Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
Nineteenth-century writers established a firm link between chemistry
and hubris that was already prepared by the Faust tradition, which also
flourished at the time. A reliable method to prove that the link had be-
come a literary cliché is to look for stories featuring chemists who com-
mit the 'sin of hubris' without any direct reference to chemistry or al-
chemy. Such an instance is
The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain
(1848)
50
by Charles Dickens (1812-70).
51
Although the main character of
that novel, Redlaw, is a chemistry professor and although most of the
plot takes place at his university “in his inner chamber, part library and
part laboratory”, Dickens avoided any further mention of chemistry. In-
stead, since poor Redlaw is haunted by his memory of awful personal af-
fairs in the past, he makes a “bargain” with a ghost. In that Faust-like
pact, he receives the gift of forgetting all wrongs in the past as well as the
capacity to pass on the same gift to everybody with whom he gets in
touch. Playing “the benefactor of mankind” by freeing other people from
the burden of their memory, Redlaw makes great use of his new capacity.
Contrary to what he expects, this has disastrous effects, however, be-
cause all the infected people turn into heartless and selfish persons. As
the ghost explains to the chemist in chapter 3, “you are the growth of
man's presumption” that overthrows “the beneficent design of Heaven”.
Did all nineteenth-century writers consider chemistry the embodiment
of hubris? Of course not, but many from various countries did. German
writers, usually quick with moral complaints, were relatively quiet about
hubris in that period, which was probably due to the absorbing power of
German idealism and the romantic philosophy of nature as an effort to
2), argues that “Hawthorne's repeated use of the trope [of the mad medical scientist]
suggest that the evil medical man was not just a stock figure for him. Indeed, Haw-
thorne wrote again and again about medical ambition because he was genuinely trou-
bled by the increasingly confident claim to somatic mastery that medicine was mak-
ing in those years” (p. 40).
50
The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain: a Fancy for Christmas-time (London:
Bradbury & Evans, 1848).
51
Baldwick (1987), who, for some reason, sees
The Haunted Man
in the Franken-
steinian rather than in the Faustian tradition (p. 115), suggests another interesting
method to prove the stereotypical connections between chemistry and villainy. In his
criminal story
The Woman in White
, Wilkie Collins “laid a false trail for us” by intro-
ducing a character as “being 'one of the first experimental chemists living' - which is
almost enough for us to condemn him in advance as a murderer,” says Baldwick (p.
184).
