Frankensteins Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic

Culture, 1780-
1830.
Edited by Christa Knellwolf and Jane Goodall. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.
xi+225 pp.
ISBN 978-0-7546-5447-6

Frankensteins Science opens with a challenge to the critical consensus

that
Frankenstein is about masculinity and scientific hubris (1) (or, in the
sub-consensus of
Evelyn Fox Keller et al., that it is first and foremost about the
consequences of male
ambitions to co-opt the procreative function [qtd. in Knellwolf and
Goodall 1]). Theres
no denying such a critical tradition exists: it begins more or less in 1823
with Richard
Brinsley Peakes stage adaptation, Presumption, climaxes in 1988 with
Anne K. Mellors
Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters, and lives on in the
popular
imagination, where Frankenstein is either a deranged laboratory-worker
gratifying our
technophobic fantasies (arctic flounder genes in tomatoes) or Kenneth
Branagh
philandering with Helena Bonham Carter on the set of Mary Shelleys
Frankenstein
(1994), when clearly he ought to have been worshipping the hem of
Emma Thompsons
nightshift. The polyamory of the auteur smacks more of Percy Bysshe
Shelley than
Victor Frankenstein, but all the same, in celebrity gossip columnia, the
conjoining of
thespian masculinity and marital hubris produces a hideous progeny
indeed.

So, there is a lusty tradition wherein Frankenstein polemicises against

mad
scientists attempting to displace their wives. Does this tradition really
constitute the
critical monolith at which Knellwolf and Goodall propose to chip? Do we
have to be
persuaded that Frankensteins representation of scientific exploration
isnt entirely
negative?

The Prometheus of Frankensteins subtitle did more than fashion human

beings
from clay: at considerable expense to his liver and liberty, Prometheus
took fire from the
sun and used it to nurture his creation. (Aeschylus Prometheus Unbound,
a now
fragmentary account of Prometheus sufferings, inspired Percy Bysshe
Shelleys play of
the same name.) Mary Shelleys invocation of Prometheus reminds us
that knowledge
and technology can give succour. The ironic gap between Prometheus and
Victor
Frankenstein attends not to any lack or excess in Frankensteins creative
genius, but to
his failure to support his creature. Prometheus disrupts hierarchies of
privilege;
Frankenstein, abandoning his creature, does not. Who or what the
creature represents
the disenfranchised, non-human animals, semi-orphaned Mary Godwin
herself is a
subject of considerable speculation, and various critics (Kate Ellis, Lee
Sterrenburg, Peter
Dale Scott) have investigated the novels vexed relationship to Jacobin
politics. I mention
all this to suggest, firstly, that though Shelley means us to disapprove of
Victor
Frankenstein, it does not follow that she means us to disapprove of
Prometheus or the
Promethean spirit of Romantic scientific enquiry, and, secondly, that there
are notable
works amongst Frankensteins critical copia that have the authors
depiction of
Frankenstein critiquing ills far other than scientific hubris.

Reviews 47
The editors of Frankensteins Science are the first to allow that Mary
Shelley is an
unlikely anti-Promethean. On Frankensteins republication in 1831,
Shelley was asked to
supply an introduction, to explain How I, then a young girl, came to
think of, and to
dilate upon, so very hideous an idea (5). She writes, as Knellwolf and
Goodall remind
us, of Erasmus Darwins apocryphal length of animated vermicelli. And
also of
conceiving Frankensteins plot:

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of

void,
but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can
give
form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the
substance
itself. In all matters of discovery and invention, even of those that
appertain to
the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of Columbus
and his
egg. (8)

Shelley identifies here as a discoverer, an inventor, as so her talk of

voids and chaos
and the conservation of matter suggests a cosmographer or physicist
perhaps even,
via her allusion to Columbus, a navigator. If the word scientist had
existed in 1831 (it
was first propounded in the Quarterly Review for March, 1834), theres
nothing to
suggest she would have disdained it, where here she aligns herself with
inventors and
enquirers of all stripes. Frankensteins Science does not need to argue
what Shelleys
own writing makes so obvious, that she may not be the anti-Promethean
we apparently
suppose. In enlarging on this claim, however, the collection offers
important accounts of
the cultural and political implications of science and scientism for
someone in Mary
Shelleys circumstances.

The ambit of science in Europe and North America two hundred years
ago was
perhaps more inclusive (of metaphysical, non-empirical enquiry) than it
is in Western
culture today. The word itself, science, was a far more malleable one.
Every savage
can dance, says Mr Darcy to Sir William, in a novel of 1813. To which
Sir William
replies, I doubt not that you are an adept in the science yourself, Mr
Darcy. Victor
Frankenstein confesses to Clerval his tastes for natural science (Shelley
69), but
equally Shelley refers to him in her introduction as the pale student of
unhallowed arts,
an artist who would rush away from his odious handy-work, horror-
stricken (9). As
Patricia Fara points out in Educating Mary: Women and Scientific
Literature in the
Early Nineteenth Century: Defining what is meant by science at this
period is
problematic, because the word itself was and is constantly changing in
significance. In
retrospect, it is tempting to pick out activities of the period that clearly
influenced the
sciences of the future, an approach that is inappropriately
ahistorical (Knellwolf and
Goodall 18). One of the strengths of this collection is its fanatical
envisioning of
science through the lens of Romantic culture. Its essays pursue areas of
science and
scientific practice prevalent in Mary Shelleys time: anatomy, geographic
exploration,
electricity, medicine, teratology (the study of monsters), Mesmerism and
spiritualism,
vivisection, and proto-evolutionary biology. There was no myth in the
early nineteenth
century setting science apart from culture. To the extent that there is such
a myth now,
books like this one are evangelists for the cultural contingency of what
counts as science,
what and how science is done, and how science is talked about.
48 Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 13.1

Knellwolf and Goodall articulate a clear party line: this book is to

contextualise
Frankenstein in contemporary literary and scientific debates, and ideally
will show that
radicalism and scientific enquiry are two horns on the same Romantic
diabolo.
Nonetheless, some of the chapters are only tendentiously related to
Frankenstein, and the
final one, Robert Markleys The Nightmare of Evolution: H. G. Wells,
Percival Lowell
and the Legacies of Frankensteins Science, though excellent, has
precious little to say
about either Frankenstein or the Romantic Culture, 1780-1830 of the
books subtitle.

Several chapters, however, offer new perspectives on Shelleys novel.

Jane
Goodalls Electrical Romanticism is one of the most thrilling,
flexuous, gymnastic
feats of critical thinking in town. Towards the end of the eighteenth
century, electrical
experiment had acquired a symbolic association with revolution. Goodall
explores how
this symbolic connection came about, through particular figures
(Benjamin Franklin,
Joseph Priestly, proponents of revolutionary ideas and experimenters with
electricity),
through the sensory effects of electrical experiments and displays, and
through theories
about the relationship between electricity and life. Goodall considers the
conflict between
the presumptuous energetic spirit of Franklin and co. and Calvinism.
(Shelleys father
had grown up in Calvinist circles, Byron had a Presbyterian nurse, and
Victor
Frankenstein hails, like Calvin, from Geneva.) Science, Goodall argues,
was a riposte to
Calvinism (a machine for generating compulsory humility [124]). To a
generation
weighted down under the psychological tyrannies of predestination
[science] restored
human agency to the centre of the picture and made a new heroism out of
the
determination to extend the bounds of human knowledge (124). In
Victor Frankenstein,
we can see the central tenet of Calvinist thought (predestination) in
furious conflict with
the doctrine of human agency, the scientific ego. On the one hand,
Frankenstein is a
radical intellectual force; on the other, he is subject to a preordained and
tragic trajectory.
Goodall goes on to explore how these poles divine predestination,
human agency
correspond with the poles of electricity (redundancy and deficiency
in Priestlys
language [127]), and in turn suggest psychiatric bipolarism. There were,
so the
documentary trail suggests, mood disorders galore in the Shelley mnage.

Joan Kirkbys Shadows of the Invisible World: Mesmer, Swedenborg

and the
Spiritualist Sciences reads Frankenstein as the story of Frankensteins
conversion from
thorough-going materialism to spiritualism, his recognition of the
affinities between the
living and the formerly living. Kirkby traces this development alongside
Swedenborgs
similar conversion. (Swedenborg, that is, whom we may know as William
Blakes
visionary antecedent, but who spent the better half of his career as an
anatomist,
searching for the material seat of human consciousness.)

Patricia Fara and Judith Barbour both attend to Shelleys reading history.
Faras
essay investigates what it means for Shelley to have been reading Ludvig
Holbergs
Journey to the World Under-ground (1742) while writing Frankenstein.
Barbours The
Professor and the Orang-Outang: Mary Shelley as a Child Reader
surveys
Frankensteins literary debts and reads exhilaratingly the cultural
assumptions writ into
the Juvenile Library, a childrens encyclopaedia to which her father
contributed. Barbour
Reviews 49
identifies formative passages, such as this, from The ourang outang; or,
wild man of the
woods: The gradations of Nature in the other parts of nature are minute
and insensible
but in the ascent from brutes to man, the line is strongly drawn, well
marked, and
impassable (44). History suggests that Shelley read this more as
provocation than
doctrine, but its nonetheless invaluable to know by what she was being
provoked.

Melinda Coopers Monstrous Progeny: The Teratological Tradition in

Science
and Literature explores links between the science of teratology (and
teratogeny, the
technical reproduction of monstrosities) and Shelleys vision of the
monstrous. The
physician attending to Percy Bysshe Shelleys syphilis, William
Lawrence, avidly
collected monstrous specimens, including a living brain-damaged boy.
Cooper invites us
to wonder whether Lawrence treated the monster as a human like
himself, a son, or an
object of study and experimentation, and in turn explores how Shelley
invites us to
consider the consequences of such experiments from the point of view of
the monster
(94).

As for the other essays in Frankensteins Science, the connection with

Frankenstein is not always clear. Allan K. Hunters Evolution,
Revolution and
Frankensteins Creature offers a brief nod to Shelley, but leaves her to
her own devices
while Hunter looks at how eighteenth-century evolutionary discourse
complements and
complicates discourses of social change. Christine Cheaters Collectors
of Natures
Curiosities: Science, Popular Culture and the Rise of Natural History
Museums focuses
on Sir Ashton Levers mid eighteenth-century collecting and on John
Goulds work in the
1830s. The essay is well-researched, well-written, well-argued, but it is
up to the reader
to surmise how it relates to Frankenstein.
Meanwhile, though its churlish to complain about what a book doesnt
do when
it does so much (and already runs to twelve chapters), the absence of an
essay on the
science of language is disappointing. Frankenstein presents us with a
theory of language
acquisition, the creature recalling:

I found that these people possessed a method of communicating their

experience and feelings to one another by articulate sounds. I perceived
that
the words they spoke sometimes, produced pleasure or pain, smiles or
sadness, in the minds and countenances of the hearers. This was indeed a
godlike science, and I ardently desired to become acquainted with it.
(112)

The creature here is the scientist, who begins knowing nothing of the
science of words
or letters, but by degrees makes a discovery of greater moment,
language (109).
Shelley goes to considerable trouble to explain how the creature learns to
speak and read
(though the sheer extent of his oratorical prowess remains somewhat
baffling). There is
more attention given in the novel to this, in fact, than to electricity. How
much was
Shelley influenced by the philological work around her? By Rousseaus
Essai sur
lorigine des langues or J. Gilchrists Philosophic Etymology: Or
Rational Grammar
(1816)?

50 Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 13.1

Works Cited
Shelley, Mary W. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1971.

Alexis Harley