The New Annotated Frankenstein

by Mary Shelley

  Davy’s text has two all-important implications for Shelley’s novel. First, Davy relies on the gendered metaphor of nature as female, the scientist as male. In effect, a male scientist penetrates, changes, and exploits nature, which is passive. Second, Davy introduces a distinction between two methods of scientific practice: the interventionist scientist, “active with his own instruments,” who in Davy’s view triumphantly “masters” nature, as opposed to the “passive” scholar who simply tries to understand and describe its workings. For Shelley, the interventionist scientist is clearly problematic. Davy’s disciple, Victor Frankenstein, is motivated not by a desire for knowledge so much as by a hubristic desire to be world-famous, even to be worshipped as a god. As he predicts, “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.”

  In contrast, Mary Shelley endorses the work of the passive scholar, most notably Erasmus Darwin, the father of the theory of evolution. In his extensive footnotes to his two-volume poem The Botanic Garden (1789–91), Erasmus Darwin had described in detail the evolution of animal from plant life, the movement up the evolutionary ladder from single-sex propagation to dual-sex propagation, and the role of sexual selection in evolutionary development—the very theory of the evolution of the species for which his grandson Charles Darwin would be given credit. From a Darwinian perspective, Victor’s experiment is anti-evolution. His attempt to create a “new” and more perfect “species” is flawed on two counts. First, Victor constructs his creature not only from human materials gathered from charnel houses and cemeteries but also from animal materials gathered from “slaughter-houses” (it is these animal parts that enable Victor to construct a creature who is eight feet tall, a giant who immediately terrifies all who see him, including his maker). Second, Victor engages in single-sex propagation, creating a male creature who can theoretically reproduce himself (by repeating Victor’s experiment as recorded in the lab notes the creature finds in Victor’s coat pocket). Not only does Victor thereby eliminate the need for females in the reproductive act: Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of his scientific project is the possibility that human society could survive without women, but he also moves down the evolutionary ladder, from dual-sex to single-sex reproduction.

  The scientific experiments that had the greatest immediate impact on Shelley’s novel were those of Luigi Galvani, the Italian biologist who tried to prove the materialist thesis that the life force (or “soul”) was inseparable from the body, as the vitalists and Christians had argued, and was identical with electricity. Remember that Victor animates his creature with a “spark” of life. Galvani spent his career applying different voltages of electricity to dead animals, most famously to frogs (his statue in front of the University of Bologna shows him holding an open book that supports the corpse of a frog). As the English saw it, the most famous galvanic experiment occurred in London in 1803, when Galvani’s nephew Giovanni Aldini brought the corpse of the recently hanged murderer Thomas Foster (or Forster) from Newgate Prison to his operating theater. There, Aldini applied ever stronger currents of electricity to the corpse, at which Thomas Foster first opened his eyes, then clenched his fist, and finally went into convulsions. As Aldini exulted in his written account of this experiment, “The action even of those muscles furthest distant from the points of contact with the [voltaic] arc was so much increased as almost to give an appearance of re-animation.” He concludes, “vitality might, perhaps, have been restored, if many circumstances had not rendered it impossible.”4

  Of course, in Shelley’s novel, Victor Frankenstein does not succeed in creating a superior species. He does not eliminate women and become God the Father. As I have argued, Mother Nature fights back against this scientific attempt to penetrate her recesses and steal her secrets.5 She does this first by disabling Victor with both mental and physical diseases. In bringing forth his male creature and then in the aborted act of bringing forth a female creature, Victor is tormented with anxiety attacks, depression, sleeplessness, and physical exhaustion, which so wrack his body that he dies of “natural” causes at the age of twenty-eight. Nature pursues Victor with the very fire and electricity he stole from her when he animated his creature with a “spark of being.” The lightning, thunder, and rain that rage around Victor on that “drear November night” of his first creation; on the Orkney islands during his aborted effort; again in the Alps, when he encounters his creature; and finally at the North Pole, when he dies—these are not just the expected paraphernalia of a gothic novel but also, more significantly, a manifestation of Mother Nature’s elemental powers: powers not unlike those of the Greek furies. They pursue Victor (like Orestes) to his hiding places. Each of the storms is exceptionally violent, not unlike those produced by the sulfate aerosols sent into the stratosphere by Tambora’s eruption and directly experienced by Mary Shelley in Geneva in 1816.

  Moreover, nature punishes Victor by preventing him from creating a normal child. Victor lacks the maternal instinct that would have enabled him to empathize with his creature, to ask even once whether his creature wants to be born, to give him an average size and familiar appearance. Remember that Victor used large animal parts because “minute” parts would “hinder my speed,” and that the features Victor has selected as “beautiful” include a “yellow skin” that “scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries,” “watery” dun white eyes, a “shriveled complexion,” and “straight black lips.” By failing to sympathize or identify with his creature, Victor denies to him the affection, the emotional and physical support, the nurturing, the “mothering,” that every newborn child requires. Thus his unnatural mode of sexual reproduction has produced an unnatural offspring, and all who see the creature reject him as monstrous. Finally, Mother Nature punishes Victor by preventing him from participating in natural reproduction and family relations, by ensuring that Victor’s unnatural creation destroys his wife, most of his family, and his best friend, Clerval. In this novel the penalty of violating nature is death.

  Implicit in Shelley’s novel is an alternative ideal, I have argued: her underlying conviction that civilization can only be advanced by human beings who value and cooperate with nature. Note that the only member of the Frankenstein family who survives is Ernest, who wants to be, not the lawyer/magistrate his father urges, but rather a farmer, one who must collaborate with rather than defy nature’s seasons and demands. The model for such “natural co-operation” put forth in the novel is that of the “domestic affections,” a mutually loving, egalitarian family, here represented by the De Laceys: the blind (and lovingly cared for) Father, Agatha (whose name means goodness), and Felix (happiness). They are then joined by Safie (Sophia/wisdom), the liberated woman who is Shelley’s homage to Mary Wollstonecraft and who seeks a companionate marriage with Felix. Here Mary Shelley implicitly endorses an ideal of community based on mutual dependence, cooperation, and self-sacrifice—what Carol Gilligan in In a Different Voice has called an ethic of care.6 But this loving family is ripped out of the novel, in flight from Victor’s creature.

  The novel thus suggests that where there is no ethic of care, where the nurturing love of a mother is absent (as it is from all the families in this novel, including that of the De Laceys), where a person places a higher value on a career and social fame than on the domestic affections (as Victor Frankenstein does, completely ignoring his best friend, his father, and even his fiancée as he conducts his scientific experiments), there monsters are made. As Victor finally realizes, in a statement that bores his alter ego, the ambitious and hubristic Walton, but nonetheless functions in the novel as Mary Shelley’s own credo:

  A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply
yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country; America would have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.

  Mary Shelley here suggests three things. First, political rulers who are incapable of loving all their subjects equally, of meeting the needs of all their citizens (as the leaders of the French Revolution had failed to do when they began to guillotine the aristocracy, Catholic clergy, and even the king and queen)—such leaders become monstrous tyrants. In Cruikshank’s famous print, it is Napoleon—rather than Victor Frankenstein—who is the “modern Prometheus.” Second, a society that fails to embrace and nurture members of other races, such as the inhabitants of Mexico and Peru—note that the creature is not “an European,” to borrow Walton’s language, but rather a giant who might recall one of Genghis Khan’s Mongolian warriors or the Golden Horde of the thirteenth century—such a society creates empires, colonies, and racial enemies rather than supporting a cosmopolitan vision of the brotherhood of man. Finally, in the same way, scientists who fail to take ethical responsibility for the predictable—or even unintended—consequences of their experiments and technological developments can destroy life as we know it.

  All of this begs for comment on some of the most troubling scientific developments of the past three-quarters of a century. We might think first of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after which several critics pointed to the uncanny similarities between Victor Frankenstein’s career and that of Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, where the bombs were designed and developed. Oppenheimer himself is said to have thought, after watching the test detonations in New Mexico that preceded the Japanese bombings, of a verse from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”7 Or we might think of bioterrorism—in particular of anthrax as a powder that can be sent through the mail, as U.S. Army biologist Dr. Bruce Edwards Ivins was accused of doing in 2001. Or we might think of the global climate change caused by carbon emissions produced at first by the Industrial Revolution and, more immediately, during our current Anthropocene era.

  Most relevant to the issues raised by Mary Shelley’s novel, however, are scientific developments in the fields of biology, microbiology, and genetic engineering. Using noninvasive prenatal genetic diagnosis, a newly pregnant woman’s blood can be scanned and the following information about her fetus gleaned: whether it is male or female; has a chromosomal deficiency or any one of over a hundred single-gene disorders, including Huntington’s disease, Down syndrome, cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs disease, or dwarfism; and other genetic traits, such as the presence of red hair. If the testing is done early enough, the mother can terminate her pregnancy with Mifeprex (the marketed combination of mifepristone [RU 486] and misoprostol). This kind of screening has been commercially developed and as of this writing is available and relatively cheap—usually less than $1,000. It will no doubt be of great interest to health insurers, especially to Medicaid, which will likely recommend it in the strongest possible terms to poor women, together with the suggestion that they terminate any diseased or disabled fetuses (thus sparing Medicaid the costs of caring for such an infant). From the perspective of the disabled community, as the late Paul Miller, an attorney with achondroplasia (dwarfism) who served in different capacities under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, argued, such a practice can be viewed as tantamount to “genetic genocide.”8

  Most relevant to the ethical issues raised by Frankenstein, perhaps, are the implications of the CRISPR-Cas9 technology for permanently altering the DNA of a human egg or sperm. CRISPR-Cas9 technology was developed in 2012 by Professor Jennifer Doudna and her assistants at the University of California, Berkeley, working with Emmanuelle Charpentier, of Umea University, in Sweden.9 In 2015, Professor Feng Zhang, of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, developed another CRISPR protein, Cpf1.10 CRISPR is the memorable acronym for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.” In layman’s terms, this technology allows biologists to target a specific gene or string of nucleotides in the DNA of a given cell; in combination with Cas9 or Cpf1, a tracer, they can then snip out that gene and stitch the DNA neatly back together, or cut out the gene and replace it with another. Several commentators have compared the process to the “cut and paste”11 function of a computer; it can be taught to and performed by a graduate student in an hour.12

  The tool seems to work in nearly every organism, from silkworms to monkeys, and also in every cell type, from kidneys to hearts to T-cells. CRISPR is being used to develop better biofuels and new enzymes for industrial markets, such as laundry detergents, water treatment, and paper milling; to improve foods such as yogurt, fish, and meat; and to modify the genes in pig embryos in order to create organs that can be used for human implants with less chance of rejection. The future implications of this technology are enormous. Potentially, CRISPR-Cas9 could be used on human eggs or sperm to eliminate some of the single-gene disorders mentioned above. Obviously, the appeal of this technology for the medical community is undeniable. A researcher with the Francis Crick Institute in London received permission to use CRISPR-Cas9 to alter human embryos.13 Although a genetically altered embryo will not now be implanted in a female womb, it is only a matter of time before that happens. And of course, any such altered gene in a human embryo is passed down to all descendants.14

  The parallels with Victor Frankenstein’s scientific project—to create a new and superior species—are obvious. Dr. Leroy Hood, the co-founder of the Institute for Systems Biology who developed the automated DNA sequencer, in 1998 pointed to human germline engineering (the altering of reproductive cells) as having the potential not only to eliminate hereditary diseases but also to produce individuals with superior intelligence, greater physical attractiveness, and improved emotional stability.15 In China, scientists attempted to use CRISPR-Cas9 to alter genes that cause a blood disorder, beta-thalassemia, in a human embryo. Significantly, in this case, their “editing technique ran amok and cut the DNA at many unintended sites,” according to the New York Times.16 At every level, this technology poses serious ethical issues. An engineered sterile or sex-limited (male) species, such as scientists have produced for the Zika-bearing mosquito, could jump to another species through interbreeding. Genetically modified crops could spread and devastate other ecosystems. And germline engineering in human embryos could produce new abnormalities.

  Confronting this possibility, the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Britain’s Royal Society in 2016 called for a “pause” in the race to edit the human genome. But their authority is not regulatory, only moral; and many physicians, including Dr. George Church of the Harvard Medical School, argued in opposition that “banning human germline editing could put a damper on the best medical research and instead drive the practice underground to black markets and uncontrolled medical tourism.”17 If we as a society are going to avoid Victor Frankenstein’s mistakes—his failure to mother his creation—we must take responsibility for both the intended and the unintended consequences of human germline engineering. First, we must establish federally mandated and enforced guidelines for such research. Second, we must fund extensive studies to determine the immediate and long-term impact of these new technologies on the environment. Most of all, we must engage in a well-informed, ongoing public debate concerning all the ethical issues raised by genetic engineering, lest our “designer babies” become monsters.

  ANNE K. MELLOR

  Distinguished Research Professor of English

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1. Joe Nocera, “Financial M
istakes, Doomed to Be Repeated,” New York Times, October 10, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/11/business/11nocera.html?_r=0.

  2. Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 9.

  3. I developed this line of questioning in Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York: Routledge, 1988), 41.

  4. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters, 105. The full text of Giovanni [John] Aldini’s An Account of the Late Improvements in Galvanism: With a Series of Curious and Interesting Experiments Performed before the Commissioners of the French National Institute, and Repeated Lately in the Anatomical Theatres of London (London: Cuthell and Martin/J. Murray, 1803) may be found at https://archive.org/stream/accountoflateimp00aldi/accountoflateimp00aldi _djvu.txt.

  5. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters, 72, 76, 92–93, 111–12, 235.

  6. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993 [repr. 2003, 38th printing,]), xix.

  7. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb13ynu3Iac.

  8. Paul Steven Miller, JD, and Rebecca Leah Levine, MPH, JD, “Avoiding Genetic Genocide: Understanding Good Intentions and Eugenics in the Complex Dialogue between the Medical and Disability Communities,” Genetics in Medicine 15 (August 2012), http://www.nature.com/gim/journal/v15/n2/full/gim2012102a.html.