The True Meaning of Frankenstein

Few texts are better known and more widely read than Frankenstein: I have a dozen modern editions on my shelves. But every one of their editors has failed to grasp what Mary Shelley was up to when she wrote it. 

Mary Godwin, as she was, aged 18, her lover Percy Shelley and her stepsister Claire Clairmont spent the summer of 1816 by Lake Geneva, much of the time in the company of Lord Byron and his travelling companion and doctor, John Polidori. As a result of the eruption of Mount Tambora in the East Indies, the weather was dreadful: it was a cold summer, with lashing rain and wild thunderstorms. The little party of English travellers was originally drawn together by Clairmont’s determination to continue her affair with Byron and then consolidated by his and Shelley’s mutual admiration. They gathered round a fire and read ghost stories aloud, and then resolved each to write a story. A few days later, Mary had a strange vision of a monstrous creature. She began to write what would become a novel. When they returned to England in September, Mary was working on a draft. By May of 1817 the novel was finished, and it appeared in print on 1 January 1818.

It is often presumed that Frankenstein is in some way a response to the Industrial Revolution. Yet there is nothing in the novel to suggest this (a passing reference to ‘the wonderful effects of steam’ was added by Percy as the book went to press). The first steamboat had appeared on the Thames in 1815, but Stephenson’s Rocket did not run until 1829. Mary wrote with a quill pen on handmade paper, just as Shakespeare did. Steel nibs were to become common a few years later. The world of the novel is pre-industrial.

Myth of Prometheus

Why then is the novel subtitled The Modern Prometheus? The standard version of the myth derives from ancient Greek sources: Prometheus stole fire from the gods, and with fire came cooking and metallurgy. It is easy to assume that ‘a modern Prometheus’ is someone who introduces revolutionary technology. But the core of the myth for Mary’s readers was quite different. It originated in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Prometheus is described as making human beings out of clay and bringing them to life. There is no fire in Ovid’s story. It is in later, Christianised versions that Prometheus steals fire from heaven to introduce a spark of life (the soul) into his creatures. This is the story of Prometheus as known by many early-19th-century schoolchildren, thanks to textbooks such as the one produced by Mary’s father, William Godwin, entitled The Pantheon. Victor Frankenstein, in Mary’s story, is a modern Prometheus because he makes a human being out of dead matter and brings it to life with a spark, the spark of electricity.

Where did Mary get the idea of artificial life? The standard answer to this question has become the one supplied by the literary critic Marilyn Butler in 1994. She pointed out that Percy and Mary were on friendly terms with William Lawrence, their doctor. In 1815, Lawrence gave two lectures on the principle of life, and, although they were published after Mary and Percy set out for Geneva, they may well have been familiar with Lawrence’s views. According to Lawrence, who cheerfully quoted Lucretius, life was simply the result of a particular organisation of matter, for which he later came under sustained attack for his materialism; Mary’s novel, too, was criticised as materialist. When Mary revised her novel in 1831, she sought to make it less radical in its implications in order to prevent it from being associated with these views. Mary was thus caught up in a conflict between materialists and those Butler calls ‘vitalists’, who took their lead from Lawrence’s mentor John Abernethy, whose views Lawrence had roundly condemned in his lectures. Abernethy thought ‘life’ was a force present in living creatures, analogous to magnetism or electricity.

Unfortunately, Butler failed to understand Lawrence. Many of his lectures were, as his opponents gleefully pointed out, simply paraphrases of a French physiologist, Xavier Bichat, an advocate of materialism and what he called ‘vitalism’. It is wrong for Butler to claim that Lawrence was opposed by vitalists: the word ‘vitalist’ did not yet exist in English (the Oxford English Dictionary gives its first use as being in reference to Bichat), but it is Lawrence not Abernethy who was on the side of vitalism.

A very strange process

Had she grasped this, Butler might have understood that Lawrence thought life was a very strange process because living beings reverse the standard principles of chemical interactions: where ordinary chemical processes lead to decay and the dissipation of energy, living creatures turn dead matter into living matter and store up energy for future use. Lawrence was emphatic: so peculiar is life that all living creatures originate from other living creatures. The claim that living creatures are simply a peculiar way of organising matter did not imply, in Lawrence’s mind, that life could be artificially produced; for only life could produce life.

Abernethy, on the other hand, thought that life was something additional to matter. His views are reminiscent of those of the young Percy Shelley, who had described human beings as electrified clay. Mary Godwin, in imagining that one might bring dead matter to life with an electric spark, was echoing Percy’s belief, which had in all likelihood been reinforced by the publication of Abernethy’s lectures. Victor Frankenstein’s physiology is that of Abernethy, not Lawrence; it is a materialist version of the Christianised Promethean myth. Abernethy thought not only that living things have a mysterious life force, but that human beings also had a soul. Here, Mary parts company with him, for there are no souls in Frankenstein; hence, rather than any similarity between her novel and the physiology of Bichat and Lawrence, the accusation of materialism repeatedly directed at the novel by its first reviewers.

Reviewers compared Frankenstein repeatedly with William Godwin’s novel St Leon (its dedicatee). In St Leon, the protagonist, an alchemist, discovers the secret of eternal life. Victor Frankenstein’s ambition is also one taken from the old alchemists; they, too, had sought to create living humans. His science is fantastical; consequently, the book as first conceived had nothing to say about the dangers of scientific enquiry, any more than St Leon warned against the dangers of alchemical enquiry. The original story of Victor and his creature had two morals: obsession is dangerous and so one ought to pursue a tranquil domestic life. This is the conclusion Victor himself draws after he has created the creature; and there is nothing natural about evil. If the Creature becomes a monster and a murderer, it is because of the way in which he is treated by his maker and those whom he meets. This is the moral Percy drew in a review of the book which was published posthumously.

I say ‘the original story’ because Frankenstein comes to us folded inside a framing narrative, the story of the Arctic explorer Robert Walton, who meets first Victor Frankenstein and then the Creature. It is through Walton that we learn their stories. One of the brilliant innovations of the book is to have two conflicting narrators given almost equal space.

The framing narrative poses a seemingly insoluble problem. No one has identified a possible source for Mary’s knowledge of Arctic exploration that she could have had to hand when she began work on her novel. A number of scholars seem to think that Mary must have been reading essays by the great advocate of Arctic exploration John Barrow, which were published in 1818: but Frankenstein was published on 1 January 1818 and finished in May 1817. Anything not in print by then can be eliminated. 

It is clear from the draft manuscript that there was always a framing narrative, but it is not clear that it was always this framing narrative, for the first 40 pages of draft text –the whole of the original introductory narrative – have been torn away. The only way to make sense of the discrepancy between the sources Mary had available and the text as it survives is to conclude that the framing narrative as we now have it was a later addition. At some point, Mary turned back, rewrote the introductory 40 pages and proceeded to add the concluding narrative as now exists. At what point? In the story, when Victor leaves the land and sets out across the frozen ocean. In Mary’s life, after she had read an essay on Arctic exploration which Barrow published in The Quarterly Review.

This was the first of Barrow’s essays to appear urging Arctic exploration; it bears the date October 1816, but was actually printed and distributed in February 1817; just when Mary would have received it, she began the most intense period of writing recorded in her journal for the period when Frankenstein was composed. Mary read Barrow, discovered that ships could sail into the frozen north and rewrote her story so that it began and ended with the letters home of an English explorer. 

As the new framing narrative was written,  the meaning of the novel shifted. Victor Frankenstein’s science was, like the science of the alchemists, secretive and esoteric. But Walton is engaged in a public enterprise which claims to serve the community of scientific enquirers. And yet, despite their differences, Walton and Frankenstein each see the other as an image of themselves; and Frankenstein tells Walton that intellectual ambition – Walton’s ambition – can be a dreadful thing. (And indeed Walton is endangering the lives of his crew.)

A new subject

Though it is often said that Frankenstein is a novel about Promethean ambition – about the dangers of scientific enquiry where there is no consideration for the ethical and social consequences – the phrase ‘Promethean ambition’ did not exist when the novel was written; it first appears 20 years later. But by the time she wrote the framing narrative, in the spring of 1817, Mary had discovered that her novel was not just another St Leon, a further reworking of ideas borrowed from Rousseau. She had found a new subject and she had found it by seeing in Barrow’s essay on Arctic exploration a casual disregard for the lives of ordinary sailors and an extraordinary arrogance. For Barrow, sitting behind his desk in the Admiralty, had no doubt that he, and no one else, knew best how to conduct an Arctic expedition.

Mary’s novel thus hides within itself a crucial moment of transition from the Enlightenment preoccupations of Rousseau (her favourite author), Wollstonecraft (her mother) and Godwin (her father) to a characteristically modern set of anxieties about humanity’s newfound power over nature. Since then, the meaning of her novel has never ceased to shift and turn. Frankenstein’s digging in graveyards for body parts acquired new relevance with the Burke and Hare murders of 1828. The series of Arctic explorations that began in 1818 culminated in the catastrophic loss of the Franklin expedition, with all lives, of 1845. The vast globe over which Frankenstein chases the monster was progressively shrunk by the steam engine, the internal combustion engine and the jet engine. And then came Hiroshima. It requires a considerable act of historical imagination now to step back to February 1817, to the arrival in Marlow of the latest issue of the Critical Quarterly, containing a review of the third canto of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, written on the shores of Lake Geneva, and an essay on ancient Egyptian monuments which would inspire Percy’s Ozymandias. What Mary found in that issue was a new framing narrative and the idea of Promethean ambition.

Elementary errors

Frankenstein has been intensely studied, yet distinguished scholars routinely make elementary errors in describing how it came to be written and what it meant when Mary wrote it. Her ‘hideous progeny’ was not about the Industrial Revolution; her Prometheus is not the Prometheus of Greek myth; its science was not that of William Lawrence; and, strangely, when Mary wrote it, she did not have a time machine which would enable her to read books which had not yet been published. It is something much stranger and more remarkable, a book that bridges two very different intellectual worlds: on the one hand the world of Rousseau and the noble savage and, on the other, the first glimmering of what we have recently come to call the Anthropocene. Its inconsistency, its shifting viewpoints, are not intellectual flaws, but the measure of its extraordinary originality.

David Wootton is Anniversary Professor of History, University of York and editor of Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: the 1818 Edition with Related Texts (Hackett, 2020).