Frankenstein

I started reading Mary Shelley’s gothic classic Frankenstein for the first time on a cruise ship we boarded in Barcelona. At the time we were bound for Tenerife in the Canary Islands. In a wine museum on the island I discovered that Mary’s future husband, poet Percy Shelley, had visited there. I was aroused by the connection and wondered how many others there might be.

Mary Shelley was the daughter of Mary Wollestonecraft, a famous philosopher  and feminist who advocated women’s equality late in the 18th century, a person I had read and written something about.

In the introduction to this edition of the novel Wendy Lesser explains that the name Frankenstein may have been derived from two German words, frank — which in English means giving currency to, and stein - which means stone. So the name, I am thinking, comes from the idea of giving life to an inanimate object with a galvanizing currency of electricity. (The ‘en’ was probably added to make the pronunciation easier.) As Lesser added, Shelley was fascinated with lightening storms. But that doesn’t explain how Shelley herself came upon this name. Perhaps she was influenced by the knowledge that Benjamin Franklin at the time was experimenting with electricity. Perhaps the first draft of the title might have been ‘Franklinstein’. Subsequently, though, I discovered from a Google search that Frankenstein was the name of an aristocratic German family whose ruined castle Shelly used to pass on her way home. The name literally means stones of the Franks, people who had settled in Germany after the decline of the Roman Empire.

The electricity/stone explanation reminded me of something I had learned earlier, an idea that the physicist Niels Bohr introduced, the complementarity principle. My first introduction to this principle was furnished by none other than a stone and someone explaining that when a stone becomes other than an inanimate objected and useful, like a door stop or a weapon, it’s due to a complementarity or supplementary action. In the case of the motionless mass that Frankenstein’s monster was, it  was given life and currency by the complementarity of an electric current.

It’s not easy to understand what motivated Mary Shelley to write a book about a monster. Lord Byron, a close friend, suggested she write a ghost story. She said she was inspired by a dream. But perhaps it had to do more with the times, a time in which science's progression was outstripping human knowledge and wisdom to handle it, a lack that at times ended up with disastrous consequences. Nevertheless, it is astonishing that a nineteen year old girl, when she started it, could have image and written such a story. (Somewhere it is said that Byron ran out of the room screaming when he read it.)

The science Mary Shelley had Victor Frankenstein preform in her novel would today be called pseudo-science or junk science. It was science fiction  (the first of its kind), because it was impossible and could not achieve reality or sustainability. However, it did have a legitimacy about it. In a sense it laid out a dangerous scenario for humankind if it continued to tinker with things and combination of things ( playing God) it had no understanding or mastery of . Since then civilization has witnessed many instances of Frankenstein-like human constructs that have had disastrous consequences, both abstract and physical.

It was pointed out that Frankenstein is a novel devoid of strong women. That is especially interesting in the fact that it was written by the daughter of an important feminist. All the women in it are passive. Like sometimes happens a quirky thought came to mind: Perhaps there was a hidden meaning here, portent to the future, about the monstrous consequences to the world’s order if feminism were to flourish. (Conversely, if equality were denied women no doubt it would be a more monstrous world.)

From the outset the word Frankenstein became a metaphor for freaky occurrences and jarring changes to the order of things. Today we talk about things like Frankenfood, which is genetically modified food, a modification not unlike Frankenstein’s monster. Metaphysical events that have defied explanation and rationalization, like the attacks on 9/11, often summoned Frankenstein type explanations. The financial crises the world experienced in 2008 was a product of weird Frankenstein-like financial derivations.

I was coincidentally remained by a friend of an architectural style known as Brutalism, a subcategory of Modernism that came into prominence in the 1960s and 70s. Today architects and observers alike are running away from this style because it doesn’t bowed well with today’s sensibilities about design. Its appearance conveys an architecture of bigness, large proportions and brutality. I was struck by a similarity with the monster I was reading about, that people are shunning architectural brutalism today in the same way that they were shunning and running away from the brutalism of Frankenstein’s monster. 

Frankenstein is a novel with many story lines. That’s probably what made it the sensation it became, because it offered many overlapping narratives of life. One of them, often hidden, is about the paradoxical nature of life — its simultaneous beauty and ugliness, good and evil, meaningfulness and meaninglessness. The monster was sensitive to both, simultaneously experiencing the creative and destructive aspects of life, which he saw in himself and had difficulty reconciling . The monster’s predicament is emblematic of life and the world. Perhaps Shelley was genetically disposed to understand the paradox  because of her mother’s situation in which she was a feminist but couldn’t live independently of a man because she needed one to survive. 

I imagine that Shelley also wrote this book to show  what she had learned from reading science and the world’s great literary works. But she may also have written it the way she did to provoke empathy, her point being, even though one is disfigured or different from others, like the monster was, that doesn’t mean one doesn’t have feelings or shouldn’t be treated with respect and dignity. The “Hunchback of Notre Dame” was another novel that elicited empathy in much the same way. 

Since I found and read this book onboard ship I thought I should make a connection between the two. It’s not an aesthetically pleasing one but neither was the appearance of Frankenstein’s monster. Nor is it a very kind one. Nevertheless, here goes: As I looked around the ship I saw people that looked disfigured and moved awkwardly like the monster did, mostly because of their age. I thought about the modified bodies many of the passengers had, like Frankenstein’s monster, with alien parts like artificial hips, refurbished knees and transplanted organs. 

I am surprised that Shelly didn’t give the monster a name. That explains why all these years it has been erroneously called Frankenstein. I also pondered a subject Shelley omitted that I thought might have made the monster a little more human. She never mentioned his bodily functions.