Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
bition for science, you are lost. Once you get involved in the chemical
investigation of nature,
i.e
. the secrets of the divine creation, you are
necessary driven to commit the sin of hubris with disastrous effects.
However, as with all nineteenth-century 'mad scientist' stories, and de-
spite Shelley's efforts to point out the determinism, the disastrous effects
are attached in order to make the moral plausible.
Frankenstein
not only
stands out as the first modern anti-modern 'mad chemist' novel, but it is
also the most radical one, because it transferred the fate of the obsessed
'mad alchemist' to the fate of science. Although we are today inclined to
read the novel as a warning of
possible
scientific misconduct, it actually
suggests both psychological and historical determinism, according to
which the 'seeds of evil' necessarily develop in the course of the scien-
tific endeavor.
Perhaps the second most famous early author of 'mad scientist' sto-
ries is the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64). His short
stories are particularly interesting because they allow us to analyze in
more detail the transformation from the medieval 'mad alchemist' to the
modern 'mad scientist'. In one of his early tales,
The Great Carbuncle
(1837),
45
Hawthorne introduced a medieval 'mad alchemist' whose mad-
ness largely remains within the scope of self-destruction: “He was from
beyond the sea, a Dr. Cacaphodel, who had wilted and dried himself into
a mummy, by continually stooping over charcoal furnaces and inhaling
unwholesome fumes, during his researches in chemistry and alchemy
[…] he had drained his body of all its richest blood, and wasted it, with
other inestimable ingredients, in an unsuccessful experiment - and had
never been a well man since.” Later in the story, a new, modern aspect of
45
From
Twice-Told Tales
(Boston 1837), 213-34 (probably written in 1834). The al-
chemist/chemist is only one among seven miserable seekers of the Great Carbuncle,
who each confess their different motives for the pursuit. In some sense, the whole
story may be read as a metaphorical classification of various kinds of alchemists/sci-
entists or Faustian seekers. William Bysshe Stein (1953), places Hawthorne's mad
scientists in the Faust tradition, as received in Puritan New England, and points out
Hawthorne's interest in ancient myths as “marvellously independent of all temporary
modes and circumstances” (p. 25). By uncritically making Hawthorne's view his
own, however, Stein decontextualizes Hawthorne's mad scientist stories and reads
them as prophecies of “inevitable doom, a fate which the atomic and hydrogen bombs
seem to confirm” (p. 148). Historian of science William R. Newman (2004, pp. 2-5)
has recently argued against such ahistorical reading.
