Lab Life: Vitalism, Promethean Science, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Mary Shelley, Theologian

Sometimes a novel can be too successful for its own good. Odd as that claim might sound at first hearing, one need only recall Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to be convinced of its veracity. Despite their obvious differences, these otherwise dissimilar works have at least this in common: they are all novels that have become victims of their runaway fame. This victimization, so to speak, happens whenever a work of fiction speaks so much to its time that it takes on a life of its own: people believe they can absorb its lessons (or what the culture takes to be its lessons) without having to go through the bother of reading the original work at all.

But Shelley’s book became a hostage to its success twice over, for the popularity of most other iconic novels does not usually entail a distortion of the events recounted in their original narratives. Not so with Frankenstein. Within a mere five years of its publication, the plot—and therefore the point—of the novel was so thoroughly worked over that its real lessons became quite lost on those who have never read the book itself. Little reviewed upon its publication in 1818, it did not even manage to sell the initial 500 copies of its first edition.¹ This muffled reaction changed when, in the 1820s, several dramatized versions of the novel were put on the boards in England, the first and most influential of which gave us many of the extra plot-bits we know today: a lab assistant (here named Fritz), the surgeon’s intimidating operating table, a massive electrical apparatus zapping the lifeless corpse, and so forth.²

The Boris Karloff movie version of 1931 (directed by James Whale, with screenplay by Garrett Fort and Francis Edwards Faragoh) only compounded the distortions: Now the “monster” is entirely mute; worse, he lives out his sad, brief life saddled with the brain of a recently deceased criminal of dim intelligence. To add to the muddle, he was brought to life in the movie by a middle-aged (and apparently fully licensed) “doctor,” and played to the hilt as cinema’s first great example of that by-now standard Hollywood trope, the mad scientist. Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, however, was in fact a medical student from Geneva: in his mid-twenties, he was supposed to be studying medicine at Ingolstadt (as his family thought), but in fact began to skip classes after his first year in order to pursue his obsession with creating life in the laboratory.

So popular and influential was this movie that nowadays most of the public knows the “monster” as a lurching, looming hulk barnacled with steel bolts in his neck, sporting stitches in his high forehead and topped off with that iconic Arnold Schwarzenegger haircut. Ironically, that same public now usually associates the Frankenstein surname not with his “mad” creator but with the creature—which is perhaps poetic justice, since Victor had categorically refused to bestow a name, any name, on his misbegotten handiwork. A fitting upshot, for now the creature has finally usurped his creator: Ask for a Frankenstein mask at a Halloween store, and a Boris Karloff mask is what you’ll get.³

The result of all these changes, early and late, has been to upend what makes the novel so enduringly topical, indeed so illuminatingly theological. To get across her essentially theological lesson, Shelley needed a creature who could speak back to his creator. Moreover—and this point cannot be stressed enough—in the novel the creature not only speaks but does so with an articulation and a grammatical fluency that could rival the complex, elegant repartee in one of Jane Austen’s genteel parlors. Admittedly, the expedient by which Shelley has this new-made creature come to such conversational eloquence strains credulity: he picks up his aristocratic cadences from listening through a crack in the wall of a hut...