five pages

five pages

Number of Pages: 5 (Double Spaced)

Writing Style: MLA

Number of sources: 2

Paper Two is a persuasive argument about Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein. We are reading two
published scholarly articles about the novel: David S. Hogsette’s “Metaphysical Intersections in
Frankenstein: Mary Shelley’s ?eistic Investigation of Scienti”c Materialism and Transgressive
Autonomy (2011) and ?omas Vargish’s “Technology and Impotence in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein” (2009). Your job is to read both articles, understand their respective arguments, and
write a position paper in which you establish your own views about Shelley’s novel in relation to
these two papers.
Your job in this paper is not to “nd more articles about Frankenstein. Your job in this paper is not
to Google things about Frankenstein and to report back to me what you’ve found. Your job in this
paper is not to sound bite snippets of things you haven’t read fully but that you happen to agree
with. Your job in this paper is not to examine how the Frankenstein story has been taken up in
movies, graphic novels or popular culture. What is your job? Your job in this paper is to be able to
understand two scholars’ arguments about Frankenstein and to use those two essays in order to
articulate your own views about the meaning of the novel.
In this diagram, you’re inside the triangle. Your job is to de”ne your position by using the three
corners as points of reference.?is paper is an argumentative essay, and by that I mean what the authors of ?ey Say / I Say have
said: “Broadly speaking, academic writing is argumentative writing. . . . You need to enter a
conversation, using what others say (or might say) as a launching pad or sounding board for your
own views” (3). An argument, in other words, is merely a conversation in which you attempt to
persuade others to join your viewpoint.
Writing isn’t really divided into opinion and fact. Rather, opinions and facts are merely tools that
we can use in order to cra? persuasive arguments. We can’t really position ourselves with respect
to other arguments, however, until we understand them thoroughly and that’s why we’re reading
two scholarly arguments in class. You’ll be more familiar with these two arguments than any others about Frankenstein and it’s only natural, then, to de”ne your own position using those two
points of reference.
Here are some other things you should know:
• How many citations must you have? ?ree. Frankenstein, Hogsette, and Vargish.
• Should you cite quotations from all three sources? Yes.
• Should quotations and sources be documented according to MLA format? Yes.
• Can you assume that I, your reader, have read all three texts? Yes.
• Should you summarize at length your three sources? No. Why not? Because I’ve read them
too.
• Should I cite enough from each source to remind my reader of things like important plot
events, crucial aspects of others’ arguments or passages that multiple people are
responding to? Yes. Why? Because you’re like a lawyer and you’re bringing evidence tocourt. It’s what writers call “presence.”
• Is the tone of this essay more formal than the last essay? Yes. Why? Because we’re practicing
academic writing.
• What does that mean? It means you should cra? your essay so that you appear professional,
respectful of others (even when you disagree with them), and have well-planned claims
with sufficient evidence to support those claims.
• Can you use “I” in this paper? Yes.
• Are there any grammatical requirements? Yes. As in the last paper, you must use one each of
the following:
— an appositive with commas
— an appositive with parentheses
— an appositive with dashes
— a list of appositives marked by a colon
— two independent clauses separated by a semi-colon
• How do you spell Mary Shelley’s last name? S-H-E-L-L-E-Y. Notice the “-ey” ending

Christianity and Literature
Vol 60, No. 4 (Summer 2011)

Metaphysical Intersections in Frankenstein:
Mary Shelley’s Theistic Investigation of Scientific

Materialism and Transgressive Autonomy

David S. Hogsette

Abstract: Frankenstein is a speculative narrative that asks: what
would happen if man created human life without the biologically
and relationally necessary woman and with indifference to God?
What if Adam were to reject his own Creator and create life after
his own fleshly or material image? Mary Shelleys answer to these
questions is not a triumphant humanist manifesto, nor is it an
ironic subversion of a supposedly outmoded theistic perspective.
Rather, she offers a philosophical nightmare-revealing the horrific
consequences of methodological naturalism taken to its logical
conclusion. Frankenstein explores the ideological vacuum engendered
by scientific materialism and examines the spiritual bankruptcy
of replacing theism with secular humanism. Victor Frankensteins
transgressive autonomy, grounded in scientific materialism, results in
a reductionism that ultimately leads to existential despair, individual
crisis, and communal disintegration.

It is in vain, O men, that you seek within yourselves the remedy for your
ills. All your light can only reach the knowledge that not in yourselves
will you find truth or good. The philosophers have promised you that, and
have been unable to do it. They neither know what is your true good, nor
what is your true state. How could they have given remedies for your ills,
when they did not even know them? Your chief maladies are pride, which
takes you away from God, and lust, which binds you to earth; and they
have done nothing else but cherish one or other of these diseases. If they
gave you God as an end, it was only to administer to your pride; they made

531

532 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

you think that you are by nature like Him, and conformed to Him. And
those who saw the absurdity of this claim put you on another precipice, by
making you understand that your nature was like that of the brutes, and
led you to seek your good in the lusts which are shared by the animals.

—Blaise Pascal

When Mary Shelley breathed literary life into her “hideous progeny”
and bid it “go forth and prosper” (Butler 197), I wonder if she had any idea
that it would be so culturally significant over 175 years later. I think she
would be fascinated by its lingering, almost ghoulish literary and allegorical
tenacity. Her creature simply will not die. On one hand, this means her work
is still teaching us something about ourselves and the contemporary world in
which we live. As Alan Rauch notes, “The novel is arguably one of the most
influential works in the conceptual practice of science and technology and
Mary Shelley one of the most influential thinkers” (96). On the other hand,
the persistence oí Frankenstein is somewhat disquieting, since it ultimately
means that we have heard her message but have not fully heeded its prescient
and relevant warnings. As Mary Shelleys imaginative vision continues to
enthrall readers, critics speculate as to why her nightmare still engages
our scientifically advanced and persistently cynical age. George Levine
suggests that the novels contemporary relevance “lies in its transformation
of fantasy and traditional Christian and pagan myths into unremitting
secularity, into the myth of mankind as it must work within the limits of
the visible, physical world” (6-7). Levine believes that the novel portrays
theistic worldviews as empty fantasies that are longed for yet repeatedly and
ruthlessly debunked by a relentless materialistic reality. Paul Cantor takes
a similar approach to the novel, arguing that Mary Shelley adopts Gnostic
creation mythology in order to revise the conservative Christian worldview
and to express a humanistic self-liberation: “Man need no longer be in awe
of his creator; he need no longer even feel grateful for being created. He can
turn his back on God with a good conscience and set about charting his
own course, seeking out ways to remake an imperfectly created world, even
to change his own nature for the better” (xiii-xiv). Other critics, like Naomi
Hetherington, David Soyka, and Anne Mellor, build upon the foundational
work of Leslie Tannenbaums detailed analysis of Miltonic tropes within
Frankenstein, yet they draw radically different conclusions, suggesting that
the novels contemporary relevance stems in part from Mary Shelley s radical
appropriation of Miltons Paradise Lost and her transgressive subversion of
the biblical account of God and His creation.

METAPHYSICAL INTERSECTION IN FRANKENSTEIN 533

Mary Shelleys novel clearly engages the question of origins from
scientific and theistic perspectives, but it does not embrace secular
humanism nor celebrate a subversion of theistic creation in favor of
scientific materialism. On the contrary, this novel grips our imaginations
today precisely because the ultimate transgressive horrors of which it speaks
pertain particularly to our scientifically advanced culture. Scientists now
hold knowledge that may allow them to do much of what Mary Shelley only
dreamed of through Victor s character. In other words, Frankenstein may
no longer be merely a vicarious thrill; it has become, instead, a terrifying
mirror reflecting a horrific reality we are unprepared to accept. This novel
is a speculative narrative that asks: what would happen if man created
human life without the biologically and relationally necessary woman and
with indifference to God? What if Adam were to reject his own Creator
and create life after his own fleshly or material image? Mary Shelleys
answer to these questions is not a triumphant humanist manifesto, nor
is it an ironic subversion of a supposedly outmoded theistic perspective.
Rather, it is a philosophical nightmare revealing the horrific consequences
of methodological naturalism taken to its logical conclusion. Frankenstein
explores the ideological vacuum engendered by scientific materialism
and examines the spiritual bankruptcy of replacing theism with secular
humanism. Victor Frankenstein’s transgressive autonomy, grounded in
scientific materialism, results in a reductionism that ultimately leads to
existential despair, individual crisis, and communal disintegration,

Mary Shelleys philosophical position hinges upon a categorical
distinction between God as an infinite Creator and necessary Being and
the human being as a finite creature. In her introduction to the 1831 text,
Mary Shelley articulates this distinction in her description of creativity:
“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out
of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded:
it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being
substance itself” (Butler 195). In her view, humans can only invent by using
materials drawn from a preexisting, created universe. God, on the other
hand, creates from void or ex nihilo. Out of nothingness God creates the raw
materials from which all other things are created. Although it is difficult to
ascertain Mary Shelleys precise theology of creation, she clearly viewed the
seen and unseen universe, the here and the hereafter, the physical and the
metaphysical as substantive realities divinely created by God. She did not
consider them to be eternally present things. Reflecting upon her feelings

534 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

and views on death, she wrote the following journal entry dated October 5,
1839:

I had opportunity to look at Death in the face, and did not fear it—far from
it. My feeling, especially in the first and most perilous instance, was, I go
to no new creation, I enter under no new laws. The God that made this
beautiful world (and I was then at Lerici, surrounded by the most beautiful
manifestation of the visible creation) made that into which I go; as there is
beauty and love here, such is there, and I felt as if my spirit would when it
left my frame be received and sustained by a beneficent and gentle Power.
(Jones 208)

According to Mary Shelley, God is “a beneficent and gentle Power,” a
necessary creative Being who is the cause of earthly and heavenly existence
and, as such, whose creative power is vastly different than that of humans
who are themselves Gods creation. Through this distinction between limited
human or creaturely invention and the unlimited creative acts of the Creator
God, Mary Shelley contrasts what she considers to be her own humble act
of novelistic invention with the transgressive invention of Victor, which he
considers in his own arrogant imagination to be somehow authentically
creative in nature. Victor is not a humble inventor who shows respect for
himself, his invention, or the Creator; rather, he is a presumptuous man
who attempts to transcend invention and to create life as if he were God.
He reduces true creation to materialistic invention, and he remains a finite
materialist in a state of denial, inventing by assembling preexisting materials
into a hideous frame fashioned after his own filthy image, constructing his
own “hideous progeny” that he is unprepared to accept, nurture, or redeem.

Mary Shelley s critique of materialism is rooted in her own understanding
of natural philosophy and the metaphysical debates surrounding the
scientific developments of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
She wrote her novel during a time when Europe was experiencing social
change, economic transformation, and scientific debate. People increasingly
looked to science (natural philosophy) to answer questions about life
and nature, expecting scientists to articulate a consistent worldview that
would help people understand the vast world around them and their
complicated place in it. As Alan Richardson so clearly reveals throughout
British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (2001), these debates and
expectations of science were in no way lost on the Romantic-period writers;
in fact, their thinking and writing about art, poetry, and the imagination

METAPHYSICAL INTERSECTION IN FRANKENSTEIN 535

were greatly influenced by developments in chemistry, biology, anatomy,
and neuroscience. One particular scientific debate raging during the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries occurred between the vitalists
and the materialists, and many of the writings and lectures generated by
this debate influenced Mary Shelleys philosophy of science and shaped her
composition of Frankenstein.

As early as 1793 with John Thelwalls controversial lecture series on
the nature and organization of life at Guy Hospital, emerging materialistic
perspectives on the science of life began to challenge the vitalist
understanding of mind-body dualism. The vitalists held that life had
its own force or metaphysical principle that was separate in nature and
distinct in substance from anatomical structure. Thelwall advanced the
materialist claim that life emerges spontaneously from nonliving material
due to particular arrangements of inert matter (Roe, Introduction 1-4).
Lectures, debates, and discussion on both the academic and popular levels
continued over the next few decades, leading up to the highly controversial
materialism-vitalism debates from 1814 to 1818 between John Abernathy
and William Lawrence. Abernathy was a well-known English surgeon and
proponent of mind-body dualism, and Lawrence was his controversial
student who advocated an antitheistic materialism and mechanistic view
of life similar to that espoused by Thelwall. Lawrence vehemently denied
any metaphysical reality and considered life to be nothing but the necessary
consequence of an organized assemblage of parts, fitting together in just
such a way that it somehow automatically became an animated being.
Lawrence characterized life as the mere epiphenomena of mechanistic
order, and he viewed the mind or consciousness as nothing but the result of
secretions within the material brain (De Almeida 100-101).

Because scientific materialism considers an effect to be its own cause
and attempts to reduce the complex metaphysical realities of life to mere
physical constructs and glandular functions, it was rejected by such
intellectuals as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Humphry Davy, whose
cogent objections greatly influenced the thinking of William Godwin and
that of his bright young daughter Mary Shelley. As Maurice Hindle notes,
Coleridge’s theological views and Davy s scientific theories encouraged both
Godwin and Mary Shelley to adopt theism and to subscribe to a science of
life informed by vitalism (31-34). Davy, a prominent natural philosopher
and chemist, was a friend of Coleridge, and both visited Godwin and his
family frequently between 1799 and 1800. Davy was a vitalist who argued

536 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

that the force of life was related to electricity, which he also believed was the
underlying force of chemistry Davys scientific discussions with Godwin
greatly enhanced Mary Shelleys knowledge of chemistry and sharpened
her understanding of vitalism as a compelling science of life. Moreover,
it is very likely that she witnessed some of Davys spectacular chemistry
lectures and demonstrations, which deepened her knowledge of vitalism
and possibly even served as the source for the scene in the 1818 edition of
Frankenstein in which Victors father encourages him to attend a lecture
series on chemistry (Robinson, Frankenstein 66). Finally, we know from
her journals that she read Davys lectures published in 1812 titled Elements
of Chemical Philosophy (Jones 67-68, 73). Davys intellectual influence
encouraged Mary Shelleys interest in a morally responsible science and
strengthened her belief in vitalism.

In addition to Davys scientific influence, Coleridge provided a
theological and poetic foundation for Mary Shelleys theistic and vitalistic
worldview. She read and studied his poetry, lectures, and sermons, and was
particularly struck by his aesthetic and intellectual brilliance during his visits
in the Godwin home. A striking influence upon her intellectual growth was
Coleridges ability to persuade her father to reject atheism and to accept a
form of theism. Coleridges theological conversion of Godwin was no small
feat. As a young dissenting preacher and theologian, Godwin initially held
to the main tenets of Calvinism. However, upon reading Baron d’Holbachs
System de la Nature (1770) in 1782, Godwin rejected Calvinism and became
a deist. In 1783, he studied Dr. Joseph Priestley s Institutes of Natural and
Revealed Religion (1782) and consequently rejected Trinitarian orthodoxy
and became a Socinianist. As his faith in Christian theism continued to
decline, Godwin began corresponding with Priestley in 1785, and by 1787
his faith had diminished to the point that he considered himself an atheistic
unbeliever (Smith and Smith 56-57). However, through his friendship with
Coleridge, Godwin continued his theological exploration and spiritual
journey, and in 1800 he renounced his atheism and embraced a vaguely
defined theism. In an undated journal entry, Godwin writes,

My theism, if such I may be permitted to call it, consists in a reverent
and soothing contemplation of all that is beautiful, grand, or mysterious
in the system of the universe, and in a certain conscious intercourse and
correspondence with the principles of these attributes, without attempting
the idle task of developing and defining it—into this train of thinking I was
first led by conversations of S. T. Coleridge. (Paul 2:357)

METAPHYSICAL INTERSECTION IN FRANKENSTEIN 537

Coleridge’s theological influence upon Godwin directly impacted Mary
Shelley s intellectual and aesthetic development. She was present at many of
Coleridge’s visits, listening to and engaging in the theological debates and
philosophical discussions between these profound thinkers. That Godwin
eventually became a theist certainly strengthened Mary Shelley s confidence
in the intellectual validity of this worldview. In addition to influencing her
through interactions with Godwin, Coleridges intellectual and aesthetic
perspectives directly challenged and shaped her philosophical and literary
development. In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Frankenstein? Beth
Lau notes that “Coleridge was a profoundly sympathetic and congenial
figure to Mary Shelley, and his ideas and literary themes resonated with
and helped her shape her own” (209). Mary Shelley discovered many of
Coleridges literary themes from his lecture series on Shakespeare and Milton
delivered between 1811 and 1812. She likely heard the lectures summarized
by her father and family friend Henry Crabb Robinson who both regularly
attended, and she also probably read summaries of the lectures in various
newspapers (Lau 212-13). Moreover, as Laus careful analysis reveals, the
close thematic parallels between The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and
Frankenstein clearly demonstrate the significant influence Coleridge had on
Mary Shelleys development as a thinker and writer. Coleridge and Davy
were certainly instrumental in shaping Godwins and Mary Shelley’s views
on theology and its relationship to the sciences of life, and the integration of
these intellectual perspectives directly influenced Mary Shelley’s process of
writing and revising Frankenstein.

Mary Shelley did not write extensively or explicitly about her theological
positions. However, she was a theistic vitalist (one who believed in the
existence of a created animating spirit or immaterial soul that is different
in nature from the material body yet related to it), as evidenced by a
cumulative consideration of various journal entries. As already noted, she
believed in the existence of a beneficent Power, a loving God who created
the physical and the metaphysical world. Not only did she believe in a
creator God, but she also believed in his providential power over his created
universe, even as she struggled with the implications of such a view. For
example, after reading Dante in 1822 she muses, “They say that Providence
is shown by the extraction that may be ever made of good from evil, that
we draw our virtues from our faults. So I am to thank God for making me
weak. I might say, ‘Thy will be done,’ but I cannot applaud the permitter of
self-degradation, though dignity and superior wisdom arise from bitter and

538 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

burning ashes” (Jones 168). In mulling over what is apparently a Reformed
or Calvinist treatment of the problem of evil from the perspective of
Providential redemptions of evil in this world (permitting evil to exist and
bringing ultimate good from it), Mary Shelley does not reject or deny Gods
providential workings in this world; rather, she draws the line at permissive
self-degradation. Most telling is that after a series of tragic losses in her life,
including the most devastating loss of them all, the death of her beloved
Percy, she does not abandon her belief in theistic Providence. Writing
in October 1822, she notes, as a simple matter of fact, that through her
earlier losses, “the Power that rules human affairs had determined, in spite
of Nature, that it [Percy and his voice of encouragement and inspiration]
should endure” (Jones 183). She notes that God allowed Percy to be a “bank
of refuge” (Jones 183) to comfort her through her children’s deaths. Then,
she simply writes, “But that is gone. His voice can no longer be heard; the
earth no longer receives the shadow of his form” (Jones 183). She accepts
this tragic turn of events as part of a providentially ordered existence and
ends the entry with this resignation: “Well, I close my book. To-morrow I
must begin this new life of mine” (Jones 183). She begins the arduous task
of starting over and trying to discover the good that will eventually come
from the evil of Percys death. In December of 1822 she takes comfort in
her theistic view of an afterlife: “I trust in a hereafter—I have ever done so.
I know that it shall be mine—even with thee, glorious spirit! Who surely
lookest on, pitiest, and lovest thy Mary” (Jones 186). Over a decade later,
reflecting upon some of the criticisms she had received regarding her views
and writings, she again acknowledges Gods providential will over her life
and that because of Providence there is significance and meaning in the
trials of life: “…as I grow older I grow more fearless for myself—I become
firmer in my opinions. The experienced, the suffering, the thoughtful may
at least speak unrebuked. If it be the will of God that I live, I may ally my
name yet to ‘the good cause,’ though I do not expect to please my accusers”
(Jones 206). The main point of considering these various journal entries is
that Mary Shelley recognized and held to a theistic understanding of life’s
tragic turns, and took what comfort she could in a faith of the divine order
of life that culminates in spiritual reunions.

In addition to believing in a creator God who works providentially
in the lives of his creations, Mary Shelley also believed in the existence of
immaterial reality and spiritual entities. As Percy Shelley noted in an entry
in Mary Shelley’s journal, this belief in ghosts and spirits necessitates a belief

METAPHYSICAL INTERSECTION IN FRANKENSTEIN 539

in God: “We talk of Ghosts; neither Lord Byron nor Monk G. Lewis seem to
believe in them; and they both agree, in the very face of reason, that none
could believe in ghosts without also believing in God” (Jones 57). In other
words, Mary Shelleys vitalistic views are directly related to and informed
by her theistic beliefs. Her vitalism, or at least an unconscious desire for
vitalism to be true and experientially relevant, is glimpsed in a desperate
dream after the death of her first child, a dream that uncannily anticipates
Frankenstein. On March 19, 1815, she writes in her journal, “Dream that
my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we
rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby” (Jones 41).
Dreams often reveal our deepest desires and hopes, shunning the pure logic
of reason, yet dreams also draw from what we already know, believe, or
hope to be true. The mechanism by which the baby is revived in this dream
reflects a crude form of vitalism: the baby’s body is cold and merely needs
warmth to revitalize the living spirit trapped within. Of course, this dream
is pure fantasy and speaks of the desperate emotional and psychological
pain Mary Shelley experienced due to the death of her baby; however, the
dream builds upon a belief system already in place within the logic of her
mind, that the human organism is more than mere molecules in motion
and is animated by a non-physical nature.

Mary Shelleys belief in and fascination with the immaterial nature
of life, a core tenet of vitalism, are further revealed in her passion for the
ghost tale. On October 20, 1818, Chevalier Mengaldo retells several ghost
stories at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Hoppner. Mary Shelleys journal is
characterized, typically, by short entries; she wrote long entries on the
issues, themes, and concerns she cared about deeply, like the death of Percy
Shelley that she, arguably, never reconciled in her own heart and mind. It
is significant to note that her October 20,1818 entry records in vivid detail
three of the ghost stories told by Mengaldo (Feldman and Scott-Kilvert 230-
33). Why does she choose to record these three stories in which the dead
revisit the living? Indeed, these stories relate to her desire to see her dead
baby again, but they also appeal to her vitalistic sensibilities which hold
to the immaterial existence of the human spirit. Mary Shelley may have
been silent in the presence Percy, Bryon, and others in their discussions of
ghosts, vitalism, and materialism, but in the assumed privacy of her journal,
she records what she values as legitimate or reasonably possible. Vitalism
offers the hope of spiritual existence and the potentiality of reunion with
the dead; materialism offers no such hope—her child is simply gone, the

540 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

dead are dead. Yet in theistic vitalism, there is a glimmer of hope. Mary
Shelley can acknowledge that her child is indeed gone, but she can ask the
logical question—gone where?—and she can hope for a future spiritual
reunion. After the death of Percy Shelley, she revisits this hope found in
theistic vitalism: “You will be with me in all my studies, dearest love! Your
voice will no longer applaud me, but in spirit you will visit and encourage
me: I know you will. What were I, if I did not believe that you still exist? It is
not with you as with another. I believe that we all live hereafter” (Jones 183).
Indeed, Mary Shelleys specific theology of life, death, and an afterlife is not
clearly outlined in her writings. However, she offers enough glimpses into
her dreams, thoughts, hopes, and desires to suggest that her views are best
understood within the context of theistic vitalism which holds to a material
and immaterial reality that is created and orchestrated by a providential
God.

Mary Shelleys theistic vitalism certainly did not go unchallenged. The
other key influences on her novel—Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Byrons
physician Polidori—were unabashedly antitheistic materialists. Mary
and Percy shared an enthusiasm for scientific inquiry, and they intensely
believed that medical science could benefit humanity. They differed,
however, in their faith in the ethical integrity of the individual scientist s
methods of scientific investigation. According to Alan Rauch in Useful
Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and the March of Intellect (2001),
Marys theism sought to hold science accountable to a more traditional
Christian ethic, while Percys antitheistic worldview sought to free science
from any normative ethical standards (126-27). Both Percy and Polidori
viewed science and its methods of inquiry from a philosophical perspective
that was largely informed by the materialism of Lawrence. Polidori
attended Lawrences lectures in the spring of 1816 in which the vitalism of
Abernathy and others was viciously criticized, often through unflattering
ad hominem attacks. Percy may have first met Lawrence in 1811 while
attending Abernathy s lectures on anatomy, and by 1814 Lawrence had
become Percy and Mary s personal physician (Mellor, “Frankenstein, Racial
Science” 9; Richardson 160-63). Lawrence directly shaped Percys scientific
naturalism, and he made an impression upon Mary as well, becoming the
inspiration for the Prof. Waldman character (Mellor, “Frankenstein, Racial
Science” 7). During the now famous outing in Geneva that lead, among
other things, to the writing of Frankenstein, Polidori records in his journal
that he and Percy discussed whether humans were nothing more than

METAPHYSICAL INTERSECTION IN FRANKENSTEIN 541

mechanistic instruments produced by an arbitrary universe or if they were
creatures fashioned by God with eternal metaphysical selves (Rossetti 122-
23). In her 1831 introduction, Mary mentions similar scientific discussions
between Percy and Byron which advocated the materialism presented in
the Lawrence lectures. Although Mary was witness to these discussions, it
seems that she was a “nearly silent” dissenter who was not persuaded from
her theistic vitalism. Mary recalls in her introduction to the 1831 edition of
Frankenstein:

Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley,
to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of these,
various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the
nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its
ever being discovered and communicated. They talked of the experiments
of Dr Darwin … who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by
some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. Not
thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated;
galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of
a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital
warmth. (Butler 195-96)

Given the strong influence of Coleridge’s theistic theology, Davys scientific
vitalism, which Coleridge also advocated (Roe, Introduction 10-14), and
her many journal entries regarding a providential creator God and her
belief in metaphysical realities and an afterlife, it is reasonable to read
Mary s near silence more as dissent than agreement. Silent dissent was her
chosen strategy for handling public disagreement and contentious debate.
In her journal on October 21,1838, she writes,

I am not a person of opinions. I have said elsewhere that human beings
differ greatly in this. Some have a passion for reforming the world; others
do not cling to particular opinions…. I respect such when joined to real
disinterestedness, toleration, and a clear understanding…. For myself, I
earnestly desire the good and enlightenment of my fellow-creatures, and
see all, in the present course, tending to the same, and rejoice; but I am
not for violent extremes, which only bring on an injurious reaction. I have
never written a word in disfavor of liberalism; that I have not supported
it openly in writing, arises from the following causes, as far as I know:—

That I have not argumentative powers; I see things pretty clearly,
but cannot demonstrate them. Besides, I feel the counter-arguments too

542 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

strongly. I do not feel that I could say aught to support the cause efficiently;
besides that, on some topics (especially with regard to my own sex), I am
far from making up my mind…. When I feel that I can say what will benefit
my fellow-creatures, I will speak: not before. (Jones 204)

Here, Mary is responding specifically to criticism regarding her relative
silence on radical political causes. However, it is reasonable to conclude that
she followed this same intellectual principle in the context of the debates
over radical science. Given her clear theistic and vitalistic persuasions,
her careful study of Davys vitalistic chemistry, and the lack of evidence
suggesting she read or ascribed to Lawrence s scientific views, it makes sense
to conclude that she remained largely silent in these scientific discussions
because she did not feel she possessed the argumentative powers to articulate
and sustain her position.

Moreover, she may not have spoken much during these discussions,
but she speaks her mind clearly in this introduction by contrasting the
materialism of Erasmus Darwin with the vitalism of Davy. She notes that
the Darwinian experiment was unconvincing and says, “Not thus, after
all, would life be given’ (Butler 195). Then, she describes a mechanical
assembling of component body parts, which according to the materialist
model should be enough to produce life. However, in her imaginative
speculation, mere order or patterned organization is not enough—the parts
must be “endued with vital warmth” (Butler 196), a phrase that brings to
mind the very language of her earlier dream in which her dead baby is
brought back to life with vital warmth. Indeed, Marilyn Butler compares
Mary Shelleys account of these vitalist-materialist discussions to the
account given by Polidori in his diary. Butler suggests that Polidori frames
the question as a vitalist while Mary Shelley frames the issue as a materialist
(xxii-xxiii). However, I find Butler puts too fine a point on the comparisons
and draws too grand a conclusion. She argues that Mary Shelley s discussion
reveals a materialistic skepticism like that of Lawrence. However, Mary
Shelley simply notes a reasonable skepticism in reanimation by merely
preserving or pickling vermicelli, yet she wonders about the possibility of
electricity imbuing a dead corpse with vital life. Here, she speaks from the
electrochemical context of Davys vitalism theories: that chemistry (what
we would now call biochemistry) may be the science for understanding
vitality of life. The theoretical implication is compelling enough to spark
her imagination and to pursue that vitalistic possibility as a scientific frame
in which to bring her ghost story to literary life. According to her account

METAPHYSICAL INTERSECTION IN FRANKENSTEIN 543

of these discussions and her own imaginative speculations in response
to Erasmus Darwins experiments, Mary does not appear to embrace the
materialism espoused by Lawrence, Percy, Byron, and Polidori. Rather, she
was more convinced by the principles of vitalism as expressed in the science
of Davy, confirmed by the theistic Christianity of Coleridge, and expressed
in her own journal writings on life, death, and the afterlife. These scientific
and theological principles form the logical foundation for Mary Shelleys
ethical critique of scientific materialism in Frankenstein.

However, it was not easy for her to assert her young authorial voice
and to oppose the charmingly intelligent yet at times overbearing and
insensitive views of Percy and his circle of friends. Who was she, after all,
compared to the great Percy and the renowned Bryon? She was, as it turned
out, a provocative writer coming into her own who would, unbeknownst
to everyone, write one of the most influential and lasting novels of the
nineteenth century. Yet, this novel would be born eventually out of a
thematic and artistic struggle between Marys theistic vitalism and Percys
atheistic materialism. For the most part, Percy s revisions and edits correct
some of Marys stylistic awkwardness and grammatical errors; however,
other of his revisions attempt to temper, if not wholly silence, some of her
theistic expressions. For example, Percy tried to revise or delete some of
Marys original language that showed an understanding of God whose
purposes worked providentially within human history. Toward the end
of the novel where Victor describes his pursuit of the Creature as less an
act of vengeance and more a providential work of God, Mary s first draft
reads, “At such moments the vengeance that burned within me died in
my heart and I pursued my path towards the destruction of the daemon
more as a task enjoined by heaven than the ardent desire of my soul”
(Robinson, Frankenstein 412). Percy revised this passage as follows: “At
such moments the vengeance that burned within me died in my heart, and
I pursued my path towards the destruction of the daemon more as a task
enjoined by heaven, as the mechanical impulse of some power of which I was
unconscious, than the ardent desire of my soul” (Robinson, Frankenstein
227).1 Marys version is more consistent with her theistic view of God
working providentially in a persons life, that God orders or directs a course
of action and the person follows that direction. Percy s version forces his
own mechanistic meaning upon the phrase “enjoined by heaven” with the
qualifying phrase, “as the mechanical impulse of some power of which I was
unconscious.” For Mary, Victor sees himself as doing the work of heaven, of

544 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

acting not from self-serving vengeance but in the service of divine justice
for the greater good. For Percy, Victor becomes a thoughtless automaton of
some unidentifiable and unknowable, mindless power of nature. As Anne
Mellor notes, “Percy tried to undermine this notion of a functioning ‘heaven
by adding his own atheistic concept of a universe created and controlled
by pure Power or energy” (Mary Shelley 64). Where Mary expresses in the
text an understanding of divine agency, purpose, and meaning within a
theistic universe, Percy revises her language to assert his own faith in some
arbitrary, unthinking power that operates as a mere unconscious impulse
upon the mechanistic human within an antitheistic universe.

Another telling example is a revision of Marys language describing
Victor s scientific activity. Marys original manuscript reads:

Although I possessed the capacity of bestowing animation yet to prepare
a creature for the reception of it with all its intricacies of fibres muscles
& veins must be a work of inconceivable labour & difficulty. …but my
imagination was too much exalted by my first successes to permit me
to doubt of my ability to create an animal as complex and wonderful as
man. …A new creation would bless me as its creator and source; many
happy and excellent creatures would owe their existence to me. (Robinson,
Frankenstein 272-73)

Percy revised this passage to read:

Although I possessed the capacity of bestowing animation, yet to prepare
2L frame for the reception of it with all its intricacies of fibres, muscles, and
veins still remained a work of inconceivable difficulty and labour. …but
my imagination was too much exalted by my first success to permit me to
doubt of my ability to give life to an animal as complex and wonderful as
man…. A new existence would bless me as its creator and source; many
happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. (Robinson,
Frankenstein 77-78)

To be sure, Percy s revision is stylistically smoother and reduces creator, creation,
and creature repetitiveness. However, Marys creationist language presupposes
intelligence, intention, purpose, and the specific agency of a creative figure.
Percys revisions draw from antitheistic, materialistic discourse in which life
indeterminately emerges from a proper yet unknown arrangement of matter.
Moreover, his language seeks to ignore or even deny the necessity of causality,
agency, purpose, intentionality, and design behind that which exists.

METAPHYSICAL INTERSECTION IN FRANKENSTEIN 545

There is an apparent worldview struggle between these two writer-
editors. Percy held to a naturalistic theory of the origins of life, and he thus
attempted to edit out the linguistic trace of God and theories of creation
and intentional design in favor of methodological naturalism that believes
life emerged spontaneously by chance or in response to arbitrary and
unintelligent natural forces. Percy believed that nature somehow gave rise
to itself naturally. Mary s language is more attuned to the causal paradoxes
of naturalism (she seems to understand that it is a nonsensical position
to presuppose that life naturally caused itself to arise from non-living
matter), and she originally intended for the theistic notion of creation
to inform the thematics of her work. In her theistic worldview, there is
design, purpose, and meaning, and there is a way to determine objective
truth, both philosophically and morally. Indeed, Mary recognized that it
may be difficult at times to discern this purpose and meaning, as evidenced
by her journal entries occasioned by the many losses and tragedies in her
life, and as suggested by the various characters in the novel who struggle to
understand the significance of the challenges, hardships, and injustices they
encounter. However, Mary also understood that just because it is sometimes
difficult to know exactly why certain things happen, this does not mean that
it is necessarily impossible to determine the significance of these events.
In her journals as described above, she often returned to a theistic faith in
providence and a created order that offered her hope of reunification in an
afterlife. Challenges and confusions in life and difficulties in determining
meaning and purpose did not cause her to jump to the non sequitur
conclusion that there is no objective meaning or purpose whatsoever.
Mary was far less agnostic about absolute truth and less skeptical about
the possibility to discern meaning in life than was Percy. Although Mary
sometimes struggled artistically with Percy over editing issues due to the
tensions between their conflicting worldviews, ultimately Mary presents
a cogent philosophical response to methodological naturalism and an
existential indictment against scientific materialism.

Mary Shelley clearly appreciated the ethical implications of the vitalism-
materialism debate, because she was concerned about the consequences not
only of actions but of ideas as well. The theistic vitalist position posits a
divinely created soul, and thus asserts that human subjects do not fashion
their own morality but, instead, seek to discover absolute moral law that
is defined by an absolutely good moral law giver. The mere assertion of an
absolute moral law indeed does not guarantee moral behavior. For example,

546 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

through his exposure to Miltons Paradise Lost, the Creature embraces the
Christian theistic worldview and its revelation of an absolute moral law, yet
he still commits murder.2 However, the theistic understanding of absolute
morality does provide a rationally consistent basis upon which to defend
objective moral judgments. After Percys death, Mary starts a programmatic
study of moral philosophy and ethical theory, noting in 1823 that “I think
also that I have found true humility…, an ardent love for the immutable
laws of right, much native goodness of emotion, and purity of thought”
(Jones 189). In her own studies, Mary Shelley, like her Creature, discovers
and embraces absolute moral law, what she calls “immutable laws of right.”
On the other hand, the materialist position is logically reductive, stripping
humanity of its sacredness and removing from the universe any objective
moral standard. Humans, according to this view, are thus free to do
whatever they see fit. Morality is reduced to judgments of personal taste in
service of subjective desire. In the vitalism-materialism debates, Abernathy
makes this very point about the moral consequence of materialism, noting
in a lecture in 1817 that the primary reason materialists were reluctant to
admit mind-body dualism and the presence of a soul that is superadded to
the material body was that conceding this point would necessitate giving up
the subjective privilege of skepticism, namely “gratifying their senses, and
acting as their reason dictates, for their own advantages, independently of
all other considerations” (qtd. in Hindle 34). Materialism justifies (but does
not necessitate) a relativistic morality that is centered upon the pursuit of
selfish desires divorced from any objective moral standard.

Such a moral perspective was quite appealing to Percy who based his
radical values and selfish behavior upon materialistic notions of moral
relativity, causing Mary much personal grief and emotional pain. According
to Mellor, Mary eventually realized that Percy s views and actions

masked an emotional narcissism, an unwillingness to confront the origins
of his own desires or the impact of his demands on those most dependent
upon him. Percy’s pressure on Mary, during the winter and spring of 1814-
15, to take Hogg as a lover despite her sexual indifference to Hogg; his
insistence on Claires continuing presence in his household despite Mary s
stated opposition—all this had alerted Mary to a worrisome strain of
selfishness in Percys character, an egotism that too often rendered him an
insensitive husband and an uncaring, irresponsible parent. (Mary Shelley
73)

(

METAPHYSICAL INTERSECTION IN FRANKENSTEIN 547

Such behaviors are more than mere character flaws or psychological
predispositions; rather, they are the logical and experiential outworking of
the theoretical ideas of materialism and moral relativism. The consequence
of Percy s relativistic morality was quite painful for Mary, and she suffered
emotional loss and spiritual pain at the hands of Percy s subjective morality,
engendered in part by his philosophical and scientific materialism. Mary s
own existential cries of the heart during this time of her life became the
creative source for the pathos in the novel, where numerous lives are
tragically destroyed due to Victor s arrogantly selfish actions resulting from
his own indulgence of scientific materialism and moral subjectivism. As
Tannenbaum concludes, “The complex pattern of shifting, mistaken, and
half-recognized mythic identifications in the novel serve to undercut the
faith in empirical knowledge that is the initial cause of Frankensteins
fall. Describing a world that contains no absolutes, no truths beyond the
evidence of the senses, Mary Shelley shows this world to be a Miltonic Hell,
a world beyond redemption, either by Christian agape or by eros” (112-
13). In Frankenstein Mary Shelley levels an existential critique of scientific
materialism by graphically representing the horrific consequences of a
scientist who reduces life to nothing but a complex arrangement of materials
and who exerts a transgressive autonomy that denies God s natural design
and moral law in an attempt to create life in the absence of woman after his
own filthy image. The result of such an irresponsible pursuit and application
of science is emotional chaos, spiritual devastation, domestic disruption,
and existential despair.

One way to resolve the misapplication of science is through proper
education and ethical literacy. Mary Shelley understood the value of such
education, sharing with parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft
the belief that access to knowledge was fundamental to the development
of the person in a free and just society. However, Mary Shelley was not so
naive as to think that education alone, unguided by moral principle, would
automatically lead to enlightenment and freedom. Rather, she understood
that educational content, moral knowledge, and the application of
knowledge in the world mattered very much. Education alone does not make
a person good, as Frankenstein demonstrates time and again. Developing
moral character involves an ethically guided education and instruction
in moral knowledge. The importance of a proper education is a central
theme in Frankenstein, as evidenced by the presence of numerous literacy
narratives, most notably those of Walton, the Creature, Safie, and Victor.

548 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

It is through Victor s development as a scientist that we most clearly see
Mary Shelley s concern over the moral consequences of scientific pursuits
informed by materialistic presuppositions. The misguided integration of
outmoded alchemy with scientific naturalism ultimately transforms Victor
into a materialist motivated by transgressive hubris. The consequences of
his scientific education and experimentation are horrifically tragic. In his
youthful studies of the ancient alchemists, Victor develops a love of science
and metaphysics, longing to understand the mystical and divine causes
behind the veil of the physical world. These studies awakened a desire to
grasp the metaphysical power animating life and determining reality: “I
entered with the greatest diligence into the search of the philosophers stone
and the elixir of life. But the latter obtained my undivided attention; wealth
was an inferior object, but what glory would attend the discovery if I could
banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to
any but a violent death” (Robinson, Frankenstein 64-65). There is indeed a
glimpse of benevolence in his desire to study science—he wishes to benefit
humanity by conquering disease, aging, and even natural death. However,
this humanitarianism is immediately dispelled in the same breath by his
selfish desire for glory, which in turn motivates his hubris and his desire for
transgressive autonomy.

Victor applies the same zealous enthusiasm that he showed for the
alchemists to his new studies at the University of Ingolstadt. His introduction
to natural philosophy and contemporary science at first disappoints him. He
soon recognizes the erroneous content of alchemy, but he holds on to the
motivations behind it—to discover divine knowledge and eternal power. His
ultimate goal is complete creative autonomy that transgresses professional,
social, legal, and moral boundaries, and the modern sciences he begins to
study at first leave the ambitious Victor singularly unimpressed:

Besides, I had a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. It
was very different when the masters of the science sought immortality
and power: such views, although futile, were grand. But now the scene was
changed: the ambition of the enquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation
of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was
required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur, for the realities of little
worth. (Robinson, Frankenstein 71)

At this point, he understands that the extravagant claims of alchemy are
unrealistic and unattainable, but he is charmed by their expansiveness,

METAPHYSICAL INTERSECTION IN FRANKENSTEIN 549

transcendence, and transgressiveness. Such grand motivations and
expectations, so he believes, are missing from practical science. But then he
meets Waldman, who introduces him to materialistic science in such a way
that rekindles Victor s desires for scientific autonomy. Waldmans teaching
convinces Victor that the ancient dreams of alchemy are in fact achievable
with the new science. For example, in one lecture, Waldman asserts,

But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt
and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed
performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature and shew
how she works in her hiding-places. They ascend into the heavens; they
have discovered how the blood circulates and the nature of the air we
breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers: they can
command the thunders of heaven, mimick the earthquake, and even mock
the invisible world with its own shadows. (Robinson, Frankenstein 72)

Victor realizes that where the alchemists have failed, the materialists
succeed. He concludes that the new naturalists have unlocked the secrets
of nature and have even invaded the very gates of Heaven, thus usurping
the knowledge and position of God. He is now confident that this new
materialistic science will allow him to achieve his lofty goal of discovering
the infinite mind of God.

Interestingly, at this point in his confessional discourse with Walton,
Victor expresses (in the 1831 edition) what appears to be religious fatalism:

Such were the professor s words—rather let me say such the words of fate,
enounced to destroy me. As he went on, I felt as if my soul were grappling
with a palpable enemy; one by one the various keys were touched which
formed the mechanism of my being: chord after chord was sounded, and
soon my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose.
So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein,—more, far
more, will I achieve: treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a
new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest
mysteries of creation. (Butler 213-14)

Since this passage does not appear in the 1818 edition, it can be argued
that Mary later added a religious or theistic fatalism to the character of
Victor, thus complicating the argument that Victor is a failed materialist
and thus the vehicle for Mary s philosophical critique. However, the specific
language that Victor uses to reconstruct these events later to Walton

550 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

clearly suggests materialistic determinism, not religious fatalism, for he
presents himself as a victim of mechanistic functions beyond his control.
Victor asserts that he is a mechanism comprised of various keys, and he
compares his soul to a complex musical instrument. Victor is not claiming
to be gripped by some unseen metaphysical power, force, demon, or deity;
rather, the words of Waldman work upon the mechanism of his being
such that a harmony of sorts (“chord after chord was sounded”) is finally
reached between Waldmans words and Victor s mechanistic being. Victor
is basically claiming that his mind (which in the materialistic perspective is
nothing but brain matter) was mechanistically predisposed to this kind of
thinking and that he was physiologically fated to react the way he ultimately
did. Victor uses his materialistic worldview to redefine the grappling” in
his mind, which is actually a reasonable moral struggle of conscience, as
nothing but the tension between a culturally imposed morality and the
drives of his mechanistic nature. As the contemporary materialist Richard
Dawkins has asserted, in this universe there is nothing but “blind, pitiless
indifference. … DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance
to its music” (133). According to scientific materialism, Victor is merely
dancing to the tune of his DNA and is thus genetically fated to pursue this
destructive project. As he continues his studies, he eventually develops into
the exemplar materialist that he was seemingly predisposed to become, and
he attempts to replace God with natural science and to transform himself
into a materialistic god. He seeks to demystify natural design by revealing
through science the mechanistic causes of perceived natural effects, and as
he demystifies the sacred, he seeks to replace a supposedly mythological
divinity with the tangible materialist scientist, namely himself: “A new
existence would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent
natures would owe their being to me” (Robinson, Frankenstein 78). Here
is his ultimate transgression—he wants to be the creator, the source, the
necessary being of this new life form. He wants to be fully autonomous, to
become a creator and a law unto himself. The ramifications of thus reducing
the divine God to a materialistic scientist are nightmarish and catastrophic.

Victor s materialism and its horrific consequences are most poignantly
expressed in the scenes leading up to and including the Creatures
animation. In order to understand the very nature and cause of life, Victor
ironically concludes from the paradoxical logic of materialism that he must
study death and natural decay. Life, in this scientific view, is nothing more
than the epiphenomena of packets of energy in motion. Life is nothing but

METAPHYSICAL INTERSECTION IN FRANKENSTEIN 551

a complex assemblage of materials, operating within systems of material
relations. To understand life, this logic therefore concludes, one need only
study its reducible materials long enough. Thus, Victor spends hours and
hours in graveyards, vaults, and charnel-houses studying the material
remnants of life—dead bodies (Robinson, Frankenstein 75-76). Ironically,
he attempts to discover the secrets of life by studying death and decay, and
for all the attention to death in his attempt to understand life, he learns
nothing of life and courts only death. This repressed truth surfaces in his
grotesque dream of Elizabeth, his bride-to-be, who transforms into the
hideous corpse of his dead mother (Robinson, Frankenstein 81-82). This
dream reveals, among other things, the horrific irony of trying to discover
the origin of life by merely studying dead and dismembered body parts. This
dream also exposes the horrific ramifications of his desire for materialistic
creative autonomy. He wants to create life by himself without the biological
complement of woman, and this violation of natural design justifies, and
arguably necessitates, the erasure of women. His transgressive autonomy
results in the figurative and literal death of all the women in his life. In his
pursuit of materialistic knowledge, Victor ignored the life around him and
thus gave birth to death-in-life (his Creature), brought death to his family,
destroyed his own mind and body, and ultimately succumbed to his own
pathetic death. The mysteries of life and all its sacredness, Mary Shelley
shows us, is not found within the decaying matter of dead or dying bodies.
Rather, she demonstrates how the beauty, power, meaning, and sacredness
of life are to be found in that which makes life so special to begin with—
relationships with friends, family, colleagues, and the divine.

Mary Shelley further reveals the intellectual, spiritual, and moral
bankruptcy of materialism in the body of the Creature. Victors blind
materialism and selfish desire for creative autonomy result in the creatures
physical hideousness. Victor chooses to make the Creature monstrous and
huge, because it would be faster and easier from a procedural perspective:
“As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I
resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic
stature; that is to say, about seven or eight feet in height, and proportionably
large” (Robinson, Frankenstein 77). The reason for Victors impatience is
his conscience: he wants to hurry through his grisly endeavor before his
moral sensibilities to life’s true significance catch up with him. He does get
glimpses of moral clarity during the process, but he must do all he can to
ignore what he knows deep within to be morally wrong:

552 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

In a solitary chamber—or rather cell at the top of the house and separated
from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase—I kept my
workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their sockets
in attending to the details of my employment. The dissecting room and the
slaughter house furnished many of my materials, and often did my human
nature turn with loathing from my occupation whilst, still urged on by
an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a
conclusion. (Robinson, Frankenstein Notebooks 1: 89)

The striking image in this passage is that of his eyes starting from their
sockets in horror at what he is doing. Indeed, he is referring to his own
eyes, but the phrase also conjures the macabre image of other eyeballs in his
inventory of body parts, gazing a ghastly stare of shocked condemnation
from the cadaverous sockets of skulls sitting on the shelves of his “workshop
of filthy creation.” Victor struggles with the horrifying disparity between the
reality he actually sees with his own eyes and the reality he wishes this scene
to be as he visualizes it in his crazed imagination, calling to mind William
Blake’s powerful lines:

This life s five windows of the soul
Distort the Heavens from Pole to Pole,
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not thro’, the eye. (172-75)

Victor s materialism sees merely with the eye, devoid of a conscience, but his
spiritual nature resists such moral blindness and attempts to see through the
eye with the moral clarity of his conscience, which reveals to him the true
horror of his work and the depravity of his very being. This truth he must
suppress if he is to complete his materialistic endeavor to blur the physical
and genetic boundaries between species in order to find larger materials to
make the work easier and faster. He selfishly considers only his pride and
achievement, totally disregarding the physical and emotional wellbeing of
his creation. He cannot show love for the being he has created, because his
materialism views the Creature only as a collection of human and animal
parts. Victor cannot ascribe any true value or human worth to his Creature.
Victor s materialism devalues life, ultimately viewing it either as a chance
accident or an abortive mutation. Many horrors are possible once life is
reduced to arbitrarily arranged particles; yet sadly, strict materialism cannot
even speak of moral horrors, for this is a value judgment that is irrelevant

METAPHYSICAL INTERSECTION IN FRANKENSTEIN 553

and unsubstantiated in a materialistic worldview—”DNA neither cares nor
knows. DNA just is” (Dawkins 133). However, Mary Shelley suggests that
such ethical disregard is unnatural and illogical. Victors own conscience
cries out against the horrors of his work: “often did my human nature turn
with loathing from my occupation, whilst still urged on by an eagerness
which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion”
(Robinson, Frankenstein Notebooks 1:89). Written on his heart are the
knowledge of life’s ultimate worth and the awareness that this value is not
linked to the material but to the transcendent. This truth is readily and
naturally apparent to Victor, but he must suppress this inner voice of moral
reason if he is to conclude his transgressive scientific enterprise.

The most tragic consequence of Victors materialism is his rejection of
the creature: “I had worked hard for nearly two years for the sole purpose of
infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest
and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation;
but, now that I had succeeded, these dreams vanished, and breathless horror
and disgust filled my heart” (Robinson, Frankenstein 81). After creating life
without the complement of woman and with indifference to God, Victor s
transformation into a transgressive materialist is complete. As Ann Engar
notes, “Frankenstein is a thorough materialist and creates without calling on
the supernatural” (142). Victor now only sees his creature as a monstrous
assemblage of grisly materials, a grotesque body of nightmarish horror.
However, Victors response is not simply aesthetic. Indeed, the Creature
is physically ugly, but that isn’t the main reason why Victor rejects and
abandons him. Victor’s materialism does not provide a rational justification
for valuing and loving the Creature unconditionally. To Victor, the
Creature is not a unique life deserving of love, nurturing, care, or concern.
Rather, it is a no-thing, just grotesque and meaningless matter, merely an
experiment gone horribly wrong. The Creature is not a life for which Victor
is responsible. Rather, it is a frightening and inconvenient mistake that he
wishes did not exist. In the Creature’s own words, he is “an abortion to be
spurned and kicked and hated!” (Robinson, Frankenstein 243).

Moreover, the Creature’s status as a spurned other can be linked
to a form of racism supported by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
materialistic sciences that Mary Shelley rejected. The Creature is clearly
symbolic of racial alterity, and he recognizes his own racial otherness.
From C. F. Volney’s Ruins of Empires and the Law of Nature (1791) the
Creature learns about the injustices inflicted upon various oppressed races

554 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

around the world. He is particularly struck by the plight of the Native
Americans, and by contemplating this history he realizes how worldviews
which characterize groups of people as subhuman contribute to racial
hatred and dehumanizing tyranny (Robinson, Frankenstein 144-45). One
logical outworking of materialistic sciences of race from the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries was the systematic redefinition of certain
groups of people as nonhuman, resulting in the justification of racism and
oppression of the racial other. In her article “Frankenstein, Racial Science,
and the Yellow Peril,” Anne Mellor outlines the racist dimensions of various
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century materialistic conceptions of race (3-
10). According to Mellor, Mary Shelley rejected these scientific views that
legitimated racial stereotyping and encouraged racial hatred. Instead, she
advocated the Family of Man theory, a view of human origins and race that
argued all human beings descended from the same created couple. In this
theistic worldview, all humans of all races are created in Gods image and are
thus equally valuable and deserving of respect, kindness, and liberty. Mellor
argues that Mary Shelley looked to universal domesticity—the Family of
Man—as the ultimate answer to racism (“Frankenstein, Racial Science”
22-25). In other words, Mary Shelley rejected materialistic naturalism,
which reduces humanity to arbitrarily evolved animals devoid of any
intrinsic value, resulting in the scientifically justified practice of classifying
difference as foreign, diseased, alien, monstrous, and other. She suggested
that the human individual should be valued as a unique creation and that
racial differences should be embraced as integral to the complexity and true
beauty of the Family of Man. In Frankenstein the Creature is paradoxically
both the benefactor and victim of materialistic creation. Materialism gives
rise to his very existence, but it is also responsible for the literal hell on
earth that becomes his life. Because of the materialistic presupposition that
the Creature is nothing but meaningless and valueless matter, Victor views
him as a nonhuman thing, a subhuman being, and a racial other. Victor is
a flawed creator who condemns the Creature to emotional and communal
isolation, not because of anything that the Creature did initially to deserve
such banishment, but because Victor himself is fallen and incapable of
being the divine creator he set out to be. The Creature s tragic saga serves as
a powerful symbolic critique of the immoral ramifications of materialistic
sciences that dehumanize individuals because of racial, genetic, or other
forms of physiological difference. Mary Shelley counters this racist
materialism with universal domesticity or the theistic notion of the Family

METAPHYSICAL INTERSECTION IN FRANKENSTEIN 555

of Man in which all humans are viewed as equally valuable and deserving of
respect, dignity, and community because they are wondrously fashioned in
the image of their Creator.

As a materialist, Victors main failing is his inability to understand
the spiritual significance of universal domesticity and the importance
of extending it to his own creation. However, all is not lost, for there is
redemptive hope for the materialist. Mary Shelley presents domesticity and
eternal communion as the liberators of a mind trapped within the confines
of a materialistic worldview. Arguably, she does seem to problematize
domesticity, question marital union, complicate friendship, and undermine
the hope of spiritual transcendence, revealing such manifestations of
communion to be more a source of personal pain and social disruption
than stability and comfort. This rejection of the domestic ideal is witnessed
most powerfully in Victor s tragic life: his own mother dies, he leaves home
to study natural philosophy and the new sciences, he isolates himself from
friends and colleagues in his little shop of horrors, he further withdraws
from his father, he neglects his fiancée, he creates life by himself without
needing the biological complement of woman, and then he rejects his own
creation which results in the violent destruction of life and the disruption
of other families and relationships. Victors life alone is a litany of domestic
devastation. However, these tragic occurrences are not an indictment of the
family as such but, instead, serve as cautionary tales about the neglect of
the domestic impulse. These horrors are negative examples against which
Mary Shelley upholds the desire for and necessity of undisturbed familial
communion and domestic relationship as the solutions to the problems of
failed community. Victor s transgressive autonomy creeps in and destroys
the possibility of ideal communion; however, Mary Shelley contrasts this
destructive selfishness (a description of things as they are in the novel)
with the ideal of undisturbed domesticity as the necessary, central, and
foundational element of proper human existence (a desire for things as they
ideally ought to be).

Contrasting Victors communal failure is the Creatures deep yearning
for the domestic ideal that offers the hope of personal redemption. All
along, the Creature sought communion with his creator. Unfortunately,
Victor failed as a self-styled god and could not provide a nurturing
relationship, thus driving the Creature to murderous revenge. At the end of
Victor s life, it is the Creature who shows true humility and sincere remorse,
eventually asking his creator for forgiveness. This contrition reveals the

556 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

creatures deeper understanding of the spiritual and existential necessity
of communion. Even though he did not establish a temporal relationship
with his fallen, human creator, he ultimately realizes that his humble act of
repentance and his seeking forgiveness has opened him up to a transcendent
communion that will finally afford him the eternal peace he so desperately
sought from his creator: “My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it
will not surely think thus” (Robinson, Frankenstein Notebooks 2: 773). He
plans to commit his body to the flames, but he is confident that his spirit
will not simply cease to exist. The Creature is no annihilationist, nor is he
a nihilistic existentialist. He is clearly a mind-body dualist, and though
he is not entirely sure what will become of his soul, he is confident that it
will consciously exist, be it as a sleeping dreamer or as a thinking agent. In
either case, he will no longer suffer the tragedy and indignities of his earthly
life. This scene moves Walton to deep compassion for the Creatures plight
and a sympathetic understanding of the tragic pathos of Victor s and the
Creatures lives. Although at the end of Victors own tale Walton views this
scientist as noble and godlike, the Creatures humility and remorse break
the chains of Walton’s own materialistic worldview and dispels his desire for
glory at any cost. His eyes are fully opened to the wisdom found in valuing
life, love, family, and relationships, a wisdom that forever eluded Victor.
Walton understands the value of his own family, the lives of his crew, and
their relationship to their own families. He realizes that there is greater
meaning to life than what is explainable by materialism or found in personal
pursuits of glory, and this meaning is discovered within the dynamics of
relationships, both temporal and eternal.

As a Gothic novel, it is easy to see Frankenstein as a narrative marked
by extravagant excess and horrific transgression. However, if Mary Shelley
indeed embraced the materialistic worldview of Thelwall, Lawrence,
Percy, Byron, and Polidori, then an interesting paradox presents itself: in a
strictly materialistic framework, can there really be any true transgression?
Victor s scientific act of creating life from lifeless matter suggests that his
transgression is more than merely scientific. The act of reanimating dead
tissue, of assembling life and giving rise to mind and consciousness from
previously inanimate, unthinking, nonconscious, dead material is surely a
prodigious accomplishment that amounts to the ultimate in transgression,
because Victor seems to be violating the very structure, logic, and law of
nature. However, to view this creative act as a transgression of some law
or design of nature presupposes a designed universe and a created order

METAPHYSICAL INTERSECTION IN FRANKENSTEIN 557

that ought not to be transgressed. From a purely materialistic perspective,
there is no created order, only arbitrary nature that at best has merely the
appearance of order and design. If this is true, then there can be no true
transgression, no rebellion, no Promethean hubris, because there is no
actual design or absolute law that is transgressed. There is only yet another
natural agent in a series of natural, materialistic agents, each contributing
to the ongoing creation and recreation, or more accurately evolution and
revolution, of life. The logical conclusion of the materialistic perspective
is that without absolute, universal, or divine design or order, there is no
objective, ultimate, or eternal standard or value against which to transgress.
Denying a created or designed order nullifies, at least in principle, the very
possibility of true transgression. Therefore, it becomes meaningless to refer
to Victor as a transgressor. If anything, Victor merely transgresses temporal
and arbitrary customs, codes, tastes, and taboos that are historically and
culturally relative. Ultimately, the transgression is of no real consequence,
because that which is supposedly transgressed is nothing more than an
insignificant and arbitrary notion that one can subjectively choose to
reject. If the novel is ultimately an expression of materialism, then it seems
problematic, if not impossible, to speak meaningfully of it as an exploration
of Gothic transgression.

However, does Mary Shelley actually eviscerate her novel by embracing
and expressing a materialistic worldview? Why is it that her novel
still speaks to audiences so powerfully even today, such that the term
“Frankensteinian ‘ is applied to scientific endeavors of questionable intent
or troubling outcome? Could it be that Mary Shelley was rather prescient
in her ethical critique of science? It seems clear that what concerned her
was that Victor transgressed not merely arbitrary taboos or relativistic
moral codes but universal moral laws, what she called “immutable laws
of right” (Jones 189), that are discernible, in part, in the natural design of
the universe and thus expressed in natural law. Because of this appeal to a
universal natural law, this novel still speaks to us today, asserting that we
are not intellectually, emotionally, or spiritually equipped to handle some
forms of knowledge and that, as such, there are reasonable limits to science.
Moreover, this novel reminds us, whether we like it or not, that philosophical
ideas and scientific theories have very real consequences. There is no such
thing as a neutral or harmless idea. This novel explores the ramifications of
materialistic concepts that deny the theistic universe and its design, order,
and purpose. If materialistic scientists presuppositionally remove God as

558 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

the necessary being of created reality, then they are free to inhabit that
vacated divine position themselves without fear of transgression, because
theoretically there is no moral law or Moral Law Giver to transgress.
As such, there is no true or meaningful moral difficulty, beyond what is
arbitrarily, subjectively, or otherwise idiosyncratically determined. In her
carefully constructed Gothic novel, Mary Shelley speaks against such a
philosophical view, presenting readers with the horrific consequences of the
ultimate transgressive act—Adam declaring God dead and His design null
and void and then creating in his own filthy image, in the assumed absence
of God, and in the tragically real absence of woman who is physically and
spiritually complementary and necessary. The result is a monstrous external
expression of internal depravity, the propagation of existential isolation and
despair, and the destruction of friendships, families, and communities that
were, by design, created for the perpetuation, development, nurturing, and
comfort of humanity.

New York Institute of Technology

NOTES

italics in the Robinson edition of the 1818 published text of Frankenstein
indicate Percy Shelleys revisions of Mary Shelleys 1816-1817 draft.

2For a fuller discussion of the Creatures informed and intellectual embracing
of Christian theism, see Ryan.

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T H O M A S V A R G I S H

Technology and Impotence in Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein

“Shall we put the heart in now?”

—Dr. Frankenstein to Dr. Praetorius in
The Bride of Frankenstein

AT THE MIDPOINT OF ALBERT CAMUS’ EAMOUS PHILOSOPHICAL novelThe Stranger {L’Étranger, 1942), the protagonist, Meursault, kills an Arab.He appears to shoot involuntarily, overcome with the heat, the sun, the
sweat in his eyes, the blinding reflection from the Arab’s knife, the wine at lunch,
fatigue, thirst. When he realizes what he has done, how he has “shattered the
balance ofthe day, the spacious calm of this beach on which I had been happy,” he
deliberately chooses to fire four more shots into the “inert body.”‘ The meaning of
these additional shots has become a legendary crux of twentieth-century philosophy
and literary criticism in numerous debates concerning the existential nature of
human freedom and the nature of human freedom in Existentialism. But there
exists another approach to the act, one that bypasses the familiar philosophical
and psychological centers ofthe debate. This other, apparently philistine, approach
I learned from a friend, a professor of engineering. He pointed out that Meursault
shoots the Arab because the Arab has only a knife and he has a gun. The gun makes

the catastrophe possible, “because,” as my friend observed, “when you have the
technology you use it.”

The effect of technology on human action, its influence on individual choice
and institutional change, is the knotty center of its relation to our freedom, to
our autonomy. Camus’ novel suggests that Meursault’s initial shot was largely
determined by the protagonist’s surroundings and by the gun in his hand, that
the influence of his own will was minimized by the forces ofthe environment and
the technology, and that firing the gun was effectively involuntary. Then, perhaps
in order to reassert the primacy of his own will and choice, Meursault fires the
additional, “undetermined” shots in an act that can be seen as ” free,” the acte gratuit
explored by earlier writers (like André Gide) interested in the problematic of choice
and causality. Meursault yields to external influences in firing the first round, but
then regains command by choosing to fire the next four. The potential cost to his
own interests (to say nothing of those of the Arab) suggests the importance he
attaches to his power of choice. We can see that the ethical difficulties involved
in the analysis of such choice can compound rapidly, as my engineer friend knew.
His point was not that these questions involving choice and freedom and morality
have no practical content but that the technology at hand influences the content
by altering the possibilities of action, changing its range and timing and radically
enlarging its consequences. Or, to put the matter more simply, the technology can
usurp power traditionally reserved to human will.

Technology usurps and empowers simultaneously. It usurps authority at precisely
the moment of empowerment, and this paradoxical effect means that all serious
discussion of technology must involve a discussion of values. Technology appears
to usurp the value-function, substituting its own imperatives at moments of choice,
moments when we would desire and expect the application of values we think of
as “human.” Technological developments have a way of intersecting or ambushing
the traditional values or at least of radically altering the contexts in which they
operate, a fact of immense political consequence. We can see, for example, that
the absolute political dictatorships of the preceding century relied heavily on
techniques of surveillance and oppression unavailable to their predecessors. Such
reliance has also been explored in numerous novels and films that deal with the
perversions of technology in dystopias. Among the most influential of these are
Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1910), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932.), and
George Orwell’s 1^84 (1949). These novels make the point that certain kinds of
moral or ethical choice (and certain kinds of repression of ethical choice) would
be impossible without certain technological achievements. This strongly indicates

An International Journal ofthe Humanities 323

that our values never exist independent of the means of empowerment—our tools,

our technology—but operate in a kind of intimate duality of alliance and conflict

with them. It is the potential for conflict between the technology and the values

that gives rise to the fear of usurpation, the fear of technology’s influence on our

freedom and autonomy.

Technology and Usurpation

Over the past two centuries this fear has been embodied in a narrative, now raised

by its universally felt significance to the status of myth, the myth of Frankenstein.

From its archetypal expression in Mary Shelley’s novel {Frankenstein, or The

Modern Prometheus, 1818; revised by the author 1831) the myth of a technological

abortion or “monster” ranging out of ethical control has continued to grow.

The story formed the basis of numerous nineteenth-century stage productions,

such as Richard Brinsley Peake’s significantly titled Presumption; or The Fate

of Frankenstein (1823). The narrative’s immense success in all its multiple

permutations testifies to its continuing cultural relevance and it is not surprising

that its perpetuation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was largely the

work of the most technologically advanced medium, film. From the beginnings of

cinema as a popular art, Frankenstein’s monster has repeatedly come to life on the

screen—and usually as the creation that threatens its creator. Even before James

Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and his equally admired Bride of Frankenstein (1935),

both with Boris Karloff, there was a one-reel Frankenstein in 1910 and a five-reel

Life Without a Soul in 1915.’ Many more could be added, varying in quality from

the silliest heavy-handed contemporary production oiMary Shelley’s Frankenstein

(Kenneth Branagh, 1994) to such loving and lovable spoofs as Young Frankenstein

(Mel Brooks, 1974).

Nor does the myth require containment exclusively in Dr. Frankenstein’s own

laboratory. There were versions of it in Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

(1919) and Paul Wegener’s The Golem (1910). It has never gone out of fashion and

in recent years the movies have offered numerous versions of a creation usurping

the space, the freedom, the power, even the time of its creator. Among the most

successful of these have been Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

in which the ship’s computer tries to take over the mission; Michael Crichton’s

Westworld (1973) where a renegade robot, the nearly perfect Yul Brynner, starts

shooting the resort’s guests; and Ridley Scott’s superb Blade Runner (198z, director’s

cut 1991) which represents the doomed rebellion of a small group of “replicants.” It

is almost unnecessary to cite the immensely successful The Terminator (1984) and

324 War, Literature & the Arts

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), both directed by James Cameron, in which the
ethical character ofthe robots, like their appearance, shifts ground and in which

“the war against the machines” leads to human hands-on destruction of the most
advanced technology—demonstrating that while technology is about what we can
do it is also always leads to questions of what we will agree to do and not to do,
what we will accept and what we will refuse. There is even a scene in Terminator 2
where the brilliant scientist tries to destroy the world-threatening microchip with
an ordinary axe.

To those who are not science fiction or film enthusiasts it will seem as if I’m
offering more detail than necessary to make this point. In fact, I’ve cited a very
small proportion ofthe films pertinent to this discussion, and if I were to include
the relevant novels since the original Frankenstein my case would drown in its
own evidence. Probably the major preoccupation of popular culture over the
past century has been the tendency of technological developments to invade and
disempower traditional values. This is evidence not just of our interest in the
problems posed by technology; this is evidence of a cultural obsession. We can’t
seem to get enough of this narrative. It’s our chief story, a myth comparable to that
ofthe loss of paradise and the fall of man in Genesis. It is in fact our version ofthat
myth, expressed as the fall of humanity from a projected technological paradise
into an actual technological crisis. All of the films mentioned here deal with the
same subject: what it means to he human. In terms ofthe Frankenstein myth, the
myth of our technology, this philosophical problem can be broken down into two
decisive ethical questions: What are the limits of legitimate power, of authority
that can claim to be ethical? And how are these limits related to our freedom
to choose—given that in our culture this freedom and power have been bound
up since the Book of Genesis with our vision of our identity as special beings, as
chosen, as human?

Such questions indicate the deep implications of technology, its persistent
tendency to lead us far beyond considerations of material progress or manipulations
of our physical environment. I will be exploring them in more concrete and specific
terms when I turn to an analysis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the one remarkable
primary version of the myth that still touches on everything. But as a preface to
that I want to propose a working definition of technology that will locate it strictly
in relation to our discussion of values.

Technology is not a value in the same fundamental sense that antiquity, humility,
freedom, or power are values. It serves to express, aid, and extend values. Values
tend to be ends in themselves rather than means, though they often function as

An International Journal ofthe Humanities 325

empowering motives. Technology derives from the Creek word techne, meaning

art, craft, skill, and it carries connotations of organized, systematic activity. In

ancient Creek and Roman culture, and to a lesser degree in European culture

generally up through the eighteenth century, technology tended to be the realm

of the “mechanical,” meaning the province of those who labored with their hands,

and therefore of slaves and other craftspeople. Their social status can be deduced

from the words of the Tribune Flavius at the beginning of Shakespeare’s Julius

Caesar:

What, know you not.

Being mechanical, you ought not walk

Upon a laboring day without the sign

Of your profession? Speak, what trade art thou?’

The skill or trade lay in the hands and the hands provide the link between the

person and the tool, the nexus of the human with the non-human.

This central significance of the human hand as the connection between the brain

and the environment, between the mind and the world perhaps inherits its force

from the long process of our evolution and the aboriginal reciprocity between our

nature and our culture. From the pebble axe to the laurel leaf blade our brains as

well as our minds grew with our technology. And this intimate connection between

what we do and what we are often finds an emblem in the human hand. This

appears to be well understood or at least intuited by the latter day manipulators of

the Frankenstein myth. It is still exciting to \vatch Boris Karloff reach out toward

the light in his great interpretation of the monster and then to notice how his huge

and awkward hands, hanging from his wrists like unfamiliar tools, seem to change

their character from pathetic and imploring to menacing. In Westworld the easiest

way to tell a robot from a guest is to look at its hands, because, as one guest puts it,

“Supposedly you can’t tell, except by looking at the hands. They haven’t perfected

the hand yet.”** In Blade Runner the revealing organ is the eye (though this requires

a careful screening and verbal test to determine the origin of the being), but the

hand is not forgotten. The chief replicant, played by Rutger Hauer, finds as he

begins to die that his hand starts to go first. He breaks two of the blade runner’s

fingers in revenge for the loss of his friends (fellow replicants) and drives a nail

into his own palm in a twisted bit of Christ symbolism—but also to keep his hand

functioning. In Terminator 2, the surviving pieces of the previous terminator are a

microchip (to represent its brain) and an exquisite metal forearm and hand. When

326 War, Literature & the Arts

the “good” terminator needs to prove his identity to the prospective inventor of the
lethal chip, he strips the skin from his arm and displays the working of his bright
metal hand—a duplicate of the surviving part.

Dr. Frankenstein’s Disease
Mechanisms like pebble axes and computers and robots are tools, extensions of the
hand of the being that devises them. A question thus arises almost naturally of at
what point the tool assumes an identity separate from its creator or owner, at what
point it acquires autonomy. At what point does the creature have the right to assert
independence, to exercise choice, to create in its own right? The Frankenstein myth
thus raises rich and complex possibilities for those who see themselves as creations,
as God’s creatures or as Nature’s, and also as potential creators (even if “only” as
parents). Are human beings unique in their prerogative to think of themselves both
as creatures and as creators? Are we the only creations with authority to create? Or,
to question the dark side of the parable that rises from our technology, in what sense
are we ourselves tools of the universe, employed or discarded without consultation,
without freedom? It was the fear aroused by these resonant speculations, a kind of
echoing awe, that Mary Shelley sought in her story of Dr. Frankenstein.

We can enter further into the source of this fear by asking whether it is simple
ignorance that leads people who have not read the novel to assume that the name
Frankenstein refers to the monster rather than the scientist. The confusion is rich
in implication. It suggests a merging of identity that implicates the creator in his
creation: there exists a sense in which the creation images the creator and perhaps
there is even a sense in which the monster (the technological achievement ranging
out of control) represents an extension of the human scientist (the technologist
who ought to be in control). The confusion of the creation with the creator also
suggests a familial, hereditary lineage in which the offspring carries the name of
the father and so becomes his link with the future, his representative through time.
It is this ancient assertion of parent-child identification that I want to pursue at the
beginning of my analysis of the novel

We first notice that Mary Shelley took pains to give Victor Frankenstein a happy
childhood under the care of devoted parents. His description of their attitude
toward their parental duties is striking:

I was their plaything and their idol, and something better—their child,
the innocent and helpless creature bestowed on them by Heaven, whom

An Intemationaljoumal of the Humanities 327

to bring up to good, and whose future lot it was in their hands to direct
to happiness or misery, according as they fulfilled their duties toward me.*

The idea that the parents have duties toward their children is of course a familiar
one to parents, but in view of Victor Frankenstein’s future abandonment of his
creation (a kind of child, as the monster sees himself) this emphasis on his own
parents’ feelings of duty toward him seems very carefully planted:

With this deep consciousness of what they owed toward the being to
which they had given life, added to the active spirit of tenderness that
animated both, it may be imagined that while during every hour of my
infant life I received a lesson of patience, of charity, and of self-control, I
was so guided by a silken cord that all seemed but one train of enjoyment
to me. (35)

What Mary Shelley stresses here is the sacred duty of parenthood rooted in
religious belief and practice, the obligation of parents to act as providential agents
toward their children, to act as stewards for divine benevolence in relation to their
offspring:

No human being could have passed a happier childhood than myself. My
parents were possessed by the very spirit of kindness and indulgence. We
felt they were not the tyrants to rule our lot according to their caprice, but
the agents and creators of all the many delights which we enjoyed. (39)

With these lessons behind him it seems strange that Dr. Frankenstein can extend
no such care to his own creation.

He fails because he misconceives his primary relationship with the monster.
When he discovers the secret of life (“animation”) Frankenstein sees himself as a
kind of surrogate providence. Having penetrated “the deepest mysteries of creation”
(49), he imagines his creatures’ gratitude flowing his way rather than recognizing
his obligations toward them:

A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and
excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the
gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs. (55)

328 War, Literature & the Arts

He will not only be a parent; he will be a god to his creatures. They will worship
him and this arrangement he presents as a kind of paradise.

As Mary Shelley’s early nineteenth-century readers would have understood
without effort, Frankenstein is bent on usurpation. He plans to employ his
new technology to create a race of dependents who will worship and praise him,
usurping what was almost universally regarded as a divine prerogative. In what
must certainly have seemed to Mary Shelley a distinctly masculine attitude
toward generation (she wrote the novel amid extreme trials of maternity and loss),
Frankenstein views his scientific paternity as the legitimate gratification of vanity
and the extension of his authority. But in fact he violates a primal contract, the
universal contract between creator and created, which specifies that the father
owes his children the means to live, that creation mandates nurture.

Frankenstein can create but he cannot nourish. His instant, self-indulgent,
petulant rejection ofthe monster confirms the catastrophe. After two years of work
putting the creature together he finally gives it life. Exhausted, he has a dream in
which his fiancée turns into his dead mother in her shroud (a precious moment
for psychoanalytic dispositions as suggesting the incestuous interaction between
desire and death) and awakes to find his creature staring at him:

I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created. He
held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called,
were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate
sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks…. one hand was stretched out,
seemingly to detain me, but I escaped…. Oh! no mortal could support
the horror ofthat countenance. (59)

Ignoring the near miracle of his own achievement and the infantile plea of his
creature (it resembles a grotesque infant). Dr. Frankenstein rejects it on strictly
aesthetic grounds. Why? The passages in which he tries to explain this rejection
are painful to read, profoundly troubling in their hysterical rationale of paternal
abandonment. And that rejection of providential stewardship carries with it
troubling suggestions of cosmic abandonment, of creatures destitute of provision
because their creator cannot or will not nourish. In the specific case of Dr.
Frankenstein we can conclude that he rejects his creation because it does him
no credit, because it is hideous, because it images something about himself that
he cannot bear to acknowledge. It suggests that he is a monster. The story of Dr.
Frankenstein is the story of a man with a breakthrough and it is even more the story

An International Journal ofthe Humanities 329

of his breakdown. After he rejects the monster, denies his paternity, the monster

roams loose on the world, creating suffering and havoc, especially for its creator.

Dr. Frankenstein had a choice. In fact he had a number of choices. He chose

to usurp the prerogatives of God, of the Creator of living things. This the novel

treats as a mistake, and Frankenstein himself comes to see it that way, especially

when in a characteristic fit of disgust he destroys the mate he has promised the

monster. Human knowledge, as Faustus learned before Frankenstein, should not

extend into the prerogatives of the divine. And yet there is a sense in which this

argument remains unconvincing, verging toward mere conventional moral pap.

Mary Shelley’s initial intended audience was her radical poet husband and the

man who gave nihilism its romance. Lord Byron. The Shelleyan free spirit and the

Byronic hero were not to be constrained or even limited by such pieties. In fact, the

real usurpation, betrayal, ultimate failure lies not in the heroic act of creation but

in the more pedestrian act of denial, of withdrawing when confronted with dire

need. The problem is not at this point with power in itself; the problem is with the

consequences of creative power, of potency. The problem lies not with the science

or the tools themselves but with where they have taken us.

One way to see how prophetically Mary Shelley caught this direction in her

representation of Frankenstein’s failure is to cover the structure of the novel

with a specific psychological grid, itself a technological achievement. The grid I

propose to use is Freud’s dramatic early twentieth-century reconstruction of the

self as composed of ego, superego, and id. This emblematic pattern fits the novel’s

psychological structure almost perfectly, with Frankenstein as the narratingsentient

ego or “I”; the idealized, selfless, virtuous Elizabeth (the narrator’s betrothed) as

superego; and the monster as denied id. Why this fit seems almost watertight may

amount to little more than a serendipity of cultural history, but more probably

derives from the function of psychoanalysis to sum up so much of those nineteenth-

century quandaries and aspirations of duty and fulfillment, the internal warfare

of desire with morality, that Mary Shelley’s novel suggestively illuminates. Freud’s

theories would in this context embody zfin de siècle attempt to come to terms with

the elemental psychological forces celebrated in European Romanticism from the

French Revolution through the first decades ofthe nineteenth century, the period

oí Frankenstein’s composition.

Psychoanalysis may be seen as a method for making a voyage of discovery, an

internal expedition into the unknown, and it was sometimes regarded as a kind

of irresponsible adventuring into the monstrous that might awaken destabilizing

passions difficult to put back in order. Sigmund Freud was ambivalently regarded—

330 War, Literature & the Arts

and has sometimes been celebrated—as a kind of Faust figure going beyond the
boundaries established by morality and religion, the boundaries Frankenstein
comes to regret transgressing. Freud’s discovery, psychoanalysis, the “talking
cure,” seemed for a time to promise imperial governance of a region that had been
beyond rational control because it was beyond scientific knowledge, the region of
the unconscious. Freud proposed an inward voyage of discovery and devised the
technology to take it.

It may be because of these affinities that a dynamic application of psychoanalytic
terminology applies so neatly to Frankenstein. We have, first of all, the speaking
ego—two of them in fact. The first narrator, Walton, foreshadows the narrator
Frankenstein, for whom he feels an intense admiration and sympathy. Walton
is engaged in a literal voyage of discovery to “the pole”—which he incredibly
imagines as a kind of paradise. For our purposes of psychoanalytic application his
self-justification must be quoted at some length:

I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation;
it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight.
There, Margaret, the sun is for ever visible, its broad disk just skirting
the horizon, and diffusing a perpetual splendor…. there snow and frost
are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land
surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on
the habitable globe…. What may not be expected in a country of eternal
light?… I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the
world never before visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted
by the foot of man. These are my enticements, and they are sufficient to
conquer all fear of danger or death, and to induce me to commence this
laborious voyage with the joy a child feels when he embarks in a little
boat, with his holiday mates, on an expedition of discovery up his native
river. (15-16)

If we compare this rationale with Frankenstein’s own self-indulgent wish to play
providence to the creatures he expects to create, we can see that it contains—as
an introductory parallel—the same psychological elements. It reveals a childish,
narcissistic self-preoccupation in which all events and all animate beings become
relevant only as they contribute to the gratification of the perceiving ego. The
fantasized untrodden, virgin country exists concentrically for the happiness of the
discoverer. But as the novel demonstrates, Walton is not on a child’s “expedition of

An International Journal of the Humanities 331

discovery” with his “hohday mates,” but on a dangerous excursion over the broad,
mysterious, treacherous sea of unexplored knowledge; and his “mates,” when they
find themselves seriously threatened, challenge his authority with mutiny.

In the same letter to his sister, Walton adds that before he became an explorer he
“became a poet, and for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation.” The idea
of a paradise of one’s own creation is itself regressive and narcissistic, implying as
it does that the self is all-in-all and ignoring as it must the outcome of the original
mythic experience of paradise. We could see it as an expression of the Romantic
ego—representatives of which Mary Shelley had closely in view in Byron and
her husband, perhaps the type of poets “whose effusions,” according to Walton,

“entranced my soul” (i6). In any case, this egocentric impulse toward infantile
gratification of primitive impulses at all costs, when isolated from those social
contexts that contain, integrate, and contextualize desire, produces the monstrous.
And the penalty for this, as Frankenstein (still showing ambivalence toward his
creation) tells Walton, is to be condemned to pursue and eradicate one’s product.
This parable is the parable of technology: as the tool extends its power, the ego that
directs it becomes more dangerous and more liable to self-destruction.

When Frankenstein realizes that his technology rather than producing “excellent
beings” actually leads to the monstrous, he rejects it. He tries to treat the monster
as merely a failed experiment, not as an intimate extension of himself. With a self-
absorbed masculine gesture of denial he tries to walk away. But this doesn’t work. It
doesn’t work because the monster is Frankenstein more fully and more intimately
than any natural child could be. Mary Shelley shows this in many ingenious ways,
all of them subject to astonishingly straight-forward psychoanalytic explanation.

In the first place, when his younger brother William is killed, Frankenstein
realizes immediately and intuitively that the monster must be responsible: “Nothing
in human shape could have destroyed that fair child. He was the murderer! I could
not doubt it. The mere presence of the idea was an irresistible proof of the fact.”
This equation between the speculation and the confirmation suggests—with one
of those preternatural insights that romantic writers sought—an internal fusing
between imagination and evidence, conception and explanation. Frankenstein
knows what his monster does because the monster is his own:

I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind, and endowed
with the will and power to effect purposes of horror, such as the deed
which he had now done, nearly in the light of my own vampire, my own

332 War, Literature &the Arts

spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to
me. (78)

As Freud was to conclude, the id contains two primal forces, eros (sexual desire or
love) and thanatos (aggression or death). Only eros can be socialized, redirected and
diffused (and in cases of extreme achievement, sublimated) toward a consideration
of the well-being of others. Thanatos, the destructive power, retains its original
direction and cannot be socialized. Bit by bit the monster loses its capacity to
love because the social impulse, eros, is perpetually blocked. The monster turns
to evil because it has nowhere else to go, and it has nowhere else to go because
Frankenstein, its origin and source, has denied it. And as in psychoanalytic theory,
the denial, the repression, cannot last: the monster returns.

This repeated act of denial has consequences for the ego, the narrating “I,” just
as Freud said it would. After he denies the monster, Frankenstein becomes less and
less effectual, less potent. When duty clearly calls on him to testify as to his creation
and save the falsely condemned Justine Marie from execution for little William’s
murder (the monster has framed her), Frankenstein cannot act: “my purpose of
avowal died away on my lips” (90). When confronted with another being in dire
need he again freezes. The paralysis derives directly from repression: unless the ego
acknowledges the forces of the id, the id will rule—and so the monster does.

From a psychoanalytic standpoint, the most interesting consequences of the
denial have to do with Frankenstein’s relation to his betrothed, the sublimely
virtuous Elizabeth. She represents all goodness and appears to be without longings
for herself. She grew up alongside Frankenstein, like a sister, like a possession (as he
first regards her), and he demonstrates a pronounced lack of passion for her. After
all, she is already eternally his own. Rather than erotic fulfillment, she comes to
stand for the obligations of social normalcy; marriage to her represents the life the
narrator ought to enjoy but for which he shows little active inclination. In Mary
Shelley’s novel, as often in psychoanalysis, when a man denies his monster he goes
limp. Frankenstein puts Elizabeth off so often that she offers to release him from
his engagement; he rejects this idea and then continues to put her off. He treats
her as she treats herself, as devoid of erotic inclination and as infinitely patient and
virtuous. In fact she embodies patience and virtue, the distillation of altruism, and
so almost beyond earthly accommodation, a Christian superego of devotion and
selflessness.

This psychological / ethical allegory is not hidden in the novel, but insisted upon
(though not, of course, in Freudian terms). Mary Shelley’s achievement lies not in

An International Journal of the Humanities 333

disguising it (as it might be disguised in a patient under psychoanalysis) but in

fleshing it out in credible character, in making it believable. It is in fact so bold as

to run to the grotesque. When Frankenstein destroys the monster’s uncompleted

mate in violation oftheir agreement, the monster tells him: “remember, I shall be

with you on your wedding-night.” The simple and straight-forward interpretation

here seems perfectly obvious to the reader: as you destroyed my mate I will

destroy yours. Even the makers of the crassest Frankenstein films can see this.

But in the novel, Frankenstein himself bedded in his internal negotiations, lost

in his solipsistic narcissism, thinks that the threat refers to his own safety. In his

characteristic inactive lethargy he muses:

Why had I not followed him and closed with him in mortal strife? But I

had suffered him to depart, and he had directed his course towards the

mainland. I shuddered to think who might be the next victim sacrificed

to his insatiate revenge. And then I thought again of his words—”I will

be with you on your wedding-night” That then was the period fixed for the

fulfillment of my destiny. In that hour I should die, and at once satisfy and

extinguish his malice. The prospect did not move me to fear; yet when I

thought of my beloved Elizabeth,—of her tears and endless sorrow, when

she should find her lover so barbarously snatched from her,—tears, the

first I had shed for many months, streamed from my eyes, and I resolved

not to fall before my enemy without a bitter struggle. (173)

What finally makes him weep is the image of Elizabeth’s potential grief for

the loss of himself—clearly in his view the ultimate depravation—and again the

emotion is self-referential, self-recreating. It will do her no good. In fact, like

a patient with a deeply repressed secret, the secret of the monster, the narrating

ego will ignore the obvious. The sane reader finds it grotesque that Frankenstein

cannot see the sane monster’s evident intention to kill the sublimated Elizabeth:

it is the superego that the id is after! And the thought is not far off that if anything

at all is to happen on the wedding night the monster had better be there. The ego

will be impotent.

Technology and Freedom

How, in this discussion of technology, did we get from power to impotence?

What is it about technological power that seems to lead to weakness? Or, to put

the question in terms of our discussion of Dr. Frankenstein and his succeeding

334 War, Literature & the Arts

permutations in our cultural history, do his weaknesses reappear in our
current technological advances? To what extent are his liabilities general to our
contemporary technology? Do we still self-indulgently create and consume our
creations without forethought? Do we lose ourselves in self-congratulation? Do
we evade the full consequences of our advances: denying the ugly while claiming
the beautiful, forgetting the new sickness while celebrating the new cure, ignoring
the impovetishment while squandering the wealth? All thoughtful people know
the answer to these questions—though some might add that we show a few late
signs of improvement. But this is not the place, and I am not the writer to enter
on a polemic against our technology (I love it too). My point is that to exercise
true authority the liabilities ofthe vast technological extensions of power must be
recognized. And by this I do not mean the acknowledged damage to the physical
and cultural environment. I mean the inner liabilities. Dr. Frankenstein’s liabilities,
that such extensions of power bring so vividly to light and make so dangerous.

Technology brings into sharp relief the implications for authority of a
relatively new conception of freedom, the conception of radical individual self-
determination. This conception may be the dominant one today, and so familiar to
most Americans and many Europeans that it goes almost unquestioned, especially
after its development in anti-totalitarian, anti-deterministic movements such
as Existentialism (Meursault’s costly freedom) and especially as it functions as a
premise: that the right ofthe individual to self-determination is primary. We forget
that this idea has achieved respectability only very recently and that its numerous
problems are still in process of resolution.

Traditional, socially contextual conceptions of freedom were questioned and
revised during the European Enlightenment (the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries) and the American and French revolutions. They were radically challenged
or abandoned during the Romantic period (approximately the period from the
French Revolution through the first third of the nineteenth century), the period
of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. There had of course been earlier representations
of individuals who denied their social or religious obligations, immoralists and
nihilists like Edmund in Shakespeare’s King Lear or like Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus.
But such characters were conscious of their alienation and of their war to the
death with the moral world around them. Dr. Frankenstein must be among the
first characters to feel socially justified in his unlimited pursuit of knowledge.
He manages to ignore established boundaries and obligations without seeing
himself as a social outcast—at least at first. In showing the consequences for him
and his community, Mary Shelley follows and continues an intense speculation

An International Journal ofthe Humanities 335

on the nature of human beings and their social obligations. As we have seen, her
conclusions are not optimistic. Her protagonist ends up in a riddle of escape and
pursuit, pursued by and pursuing his monster.

What brings the question of such radical freedom to our immediate attention
is its association with technological advance. Because he conceives of himself as
ethically unfettered, Frankenstein develops the science to create, or at least to
recreate, life. He masters the technology to create a monster. The mastery, the
power, appears to be inseparable from the freedom to achieve it and this freedom
depends upon the ability to conceive of oneself as socially unfettered, a free creative
spirit, someone paradoxically licensed to transgress ethical boundaries in the
name of social progress. In this regard Dr. Frankenstein is a twisted predecessor of
Raskolnikov as a failed Übermensch. The concept and the practice of technological
advance take on a new and unpredictable character, the character of the free creator,
a godlike character, the character of usurpation. The achievement of this character
is potentially costly: in the case of Frankenstein and his many cultural descendants
the cost appears to be the denial of those values that seemed for most of our history
to constitute our humanity. Radical self-determination can lead us out of the realm
of the human, at least out of the traditionally human. Paradoxically, the consequent
psychological crisis can be expressed in terms of impotence; the power lures us to a
social, ethical, emotional desert, to death rather than life.

Finally, this crisis leads to a general realization about our technology: that it is
us. Frankenstein’s monster is Frankenstein; the creation expresses the creator. The
bomb, pollution, land-mines, poison gas, the stealth bomber are us. And so are
motion pictures, relativity theory, vaccines, foreign aid, language, the symphony
orchestra, durable pigments. It enriches our conception and our exercise of
authority to know this, to acknowledge it. Our tools, far from being alien and
inhuman, richly express human aspirations. Only we can use them: they are fitted
to our hands. I am typing on the keyboard of my computer and I might be at the
controls of an F-ii or holding a lariat or a violin. I can’t deny that these tools express
me, are made in my image. The Frankenstein myth tells me what will happen if I
deny the resemblance. As Emerson summed it up in his essay on self-reliance, “My
giant goes with me wherever I go.”*

Notes
1. Albert Camus, ffie Siranger, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage, 1954), 76.

336 War, Literature & the Arts

2. Albert J. LaValley, “The Stage and Film Children of Frankenstein: A Survey”; William Nestrick, ‘Frankenstein and
the Nature of Film Narrative”; both articles in The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Sheiiey’s Novei, ed.
George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

3. William Shakespeare, Mus Caesar, ed. S. F. Johnson (Harmondsworth; Penguin Books, 1987), 27 (1.1.2-5).

4. Westworid (1973), dir. Michael Crichton, perf. Richard Benjamin, Yul Brynner, James Brolin.

5. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, ed. Maurice Hindle (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 35.
This text is based on the third edition (1831) and contains Shelley’s final revisions.

6. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Richard Poirier (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1990), 46.

THOMAS VARGISH, a Contributing editor to WLA, has published widely on nineteenth

and twentieth century literature and cultural history. He has been a Rhodes Scholar and a

Guggenheim Fellow.

An International Journal of the Humanities 33 7

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