Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Penetrating the Secrets of Nature

Mary Shelley  In 1818, Shelley's story was published as Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. This story — both in the original novel and shaped into new forms, such as plays, films, and comics — has captivated people ever since, exposing hidden, sometimes barely conscious fears of science and technology. As scientists have gained new powers, the Frankenstein story remains, like a warning beacon, throwing its harsh, unsettling beam upon human efforts to penetrate the secrets of nature. Mary Shelly ( )Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus London, Courtesy Singer-Mendenhall Collection, Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.

Biography  Hollywood did not give birth to Frankenstein; Mary Shelley did. More than a century before actor Boris Karloff, helped by make-up artists, made the monster in his image, came Shelley and her creation.  The mother of Frankenstein came from the rarefied reaches of the British artistic and intellectual elite. While Mary Shelley drew her inspiration from a dream, she drew her story's premises about the nature of life from the work of some of Europe's premier scientists and thinkers. The sophisticated creature that billowed up from her imagination read Plutarch and Goethe, spoke eloquently, and suffered much.

A Dark and Stormy Night  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. One evening, Byron challenged his guests to each write one themselves. Mary's story, inspired by a dream, became Frankenstein. The Villa Diodati. Courtesy of The Granger Collection, New York.

A Writers Life  Mary Shelley came from a rich literary heritage. She was the daughter of William Godwin, a political theorist, novelist, and publisher who introduced her to eminent intellectuals and encouraged her youthful efforts as a writer; and of Mary Wollstonecraft, a writer and early feminist thinker, who died shortly after her daughter's birth.  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. By then Mary had already borne him two children. Percy Shelley. Courtesy of The Granger Collection, New York Mary Wollstonecraft.

Boundry Crossings 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. When Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet, drowned in London in 1816, rescuers took her lifeless body to a receiving station of the London Society. There, smelling salts, vigorous shaking, electricity, and artificial respiration — as with the resuscitation bellows shown here — had been used since the 1760s to restore drowning victims to life. Harriet, however, did not survive. A Physical Dissertation on Drowning Rowland Jackson, London, Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine Collection

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, Blundell's Gravitator. Reproduction of an illustration from The Lancet, II (June 13, 1828): 321. Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine Collection.

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 Frankensteinwas 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." 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). 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.

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 ofFrankenstein'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 Jean Riolan, Paris, Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine Collection

Preface  Mary Shelley subtitled her novel "The Modern Prometheus." According to the Greeks, Prometheus stole fire from the gods. As punishment, he was chained to a rock, where an eagle each day plucked at his liver. Haughty Prometheus sought fire for human betterment — to make tools and warm hearts. Similarly, Mary Shelley's arrogant scientist, Victor Frankenstein, claimed "benevolent intentions, and thirsted for the moment when I should put them in practice." Frankenstein endures not only because of its infamous horrors but for the richness of the ideas it asks us to confront — human accountability, social alienation, and the nature of life itself. These passages illuminate some of them. Prometheus Bound, Peter Paul Rubens ( ). Photographic reproduction of an oil painting. Courtesy of The Granger Collection, New York.

Paradise Lost  Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay To mould me man? Did I solicit thee From darkness to promote me?  Lines from John Milton's Paradise Lost From the title page of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheuse, 1818  In Frankenstein, the intelligent and sensitive monster created by Victor Frankenstein reads a copy of Milton'sParadise Lost, which profoundly stirs his emotions. The monster compares his situation to that of Adam. Unlike the first man who had "come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature," Frankenstein's creature is hideously formed. Abandoned by Victor Frankenstein, the monster finds himself "wretched, helpless, and alone." The Expulsion from Eden, 17th century. Artist unknown. Photographic reproduction of a line engraving. Courtesy of The Granger Collection, New York.