The Monster And The Master

Seeing as I devoted yesterday's post to a popular horror story and tried to draw out a lesson for us in terms of the spiritual life, I thought I might look at another work which has been included in the same genre, but one that is a very different treatise. I am speaking of Frankenstein by the English novelist Mary Shelley. While Dracula was written as a horror story with serious themes, Stoker spent a great deal of time doing his research to get facts correct, insofar as there are facts with vampires, Mary Shelley, on the other hand, while prompted to write a ghost story, saw a vehicle to look at philosophical issues; Frankenstein is a very different work.

You are all aware of the story of Shelley's protagonist and his ambitions, countless movies have been made detailing the mad scientist's attempts to create life but ends up making a monster who wreaks havoc on society. The monster kills at will and has become a fearful thing, a personification of chaos and evil. These interpretations of the novel are more in the line of parodies than faithful renditions of the work - Shelley's novel is not a penny dreadful style potboiler, it is a very serious reflection on what it means to be a human being.

Mary Shelley lived during a time of great change. Among the second generation of Romantics, she saw extraordinary developments occur during her lifetime as Britain became an industrial powerhouse and, in terms of development and influence, the centre of the earth. She was a political radical, she could not be anything else given that her parents were brilliant radicals themselves: novelist and journalist William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, author and feminist. When love came into her life it was in the form of Percy Shelley, poet, political thinker, atheist and wild boy around town; Shelley abandoned his wife and children to elope with Mary. The circle she and Shelley moved in included figures as radical as them, foremost among them was the poet Lord Byron, a figure of great romance who was described by one of his lovers as 'mad, bad and dangerous to know' - a very accurate summation of the man. 

Despite the people who were around her, she managed to keep her head. Shelley and Byron were, in my opinion, utter lunatics: privileged fantasists who were possessed by the Romantic ideal whose works, with a few minor examples, display little of the genius credited to them. I think the greatest mind of that group was Mary and her work far exceeds theirs in its depth and the questions it poses. Her most famous work, Frankenstein, was initially the product of boredom while she, Shelley and others were staying near Lake Geneva. Stuck in a rainy summer, the suggestion was made that the group of friends, which also included the doctor John Polidori, all write a ghost story. The two that took this most seriously was Mary and Polidori. Polidori wrote The Vampyre which would serve as one of the first major works in the vampire genre and influenced Stoker; for a time Byron was thought to be the author and Polidori died soon after its publication, unacknowledged and poor. 

Mary would not suffer such indignation. Her initial story, expanded to a novel and revised, proved to be a notable work. Acknowledged as the author of the novel at a time when women usually had to disguise authorship for their works to be appreciated, she would become a writer and editor following Shelley's death in 1822, living until 1839. The novel was seen as a work of genius by many, and while all acknowledged that it was deeply disturbing, only some discerned how insightful it was. Frankenstein is a gothic novel with Romantic overtones, yet, rather than indulge the egotism and individualisation so dear to the Romantics, she turns on it and exposes its dangers. Her novel is about a man who embraced the Romantic ideals and advances in science who sought to overcome the greatest limitation known to humanity: death. Here is a man, wholly absorbed in himself, who wanted to play God and create life; instead, he created a monster. In reality, the monster he created was not the being he cobbled together and brought to life - it was himself. Shelley subtitled the novel The Modern Prometheus - reference to the man who stole fire from the gods. In writing it, Mary uses the memoir genre, and like a Russian doll, she envelopes a number of memoirs in others - embedded narrative as it is called. Like Stoker's Dracula, this brings a sense of immediacy to the book, it draws the reader right into the heart of the story because Mary is speaking directly to us.

Victor Frankenstein, the protagonist, is a man afflicted with grief. His encounter with death leaves a bitter taste in his mouth. He throws himself into his scientific studies and aims to create life, to outwit death. Gathering body parts from cadavers, he forms the body of a man and then brings him to life by capturing electricity and directing it through the lifeless tissue. The creature comes to life, but as he opens his eyes, Frankenstein is horrified. As the creature reaches out to him - we learn later he was reaching out to his father, his maker; but Frankenstein flees. In his view, he spends the rest of his life running in fear from a creature that wants to kill him. In reality, the creature, utterly forlorn and abandoned, seeks nurture, love and guidance; it is his experience of rejection and violence that forces him to violence. The creature is not even given a name, his creator speaks of him only as a monster, a wretch, a demon and devil; beyond such negative sobriquets, he is denied an identity. Yet, despite the prurient cinematic interpretations, the creature is no monster. As someone once said to me, the creature is the sanest character in the book - not a bad assessment. Victor Frankenstein is the real monster, one who took what he should not have taken and when everything came crashing down, fled and convinced himself that he was a victim - the story of human life - the effects of original sin.

Frankenstein's relevance for us today is all too clear. If Mary Shelley was concerned about man playing God in the early decades of the 19th century, she would be horrified at the state we find ourselves in in the early decades of the 21st century. The lesson she sought to teach has fallen on deaf ears, and her work has been transformed into a garish frightfest to keep us awake at night. Her theme should frighten us much more than Boris Karloff stomping around a set on screen; the horrors that undid Frankenstein take place every day in the hospitals and clinics of the world. Unlike the distracted young madman of Shelley's novel, the modern day scientists see nothing wrong in playing God and society at large rushes to their defence and attacks those who question what is being done in name of progress and ambition. Victor Frankenstein was successful in his efforts, but he and others would pay a terrible price for that he did, so too with his confreres today: they are successful, but there will be a price to pay.

A priest once said to be that to be fully human is to be sinless, since this is what God intended for us when we were created - we fell and sin through our own fault; to sin, then, is to be less than human. Jesus came to restore us to the fullness of our humanity and did so by becoming human and offering himself as a sacrifice for sin. It is also true that when we as human beings seek to play God, even desire to become God, then we become less human - we not only attack God by usurping his divinity and authority, we also attack our humanity by dismissing our status as creatures, our need of redemption and God's plan for us. As we seek to create life as if we are God, we wound the lives that come into being through our machinations; the wonder and beauty of procreation is reduced to the manipulation of man. In this we do not assert that we are masters of life - there is only one Master, rather we fall deeper into our exile and while we may nurse the delusion that we can do all things, our fate in the end will reveal that we cannot. 

Mary Shelley's story has a much broader relevance than the one I have intimated above, and there are many other themes being explored. In general, the work can be understood as a call for us to respect life and understand our necessary limitations. It may seem strange to say that limitations are necessary, but they are, and they are for our benefit. When God marked a line in the sand, he was not denying us anything, but rather opening us to much greater things - what we receive as gifts from God are much greater and more transforming than anything we can achieve by ourselves. Victor Frankenstein became a monster because he thought he could become master - to become God, as Satan tempted our first parents in the garden. However, it is the one who sees himself as servant, a creature, who becomes like God sharing in his very divinity and reigning with him in his kingdom. Mary Shelley may not have been thinking in such overt theological terms, but she teaches the same lesson in her own way.