Pride and Prometheus

by John Kessel

  My plan yet lacked two vital elements. The first I hoped to find at the Oxford colleges. I carried with me letters of introduction from my mentors Professors Waldman and Krempe. Although I spent some days in reading in the Radcliffe Camera’s imposing science library, my chief aim was to speak with Cathcart Glover, a leading anatomist and physiologist.

  During our first week in Oxford I went out of my way to join Henry in his tours of the area. The weather had turned and we were favored with days of blossoming spring. Oxford’s streets and ancient spires conveyed dignity and repose. The beauty of the surrounding countryside and the Isis River drew me out of myself. Henry was fascinated by how the English Revolution in its regicide had anticipated the French Revolution by a hundred and fifty years. As Swiss, we had not suffered such political upheavals. He wondered if, should Bonaparte finally be defeated after his recent escape from Elba, the history of France would follow that of England. Henry had many theories, and spoke of writing a book about them. For an hour or two each day, in his presence, I was able to put aside the knowledge of my promise and enjoy the moment, but every night I feared to find the Creature standing in the street outside our inn.

  Henry spent his evenings with new friends he had made at the colleges, at some club or tavern or coffee shop, talking politics and literature. The presence of the university and its many students recalled my days at Ingolstadt, not so long past by the calendar, but an eon ago by the alteration of my heart. Henry was interested in the English radicals and asked these rowdy, privileged young scholars many questions about whether they had any lasting influence on the British government and society. I avoided these revels as much as possible.

  Knowing now that the Creature was watching me, I worried when Henry was out without me, at the same time I was relieved by his absence, and the absence of his increasing questions about my research. I had resigned myself to the fact that I required the Creature to follow me, if only because he needed to see me fulfill my promise, take the female I created, and depart forever from my life. I told myself that as long as I progressed in this task, Henry would be safe. He would not dare harm Henry for fear of ending my commitment to creating his mate.

  My letters secured me an introduction to Senior Fellow Glover, and he asked me to join him at his rooms for supper. At seven I arrived at Brasenose College, where Glover had his apartments. The porter ushered me to his rooms.

  The professor greeted me heartily. He was a stout man of middle years, his hair thinning, his face open and good-natured, the very picture of the happy academic bachelor. The room was warmly lit by several oil lamps, and a small fire burned in the grate, but the latticed window was open to the cool night air. Over a meal of roast mutton and delicately prepared vegetables punctuated by full glasses of fine red wine—Professor Glover boasted his rights to the college’s extensive cellars—I assumed a conviviality that I did not feel and answered his questions about Waldman, Krempe, and Ingolstadt.

  Almost from the moment I had made my promise to the Creature, the question had occurred to me that, should the female I created not turn from him in disgust and terror, what might come of their union? The natural outcome of his coupling with a female would be offspring. I had fashioned the Creature to be exceptional in every way: he was stronger than a man, better able to endure pain, heat, and cold, and, as witnessed by his learning language and reading, and his eloquence in argument, brilliantly intelligent. Notwithstanding his promise that he and his mate would hie off to some distant corner of the world, a race of such beings would become a threat to all humanity—unless I could prevent such an outcome.

  Glover had spent his career studying female human anatomy. I begged him to elaborate on his observations about the process of generation. He settled back over an after-dinner glass of malmsey, well satisfied to expound.

  “The cornerstone of my understanding is William Harvey’s assertion: ex ovo omnia. Everything originates in the egg! Certainly I honor van Leeuwenhoek for his discovery of the spermatozoon. It was a great achievement, the discovery of the spermatozoon. I believe in the spermatozoon—nonetheless, all mammalian creatures grow from an undifferentiated egg.”

  “Yes. I am interested—”

  “Epigenesis, not preformation! A tiny man inside each spermatozoon—absurd!”

  “I agree with you completely.”

  “I honor all our scientific forebears, mind you,” Glover said, holding up an index finger. “Aristotle, Galen, de Graaf, Malpighi, the great Harvey—we are all Harvey’s children, Mr. Frankenstein—but that does not mean we must tolerate, or worse still, perpetuate, their mistakes. We do not credit spontaneous generation, for example.”

  “But Darwin’s experiment with vermicelli suggests that life may arise spontaneously.”

  “Nonsense. Ex ovo omnia! Even worms and maggots must originate in a living egg. There is no higher life without sex. And a good thing it is, eh?”

  “Yes. No doubt sex is a good thing.”

  “Indeed! I should think a young man would agree with that. You have read Harvey’s Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium, have you not? Harvey did not believe in spontaneous generation.”

  I found it difficult to tolerate his dogmatism in an area where, by experience, I had proven him wrong. “A book written more than one hundred fifty years ago.”

  “Yes, but borne out by a century’s worth of study.”

  “Life must at some point have originated from dead matter. Dr. Darwin—”

  “Darwin? Darwin is moonshine. There is no such thing as spontaneous generation, Monsieur Frankenstein. Thirty years ago Spallanzani disproved Buffon and Needham. There are no ‘vital atoms’ responsible for life. Such notions are magic, not science.”

  I considered telling him that I was being stalked by a creature that proved that lifeless matter could be made to live. To kill. To discourse on justice. Even, perhaps, to have a soul. But this wrangling was not to my purpose. “I wonder if we might return to the matter of the ovum.”

  “Yes?”

  “You have studied the causes of barrenness,” I said. “The question I put to you is, could you, by manipulation of the female generative system, cause a woman to be barren?”

  Glover swirled the sweet wine in his glass. “The cause or causes of barrenness have not been established. I speculate it is a matter of the ovaries not functioning. When and how they produce an egg, and precisely where in the body that egg meets the semen, and how the semen works on it, and how the undifferentiated egg grows to human form and why some are born male and others female—all these things are still not completely understood. Spallanzani—sadly, a preformationist, but still a natural philosopher of insight—demonstrated that filtered semen becomes less effective as filtration becomes more complete. So the active agent is the spermatozoon, not the seminal fluid. That suggests if one could prevent the sperm from reaching the egg, one would prevent conception. This is the principle, though none knew it, behind methods used for hundreds of years—pigs bladders, pessaries, and the like—with varying degrees of success.”

  “Might there be way to prevent conception by surgical means?”

  “One might remove a woman’s ovaries. As a possible cure for hysteria I have considered but never attempted this: given modern scruples, finding a subject for such an experiment is difficult. A woman without ovaries would doubtless not bear children. But we could hardly call her a woman then, could we? And such a surgery would likely be fatal.”

  “Do you know the specific place of generation within the woman’s anatomy?”

  “Well, this is still a matter of speculation.” He pushed himself out of his chair, opened a cabinet, and drew from it a rolled-up chart. He moved some books from a worktable, unrolled it, and set a lamp down on one corner. I recognized the drawing as a diagram of the womb and associated organs, with Latin designations. Glover placed his thick finger on the center of the diagram. “I believe the semen meets the egg here, in the uterus.”

  “But the eggs
must originate in the ovaries,” I said.

  “Yes. The egg I believe moves to the womb by way of one of these channels. By what prompting, and at what time of the female monthly cycle—these and many other details of the process are obscure.”

  This was a more detailed diagram than any I had seen. “Did you create this yourself?”

  “It is the work of thirty years.”

  “Remarkable,” I said. “If one were somehow to block these tubes through surgery, would not the egg be bottled in the ovaries and never move to the womb? One might thus prevent a woman from ever conceiving a child.”

  “In theory. It’s even possible this is something that happens in nature. But if so, the eggs, being confined to the ovaries with no escape, may rot and cause disease. The menstrual blood, with no possibility of discharge, might back up and clot the heart. And such surgery, though not so extreme as removing the ovaries, would be hazardous. One would be more likely to kill your patient. If you succeeded, your achievement would only be to make a woman barren. Such might be an advantage to a lady of the evening, I grant, but surely not to any wife or daughter.”

  “Surely.”

  Glover let go of the edge of his chart, and it rolled closed. “But why pursue this? What purpose would it serve?”

  I had prepared a response to this question. “You are familiar with Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population?”

  “Yes, of course. So you see this surgical treatment as a solution to the problem of an insupportable population?”

  “Certainly for the poor. We might do away with almshouses and prisons if we could control the numbers of the unfit and criminal.”

  Glover returned to his armchair. “A rather utopian—if you will pardon my pun—conception.” He winked.

  “That may be. Still, the knowledge you have gathered would be invaluable to such a project. Would it be possible for me to copy your diagram? Do you have notes on the dissections? In anything I publish, I will, of course, give you full credit for these discoveries.”

  Glover smiled. “Ah, the ambitions of youth.”

  “What mysteries might be revealed if only we understood that first moment of life?” Though I said this only to distract him, it was a sentiment that two years ago had ruled my existence. Before my discovery of the secret of life, it had seemed the most desirable goal a man might seek: to know, and to control, the border between life and death. “To discover nature in her secret places, and expose her to the light,” I said.

  “Nature has concealed her mysteries for centuries,” Glover said. “Yet we have learned more in the last one hundred years than men have discovered in the previous two thousand.” He poured me another glass of Madeira. “As Newton said, if we see farther today, it is only because we stand on the shoulders of giants.”

  Glover agreed to let me have his dissection notes, drawings, and diagrams. I managed to continue in conversation with him for another hour while he plied me with ever rarer varieties of whiskey and snuff, more to give the appearance of engagement than out of any genuine wish to know him better. I had gained what I needed from him, enough at least to contemplate the distasteful task ahead of me.

  As I left, my head spinning, three drunken young men staggered through the Brasenose gates, and outside, in the grand central square, a mob of their fellows passing by the Radcliffe Camera filled the night air with their revelry. I thought of Miss Bennet and her belief in the restorative effects of social interaction. Human contact. Companionship. Rather than as an example of acquiring knowledge through false pretenses, I might recast my visit with Cathcart Glover as an exercise in following her advice—but so far I had not felt its salutary effects. It seemed to me that as Miss Bennet had spoken, she was trying to convince herself as much as me. An empty dance card presented as good a spur to ineffectual rationalization as a need to create a sterile monster. Paradoxically, despite my perpetual dejection and Miss Bennet’s questionable advice, during the moments I had spoken with her, I had forgotten the thing that followed me, and the burden on my heart had lifted.

  What had she thought of the consolations of society when I did not return to dance with her as I had promised?

  By the time I reached our inn, all my brooding had settled down on me again. The Creature was moved by the desire for physical affections that, thanks to Cathcart Glover, I would prevent from producing offspring. I would keep the evil that I created from spreading to destroy the human race. From a utilitarian perspective, my dissembling tonight was a moral act.

  How would the monster react when he realized that his female would bear him no children? The thought that the wretched thing might aspire to fatherhood seemed both an absurdity and an abomination. More probably, lust was his sole motivation, which raised another thought: Once I gave him his bride, how would he treat her? Might he take out the abuse he had suffered on the one being who offered the affections he would never receive from a human being?

  Even if so, such an evil could not rival the evil he might yet wreak upon everyone that I loved. I had better not waste my sympathies on a second, yet uncreated, monstrous thing, likely to be as soulless as the first.

  I climbed up the stairs to the rooms I shared with Henry. He was not there. No doubt he was with some of his new friends, pursuing the carnal entertainments that my monster was willing to kill to experience—entertainments in which I had never indulged.

  I lay in the dark. Below the window, a horse clopped by on the cobbled street. I heard distant music. I thought of Elizabeth, her long faithfulness to me, her beauty and goodness. I longed to be with her. I needed to be done with this, at home in her embrace. Thanks to Glover I now lacked only the second element vital to end the curse that had come on me the night I’d brought that vile thing to life: the body of a young woman, recently deceased.

  FIVE

  In the week after Lord Henry’s ball, Kitty’s cough worsened, to which were added a sore throat, fever, and chills. The apothecary summoned by the Gardiners pronounced it a bronchial catarrh and prescribed warm tea with lemon. Although Kitty received the best of care at the Gardiners’ home in Gracechurch Street, Mrs. Bennet was not mollified. Had the Gardiners lived in Hanover Square, Mrs. Bennet might have rested easier, but from the vantage of Gracechurch Street, her daughter’s illness seemed a grave matter.

  So once Kitty had improved enough to rise from her bed, Mrs. Bennet insisted that they return to Longbourn. Despite Kitty’s aphonial protests—her voice reduced to a whisper—Mrs. Bennet maintained that the country air would suit her better. Parental anxiety prevailed over filial aspiration, and by the third week of April, Kitty, Mary, and their mother were home again.

  Mary would have been relieved to leave the city and its social engagements behind, had it not been for her dance and conversation with Victor Frankenstein. She did not imagine that she might encounter him again, and when she thought about how he had left her waiting by the side of the dance floor, she wondered why she would even want to, but still the evening lingered in her mind.

  She ought properly to have put him out of her thoughts. She could not. He stood apart from every man she had ever met in ways that spoke to her heart so directly that it gave her pause. He did not take her interest in natural philosophy as some source of comedy. He spoke with her as an equal, a mind capable of understanding the rigors of science. Dare she conclude that he had been impressed with her?

  And then there was the tragic tale of his lost brother. Mary had heard genuine grief in his voice, not some ballroom stratagem. He had been grateful for the comfort she brought him. There was in addition some mystery in his past that had driven him from his studies. She had the sense that he carried some great burden.

  It did not detract from the impression he had made upon her that he was some years her junior, and very handsome, and that she, in his presence, had spoken with wit and confidence she had never mustered before. Had she been able to confront her reaction, Mary would have had to admit that she was smitten.


  She did not trust such emotions. She was not some girl of sixteen. She was thirty-two years old. She set about making herself busy, studying a new piece for the pianoforte.

  While Mary coped, nothing would raise Kitty’s dampened spirits. Within a week she was feeling better and repining bitterly their remove from London. Mary pointed out that at home she was at least free of Mr. Collins, who would never forsake the city for the country during the social season. He left the duties of his parish to his curate, except when he had composed a particularly fine sermon or, of course, whenever Lady Catherine de Bourgh required his presence. Failing that, he seemed never to mind being absent from his parishioners. His son was left in the hands of what Collins let everyone understand was a superior governess.

  None of this was consolation to Kitty for the loss of her season, as she did not fail to remind her mother and sister. Mr. Bennet remained in his study, emerging only at mealtimes. In recent years his sardonic comments about Mrs. Bennet’s and Kitty’s marital campaigns had gotten gentler, and then ceased. Though Kitty seemed to have given up thoughts of Mr. Sidwich, Mrs. Bennet still made daily reference to him.

  “Perhaps,” Mrs. Bennet remarked to her husband, “if you had moved yourself to venture into society and make Mr. Sidwich’s acquaintance, we might have persuaded him to visit Longbourn after Parliament closed. You have no consideration for the prospects of your children.”

  “Perhaps you are right, my dear,” Mr. Bennet replied wearily. “And had the Grand Armada met with better weather, we might be speaking Spanish right now. But we shall never know, shall we?”

  At one time Mr. Bennet would never had said anything so unnecessarily cruel, and it made Mary uncomfortable that he had become so. Still, she wondered how her mother could live in a state of such perpetual dissatisfaction. No matter what felicity might befall the Bennet family, she would not let herself rest in the moment. Lacking the sympathetic ear of her husband, she inflicted her unsettled mind chiefly on her daughters.