I began class asking how Mary
Shelley's novel met the class' expectations, given the many pop
cultural representations of the monster (from Kenneth Branaugh's
recent film to Phil Hartman's version on Saturday Night Live
to Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein (a scene from which you are
seeing to the right of this text, specifically of the monster and
Elizabeth in bed together). As various students stated, the original
monster is quite different from these later clichés. For
example, the monster cannot be characterized as simply evil; he is
also certainly not ignorant or inarticulate, at least not once he
teaches himself about history and literature. One point that was
brought up is that the monster is not himself called "Frankenstein."
This led me to render a discussion that I had had with Michael Alley
after last Friday's class. As Michael and I discussed, in
misattributing the name of the monster's creator to the monster
itself, pop culture could be said actually to have underlined one of
Mary Shelley's points: that Victor Frankenstein is himself in many
ways more monstrous than his own creation.
As was correctly pointed out, however, this does not mean that Victor Frankenstein and the monster are not closely aligned. Like Victor, the monster learns incredibly quickly and is voracious for knowledge; the monster could even be said to act out some of Victor's most repressed unconscious desires given the rather interesting dream that he has of a dead Elizabeth immediately after creating his creature (p. 86). Due to his rather incredible misreading of the monster's warning (I will be with you on your wedding-night!) Victor could be said to make his dream come true. That is, in the end he does "embrace" the dead corpse of Elizabeth on p. 220. Could it be that Victor is not far off when he cries out on p. 122, "I, not in deed, but in effect, was the true murderer."
I followed this discussion with an introduction to the important historical changes that were occurring in Shelley's day, with a mind to the following question: "why does the first ever science-fiction story appear in this particular time period?" I mentioned the following:
- The French Revolution (1789), which led (in France) to the execution of the king and also aided the subsequent rise of the middle classes. The fact of the revolution in France led many in England to fear a similar revolution in Britain, either by the middle classes or, worse, the lower classes. The developing madness of King George in England throughout this period did not help in bolstering the image of the aristocracy in the minds of the English.
- The rise of the middle classes in England as the nation became increasingly reliant for its wealth on industry and business. This fact also led, of course, to the rise of capitalism as the predominant way to conceive of business relations.
- The Industrial Revolution and the related changes occurring in the exploration of the physical world, which increasingly ushered in our modern forms of medicine and science.
- Urbanization: as industry became the major money-maker in the nineteenth century and as new machines made farm labour less necessary, people entered the cities in droves to begin working in factories and sweat shops.
- Increasing literacy rates: more and more middle-class men, middle-class women and even lower-class people were learning how to read. This expansion of the reading audience made it possible for our modern mass market to become possible. That is, the book industry could now make a profit by selling inexpensive books to an extremely large number of consumers.
One effect of these changes is that the novel was increasingly becoming an important generic form, even if in Mary Shelley's time it was still looked down upon as a lesser form than poetry. This is significant given Mary Shelley's intimate connection to the major Romantic poets of her day (her husband, Percy Shelley, as well as Lord Byron and John Keats). It was also true that an increasingly large percentage of novels were being written by women often for a predominantly female audience. Following in the tradition of Samuel Richardson (who wrote the hugely popular novels Clarissa and Pamela in the eighteenth century), female novelists increasingly represented scenarios and issues of interest to women: domestic situations, powerful feelings, motherhood, and the search for a husband. (Think, for example, of the many Jane Austen cinematic adaptations of late; Austen was writing around the same time as Mary Shelley.) Romantic poets, on the other hand, were interested in quite different things: they too wrote about their feelings but they tended to explore extreme states of emotion; the "Romantic hero" tended to be a character who spurned the conventions of the city or the family, searching instead for divine inspiration in the sublime landscapes of Switzerland or of the North. Their mythological hero is Prometheus, a Titan who went against Zeus in stealing fire for man. Prometheus becomes a "symbol and a sign/ To mortals," as Lord Byron states in the poem named after the Titan; he is the figure for "a firm will, and a deep sense,/... Triumphant where it dares defy,/ ...making death a victory." Prometheus thus becomes a prototype for the Romantic hero. We also discussed J. M. W. Turner's paintings as an example in art of the sublime and of the Romantic sensibility.
As the class correctly pointed out, Mary Shelley could be said to have an uneasy relationship both to the generic female domestic novel and to the Romantic ideology, which she critiques to some extent through her representation of Victor, Walton, and even the monster. For example, we can easily see Victor as a sort of Prometheus figure (stealing the fire of life from the gods in order to give it to mankind) but he is clearly a Prometheus figure that is only ambiguously heroic. As already mentioned, his stupidity could be said to lead to the death of his entire family. Victor's final speech to Walton's crew--"Be men, or be more than men!" (239)--also suggests that he himself has not learned the dangers of allowing one's desires for glory overshadow the concerns of others (one's family, for example, or one's crew). One could say that Mary Shelley is offering the reader an "alternative Romanticism" that is embodied perhaps in the figures of Clerval and Elizabeth, specifically a love of poetry, a dedication to one's family, an acceptance of one's responsibilities, and compassion for all creatures. The fact that Mary Shelley first published her novel anonymously and that her husband, Percy Shelley, later wrote the Preface to the book in her own voice serve further to underline just how uneasy her relationship to both the novel and Romanticism really is.
The final question that we explored, which we will continue to discuss next class is: "what does all this have to do with science fiction?" We thus began to discuss why this generic form first comes to the fore in this period. It was suggested that the rise of science made the form possible for the first time, since science offered possible explanations for events that seem beyond the parameters of our quotidian lives (to recall our definition of science fiction from the very first class). One could also say that the Romantic tendency to explore the extremes of one's emotions and of nature does tie in strangely to science fiction's tendency to explore that which is beyond the parameters of the everyday. Indeed, Mary Shelley underlines this connection by casting her Romantic hero, Victor Frankenstein, as a scientist. The Romantic critique of science, of the industrial revolution, of urbanization, of the loss of emotion among city-dwellers would all be picked up, in fact, by future science-fiction works, particularly by the genre of dystopic fiction.
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