Frankenstein Meme Database Themes

Themes

FRANKENSTEIN MEME THEMES: Including A Brief List with 9 Key Themes and a Long List, with definitions, excuses, explanations, and links.

These themes should be understood as ending with a silent “…and Frankenstein” added on; for example, when we look at “Android,” we mean in relation to Shelley’s novel and not every instance of an “android.” The argument here is that these are key literary themes on which Frankenstein has exerted a significant influence.

SEE ALSO: The website FAQs page for more on the guiding principles behind the project and its organization.

A Brief List of Nine Key THEMES for Discussing Frankenstein’s influence, with short definitions:

ANDROID—human-made artificial “humans”; augmented, transformed human bodies; vivisection; cyborgs and robots, and more; questioning “What is Human?”

BYRONIC HERO—willful, superior, misanthropic, aristocratic antihero: Victor is an exemplar; also includes the first literary vampires, which arose out of the same ghost story contest that inspired Frankenstein.

POSTHUMAN and LAST MAN—apocalypse/rebirth; sublime turn of history; singularity; forced evolution; transhuman; eco-/anthropocene monsters, including human/animal hybrids; questioning “Am I Human?”

MAD SCIENTISTS/MONSTERS—iconic pulp creator who loses control of experiment; monster destroys creator; confusion of “Frankenstein” as naming creator and monster; educating mad scientists.

QUEER FRANKENSTEIN—gender questions and the monstrous; queer desire and the pitiable outcast figure, especially in representations between men/male monsters; men giving birth; empathy with abjection.

RACE/POLITICS—intersection/conflation of race, politics, or imperialism with monsters; fear of class; fear of the mob; Black Frankenstein: American black bodies conflated with the Creature.

RETRO SF—celebrating Frankenstein as sf’s origin; bringing life to antique automata or vivisected bodies, and other out of control experiments by natural philosophers; Steampunk, Edisonades, Victoriana; Gaslamp sf.

SYMPATHETIC MONSTER—the modern monster we identify with as well as fear; the monster inside us; we are the monster; the Jungian shadow; the pitiable, terrible outcast; sympathy with abjection; educating monsters.

WOMEN WRITING MONSTERS—Shelley as an origin for the feminist transformation of sf, with a parallel rise in her academic reputation; intersection/conflation of writing/women/monsters.

A Long list of Our Nine Key Themes, with expanded DEFINITIONS and EXPLANATIONS:

ANDROID—human-made artificial “humans”; augmented, transformed human bodies; vivisection; cyborgs and robots, and more; questioning “What is Human?”

“Android” is only one of a host of possible terms to describe the theme of the human-like creature, made by a human, who ultimately challenges the definition of humanity. Allied terms include Robot, Cyborg, Automaton, Golem, Homunculus, sometimes Zombie—and any other artificial, human-like being. There is a separate, unique history for each of these terms, of course. The ancient Golem and alchemical Homunculi, for example, and the Android in its oldest senses, influenced Shelley’s story; her novel, in turn, is an obvious precursor to the invention of Robots and Cyborgs in literature. But thematically, the database is more interested in what connects them all: the creation of an artificial “human-like” being in stories where making a new human-type life threatens to usurp the power of creating life from the natural act of child-birth and/or from the divine act of Creation.

“Android” means “manlike”, and though “not commonly used in sf until the 1940s”, the earliest recorded usage is in 1727 by Albertus Magnus, one of the alchemists who inspires young Victor Frankenstein (Clute and Nichols, Encyclopedia of SF). “Android” was often used to describe early automata that resemble humanity; beyond that, Philip K. Dick influentially interchanged “android” and “robot,” confusing (usefully, from the point of view of the database and its themes) attempts to separate machine-based and organic-based artificial human-like constructions from one another, as well as from humanity.

The question “What is Human?” is key, and has a long history in sf. The issue reaches back before the extraordinary “Supermen” and alien encounters in early pulp sf and moves beyond Dick’s “Andys” or Tiptree’s “girl who was plugged in.” The 1980s subgenre of Cyberpunk, for example, blurred the line between humanity and our intimate connection to the tech we inhabit, wear, and implant. Norman Spinrad, in “The Neuromantics” (1986), argues that one meaning of Neuromancer, the title of William Gibson’s central Cyberpunk text, is “new Romancer.” Cyberpunk writers, he suggested, should be called “Neuromantics,” as their work was “a fusion of the romantic impulse with science and technology.” Cyberpunk frequently tests the limits of the human in the remaking of humanity through machine augmentations and biological engineering. Bruce Sterling, in fact, defines the subgenre by the presence of such modifications (see, the “Introduction” to his foundational 1986 collection, Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology). Suffice it to say, the limit of the human is a constant sf concern; Mary Shelley’s novel is the origin point for this ongoing, vital discussion in sf.

“Android” centers on the body, from vivisection and grave-robbing to the moment of “birth” of patchwork bodies, sometimes mixed with animals, sometimes with machines, to make a new life. As the question turns from “What is Human?” to the more introspective “Am I Human?”, matters of consciousness take precedence and the POSTHUMAN and LAST MAN theme takes precedence in the exploration of emergent issues when a new being tasks its maker with existential questions from an alien mind.

References:

For “Preface to Mirrorshades” (1986) by Bruce Sterling:

http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/mirrorshades_preface.html

Androids: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/androids

Cyborgs: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/cyborgs

The Byronic Hero is a gloomy, brilliant antihero. Mary Shelley’s friend Lord Byron is the most famous model for the figure in his day (unless it was Napoleon); Victor Frankenstein is perhaps the most famous iteration in our own time (unless it’s Batman). The figure is embodied in Gothic villains from Manfred in The Castle of Otranto (1764) forward to Byron’s own play, Manfred (1817), and beyond. Sublime in his far-darting intellect and willed achievement, the figure appears in many of Byron’s extremely popular narrative poems, such as Don Juan (1818-1824) or “The Corsair” (1814). Drawing directly on contradictions in the original source–Lord Byron himself–both Victor and the Creature are Byronic Heroes, making Shelley’s novel a complex and intense interrogation of the figure.

The first vampire stories in English literature are inspired by the same “ghost story contest” that propelled Mary Shelley’s invention of Victor and his Creature. Notably, the vampire, too, is modeled on Byron, who instigated the contest. Lord Byron’s confessional (and then unpublished) fragment from the contest inspired John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819), which was published under Byron’s byline, angering both authors. In frustration, Byron subsequently published his “Fragment” (1819) from the contest. Both stories, and the controversy, increased the fame of a monster new to Western Europe, leading, of course, to Dracula at the end of the 19^th century. Vampires have had a range of versions since, some which diverge widely from the Byronic source material. But Dracula’s aristocratic bearing attests to the influence of the Byronic on the vampiric in English literature. The link between the vampire and Victor Frankenstein remains intense and vital.

References:

For more on monstrousness and class in Frankenstein, see RACE and POLITICAL.

See http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/vampires

For Byronic Heroes in sf, see Antihero: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/antiheroes

See also the strong, brief Norton Anthology description of the figure:

http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/romantic/topic_5/welcome.htm

Mary Shelley’s other science fiction work is titled The Last Man (1826). In the work, Lionel Verney, the last man, narrates his story of the end of the human world by plague. In Frankenstein, when Victor confides why he refused to build a mate for the Creature, he reasons that he would raise “a race of devils” to usurp humanity, ending the world. The sublime enlargement of scale—the turn to the global and the possibility of evolutionary extinction—presented in The Last Man’s plague which wipes out humanity, can be teased out as a background possibility in Frankenstein as well. A link can be usefully forged between the beginning of a new species and the end of another, as the alpha and omega meet at the sublime turn of history.

The sublime is the Romantic era term for a confrontation at the limits of human understanding, in which the mind and imagination are challenged by conceptions “too large” for comprehension; often, in what has been called the “natural sublime,” the sublime is figured as an attempt to “grok” (to use a sf term), or to apprehend when we cannot comprehend, nature in totality as an “other.” The “sublime moment” breaks understanding, and then…it either promises a reintegration (and elevation) of the self in some sort of transcendence, or threatens a dissolution of the self, an end. (Note: what it actually is does is unknown, and so might be quite different from what it “promises” or “threatens.”) To complicate things further, the end for humanity might be figured positively, depending on what one thinks of what humans have made of the world. Though critics disagree on the matter, The Last Man (1826) can be read as a critique of humanity that welcomes the end of the world as a relief.

Frankenstein remains an important example of the sublime in sf, and an influence on stories about breaking limits, both evolutionary and ecological, and of the effect of humanity on nature as recorded in a term like “anthropocene.” In both of Shelley’s sf novels, we can note sublime elements: a Byronic Hero (Victor and the Creature; Lord Raymond), a final, nearly-impossible confessional narrative of fantastic events (from a dying Creator and Creature; from the Sibyl’s cave), and a sense of a confrontation with nature and evolutionary change itself (the Creature synthesizing animal and body parts; the all-consuming plague). The Creature itself is sublime, in size and in its startling intellect, and is directly and continually conflated with sublime natural scenery in the Alps and elsewhere. If Victor makes the Creature’s mate, perhaps he will realize a plague that could wipe out humanity…and, judging from how he treats the Creature, perhaps deservedly.

As something new and different emerges in the movement from “last” to “what comes after,” the “Am I Human?” question takes precedence, worrying if humanity is, or ever has been, truly and only human, and whether what comes after might be human, or more so…posthuman. Where the theme of the ANDROID focused on the body, here the emphasis is on the creation of an emergent, self-aware intelligence in a story, whether embodied or disembodied…say, inside a machine…which may raise questions about the nature of existence itself.

In research on Artificial Intelligence, “strong A.I.” describes the moment when computers or other machines become self-aware; it is an ongoing “holy grail,” sometimes deemed impossible, sometimes feared, sometimes seen to be imminent. Long important in sf, it is a key trope of Cyberpunk stories which frequently feature A.I.s awakening in vast matrixes of the net. The central connection to Frankenstein is the creation’s questioning of its own humanity and the limits of the human, threatening at once to be all-too human and to be more than human. The Singularity, the moment when human intelligence is surpassed by a human-built intelligence, is present or threatened. The Creature is not a computer, of course, but a biological creation. However, the famous bolts in the neck of Frankenstein’s Creature from Whale’s preeminent 1931 movie version point to a slippage between terms like A.I. and the trans- or posthuman, mirroring Philip K. Dick’s blurring of Robot and “Andy” or Android.

In writing of the “Posthuman”, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction notes:

In sf, this term for the successors of present-day humanity does not normally refer to products of “natural” Evolution–like, perhaps, H.G. Wells’ influential vision of evolved future man with bulging brain and partly atrophied body in “The Man of the Year Million” (6 November 1893 Pall Mall Budget)–but to the results of our own or others’ intervention via Technology (including techniques of Biology), Genetic engineering, Nanotechnology, and so on.

The influence of Shelley’s novel also looms large when the question of the Creator’s responsibility is raised. The real power of that question is how it reflects on all of us, not just on some “mad” scientist who might be quarantined as a monster him- or herself.

Works influenced by the space-and-time shattering aspects of Shelley’s novel may also attempt to cross sublime boundaries in order to frame humanity’s effect on the world and our complex relationship to other minds in it; they are working in the wake of the Romantic era’s ecological awareness and its first apprehensions of what we now call the “anthropocene.”

References:

See also the ANDROIDS and BYRONIC HERO entries. Also, for more on the creator’s responsibility, MAD SCIENTISTS and FRANKENSTEIN MONSTERS.

For a fuller treatment of the AI theme in sf generally,

see http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/ai

For the problem of the creation of an artificial intelligence, see Cybernetics:

http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/cybernetics

On the Singularity, see: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/singularity

and Conceptual Breakthrough: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/conceptual_breakthrough

Also, Novum: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/meme

The Singularity is described in “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era” (1993) by Vernor Vinge:

https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html

Also see, From the Encyclopedia of SF:

http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/evolution

http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/posthuman

http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/last_man

http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/ruins_and_futurity

MAD SCIENTISTS/MONSTERS—iconic pulp creator who loses control of experiment; monster destroys creator; confusion of “Frankenstein” as naming creator and monster; educating mad scientists.

The “Mad Scientist” is a ubiquitous figure in pulp sf magazines in particular, but has many, many iterations outside of them, before and after. Consciously indebted to Frankenstein, the term threatens to be too large…to refer to too many works..to be usefully deployed. When such a figure is present, to show signs of its original, it should focus on the responsibility of the Creator as the ill-conceived experiment careens out of control. There is a sense of “presumption,” the word used in titles to some of the first plays adapted from Shelley’s novel, in the mad scientist’s character. Readers, and so adaptations of Shelley’s work, often associate the figure with blasphemy, though that seems tied to over-readings of Shelley’s changes to the 1831 edition and not to the original themes introduced in the 1818 first edition of her novel. The mad scientist is a kind of debased Byronic Hero…one flattened of its complexities. Still, this stock sf character has been used as a shorthand to tell many a cracking good story, providing a key trope in its shared story telling tools that make up the genre. One irony is that while Victor is the first mad scientist (a few decades before the term “scientist” actually exists), with numerous mad doctors in his wake, he is not, as many call him, “Dr. Frankenstein.” Victor fails to get his degree, leaving university early to complete his experiment. (Perhaps the lesson of the work is to stay in college, listen to your professors, and take your degree, or else calamity follows?) Further, the word scientist is not coined until 1834, so Victor Frankenstein is perhaps better described as a natural philosopher (especially with his reliance on alchemy). However, it has been strongly established that Shelley’s work is steeped in cutting-edge science of her day, from galvanism to air pumps. As a working writer, Shelley wrote many of the entries for Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men (1829-46), so we can perhaps see Victor as himself a “Scientific Man,” and. further, we might be impressed enough by his achievement, though it ended badly, to give him an honorary doctorate.

“Frankenstein Monster” is a general name for the connected, mirror-image term to the “Mad Scientist,” encompassing in itself the confusion of the Creator and Created that names both of them “Frankenstein.” The “Frankenstein Monster” is, in short, a misapprehension, but, a far-reaching and influential misreading that certainly gets at the central connection between the two figures. For the purposes of the database, we simply bring MAD SCIENTISTS/MONSTERS close together in one hybrid term. The mad scientist’s monster is a destructive (and not especially existentially challenging) monster; our formulation is borrowed more or less directly from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction on the “Frankenstein Monster”:

“The term is in general use, not only in sf Terminology but in common parlance, to mean a Monster that ultimately turns and rends its irresponsible creator.”

In sf, the fear of the man-made-monster can link to a more general fear of technological advance, or Ludditism, as described by Isaac Asimov’s phrase, “The Frankenstein Complex.” As The Encyclopedia explains:

Isaac Asimov’s Robot stories refer repeatedly to the “Frankenstein Complex” – a term he introduced in “Little Lost Robot” (March 1947 Astounding) – generalizing the Paranoia-spawned fear of retribution for impious creation from biological to mechanical beings. Discussions of future AI possibility are likewise frequently tinged with the Frankenstein complex[…].

References:

See LAST MAN and POSTHUMAN for more on “awakening” A.I.s.

In the Encyclopedia, see:

See: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/mad_scientist

and: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/frankenstein_monster

Mary Shelley obsessively read and reread the writings of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, whose proto-feminist writings remain radical. Yet Frankenstein is a novel about contentious relations between men, in which women figure as pawns merely. What can it mean? For a discussion of the prominent feminist aspects of this matter, see WOMEN WRITING MONSTERS. Another angle of approach is to read the story as Shelley’s penetrating comments on men and power, and on the meaning of intimacy between men; the meanings Shelley explores are often, of course, a “toxic masculinity,” in which death and selfishness are paramount. Still, Shelley’s critique of male power and intimacy rewards attention to its perception of how men are negatively shaped by patriarchy; and it is worth remembering that even Victor, who is generally excoriated by modern readers sympathetic to the Creature’s plight, is based on men she knew and loved: Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, her husband, who’s childhood nickname was “Victor.” That both men were surely aware of the “portrait” of themselves she offered, is also something worth considering. It’s hard not to imagine them teasing her about her portraying them as monsters, and yet allowing a certain justice to her terrible insights into male interactions and their violence.

Further, while both Byron and Percy Shelley offered models of a Romantic type—a daring, male figure of the poet or philosopher of far-darting intellect—both offer critiques of standard norms of masculinity of well. Percy Shelley embraced notions of the feminine and androgynous in his life and writing; and Byron, as the Byronic Hero bar none, performed a kind of hyper-masculinity that went over the top beyond masculinity, like a kind of reverse “drag” performance. A dandy or “Beau Brummel” in his taste in fashion, his predatory sexuality appears pansexual in its appetites, more performative itself than an indication of real intimacy. Each poet is, in short, both a model of masculinity and a critique that opens doors to reading Shelley’s novel as exploring potentially toxic or narcissistic maleness but also powerful queer masculinities. The story of the Creator making a male Creature becomes, as parodied in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), the making or controlling of an ideal partner as an image of the maker’s desire alone. Victor and the Creature “killing” each other’s female mates, with Elizabeth strangled in her wedding bed, are events loaded with a homosocial/homosexual intensity that cuts across normative gender expectations. In the end, neither cares about anyone but the other, developing a kind of intense, destructive attention that must be called love—perhaps a kind of love that cannot speak its name.

Queer Frankenstein locates the Creature as a nexus point for a crosscurrent of powerful emotions that have queer implications: a figure who is considered a monster who is denied humanity and neglected by Victor, moving us to empathy and identification. This links strongly to the Sympathetic Monster theme, using it, in this case, to promote the insight that society has made monsters of those who are not so by failing to recognize queer humanities as human. The anger of the Creature can be remade to stand for the anger of those unfairly stigmatized by sexual orientation. The redemptive power of the figure, in both the righteousness of its violence and in its powerful voicing of the position of the outcast, remains undiminished.

An important and mythic subtheme associated to this theme is “Men Giving Birth.” Mythic originals include Athena memorably breaking out of Zeus’s head. The iconic modern take on the theme is Mary Shelley’s novel. The making of an “android,” the stitching together of a new being, though that certainly can be seen as a kind of “birthing,” belongs to ANDROIDS. Here, we mean something more immediate, the actualization of the phrase “men giving birth”: a live birth out of a man’s body, from Adam’s rib to modern science fictional “births” like those enacted with aliens in Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed, for example.

References:

See SYMPATHETIC MONSTERS and ANDROIDS.

RACE/POLITICS—intersection/conflation of race, politics, or imperialism with monsters; fear of class; fear of the mob; Black Frankenstein: American black bodies conflated with the Creature.

To begin, the Creature’s outcast nature is notably “unclassed” in relation to Victor Frankenstein’s clear upper class status. Frankenstein is a novel born of a Revolutionary Age, especially the reverberations of the French Revolution of 1789, which centers on matters of class conflict. One of the first larger cultural uses of Mary Shelley’s Creature is in representations, in both contemporary illustration and political speech, of the fear of mobs of working class Irish, a connection at once of class and race. Readings that locate part of the Creature’s power in its representation of the laboring lower classes, immigrants, and racial others emerging in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, or in the movement of capital around the world in Imperalism, or in serious questions about the “abjection” of certain subjectivities in our economic and political systems as “inhuman,” gains power from Mary Shelley’s own radical political leanings; she supports revolutionary organizations, like the Carbonari, a group fighting for Italian Independence, even late in her life, long after some critics have claimed a more conservative turn in her thinking.

The development of the robot in later sf out of Frankenstein’s Creature also supports readings of the Creature as embodying questions of political outcasts from the new order. As the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction explains:

The word “robot” first appeared in Karel Capek’s play R.U.R. (1920; trans 1923), and is derived from the Czech robota (statute labour), making it clear that Čapek intended his drama to comment on Slavery (see Imperialism), class, race (see Race in SF), and social revolution.

The robot is a creature whose marginal status marks it as of the disenfranchised lower class in capitalist society, and as racially oppressed in a white dominant society. Stories with built or made creatures who “awaken” to oppression and embody class struggle draw on Mary Shelley’s Creature as a precursor text concerned with society’s attempts to demonize and control lower class bodies.

Recent, modern influential readings have developed the argument that Frankenstein enables a postcolonial critique of the “othering” of Imperialism and its racialized fear of the foreign. Key texts include Gaytri Spivak’s “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985) and Anne Mellor’s “Frankenstein, Racial Science, and the Yellow Peril (2001). These readings bring together Shelley’s work, its history, and readings of power, particularly through the lens of race. As we move forward in time from Shelley’s era, stories continue to use monstrousness to critique the imperial and postcolonial conditions of our world, to embody the fear of retribution by “others” who have been cast aside, and to give an impossible voice to the monstrous and abject subaltern.

“Black Frankenstein” is a new term offered by Elizabeth Young in Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor (2007) that crystallizes and describes the use of the Creature in complex ways to represent slavery, black bodies, violence against people of color, and more in American society and culture. Her powerful readings offer Frankenstein as an important precursor text to be recast for new purposes in the emergence of Afrofuturism and other futurities imagined by people of color. Just as women writing in genre fiction find a key ancestor in Mary Shelley, so her text and its non-white Creature offer a point of contact for the embodiment and voicing of otherized bodies. The Creature’s longing to be accepted as “human” resonates in matters of race. In fact, it feels all too relevant today.

References:

For Spivak’s essay: http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/spivak.html

See Mellor’s essay: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08905490108583531?journalCode=gncc20

See also the SF Encyclopedia entry for Afrofuturism: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/afrofuturism

Brian Aldiss influentially placed Mary Shelley’s novel as the first sf novel (Billion Year Spree, 1973), marking sf as rising out of the Gothic and taking shape as a literature that examines modernity just as revolutions remade the political landscape in the modern image of capitalism and the promise of democracy (both of which put a new emphasis on the individual, the new human, who buys and votes). Frankenstein is a keystone for any work that reexamines the premises and purposes of the genre of sf itself. We call works “looking backward” into sf’s history “Retro SF” here, but the theme encompasses any 19^th-century kind of sf that uses Mary Shelley, her novel, Byron or Ada Lovelace, or makes other connections to Frankenstein. The stories can be called substets of “Victoriana sf” or “Gaslamp Fantasy,” or something else. An important recent term to consider here is, of course, “Steampunk,” a movement that is both a subgenre of sf but also a style that influences many a non-reader of sf engaged instead in cosplay, in style, or even simply in “maker” culture. Steampunk looks to Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, but Mary Shelley’s precursor status to the field also makes an important mark. The appearance of Mary Shelley and members of her Circle in works by Steampunk originator Tim Powers, for example, show the strength of the link. Steampunk stories often have built creatures, both clockwork and biologically engineered, with the requisite “mad scientists” nearby, which also links the subgenre directly to Frankenstein. Further, Shelley’s original and many Steampunk stories share a general sense of political opposition to larger, oppressive forces. (See RACE and POLITICS above).

Jeff Nevin’s essay “Steampunk’s 19^th Century Roots” from the Steampunk (2008) anthology argues that the subgenre emerges as a counter to the triumphalism of the early 20^th-century “Edisonade,” those early sf stories of “gee-whiz” invention. The seemingly unselfconscious imperialism of those stories is also oppositional to Shelley’s work. However, when the Edisonade story betrays a dark side, consciously or unconsciously, in its genocidal conquering of other planets by scientific invention or of, say, a steam man sent by “wonder boys” to kill Native Americans, or the sense that its inventor-protagonists are as much flim-flam men as creators, ruthless and self-serving…or perhaps the word is Byronic…then the Edisonade serves at once to foreshadow Steampunk’s emergence and to look back to Mary Shelley’s warning text, perhaps despite itself.

References:

See RACE and POLITICS.

http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/edisonade

http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/steampunk

Frankenstein is a novel of firsts: the first sf novel, and the first appearance of the mad scientist, and yet Mary Shelley’s modern monster with which we identify with instead of simply trying to kill might be her signature creation and legacy. The abject Creature has been a powerful cultural force, not just as the iconic, destructive “Frankenstein Monster”, but as a “Sympathetic Monster” with both sides of that contradictory phrase in play. Readers, as teaching the text makes clear, identify with the Creature instead of Victor Frankenstein (whose name is on the cover); but the Creature is murderous in its violence. Shelley wrote what many of us, as readers, take to be our own autobiography as monsters: we recognize in the creature’s outcast nature and thwarted desires, a portrait of our own psyche. When stories powerfully give us monsters who remain monsters yet move us to sympathy, we have a monster indebted to Shelley’s reinvention of the monster tale—the first of a peculiar but now widely recycled subset of the “monster” category proper. Also known as the outcast, the alien, the other—the Sympathetic Monster calls up our empathy but is always dangerous and frequently prone to outrageous violence.

The relationship of the Creature to Creator in Shelley’s novel can be, and has been, generally understood in a simplistic way as a monster who takes revenge on its maker, the mad scientist (See MAD SCIENTISTS/MONSTERS). But more powerful readings emerge from an engagement with the sympathetic monster’s relation to the more complex, contradictory Byronic hero that is its “father,” Victor Frankenstein; their intense and intimate destructive relationship rewards close attention. (See QUEER FRANKENSTEIN for a consideration of the sexual tensions here.) The term “the Shadow,” drawn from Jungian psychology, has been used to describe the close interchange between such “bound together” figures; “the Shadow” is an archetype, suggesting that one way to read the two characters is as two aspects of one being, one personality.

As Ursula Le Guin writes in “The Child and The Shadow” (1975) of the archetype as it appears in many kinds of fantastic literature:

“The shadow is on the other side of our psyche, the dark brother of the conscious mind. It is Cain, Caliban, Frankenstein’s monster, Mr. Hyde. It is Vergil, who guided Dante through hell, Gilgamesh’s friend Enkidu, Frodo’s enemy Gollum. It is the Doppelganger. It is Mowgli’s Grey Brother; the werewolf; the wolf, the bear, the tiger of a thousand folktales; it is the serpent Lucifer. The shadow stands on the threshold between the conscious and the unconscious mind, and we meet it in our dreams, as sister, brother, friend, beast, monster, enemy, guide. It is all we don’t want to, can’t, admit into our conscious self, all the qualities and tendencies within us which have been repressed, denied, or not used.”

The particularly Frankenstein spin on the Shadow puts emphasis on the relationship of self to monster—the secret, even shameful, nature of the connection—and the Gothic sense that both parties are doomed because they cannot escape one another. This kind of figure or relationship has also been called the Double, the Doppelganger, the Evil Twin, even versions of the Clone. Its presence is “uncanny” in Freud’s sense of the word, tying it to a repressed recognition of the self. Here is how the Encyclopedia of Fantasy defines the Double:

“The sinister double, originally as the Doppelganger, was one of the central motifs of Gothic fiction (> Gothic Fantasy) and remained an important theme in weird fiction throughout the 19th century. The notion is connected to various superstitions regarding Shadows, Mirror images and Twins, but derives much of its psychological power from the fact that we all construct civilized ‘social selves’.”

A powerful trope in the 19^th-century, the figure of the Double has hardly fallen out of fashion in the 20^th century or beyond, and Frankenstein offers a particularly influential version of our conversation with the monsters inside us.

References:

SEE QUEER FRANKENSTEIN and MAD SCIENTISTS/MONSTERS.

See the full entry on the “Double” in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy:

http://sf-encyclopedia.uk/fe.php?nm=doubles

WOMEN WRITING MONSTERS—Shelley as an origin for the feminist transformation of sf, with a parallel rise in her academic reputation; intersection/conflation of writing/women/monsters.

Frankenstein is notably a story about men written by a woman who is the daughter of “the” outspoken early feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft. So, a double reading of Shelley’s text suggests itself: Frankenstein is a story of men in conflict, but also about men’s actions and lives from the perspective of a woman who knows the consequences of male lives on the women around them; in short, the women of the novel are mere pawns in the intense relationship between the men not through the author’s inattention, but with an awareness of patriarchy. To go further: Mary Shelley herself is a model for the Creature; she is in monstrous “drag”—in a literary mimic of the performance women must enact if they are to matter in a world controlled by men, revealing another, powerful dimension to the Creature’s anger. According to contemporary reviews, Shelley, a teenage young woman, should not have written her horror book at all—she is a monster to have done it. Like her creature, she desires more, and achieved more, than she is allowed. This reading has been influential and inspirational to other writers, especially women writers of sf.

Frankenstein has had an effect on sf from 19^th century vivisection and scientific breakthrough stories to early 20^th century pulp magazine mad scientists, but an influx of women writers into genre sf from the 1970s forward increased the seriousness with which readers approached Shelley’s ideas, and brought the feminist reading of her text into focus. Feminism’s crucial expansion and transformation of sf itself in a larger sense placed Mary Shelley in a key position as an important “foremother” of the whole sf enterprise. This promoted serious, ongoing academic critical work on Frankenstein, opening its study beyond its status as a horror tale and a “curiosity” in the study of Percy Shelley or Byron to a work of sf and of literary value in general. Mary Shelley’s novel offered an originary precursor for sf very different from the male-dominated tradition of early 20^th-century American “Golden Age” sf.

“Women Writing Monsters” is a phrase that attempts to get at the complexity of Shelley’s influence. The phrase has the double meaning of referring to writing by women about monsters, especially gendered creatures, but also to writing women as monsters—from female monsters like sirens or medusas, to femme fatales or vaginas dentatas, to what it means to be considered monstrous simply for being a woman writer. Any writer’s relationship to writing might be figured as “monstrous,” but Mary Shelley’s calling her text her “hideous progeny,” directly paralleling her creation to Victor’s Creature, suggests a poignant feminist comment about women and motherhood when she calls for her monster to “go forth and prosper.” What does it mean to love the monsters we make with a mother’s love? Frankenstein has a sometimes thorny but powerful feminist legacy in stories written in many genres of the fantastic, often by women writing of gender and monsters…or about the fear of motherhood…or of monstrous sexuality (of various kinds).

See QUEER FRANKENSTEIN for a discussion of gender focused on the homosocial and homosexual relationships between men in Frankenstein.