concurrence of
two specific factors: the need to produce a horror story and the account
of an alleged scientific experiment. Mary and Percy Shelley, their baby
son William and Mary's step-sister Claire Clairmont were spending the
summer of 1816 near Geneva, as neighbors of the poet Lord Byron and
his personal physician Polidori. Kept indoors by a stretch of bad weather,
Byron, Percy, Polidori, and Mary each agreed to write a ghost story as
entertainment. Mary records that she found great difficulty in thinking of
3
Ken Russell's film
Gothic
(1986) and the opera
Mer de Glace
(1991), libretto by
David Malouf.
