Frankenstein Bicentennial | Musings of the Monster Librarian

Book Review: Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by Kathryn Harkup

Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by Kathryn Harkup

Bloomsbury Sigma, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-1472933737

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, MP3 CD

The primary takeaway I got from Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is that Frankenstein really truly is science fiction. There are things implied in the book that science today still isn’t able to accomplish! I think in today’s world we don’t really have the ability to imagine the time that Mary Shelley was writing, when the way people saw the world was in flux, with alchemy only very reluctantly ceding its way to the barely understood beginnings of chemistry, biology, and physical science, and the materials for experimentation not easily available. The potential of science to change what makes us human, as exciting and mysterious as it was, also activated anxieties and fears that, while they have changed in specifics, still affect us today. The mystery of what science could accomplish, though, was so profound at that time that Shelley’s novel of an ambitious, obsessive scientist has so little actual science in it, and so little of the text actually devoted to creating the monster itself.

Harkup breaks her topic down by first summing up the life of Mary Shelley to the point at which she wrote Frankenstein, and then, about 80 pages in, addressing the specific aspects of science and experimentation described in the text. She does a good job of recreating the gruesome aspects of science at that time, and the enthusiasm scientists had that sent them past the point of what we would consider ethically acceptable. She covers some fascinating people and ideas, such as anatomist John Hunter (evidently the model for both Dr. Doolittle and Dr Jekyll); foundational chemist Antoine Lavoisier; serial killers William Burke and William Hare, who sold the bodies of their victims to anatomy schools; and Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta, the major players in the debate on the role of electricity in animal and human bodies, among others. Bodysnatching, graverobbing, transplants, preserving body parts in jars, the creation of batteries, chimeras, body decomposition, electroshock therapy, acromegaly, transfusions, feral men, Lamarck’s theory of genetics, all are covered in the pages as the flotsam surrounding educated (and not as educated) people at the time, often simultaneously as entertainment and education.

Making the Monster is interesting, even compelling at times, but there were some stretches that took me a long time to get through. I got impatient when Harkup moved too far into the past or too close to the current day, and much of what she said about where Shelley got her ideas was farfetched supposition. That is, not that Mary couldn’t have encountered these ideas and people, but that she might have encountered (for example) John Hunter’s ideas because of a one-time encounter between Hunter and her father. Despite it running only 274 pages, I ended up picking it up and putting it down several times.

As it’s the 200th anniversary of the novel, this is a good addition to a Frankensteinia collection, and some of the stories about the science of the times make for interesting reading if you are interested in the history of science in the 1800s. Making the Monster is a mostly enjoyable read, but outside of the specific applications of science that tie into the novel, it treads some pretty familiar ground, so it’s not an essential item for most collections. Recommended for large public library collections and Frankenstein lovers.

Musings: Frankenstein and Race

Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor by Elizabeth Young

NYU Press, 2008

ISBN-13: 978-0814797167

Available: Used hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition

With this being the bicentennial of the publication of Frankenstein, we can look forward to a year of interpretations of the text. Of course, you can read the novel as if it was produced in a blank space if you just want entertainment(this seems unlikely since the framing device is deadly dull, and almost anyone who picked it up and just read the first page would probably put it back down), or you can run with the romantic version of the summer party where the novel was first inspired, but Mary Shelley, even at 18, was an intelligent woman who listened well and was familiar with literature, philosophy, and the issues of the time.

The easiest way to look at Frankenstein is to consider her life circumstances as the gifted and passionate daughter of a prominent and provocative feminist who died giving birth to her, and a freethinking, progressive father who educated her to want more than she had. She had already been a mother herself, and watched her child die. The creation and destruction of life must have often been on her mind. In that way, Frankenstein is deeply personal to the author. But for the book and its characters to have survived so long and been recreated in so many ways and such a variety of media, it’s about much more than her own circumstances and emotions. She touched a nerve in our culture through her insights about her own life and times, and even if she never expected that her creation would continue to be relevant as time passed… well, it has been, and continues to be.

Frankenstein centers on reactions to physical and mental difference– monstrosity– and oppression and rejection of the “other”. It is a text that can be used both to justify oppression and to critique it. I was surprised to learn recently that the novel had been used in an argument against the abolition of slavery. This made me want to look further into it. In 1824, British Foreign Secretary George Canning did, in fact, refer to Frankenstein’s creature in a rebuttal to pro-abolition forces in Parliament, saying:

“We must remember that we are dealing with a being possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child. To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical strength … would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance.” (Wolfson)

I can’t imagine that Shelley was anything but appalled to have her work manipulated to support slavery. I learned from an online excerpt of Elizabeth Young’s Black Frankenstein that that support crossed the ocean to America (this seems like a cool book, if you like certain kinds of academic reading, which I do, but I haven’t had the opportunity to read the whole thing). After the Nat Turner revolt, American Thomas Dew quoted Canning’s reference to Frankenstein in a long pro-slavery essay. (Young, 19) In 1860, Frederick Douglass wrote that “slavery is the pet monster of the American people”, and it is still one we’re grappling with today. A century later, civil rights activist Dick Gregory observed that James Whale’s movie told the story of “a monster, created by a white man, turning on his creator.” (Young, 4) In fact, race played into the visuals of the movie, with the filming of the mob scene at the end created to evoke a lynching. (Wolfson) Frankenstein may have started out as a nineteenth century British Gothic novel, but it’s made a home for itself in American culture. With race at the forefront of our issues today, now is a great time to consider Frankenstein in a new light.

Wolfson, S. “What makes a monster?” New York Public Library. Retrieved from http://exhibitions.nypl.org/biblion/outsiders/outsiders/essay/essaywolfson

Young, E. (2008) “Introduction”. In Black Frankenstein: The making of an American metaphor. New York: NYU Press. Retrieved from https://nyupress.org/webchapters/9780814797150_Young_intro.pdf)