Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
actual contemporary target, represented by the elixir motif, was nothing
else than rudimentary medicinal chemistry, against which neither com-
monsense morality nor philosophical ethics could and did raise any ob-
jections. However, writers had strong concerns about the use and possi-
ble abuse of chemistry's power, which they thereby conceded to exist.
“There is nothing that human imagination can figure brilliant and envi-
able, that human genius and skill do not aspire to realise,” wrote William
Godwin at the very beginning of his 'al-chemist' novel
St. Leon
(1799).
In retrospect, this sounds like a programmatic division of labor, where
the writers should take the part of the imagination for the purpose of
warning, and then decide how scientists might realize it.
Although there is still debate about how much she was influenced by
her father, twenty-year-old Mary Shelley (1797-1851) seems to have
taken these words of her father to heart in writing her famous novel
Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus
(1818), the most famous of all
stories that combine hubris with the 'mad scientist'.
40
The plot is much
too well known to require a detailed description. The ambitious Swiss
scientist Frankenstein creates an artificial human being that eventually
turns out to behave like a monster, killing his brother, his friend, and his
wife, and finally committing suicide, after Frankenstein himself dies dur-
ing his remorseful but unsuccessful hunting of the monster. The interest-
ing point here is how Shelley tried to relate all this to contemporary
chemistry, because Frankenstein is, of course, a chemist of the late eight-
eenth century.
41
Chapters 2-4 of the novel, while at the surface level describing steps
in the adolescence of Victor Frankenstein, provide an interestingly de-
tailed version of the history of science, which has largely been over-
40
All quotes below are from the 1831 edition (London: Colburn & Bentley).
41
Strangely, the reference to chemistry has received little attention in the hundreds of
existing
Frankenstein
interpretations. Baldick (1987, pp. 6ff.) distinguishes between
ahistorical psychological interpretations and what he calls the “technological reduc-
tions”, which, again, ahistorically project all kinds of mechanical, electrical, and ge-
netic engineering onto the novel. Whereas Baldwick himself seeks a historically in-
formed multidimensional interpretation to explain
Frankenstein
as the birth of a
“modern myth”, my point is that the “Frankenstein myth” is not a modern invention
but, beyond being a Faustian variant, is another transforming step from the four-
teenth-century mad alchemist.
