by Mary Shelley
A well-publicized court-martial was held in 1792, resulting in the hanging of several crew members. Walton, no experienced captain, may well have been mindful of the risks of taking a hard line with his crew.
In “The Story of the Court-Martial of the Bounty Mutineers,” Douglas O. Linder, of the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law, conjectures that, had the “botanical curiosity” breadfruit not been discovered in Tahiti in 1769, providing an economic purpose for such expeditions as Bligh’s, and had not Bligh witnessed, in his early twenties, the bludgeoning death of Captain James Cook, by Hawaiians in the Sandwich Islands, the Bounty would never have sailed nor the mutiny have occurred (see http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/Bounty/bounty account.html).
36. In the 1831 edition, “insisted” replaces “desired.”
37. So much for Walton as a judge of men—see text accompanying note 20, Volume I, Letter II, above, for his judgment that his crew was possessed of “dauntless courage.”
38. The 17th in the Draft.
39. Corrected to “9th” in the 1831 edition.
40. The composition and dose would have depended on the surgeon’s preferences. The Edinburgh New Dispensary, the standard reference work of the time (revised by Andrew Duncan in 1791), recommended that hysteria and other nervous cases be treated variously with compounds of asafoetida (Ferula assa-foetida), camphor (Cinnamomum camphora), clary Sage (Salvia sclarea), feverfew (Tanacetum parthenium), galbanum (Ferula galbaniflua), black hellebore (Hyoscyamus niger), iron (martial flowers, called Ens veneris), lavender (Lavandula angustifolia), opium (Papaver somniferum), pennyroyal (Mentha pulegium), St. John’s wort (Hypericum perforatum), valerian (Valeriana officinalis), and wood soot (literally, the material produced when wood is burned). Regarding the last, the chemist Daniel Cox’s New Medical Compendium, for the Use of Families, etc. (London: Longmans, 1808), notes that “the more resinous the wood, the more the soot abounds with bitter oily matter. … Wood soot is directed in hysteric cases, and in different nervous disorders, as an antispasmodic and corroborant,” often in combination with asafoetida, mentioned above (63).
41. The 1831 edition replaces “my fellow-creatures” with the phrase “the beings of my own species.”
42. According to Robinson, “From this point until the end of the novel, [the text] is dominated more by” Percy Shelley’s “voice, for he fair-copied and embellished the last twelve-and-three-quarter pages of the Draft” (The Original Frankenstein, 252, n. 113).
43. Victor again changes his mind about the virtues of the pursuit of knowledge; having failed to convince Walton’s crew to continue the expedition, he now warns Walton against the very ambition which he exhorted the crew to embrace.
44. Arthur Belefant, in Frankenstein, the Man and the Monster, makes the tantalizing argument that the creature never existed and that he was only the product of Victor’s fevered imagination. Belefant suggests that Victor was in fact terrified of committing incest by means of a marriage to Elizabeth, his spiritual sister, forced on him by his mother on her deathbed. In order to forestall the marriage, he first killed William, then Clerval (who may have been involved in William’s death or may have grown suspicious of Victor), and finally, in desperation, Elizabeth. Only Victor, up to this point, has seen the creature; the other “witnesses” are all unverifiable, being part of Victor’s tale. As noted above in various places, many of the incidents described by Victor seem impossible, either physically (leaping about the glacier) or by reason of the time sequencing (the killing of Clerval), but are easily explained if the creature did not exist. That Walton sees the creature, Belefant proposes, was an addition made by Percy Shelley, who did not fully understand the secret tale of incest and murder that Mary Shelley had composed. A review of the Draft makes clear, however, that while Percy Shelley did make many revisions in the course of preparation of the fair copy, these were almost exclusively turns of phrase, and it is plain that the confrontation between Walton and the creature was Mary Shelley’s intended conclusion.
An even more radical interpretation is suggested by David Ketterer, in his thoughtful Frankenstein’s Creation: Neither the creature nor Frankenstein existed; both, and the entire remaining cast of the tale, are figments of Walton’s imagination, an “anxiety” dream arising out of his uncertainties about his expedition. Ketterer admits the similarity of the suggestion to that in The Dream of Prospero (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), by David Gwilym James, who proposed that all of the story of The Tempest is meant by Shakespeare to be seen as a dream experienced by Prospero in his library in Milan, one that serves to warn him about his responsibilities as a ruler.
45. The scene echoes not only the earlier image of Caroline Beaufort kneeling at the side of her dead father (immortalized by Alphonse Frankenstein in a painting—see note 33, Volume I, Chapter VI, above), but also the scene of Elizabeth’s death, with her hair half-covering her face (see note 7, Volume III, Chapter VI, above). William Veeder, in Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, chapter 7, “Value and Viability,” sees the detail of the creature’s hair hanging down as confirming the existence of the female portion of the creature’s psyche (in Veeder’s view, all psychologically balanced individuals have both male and female psychic components). He concludes, however, that Mary Shelley did not mean to suggest that the creature could hope to integrate the male and female portions of its psyche and achieve the desired state of androgyny without extensive social intercourse—that is, the creature would never become psychologically healthy in isolation. Veeder also notes that, as in both the bridal chamber scene and the scene of Frankenstein’s first meeting with the creature (see note 9, Volume I, Chapter IV, above), the creature extends his hand, identifying him with Elizabeth and symbolizing that there is an opportunity for Victor and the creature to resolve their relationship.
46. “Endeavoured to recollect”? Only moments before, Victor expressed his “dying wish” (as Walton presently characterizes it) that Walton destroy the creature.
47. In French, no doubt—as we have seen, there is no textual evidence to suggest that the creature acquired any other language, and even if he learned to “get by” in German or other tongues during his rapid travels, he could not speak any other language as fluently as is displayed here. Accordingly, we can now answer the question asked earlier about Walton’s linguistic skills: He spoke and understood French, although he does not point that out here, and he kindly, and without mentioning it, translates the creature’s story into English for the benefit of his sister. We must therefore take the phraseology of the creature’s remarks as Walton’s interpretations, not actual transcriptions.
48. The phrase “may not” is replaced with “cannot” in the 1831 edition.
49. The odd word “looks” is changed to “eyes” in the 1831 edition.
50. The word “I” is italicized in the Draft.
51. The word “more” does not appear in the 1831 edition.
52. The creature evidently knows that Frankenstein has related his history to Walton—otherwise, he would explain the identity of “Clerval.” How does the creature know this?
53. See John Milton’s statement ascribed to Satan in Paradise Lost (which, it will be recalled, the creature had read):
So farewel Hope, and with Hope farewel Fear,
Farewel Remorse: all Good to me is lost;
Evil be thou my Good …
(Book 4, lines 108–10)
54. The phrase “bringing forth” is revised to “unfolding” in the 1831 edition, and in the succeeding sentence, “vice” becomes “crime.” In the following sentence, “crime” is replaced with “guilt.”
55. The phrase is “run over” in the 1831 edition, and “deeds” become “sins.” In place of “I am he,” the phrase is “I am the same creature[.]”
56. “Contumely” means insolent or insulting language or treatment.
57. The phrase “these hands” replaces “they” in the 1831 edition, and “it” is revised to �
�that imagination.”
58. And where would the creature obtain the wood for such a “funeral pile”? In the Quarterly Review (January 1818), John Croker slyly remarks that the pyre will be “(of ice, we conjecture).” Wolfson and Levao, in The Annotated Frankenstein, suggest that it will consist of the remains of Frankenstein’s and the creature’s sledges as well as the wreckage of previous explorers’ ships, trapped in the ice.
59. The birds are “warbling” rather than “chirping” in the 1831 edition.
60. The 1831 edition revises the balance of the sentence to read as follows: “thou wouldst not desire against me a vengeance greater than that which I feel.”
61. The word is “will,” not “may,” in the 1831 edition.
62. Just as the creature did, points out William Veeder, in Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, after killing Elizabeth.
63. And so Walton reveals himself to be craven: Having only a few days before solemnly promised Victor, a man whom he virtually worshipped, that he would carry out Victor’s vengeance, he now allows the creature to depart unchecked and unharmed.
Mary Shelley’s original version of this paragraph in the Draft read: “He sprung from the cabin window as he said this on to an ice raft that lay close to the vessel & pushing himself off he was carried away by the waves and I soon lost sight of him in the darkness & distance.” Thus she originally intended that the fate of the creature be even more uncertain and his departure a choice made by him, rather than an outcome effected by the passive action of the waves.
AFTERWORD
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Genetic Engineering
BY ANNE K. MELLOR
AS LESLIE KLINGER’S superbly annotated edition of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus has reminded us, a myth was born in Geneva on the night of June 16, 1816, the only entirely human-created, datable myth describing the origin of mankind. (All other creation myths depend either on the direct agency of God or gods or, as in the case of the golem, divine participation though a sacred sign.) On that night, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin gave birth to one of the enduring myths of modern civilization, the narrative of the scientist who single-handedly creates a new species, a humanoid form that need not die.
This narrative has become the myth of modern science, the master narrative for the ways in which man’s attempts to control and improve the workings of nature can have unintended and even monstrous consequences. As Shelley’s creature says to Victor Frankenstein, “You are my creator, but I am your master: obey!” This myth has been invoked since World War II and even before to describe almost every scientific, social, and political development with potentially disastrous outcomes, from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima; to the “Frankenfish” or “Frankenfoods” of genetically modified salmon and wheat; to the economic crisis of 2008, which the New York Times’s Joe Nocera called the result, in part, of “Frankenstein-like financial engineering.”1
Why was this myth born on this night? As scholar Gillen D’Arcy Wood has reminded us, the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Tamboro in April 1815 caused the “Year without a Summer”2 and forced the Shelley-Byron entourage to remain indoors during the freezing weather; they then decided to compete in a ghost story contest that inspired at least three of the participants to write, although only John Polidori and Mary Shelley actually produced stories worthy of the name. (Polidori’s The Vampyre, incorporating Byron’s “A Fragment,” featuring vampire Augustus Darvell, was published under Byron’s name after 1819, and may have served as an inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.)
Here I want to focus on just why Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin had her particular daydream or “waking dream” of “the pale student of unhallowed arts” bringing to life “the thing he had put together.” In a terror that Mary shared, he then fled from “his odious handy-work,” only to be awakened by “the horrid thing … looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.” This reverie, so vivid that Mary Shelley recalled it in detail fifteen years later when preparing a new introduction for the revised 1831 edition of Frankenstein, grew directly out of her most traumatic biographical experiences. A motherless child—her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died of puerperal fever as a consequence of giving birth to this daughter—Mary Godwin had undergone a childhood of parental abandonment and abuse. Her father, William Godwin, assigned child-rearing responsibilities to his second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, who favored her own children and especially resented Mary. To end the household friction, Godwin shipped the fourteen-year-old Mary off to Dundee, Scotland, to stay with strangers, the William Baxter family, for two years.
Mary returned to London in 1814, at the age of sixteen, and fell in love with the married Percy Shelley, her adored father’s disciple. A few weeks shy of seventeen, she left her father’s home to travel with Shelley. Seven months later, she gave birth prematurely to a baby girl, who lived only two weeks. As Mary recorded in her journal on March 19, 1815, “Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby.” Immediately pregnant again, Mary gave birth on January 24, 1816, to a son, whom she named William. Five months later, she had the waking dream that engendered her novel, a novel that perhaps for the first time in literature embodies the anxieties of a very young, pregnant woman, and may hint at the questions the author might obsessively have asked herself: Will I be able to love my child, even if the child is deformed? Will I be able to mother a child? What if my child dies?—a question sharpened by the infant mortality rate in Europe in Mary’s day: as high as 20 percent. Could I ever want my child to die? Could I kill my own child? Could my child kill me, as I killed my mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, in childbirth?3 Victor Frankenstein’s horrified rejection of his newborn child, his desire to kill it, here expresses the postnatal depression, even intense hostility, that some new mothers feel—or are afraid of feeling. This postnatal hostility erupts into the novel at the moment when Mary Shelley represents the creature’s murder of little William Frankenstein, a boy who has the same blond hair and “lively blue eyes, dimpled cheeks, and endearing manners” of Mary’s own son, William Shelley—a boy who has the same propensity to take little “wives”: Louisa Biron being William Frankenstein’s favorite playmate, while Allegra Byron was William Shelley’s choice. The creature’s accidental smothering of the child he wished to adopt expresses Mary Shelley’s horrified recognition that she is capable of imagining herself as the murderer of her own child—capable of infanticide. As Shelley here realizes, a battered and abused child is fully capable of becoming a battering, abusive parent.
At the same time, this waking dream articulates Mary Godwin’s intense anxieties of authorship. The daughter of two famous writers, the mistress of an aspiring poet and novelist, competing in a ghost story contest with the most famous living writer of the day, Lord Byron, Mary felt understandably inadequate. As she recalled fifteen years later, “Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.” In fact, as we know from Polidori’s journal, she began writing her story on June 17, 1816, the morning after the challenge was issued. She subsequently accepted several editorial revisions, of style and of content, from her mentor Percy Shelley, revisions that I have described in detail in Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters, and that in my view did not improve the novel.
Equally important, as Leslie Klinger’s annotations amply document, Frankenstein is born out of the specific historical, political, and scientific milieu in which the Shelley-Byron entourage moved. In my book on Mary Shelley’s fiction, I describe at length the ways in which the novel responds to the originating ideology and devastating consequences of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s military campaigns; to the specific utopian dreams of human perfectibility and the marriage of opposites promoted by Godwin and the Romantic poets Mary Shelley knew intimately; and to the negative impact on women of the patriarchal culture in which the auth
or lived, and the sexual division of labor so acutely analyzed by her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. My intention here is to look at the ways in which Victor Frankenstein’s scientific project—to create a “new species” that would be able to “renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption”—resonates with recent advances in genetic engineering.
Mary Shelley grounded Frankenstein’s scientific experiments on the cutting-edge science of her day. Although she had no personal experience of “doing science”—note that Victor’s laboratory consists of a small attic room lit by a single candle—she had read and discussed with Byron and Percy Shelley the theories and experiments of the leading biologists and chemists of the late eighteenth century, among them Humphry Davy, Erasmus Darwin, and Luigi Galvani. When Victor goes to the University of Ingolstadt (a hotbed of revolutionary Jacobin activity), he attends the lectures on chemical physiology of Professor Waldman, whose arguments are derived directly from Davy’s A Discourse, Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry (1802). There Davy insists that chemistry has bestowed upon the chemist “powers which may be almost called creative; which have enabled him to modify and change the beings surrounding him, and by his experiments to interrogate nature with power, not simply as a scholar, passive and seeking only to understand her operations, but rather as a master, active with his own instruments” (italics added). Or, as Waldman puts it in the novel, “The modern masters [of this science] … penetrate into the recesses of nature, and shew how she works in her hiding places.”