Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
It is not difficult to supply reasons why the account of Darwin's al-
leged experiments should have had such a profoundly unsettling effect
on Mary Shelley, aged eighteen, the youngest and least assured person
present, and clearly intellectually overawed by the discussion (she tells
us that she was “a devout but nearly silent listener”). Only the preceding
year, Mary had lost her first child born prematurely and had recently un-
dergone a second, difficult confinement. Inevitably she would have felt
emotionally disturbed, even violated, by a discussion which not only
abolished the role of the female in the creation of life, but trivialized the
process by reducing it to “a piece of vermicelli in a glass case”. Unable
to argue at a rational level with the intellectual giants Byron and Shelley,
she doubtless suppressed her disquiet, which emerged violently in her
subsequent dream. What is more interesting for the purpose of this explo-
ration of images is her immediate identification of the highly visual
nightmare image of the attempt to create life with her earlier aim “to
think of a story […] which would speak to the mysterious fears of our
nature and awaken thrilling horror” (Shelley 1996, p. 171).
Frankenstein is not only the Romantic over-reacher determined to
transcend human limitations; he is also the heir of Baconian optimism
and Enlightenment confidence that everything can ultimately be known
and that such knowledge will inevitably be for the good. “I doubted not
that I should ultimately succeed […]. A new species would bless me as
its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their
being to me.” (Shelley 1996, pp. 31f.).
Frankenstein also accepts uncritically the reductionist premise of the
eighteenth-century mechanists, that an organism is no more than the sum
of its parts. As heir to a such a view, he has no sense of the extraordinary
irony involved when he sets out to create a “being like myself” from
dead and inanimate components, ignoring the possible need for any liv-
ing or spiritual elements. Even in retrospect he seems to see no anomaly
in this, for he tells Walton, not without pride: “In my education my father
had taken the greatest precautions that my mind should be impressed
to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world” (Shelley 1996, p.
172). This is the edition most commonly reproduced and it is consequently the one
that has colored successive interpretations of the novel (Butler 1993, pp. 302-13).
