Friday, August 7, 2009

Frankenstein I

In my first blog post I mentioned Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. As I was cleaning out my office this past week, I came across my notes from the last time I taught this work. While many are familiar with popular versions of the story in both print and visual media, I suspect few have actually read the novel unless they were assigned it in a college literature class. In the popular mind, Frankenstein is primarily known as an early scary horror story. Perhaps some are aware that popular images of the "mad scientist," whose clinical experiment gone wrong unleashes horror on the world, comes from Mary Shelley's imagination. No doubt she had her own sources, but her version has had the most lasting impact on popular culture.

Like most gothic romances, this one could be analyzed as a symptom of cultural anxiety, in this case anxiety about science, religion, human nature, the rise of democracy, even nascent globalization. Melodrama is often given a bad rap, but, as an expression of human psychology, it can be indicative of what lurks most urgently under the surface of ordinary social reality.

Note how the novel can be read as a re-enactment of the Fall (Paradise Lost is explicitly referenced). Like the Judeo-Christian God, Dr. Frankenstein creates an "innocent" human (who later wants a wife), full of potential for goodness and greatness, but who ultimately gets out of control and uses his freedom for destructive purposes (sin and evil). Once the creature becomes a monster, it is possible to view him as an allegorical Satan rebelling against his God. In this version of the Fall, however, Frankenstein (God) is held accountable for the monster he has created. At one point the creature says, "I am malicious because I am miserable." Earlier, Frankenstein (God) himself reflects on his own responsibility: "For the first time...I felt what the duties of a creator toward his creature were, and that I ought to render him happy before I complained of his wickedness." Unlike the traditional doctrine of Original Sin (humans are sinful by nature), this version suggests that evil is the result of natural human goodness being corrupted by suffering, mistreatment, and ultimately lack of love. It is our social experience ("nurture" or lack thereof), not our inborn "nature" that determines our goodness and greatness (or lack thereof). The new science of human nature puts the religious doctrine of Original Sin into question.

Why should the issue of human nature be so anxiety-producing at this time in history (1818)? Could it be because the decline of traditional monarchies ("divine right") and the rise of democratic institutions put the fate of nations into the hands of "common people"? Were they capable of ruling responsibly or would they lead us to ruin? It might depend as much upon the quality of the society as upon any fixed human nature. In other words, human nature might be maleable and open to being shaped by parenting, by education, and by social experience.

It is no surprise then that issues of human growth and cultivation become major themes of the novel. See the next blog post.

1 comment:

  1. I'd like to clarify the references to the "traditional doctrine of Original Sin".

    It's my understanding that the Genesis story of "The Fall" is a community's effort to reconcile belief in a God who is good with the realities of evil and suffering.

    Unlike faith traditions that ascribed the source of those realities to God, the community from which the Genesis account emerged offered the possibility that all of creation was initially "very good", and that evil and suffering emerged because elements within creation (including human beings) freely chose not to act in harmony with that goodness. Then, because choices have consequences -- like pebbles tossed into a pond that send out ripples -- that brokenness became a part of the fabric of reality.

    I realize that some religious faith traditions interpret the Genesis story as claiming that human nature is fundamentally evil.

    But there are other religious faith traditions that interpret the story as retaining the belief that human nature is fundamentally good, but that the consequence of being born into a world that is broken as well as blessed means that every human being is wounded from the beginning of their existence.

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