Members-Only Book Group: Frankenstein

Previous Page

I first read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in high school and was sorely disappointed because I was a fan of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. The book was not like the movie. If I had been a better reader, I would have appreciated Shelley’s book—and the cleverness of Brooks’s parody—as a great work of Gothic horror and science fiction dystopia. I re-readFrankenstein for Professor Beiber-Lake’s Bioethics in Film, Television, and Literature class at Trinity, and then revisited the book with The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity’s members-only virtual book group last April.

We used the text from B & H Publishing that includes footnotes and a guide to reading and reflection by English professor Karen Swallow Prior. Prior’s introduction helps us understand aspects of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s past that informed the themes throughout the book. Among those themes are birth and death, creation and community, friendship and virtue, and the hubris of “playing God.” The book was first published in the early nineteenth century, when the fruits of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution had ripened, and Shelley masterfully critiques both the rationalist Enlightenment project and Romanticism’s response to it.

The main character, Victor Frankenstein, grew up in an idyllic setting in Geneva with his cousin and betrothed Elizabeth, his parents, two brothers, and his friend, Henry Clerval. His youth is marked by curiosity and companionship. His obsession with the alchemists was stoked by his father’s insistence that he read something of greater value, such as the Enlightenment scientists. When Victor leaves his family setting for the university, he indulges in his obsessions with modern science (i.e., “natural philosophy”), especially chemistry, becoming more reclusive and single-minded in the process, until his pride leads him to create life in the lab. When he looks upon the monstrosity that he has metaphorically born after months of labor, he finds it abhorrent, rejecting it outright.

Victor’s attempts to ignore his creation lead to a series of tragedies, including the death of his younger brother, his friend, and eventually his beloved Elizabeth. The creature, who is never given a name, is angry over his creator’s rejection of him and his creator’s unwillingness to make him a female companion. The creature had spent the better part of a year watching a family through a secret hole in the wall of their small cottage. He learned to speak, read, and love through this family, but only as an outsider. The creature desires to meet the family, but knowing his grotesque appearance will be abhorred by them, he waits until the blind father is alone before making his introduction. The family eventually rejects him, further compounding his sense of isolation. He, therefore, haunts his creator to force Victor to make him a companion.

The framing of the book is Victor telling this story to an ambitious explorer he encounters in the Antarctic. The language and imagery invoke The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798). The ancient mariner’s penance for killing the albatross, which led to the death of his crew, is to tell his story to others so that they do not make the same mistake. So it is with Victor Frankenstein. He warns the explorer of how his feverish obsession and flurry of passion led to the birth of a creature that killed everyone he loved and nearly killed him. Sometimes readers will accidentally call the creature “Frankenstein” rather than the scientist. To do so is to intuitively pick out an important theme of book: Who is the monster in this story?

Making Life, Taking Life, and Faking Life

If bioethics addresses the technological endeavors of “making life, taking life, and faking life,”[1] then we see all three of these in Frankenstein. Shelley is haunted by her mother’s death that occurred after giving birth, a more common occurrence during Shelley’s time than it is today, and by the deaths of four of her children. Shelley, herself, almost died while miscarrying her fourth child. Her husband, Percey Shelley, died in a boating accident at age 29. The idea of death as related to the creative act echoes throughout the book.

Both man and woman were made in the image of God, and both are required, at least for now, to procreate. Victor Frankenstein “plays God” by trying to create a creature made in his own image without a woman but through his own mastery of the natural sciences. He succeeds in making a creature, but rather than looking upon his creation and calling it good, he rejects it. Victor is not good, and therefore, the creature made in his image is not beautiful, but repulsive. The creature when confronting his creator blames Victor for his monstrous appearance: “God in pity made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid from its very resemblance” (181).

Just as there is power in making life, there is power in taking life. The creature’s vengeance becomes an unmitigated fit of passion. The creature relished in the power that killing gave him, just as Victor relished in the power that creating gave him. Victor’s younger brother William, whom Victor describes as inspiring the tenderest affection from those that meet him (60), was an innocent victim, murdered out of vengeance. The creature describes his feelings after the murder as his heart swelling with “exultation and hellish triumph” because he, too, can “create desolation” (197).

In bioethics discourse, “faking life” usually means technological enhancement, the logical end of which is transhumanism. (See Matthew Eppinette’s recent presentation “The False Promise of Techo-Resurrection.”) Enhancement is an act of denial of our own mortality and limitations. Victor’s ambitions echo Descartes and other Enlightenment scientists in that his goal is no less than to conquer death. His first encounter with death was when his mother died of scarlet fever, leaving his father as his only parent and Elizabeth as the nurturer of the household, reminiscent of Mary Shelley’s actual home life.

The impetus to genetically modify or medically enhance children touches on this desire to shirk our limitations, to create something in our own image, but better. Maybe even immortal. The film GATTACA (1997) illustrates this impetus with modern technology when the parents conceive their first son “the old-fashioned way.” He was not selected from a set of embryos that were genetically optimized, and in learning this, the father changes the son’s name to Vincent rather than naming the oldest son after himself. The second son, the favored son in the father’s eyes because he was conceived through technological prowess, was given his father’s name, Anton.

Virtues and the Scientific Endeavor

During the members’ book group meeting we discussed the idea of virtues, a theme throughout Frankenstein. The virtues, as classically understood, are the middle or “golden mean” rather than the extremes. For example, courage is a virtue while its counter vices are the unmoderated extremes, either bravado or cowardice. If the virtues stem from humility, then Victor’s descent into vice started when he perused vainglory, wielding science as a means of power. He then engaged in a single-minded pursuit, the implications of which were secondary to his desire to succeed. While negatively portrayed in Frankenstein, this narrative is lauded in today’s culture: the lone genius scientist without the confines of morality stopping him from pushing the boundaries and making great discoveries. This is a kind of mythos, a story about the scientific endeavor that Descartes paints in his Discourse. This narrative is evidenced in the recent film Oppenheimer (2023) in which the Manhattan Project is reframed as a story centering around one man.

One of the reflection questions Karen Swallow Prior includes at the end of the B & H edition of Frankenstein is on the importance of telling, and controlling, our own stories. Both Victor and the creature insist on telling their stories, and Prior says the way Shelley uses a framing narrative for the book demonstrates that Frankenstein is a story about stories. Stories and narratives have important implications for bioethical discourse, something medical historian J. Benjamin Hurlbut wrote about in 2021 for MIT Technology Review. [2] Hurlbut had met Chinese scientist He Jiankui before He’s 2019 announcement that he had genetically modified two sets of embryos using CRISPR gene editing technology and implanted them in two women who brought them to term. He saw his work as following in the footsteps of “cowboy scientists” who took risks and were lauded as heroes. He specifically mentioned Robert Edwards, whose work led to the first baby born through IVF, to Hurlbut. He Jiankui had imbibed a false story that sanitizes the scientific endeavor and elevates the scientist as a heroic figure. The story omits greed, vainglory, and other vices that are often part of the race to be first.  “Storytelling matters,” writes Hurlbut. “It shapes not only how the past is remembered, but how the future unfolds.”

Frankenstein is also a story in our cultural ethos and has served as a crucial narrative for expressing the unease over the hell that man-as-maker can unleash when divorced from his source of morality and virtue.


References

[1] Nigel Cameron, “Christian Vision for the Biotech Century: Toward a Strategy” in Human Dignity in the Biotech Century (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2004), 26.

[2] J. Benjamin Hurlbut “Decoding the CRISPR-Baby Stories” MIT Technology Review, February 24, 2021, https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/24/1017838/crispr-baby-gene-editing-jiankui-history/.