Introduction

The year 2018 marked two-hundred years since the publication of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein in 1818. This anniversary was celebrated by new editions, new biographies of Mary Shelley, critical works, and many events all around the world, including the conference Frankenstein 2018: Two Hundred Years of Monsters at the Australian National University, at which many of the contributors to this special issue spoke. The continued importance of the novel was also testified to by an event organised by the Keats-Shelley Association of America, Frankenreads, where on a single day at Halloween, participants in libraries, universities, and other public spaces across the globe read the novel aloud in its entirety. Holmes (2017) estimated in the New York Review of Books that

[t]here have been more than three hundred editions of the original novel; more than 650 comic books and cartoon strips inspired by it; over 150 fictional spin-offs and parodies; at least ninety films, including James Whale’s 1931 classic with Boris Karloff; and something like eighty stage adaptations.

It may seem surprising that there is anything new to say about the novel, and yet we hope to have done so with this special issue.

One thing that emerges from the essays included here is the importance of reading the novel again, rather than relying on what we think we know of a text that is so very well-known and so very much loved. The fact remains that the popular conception of “Frankenstein” is far removed from the novel itself, and it is chastening to consider how few of those who have consumed the comic books, cartoon strips, spin-offs, parodies, and films have actually read the original text. The idea on which the novel is based has become a floating signifier almost entirely independent of the thing it used once to signify. Many people confuse the protagonist’s name for the Creature’s, and many believe the tale presents a simple moral that criticises scientific arrogance. In fact, many Shelley scholars no longer consider the novel to be anti-science, but think of it as, primarily, a critique of Frankenstein’s decision to abandon his creation immediately after its conception. Given that her own mother had died days after Shelley’s birth, and she had already herself experienced the death of a child, the particular anxieties attendant on parenting and responsibility seem to be foregrounded. When Shelley revised the novel for its reissue in a one-volume popular edition in 1831, she downplayed its political radicalism and aligned it more closely with conventional religion, drawing out its moral message about the dangers of playing God and thereby giving the text a more “anti-scientific” character. This special issue returns us to the 1818 text, which scholars generally prefer as expressing the spirit in which the story was conceived, but any discussion of the novel must also inevitably explore the beginnings of the myth-making process that led to where we are today.

In the present day, “Franken-” is a prefix placed in front of an ever-increasing number of worrying scientific developments, from genetically-engineered “Frankenfood” to the “Frankenstorm” that resulted from a combination of weather systems which hit New York in 2012. Cloning was described as being driven by a so-called “Frankenstein syndrome” (US National Institution of Medicine) and the proposal to fuse together human cells with rabbit eggs was described as the creation of a “Frankenbunny”. In a 2017 tweet, US President Donald Trump dubbed Senator Al Franken “Al Frankenstein” after sexual misconduct claims. The message is clear: using this prefix denotes horror, violence, and the unnatural.

In Britain, on 5 March 2018, The Sun newspaper issued an outraged report in which the headline read: “FLAKENSTEINS. Snowflake students claim Frankenstein’s monster was ‘misunderstood’ – and is in fact a VICTIM” (O'Shea and Jacobs 2018). The article expressed disbelief that the creature was a sympathetic character. Indeed, this reading of the novel was represented as the idiosyncratic interpretation of the so-called “snowflake” generation, those born after 2000 with left-leaning politics. The mere fact that The Sun felt the novel worth commenting upon demonstrates just how popular is its appeal. The article came as a result of an earlier story published in The Times with the headline: “Frankenstein’s monster? He was stitched up, say millennials” (Smyth 2018). Further detail was given in the article’s subheading: “Concern for animal rights causes students to sympathise with the murderous creature”. It was gratifying to witness the ridicule with which The Sun’s article was received on Twitter, with many commentators declaring that this was exactly what the novel was about. The episode showed clearly the disjunction between the widespread misconceptions of people who have only read about the novel, and the insights of the legion of Mary Shelley fans who have actually read it.

The inspiration of the conference Frankenstein 2018: Two Hundred Years of Monsters was therefore both to return to the original 1818 text – to listen again to what it might have to say to us – and to take stock of its gargantuan cultural legacy. This is less a matter of “correcting” misconceptions or chastening adaptations that are “unfaithful” to the original (though this is sometimes important) than of tracing the myriad ways in which the novel has taken on a life of its own as it has moved through different historical and cultural contexts. Evolutionary theory tells us that both inheritance and mutation are essential for the capacity of a species to adapt to changing environments. Two Hundred Years of Monsters sought to pay homage, not only to Mary Shelley’s enduringly fascinating original monster, but to what Shelley herself might have called its “hideous progeny”: the novel’s countless monstrous offspring, the experimental productions of thousands of “co-creators” over the last two centuries – in theatre, film, television, comics, literary and genre fiction, and, of course, literary history and criticism – who have sought to pass on to their own generation some kind of urgency – whether of science, politics, sex, or gender; whether of tenderness or horror; whether of salvation or destruction – that they have recognised in Mary Shelley’s story.

The essays in this special issue follow a roughly chronological schema. The first series (Cook, Ruston, Ford) examines the historical and intellectual contexts in which Mary Shelley’s vision took shape, and the startlingly wide and various range of elements from which her monster is assembled. A second series (Carlson, Smith, Willis) examines the novel’s many afterlives: the inherited characteristics and the accidental mutations that have enabled the novel not only to speak to different generations of readers, but to readers from a wide range of backgrounds, from nineteenth-century professional scientists to comic book artists in 2017 responding to Black Lives Matter.

Alexander Cook’s essay “Perfecting Monstrosity: Frankenstein and the Enlightenment Debate on Perfectibility” reconsiders the usual interpretation of Frankenstein as an attack on utopian Enlightenment ideals. He finds that Shelley’s novel offers a measured and serious reflection upon the notions of human perfectibility espoused by her father William Godwin, among others, and argues that the novel does not necessarily simply reject these. Rather than see Frankenstein as representing the failed Enlightenment project, Cook views the novel as meaningfully dwelling upon “the modes and mechanisms by which a better humanity might be nurtured and on the obstacles to that project”. The result presents a new perspective on an aspect of the novel that many critics will feel that they already know. Again, the novel need not be read as the simple cautionary tale or critique of Enlightenment rationality that it is often portrayed as in both popular and academic culture.

Another popular misconception that persists to this day is that Victor Frankenstein is a trained medical doctor. This is refuted in Sharon Ruston’s essay “Chemistry and the Science of Transformation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein”. The image of the mad “Dr Frankenstein” is pervasive, found even in respectable academic journal papers and books. Ruston finds that the error is an important one, which obscures the real focus of Victor’s studies at university: chemistry. She argues that chemists in the early nineteenth century had a particular worldview that meant they saw all forms of matter as temporary states, liable to transform according to physical or chemical processes into new forms. This quality was equally found to be a character of selfhood, and questions were asked at the time about whether humans were physically the same people from birth to death, given the many physical changes that their bodies went through in that time. Ruston finds that Frankenstein’s achievement in creating the Creature is only possible because he possesses the worldview of a Romantic-era chemist. He believes that just as once-living matter dies, what is dead can live again, as matter transforms into new forms.

Thomas H. Ford’s “Frankenscription, a Natural History of Poetry” locates Mary Shelley’s novel at the cusp of two epistemic shifts that have long been associated with the term “Romantic” – the relation between nature and history, and between poetry and nature – that are here brought together in a distinctive configuration. Around 1800, in the so-called second scientific revolution, the age-old domain of “natural history” falls into disuse, fracturing into numerous more specialised disciplines, but also supplanted by a new sense of the linear rather than cyclical temporality of nature, a view which makes “natural history”, ironically, look decidedly static and ahistorical. Ford excavates two contemporaneous works of aesthetic theory that respond to this moment in remarkably similar ways: Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel’s 1797–1804 formulation of the “natural history of poetry”, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1798 essay, “On Poetry”. Both essays, though in different ways, distinguish a primordial “poetry of nature” and a modern “poetry of art”, but in terms such that the primordial temporality and unmediated transcription of a “poetry of nature” can only be properly apprehended in a kind of retrospective back-projection, from the standpoint of a modern, post-natural “poetry of art”, which reflexively brings the “poetry of nature” into being as a necessary but irretrievable precursor. Ford then examines the ways in which this “post-natural aesthetics of nature” plays out in Frankenstein, in which nature is both inscribed in place, “marking the earth with meaning”, and typographically displaced, reconfigured as a textual and technological artefact attuned to the communication networks of modernity.

Noting how Frankenstein’s frame-narrator Robert Walton repeatedly expresses his “want of a friend”, Julie Carlson’s essay draws out the extraordinary semantic complexity of the term “friend”, both in Mary Shelley’s time and over the ensuing centuries of the novel’s reception. As well as being used in Frankenstein as a designation for “virtually every type of human relationship”, friend is a term whose apparent capaciousness masks a range of caesuras in terms of class, race, gender, and sexuality. Arguing that the dominant critical focus on “sympathy” obscures “the revolutionary promise signalled by ‘friend’ in the period”, Carlson draws out three interpenetrating configurations of friendship: as an interpersonal relation (in which the friend, as Victor puts it, can “perfectionate our weak and faulty natures”); as a relation to writing (as the sustenance that the Creature draws from books); and as a relation to political futurity (the “friends of man” as a model of a supposedly universal freely-chosen mutuality). Though, as Carlson notes, “Frankenstein has been a phenomenal friend to generations of readers”, the novel itself is “more cautionary than laudatory about the promise heralded in friendship”. In drawing out Frankenstein’s equivocal exploration of friendship, Carlson brings together three interlocutors with the novel: the story of Jemima in Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798); Jacques Derrida’s interrogation of the concept of the friend in philosophy in Politics of Friendship (1997); and the critique of “the friend” as a model of sociality and political futurity in Black political theory. Concluding with an examination of the long tradition of reading the Creature as Black, most recently seen in Victor LaValle’s 2017 comic series Destroyer, Carlson notes that the Creature himself never expresses the “want of a friend” shared by Victor Frankenstein and Robert Walton. Instead, the Creature “can only gesture toward the responsiveness that he seeks because there does not yet exist a working vocabulary to name it”.

Russell Smith’s essay “Frankenstein in the Automatic Factory” similarly looks to futures that the novel only half-imagines. Smith begins by noting that, although critics have long recognised the importance of two contemporaneous historical events for the composition of Frankenstein – the “Luddite” campaigns of machine-breaking, and the debate at the Royal College of Surgeons about whether living beings are distinguished by the presence of an immaterial “life force” – the relation between these two developments has remained obscure. This has led to fundamentally divergent readings of the novel: is it a biological-scientific fable of the dangers of meddling with the phenomena of life, or a technological-political fable of the revenge of the marginalised and neglected? Smith then examines the career of Scottish physician Andrew Ure, who in November 1818, less than a year after the publication of Frankenstein, performed a series of electrical experiments on the body of an executed criminal. Ure went on to become one of the first ever scientific consultants to industry, and a vigorous defender of the factory system. Ure’s writings blur the distinction between the “automatic” responses of the artificially stimulated body and the “automatic” operations of the intelligent machine. In particular, Ure celebrates the invention of the world’s “first truly automatic machine”, the self-acting mule or “Iron Man”, and dubs its inventor Richard Roberts “our modern Prometheus”. By examining the interpenetration of organic and mechanical metaphors in Ure’s theorisation of the factory, and his celebration of the capacity of the machine to discipline the unruly human body, Smith suggests that Frankenstein foreshadows in an uncanny way the increasingly intimate relations between biological automatism and mechanical automation in technological modernity.

Martin Willis, by exploring references to the novel in nineteenth-century journals of science and medicine, discovers that it was quickly put to use by the scientific community. Rather than the usual understanding we have today, that “Frankenstein” is a word used to criticise science, Willis finds much evidence to show that men of science employed the term themselves for a variety of purposes. These “lost metaphors” are brought again to the fore by Willis, and their purpose in the deliberate “self-fashioning” of scientific culture is clearly identified. Willis’s article reveals once again that those working in science do not operate outside of culture but purposefully shape an identity for themselves by using existing cultural forms. His essay denies scientists the role of passive victim in a world that labels them unthinkingly Frankensteinian, and instead demonstrates how Victorian men of science utilised the myth as a mobile and revealing identity-marker. Perhaps surprisingly, Willis finds that “Frankenstein” is sometimes used as a positive, self-affirming metaphor by the men of science themselves.

Why, then, has Frankenstein endured with such widespread popularity? The answer may lie in its construction, in its subject matter, or in the messages that have been taken from it. There is no single authoritative voice in Frankenstein to tell us how to understand and judge events and characters. The narrative frames of the story, which open out like Chinese boxes, ensure that no single narrator is given precedence. So too, the novel, like its most famous character, is patched together from numerous literary genres and discourses of knowledge. Though it most obviously draws on the tradition of Gothic horror, it also arguably inaugurates the genre of science fiction; Walton’s frame-narrative taps into the contemporary enthusiasm for narratives of Arctic exploration; all three narrators draw on elements of the Bildungsroman, and the Creature’s story of his education through observing the De Lacey family has elements of the philosophical conte. Reflecting Mary Shelley’s extraordinary intellectual milieu, the novel also directly references contemporary debates in a wide range of fields, from natural history, chemistry, and galvanism, to political philosophy, world history, and theories of education.

Though Frankenstein is often thought to express a fear of science, and is based on a knowledge of the theories and debates of Shelley’s day, the presentation of the story by multiple narrators introduces an unresolvable ambivalence into its treatment of scientific discovery. So too, Victor Frankenstein is so evasive about the exact details of his experiments that succeeding generations of readers have found the story and its characters lend themselves to an exceedingly wide range of plausible interpretations. The novel’s contribution to the nature/nurture debate remains unresolved and controversial, such that The Sun sees the Creature as a murderer, while most university students read him as a victim. The question of where responsibility lies in the novel for the terrible events that occur is an insistent one. The novel appeals to modern “snowflake” readers who believe that the Creature murders because of the way he is treated by society: he tells Frankenstein that “events […] impressed me with feelings which, from what I was, have made me what I am” (Shelley 1994, 92). In a world where atrocities occur on a daily basis, the Creature’s story continues to offer a disturbing picture of the psychological consequences – and social costs – of marginalisation, exclusion, and stigmatisation. So too, Victor Frankenstein’s infuriating wavering between periods of self-lacerating prostration and inaction, and vigorous attempts to absolve himself of responsibility, continues to play out in contemporary political and media responses to a range of self-created emergencies, from climate change to extreme-right terrorism. Shelley’s use of science as a central motif is a masterstroke because science is always, necessarily, moving beyond the boundaries of what has been done before and so will consequently continue to create anxiety and concern. Finally, by creating a being who is both like and radically unlike us, the novel encourages us to think about both what it means to be human, and what it means to be dehumanised. The essays in this issue bear witness to the ongoing relevance, indeed urgency, of the difficult questions the novel continues to put to us.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Sharon Ruston is Professor of Romanticism at Lancaster University. She is the author of Shelley and Vitality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; paperback 2012), Romanticism: An Introduction (Continuum, 2010), and Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science and Medicine of the 1790s (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and the co-editor of The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy, 4 vols (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Russell Smith is a Lecturer in Modernist Literature and Literary Theory at the Australian National University. He has published widely on Samuel Beckett, including most recently in the Journal of Beckett Studies (2017), Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui (2017), and Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art (ibidem-Verlag, 2017). He was co-editor of Australian Humanities Review from 2008 to 2015 and has also written extensively on contemporary visual art. The organiser of the conference Frankenstein 2018: Two Hundred Years of Monsters at ANU in September 2018, he is currently working on a project titled Frankenstein and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

ORCID

Sharon Ruston http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3864-7382

Russell Smith http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6650-0276