Deconstructing the Modern Prometheus: The Case of Mary

Shelley’s Frankenstein

HUM 3905: Junior Seminar in the HumanitiesSpring 2014Dr. Perdigao

January 15, 2014

Envisioning Technology• Term technology—from Greek noun meaning “a systematic

treatment” (Rhodes 22)

• Machines, technology, science

• Conflation of science and technology (Rhodes 22)

• Old and new technology

• Prometheus and Eve as examples—curiosity and caution

• Changing ideas about creation—from religious contexts to modern industry and scientific experimentation

• Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate About Machines, Systems and the Human World, Ed. Richard Rhodes

The Path to Modernity• “By relying on convention, eighteenth-century writers could be

seen as trying to control an unstable world. The classical past, for many, provided an emblem of that stability, a standard of permanence. But some felt that the high valuing of the past was problematic, the problem epitomized by the quarrel of ancients versus moderns in England and France. At stake in this controversy was, among other things, the value of permanence as opposed to the value of change.” (Lawall 6)

• “Those proud to be moderns, on the other hand, held that men (possibly even women) standing on the shoulders of the ancients could see further than their predecessors. The new was conceivably more valuable than the old. One might discover flaws even in revered figures of the classical past. And not everything had yet been accomplished.” (Lawall 6)

• Ideas about progress, modernization

• Man’s ability to create and manipulate life

• The possibilities and limitations of science and technology

Literary Theory: The Basics• Formalism/New Criticism

• Biographical Criticism

• Reader Response

• Structuralism Linguistics

• Narratology• Semiotics• Mythological Criticism/Archetypal Criticism

• Race, class, gender, sexual orientation• New Historicism/Cultural Criticism• Marxist Theory

Constructions of class, class conflict• Feminist Criticism/Gender Studies/Queer Theory• Critical Race Theory• Postcolonial Theory

Literary Theory: The Basics• Poststructuralism/Poststructuralist Theory• Psychoanalytic Theory

Freud and Lacan• Deconstruction

Absent presentDecentered centerBinary oppositions—from either/or to and/both

From New Criticism to Deconstruction: On Themes• Question of reason

• Creation—scientific and religious discourses

• Politics, construction of society

• Role of women

• Masculinist pursuits

• Death, loss, and recovery

Biographical Criticism: Mary Shelley (1797-1851)

• Mary W. Godwin born in 1797 to William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft; mother dies ten days after her birth

• 1801: William Godwin marries Mary Jane Clairmont who has children Charles and Jane (Claire); join Mary and Fanny

• 1812: Percy Shelley begins correspondence with Godwin; visits Godwin house; eventually meets Mary

• 1814: Mary returns home; starts affair with Percy; they elope, bringing Claire; Harriet Shelley gives birth to second child

• 1815: Mary gives birth to daughter who dies

• 1816: Mary gives birth to son William; leave England for Geneva; meet Byron; Mary writes Frankenstein; Fanny commits suicide; Harriet Shelley drowns; Mary and Percy marry

• 1817: Mary gives birth to daughter Clara

• 1818: Frankenstein published in January; Clara dies

• 1819: Return to Rome; William dies; Mary writes Mathilda, not published in lifetime; gives birth to Percy Florence

Biographical Criticism: Mary Shelley (1797-1851)

• 1822: Mary almost dies from miscarriage; Percy lost at sea

• 1823: Valperga published; second edition of Frankenstein published; Mary returns to London

• 1824: Mary begins work on The Last Man; her edition of Percy’s Posthumous Poems published but suppressed

• 1826: The Last Man published; Charles, Percy’s son, dies

• 1830: Perkin Warbek, fourth novel, published

• 1835: Mary contributes sections in Cabinet Cyclopaedia

• 1836: William Godwin dies

• 1837: Falkner, Mary’s last novel, published

• 1839: Mary prepares and publishes four-volume edition of Percy’s Poetical Works

• 1851: Mary dies in London; buried between her parents

Archetypal Criticism: Tracing Prometheus• Greek mythology; Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound; Shelley’s Prometheus

Unbound

• Ovid’s Metamorphoses (she was reading in 1815): plasticator, “figure who creates and manipulates men into life, rather than ‘saves’ them” (xxviii)

• Prometheus account in Hesiod’s Theogony and Work and Days

• Punishment from Zeus for transgression

• Ovid’s Metamorphoses, shifts emphasis to celebrate act of creation

• Prometheus’ act of creation—viewed as transgression, requiring punitive measures, or to be celebrated

• Ideas about science and technology

• Tragic hero in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound

• Percy Shelley returns to story with Prometheus as allegorical figure for the Romantics, transgressing prescribed boundaries

• Mary Shelley’s revision of the story with Frankenstein: calls Enlightenment and Romantic ideas into question

• Galvanism—Luigi Galvani (1737-98), Italian physiologist and experimenter, studied “animal electricity” in nerves and muscles of animals, experimenting with frogs (267)

• Humphry Davy, electrochemistry and discoverer of potassium and sodium, experimental chemist (xxix); Mary was reading Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812) and A Discourse, Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry (1802), in 1816, progressive views

• Conversations in 1816 in Geneva between Percy, Dr. Polidori, and Byron on the “nature of the principle of life” (xl), experimental science in physiology

• 1803 Giovanni Aldini, nephew of Luigi Galvani, published a book on “galvanic experiments in public” on the body of a “freshly executed criminal” (xli)

New Historicism: Weird Science

Science Ed• “eager desire to learn,” “secrets of heaven and earth that I

desired to learn,” the “metaphysical,” the “physical secrets of the world” (39)

• Cornelius Agrippa: ancient as “chimerical” and “modern science” as “real and practical” (41), but Victor is unaware

• Paracelsus (Swiss alchemist and physician, empirical observation), and Albertus Magnus (Dominican theologian, magic to pursuit of knowledge, natural science), reference to Newton

• Untaught peasant versus most learned philosopher: “He might dissect, anatomise, and give names; but, not to speak of a final cause, causes in their secondary and tertiary grades were utterly unknown to him” (41)

New HistoricismCharacteristics of Romanticism

– sacredness of the individual– suspicion of social institutions– belief in expressed feeling as the sign of authenticity– nostalgia for simpler ways of being– faith in genius– valuing of originality and imagination– an ambivalent relation to science (492)

New Historicism• Godwin’s “rational philosophy”: new system based on “universal

benevolence” a just and virtuous society, emerging from the “exercise of reason and free will” developed in an enlightened society that is free from “superstitions of religion, the despotisms of government and the property fetishes attached to marriage and inheritance, for all these tended towards the establishment of selfishness, division and malevolence” (xxxii), contradicts 17th century Hobbesian view of “self-interested” man

• Godwin’s “Enlightenment insight into the dangers of putting the ‘abstracted’ pursuit of knowledge before collective responsibility and happiness” (xxxiii)

• “The Romantic idealism of Shelley and his ‘over-reaching’ heroes was, like all idealisms, based on a faith in man’s, or more correctly, men’s supposedly ‘divine’ or creative powers. It is Mary Shelley’s critique of where such highly abstracted creative powers can lead when put in a ‘realizing’ scientific context and then driven along by ‘lofty ambition’ and ‘high destiny’”(xxiv).

• 18th century French philosophes, Diderot and Condillac, following John Locke (xxxiv); tabula rasa theory

• 1818, 1823, and 1831

• Influence of Percy Shelley, his death in 1831

• Changes to original

• Revision of Elizabeth

• Account of education

On Print Culture

• Edmund Burke’s use of the metaphor in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), monster as armed insurrection (xliii)

• “During their systematic efforts to understand the Revolution and its outcome in Napoleonic despotism, Mary and Percy Shelley read not only the works of radicals like Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, but also conservatives and anti-Jacobins, among them Burke and Abbé Barruel” (xliii)

• Marxist interpretation—text born of “the fear of bourgeois civilization” (xliii)

• “Monster” metaphor popularized during the 1830s with calls for democratic reform in England (xliii), but also before as warning for dangers of reform during the French Revolution and the Terror

The Monster Metaphor and Marxist Theory

• Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): importance of education for women

• Caroline, Elizabeth, Justine, Safie

• Female creature

• “My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor; and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being, and become linked to the chain of existence and events, from which I am now excluded.” (150)

• Idea of the female creation— “thinking and reasoning animal” (170); destroys her (175)

Feminist Theory

The Case of the Modern Prometheus• “What kinds of action can be defended as reasonable? What are

we to make of the discrepancy between the ‘mad’ scientist’s reason, and the ‘Godwinian’ reason exercised by his ‘hideous progeny’?” (Hindle xii).

• Choose a side . . . Who or what is to blame for the destruction in the novel?

• Victor Frankenstein

• The creature

• Society

• Science

• Robert Walton

• Mrs. Saville, Margaret

• Victor’s mother Caroline

• Beaufort

• Alphonse Frankenstein

• Elizabeth Lavenza

• Father, a Milanese nobleman, German mother died during childbirth (36-7)

• Henry Clerval

• Justine Moritz

• William

• Ernest

Casting

• Krempe (47)• Waldman (49)

• De Lacey• Agatha• Felix• Safie

Casting

• “Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base?” (122).

• The Comte de Volney’s Ruins of Empires: philosophy of history

• Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (100 AD)• Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)• Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)• “Romantic cyclopedia universalis” (271) (130)

• “Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?” (131)

The story within the story: Evolution

• “I observed, with pleasure, that he did not go to the forest that day, but spent it in repairing the cottage and cultivating the garden” (114).

• “I had admired the perfect forms of my cottagers—their grace, beauty, and delicate complexions: but how I was terrified, when I viewed myself in a transparent pool! At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification. Alas! I did not yet entirely know the fatal effects of this miserable deformity” (117).

• De Lacey’s and Safie’s stories (125)

• Persecution of Safie’s Turkish merchant father because of “his religion and wealth rather than the crime alleged against him” (125) in Paris

• Perpetual exile for the De Lacey family due to involvement in plot—exile to Germany (128)

• Justice system—inhumanity (Justine, Safie’s father, De Laceys)

Evolution of the Creature

• Elizabeth’s death (199)

• Retells story to magistrate (202), “Chinese box structure”

• Rewrites the story (213)

• “When younger. . . I believed myself destined for some great enterprise. . . From my infancy I was imbued with high hopes and a lofty ambition; but how am I sunk” (214)

• “Seek happiness in tranquility, and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries” (220)

Didacticism

• Description of creature (221)

• “Evil thenceforth became my good” (222): Milton

• “I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filed with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness” (223).

• “I shall collect my funeral pile” (225).

Last Words

• http://www.nlm.nih.gov/frankenstein/

• (The Birth of Frankenstein: Boundary Crossings in 1818-Body Parts; The Celluloid Monster; Promise and Peril)

• http://www.pbs.org/teachers/thismonth/technology/index3.html

• Norma Rowen, “The Making of Frankenstein’s Monster: Post-Golem, Pre-Robot”:

• http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/rowen.html

Contextualizing Frankenstein

• Frankenstein (1931) (1:33)• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H3dFh6GA-A

• The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)• http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0026138/?ref_=fn_al_tt_4

• Young Frankenstein (1974)• http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072431/?ref_=nv_sr_1

• Frankenstein (1994)• http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109836/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2

• Frankenweenie (2012)• http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1142977/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

• I, Frankenstein (2014)• http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1418377/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

The Legacy of Frankenstein