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  • Mary Shelley and the occult
  • Rebekah Sheldon (bio)

When Victor Frankenstein arrives in the receiving room of M. Krempe in the university town of Ingolstadt, Germany, it is to learn once again the lesson given him by his father: that the alchemists whose books he has devoured are no fit reading matter for a proper subject of the Enlightenment.

Every instant that you have wasted on those books is utterly and entirely lost. You have burdened your memory with exploded systems and useless names. Good God! in what desert land have you lived, where no one was kind enough to inform you that these fancies, which you have so greedily imbibed, are a thousand years old, and as musty as they are ancient? I little expected in this enlightened and scientific age to find a disciple of Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus.

(Ch. 3)

In the two centuries since Mary Shelley composed these lines, the figure of the mad scientist has become fixed in the public imagination as the practitioner of ethically dubious experiments justified by way of manic techno-transcendentalism, an inflated sense of self-worth, greed or a lethal combination of all three. As in Shelley’s original, these representations track closely to contemporaneous technoscientific developments on the edge between fantastic vision and practical reality. Frankenstein’s Gothic lightning, for example, recalls the work of the galvanist and prefigures the coming age of electricity. H.G. Wells’s tuned his Dr Moreau to new findings in endocrinology, expressing amazement at the malleability of what Moreau calls ‘the chemical rhythm of the creature’ (Garden City Publishing Company 1896: 130), a point that would come to be central to twentieth-century conceptions of physiological growth and sexual development. Contemporary media so abound in mad scientist figures – from Blade Runner’s Dr Eldon Tyrell (Scott US/UK/HK 1982) to Stranger Things’ (Netflix 2016–) Dr Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine) – that one might be excused for thinking that all capitalism is biocapitalism and that inside every shadowy government agency is a monster laboratory.

What hasn’t found expression, however, is the scene of reading that precipitates Victor Frankenstein’s impassioned lurch into his ‘filthy workshop of creation’. Tinkering with the building blocks of nature might well be as Enlightened as racial slavery, but it seems that M. Krempe was right to associate Victor’s taste for the occult with an antiquated past. Even in supernatural horror, the occult comes in for ridicule. H.P. Lovecraft’s hapless narrator in ‘Call of Cthulhu’ (1928) compares the horror of the Elder God to the writings of Cornelius Agrippa and finds the latter sadly lacking. Buffy [End Page 172] the Vampire Slayer’s (US 1997–2002) Giles (Anthony Head) may be the only adult and a librarian, but the tomes he pulls off the shelf are only good for the slaying they enable. Frankenstein may be the first mad scientist in sf history, in other words, but he appears to be one of a very few occultists, at least until the twenty-first century.

The occlusion of occult sciences in favour of technoscientific extrapolations has likewise defined what is commonly held to be the distinguishing difference between sf and fantasy: the conformity of the story world to the constraints of natural law, a distinction subtended by the modern notion that we can tell the difference between natural and fantastical behaviours. Yet Victor Frankenstein’s success, like every subsequent advance in molecular biology, reveals the flexibility of those boundaries and underscores the continued operation of philosophical speculation and imaginative fancy in the appearance of a lawful and orderly nature.

Rebekah Sheldon
Indiana University Bloomington
Rebekah Sheldon

Rebekah Sheldon is Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University and the author of The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe (2016). She is currently researching a new project on queer occultism.

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