Thoughts on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

It came to me that it's important to think about the big back story of the fact that Mary was Percy's young second wife, his ambitions as a literary luminary on track. Plausibly the "modern Prometheus" is Shelley himself, in guise of Victor Frankenstein. This whole pivotal threat, "I will be with you on your wedding night," is very telling. The story becomes the protagonist agnosticizing over his hidden secret, which seems to be a kind of transformative magic spuriously transmuted from the learning of the alchemists. And the threat is carried out!

It's reasonable to imagine Frankenstein as a multileveled overture from Mary to Percy. Whether or not that's true, the words penned by Frankenstein to his fiancee are distinctive:

"In this state of mind I wrote to Elizabeth. My letter was calm and affectionate. "I fear, my beloved girl," I said, "little happiness remains for us on earth; yet all that I may one day enjoy is centred in you. Chase away your idle fears; to you alone do I consecrate my life and my endeavours for contentment. I have one secret, Elizabeth, a dreadful one; when revealed to you it will chill your frame with horror, and then, far from being surprised at my misery, you will only wonder that I survive what I have endured. I will confide this tale of misery and terror to you the day after our marriage shall take place; for, my sweet cousin, there must be perfect confidence between us. But until then, I conjure you, do not mention or allude to it. This I most earnestly entreat, and I know you will comply."

However preposterous this declaration, you almost have the sense that it is one that the young authoress might have personally read or have imagined, given her position as the second child bride of a polygamous poet and marital experimenter.

The story is one of portents, as befits its origins in homage to German horror tales--looking up the word "monster," used many times, it comes from Latin, meaning a sacred warning, and might conceivably have had that meaning as Mary Shelley used it. And of course it is "Frankenstein's Monster" that we always refer to, though we invariably now associate this with the tottering colossus of Boris Karloff's depiction.

There's also an explicit theme of science over-reaching in "The Modern Prometheus," which causes me in a number of places to think of the monster as a machine, a symbol of coming industrialization, a misshapen extension of man. In that way, and particularly in an age burgeoning with biotechnology and information, the story both retains its relevance, and becomes increasingly quaint. But I'm really not inclined to pursue that line, the creation of the monster is literally and figuratively a deus ex machina, a story-telling device, and it's kind of treated as one, with some powerful writing, but only a few pages devoted to the pivotal event. No Tesla coils or even dismembered corpses.

This novel can easily be read as a description of mental illness or drug addiction as it progressively destroys the protagonist's relationships with his family and friend. I probably just missed something, but it seemed like there was a big time discrepancy between 6 months or so, on Frankenstein's part, and several years while the monster gains his faculties. In any case, it's a fascinating concurrency between the two points of view of potentially a schizophrenic personality.

The preface to the novel (reportedly written by Percy Shelley in 1818) begins:

"The event on which this fiction is founded had been supposed, by Dr. Darwin and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence..."

Frankenstein was written much too early to be citing Charles Darwin, who didn't publish until 1858. It turns out that the reference is to his grandfather Erasmus Darwin. The elder figure was clearly a heavyweight as he is cited by name in the first sentence of an introduction. He conceived of something called a Theory of Evolution, an extension of Lamarkian cosmology, so the vision has been around a while.

There are sort of two major mythic themes to the story of Prometheus, the creation of man/woman/life from clay, and the image of the bearer of the spark of fire to man. Loosely speaking, Mary Shelley's "The Modern Prometheus" deals with the former, "Percy Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound" with the latter.

There is both an allusion and a departure indicated in Mary Shelley's title, Modern Prometheus," and Percy's Prometheus is similarly Unbound. There's a lot of discussion about the homage of the latter to Milton's Paradise Lost. I haven't been able to do more than scan a Wikipedia outline of Paradise Lost and Prometheus Unbound, but a notable difference is that the former is Judeo-Christian in basis while the latter is Graeco-pagan.

Probably the earliest established and primary aspect of the Prometheus myth has him as a trickster of the Gods, fooling Zeus himself into choosing the inferior portion of the meats. Not as uniformly stated is his role in creating man, whether he is the creator himself, who opened the head of Zeus in the formlessness of Chaos and allowed it all to happen, the savior of man, the stayer-of-the-hand, when Zeus is getting ready to ball the clay, or finally the deliverer of fire and the arts of civilization, that are the distinguishing characteristics of humanity. And all mixed up in this also is the role of Pandora, who is Eve/Lilith, revenge.

An interesting though philosophically heavy-handed aspect of this book is the way in which the monster is a tabula raza, acquiring all his manners from the cottager family. It recalled to me an essay I had read years ago on "The Robinson Crusoe myth" and the writings of an arab author, Ibn Tufail, who placed a feral child on an island and showed the full fruits of civilization were inate in and could be derived from, first principles as established in the Koran. That philosophical notion is explicitly mechanistic. In Frankenstein the picture is slightly more nuanced, admitting three seminal books of more recent provenance and an additional outside influence, the character of "The Arabian." *

I become convinced that the Arabian is the true Mary Shelley alter-ego, who presents a feminist angle on being tabula raza:

"I soon perceived that, although the stranger uttered articulate sounds, and appeared to have a language of her own, she was neither understood by, not herself understood, the cottagers. ...Presently I found, by the frequent recurrence of some sound which the stranger repeated after them, that she was endeavouring to learn their language; and the idea instantly occurred to me that I should make use of the same instructions to the same end. The stranger learned about twenty words at the first lesson, most of them, indeed, were those which I had before understood, but I profited by the others."

While possessing a rich history, the Arabian shares only inate human characteristics with her hosts, the cottagers. Without language, her past experiences are irrelevant, almost an impediment.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayy_ibn_Yaqdhan

Empiricism, tabula rasa, nature versus nurture

In his Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, Ibn Tufail was the first to demonstrate Avicenna's theories of empiricism and tabula rasa as a thought experiment in his novel, as he depicted the development of the mind of a feral child "from a tabula rasa to that of an adult, in complete isolation from society" on a deserted island. The Latin translation of his work, entitled Philosophus Autodidactus, published by Edward Pococke the Younger in 1671, inspired John Locke's formulation of tabula rasa in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,^[13] which went on to become one of the principal sources of empiricism in modern Western philosophy, and influenced many Enlightenment philosophers, such as David Hume and George Berkeley. The theory of tabula rasa later gave rise to the nature versus nurture debate in modern psychology.