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Frankenstein

Or the Modern Prometheus

By Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Familial, Mythological, and Historical Context

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MARY SHELLEY: �Her Inspiration and Family

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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851)

Mary Shelley came from a rich literary heritage. She was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, a writer and early feminist thinker, and William Godwin, a political theorist, novelist, and publisher. He introduced her to eminent intellectuals and encouraged her youthful efforts as a writer.
However, “…her mother died soon after giving birth to her, a tragedy that made her a monster in her father’s eyes…” –Susan J. Wolfson
At fifteen, Mary met the poet Percy Shelley, who was married at the time. Two years later, she ran off with him to France. They were married in December 1816, two weeks after Percy Shelley's first wife drowned.

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A Dark and Stormy Night

One evening, Byron challenged his guests to each write one themselves. Mary's story, inspired by a dream, became Frankenstein.

“When I placed my head upon my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. . . . I saw--with shut eyes, but acute mental vision--I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous Creator of the world.”�Mary Shelley, from her introduction to the third edition of Frankenstein

In the summer of 1816, nineteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her lover, the poet Percy Shelley (whom she married later that year), visited the poet Lord Byron at his villa beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Stormy weather frequently forced them indoors, where they and Byron's other guests sometimes read from a volume of ghost stories.

The Villa Diodati

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Mary Wollstonecraft (mother)

Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

“It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows, into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion, that they were created rather to feel than reason, and that all the power they obtain, must be obtained by their charms and weakness.”
“Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.”

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William Godwin (father)

The father of philosophical anarchism
“He that loves reading has everything within his reach”
“Learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius... he who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much.”
“Study with desire is real activity; without desire it is but the semblance and mockery of activity.”
“The proper method for hastening the decay of error is by teaching every man to think for himself.”
“Government will not fail to employ education, to strengthen its hands, and perpetuate its institutions.”

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Percy Bysshe Shelley – eminent poet

At university, Shelley began reading books by radical political writers such as Thomas Paine and William Godwin
Shelley eloped to Scotland with Harriet Westbrook, a sixteen year old daughter of a coffee-house keeper.
But in 1814 Shelley fell in love and eloped with Mary.
In 1817 wrote the pamphlet A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote Throughout the United Kingdom. In the pamphlet Shelley suggested a national referendum on electoral reform and improvements in working class education.
“The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.”
“The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.”
“Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”

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Mythological Allusions:�Prometheus – A Creation Story

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Prometheus

Prometheus, a titan in Greek mythology, molded man from water and clay.
Since these elements would not suffice, Athena, here among the clouds, animated the molded man by giving him a soul.

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Prometheus

Prometheus planted blind hope in the hearts of men, and stole fire from the gods, to give it to men.

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Prometheus Bound�(Rubens)

For this audacious deed, Prometheus paid a high price. Zeus ordered Hephaestus to nail Prometheus to Mount Caucasus. Prometheus remained bound for thirty-thousand years. And every day an eagle swooped on him and devoured the lobes of his liver, which grew by night as much as the eagle had devoured during the day.

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Prometheus Unbound

After millennia of torture, Heracles killed the eagle and freed Prometheus.
However, Zeus was also angered at the humans, and to punish them he gave them Pandora - the first woman. Prometheus tried to save the humans, but they had become so depraved that Zeus sent a flood to drown them all.
Only Prometheus good son Deuchalion survived since Prometheus told him to make an ark.

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Historical Context:�Scientific speculation and innovation

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Boundary Crossings in 1818

In her novel, Mary Shelley is silent on just how Victor Frankenstein breathes life into his creation, saying only that success crowned "days and nights of incredible labor and fatigue;" Frankenstein offers no monster-making recipes.

But Shelley's story did not arise from the void. Scientists and physicians of her time, tantalized by the elusive boundary between life and death, probed it through experiments with lower organisms, human anatomical studies, attempts to resuscitate drowning victims, and experiments using electricity to restore life to the recently dead.

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Restored to Life?

In March 1815, Mary Shelley dreamed of her dead infant daughter held before a fire, rubbed vigorously, and restored to life. At the time, scientists would not have wholly dismissed such a possibility. Could the dead be brought back to life? Could life arise spontaneously from inorganic matter? Physicians of the day treated such questions seriously as the treatises they wrote, the methods they employed, and the contrivances they built all testify.
James Blundell, a London physician troubled by the many women who died after childbirth from massive bleeding, introduced blood transfusion between humans, using the simple apparatus shown here. Reproduction of an illustration from The Lancet, 1828-1829.

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Galvanism

During the 1790s, Italian physician Luigi Galvani demonstrated what we now understand to be the electrical basis of nerve impulses when he made frog muscles twitch by jolting them with a spark from an electrostatic machine. When Frankenstein was published, however, the word galvanism implied the release, through electricity, of mysterious life forces. "Perhaps," Mary Shelley recalled of her talks with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, "a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things."

Galvani's Experiments �National Library of Medicine Collection Illustration of Italian physician Luigi Galvani's experiments, in which he applied electricity to frogs legs; from his book De Viribus Electricitatis in Motu Musculari (1792). (above)

A Galvanized Corpse �Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division�Electricity's seeming ability to stir the dead to life gave the word galvanize its own special flavoring, as this 1836 political cartoon of a "galvanized" corpse suggests.

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Body Parts

To make his creature, Victor Frankenstein "dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave" and frequented dissecting rooms and slaughterhouses. In Mary Shelley's day, as in our own, the healthy human form delighted and intrigued artists, physicians, and anatomists. But corpses, decaying tissue, and body parts stirred almost universal disgust. Alive or dead, whole or in pieces, human bodies arouse strong emotion--and account for part of Frankenstein's enduring hold on us.

As this early book illustration suggests, nature's own "monsters"--sharp deviations from normal human development--fascinated anatomists of Mary Shelley's day and before.

De Monstro Nato Lutetiae Anno Domini, 1605 �National Library of Medicine Collection