Collected Essays. Brian Aldiss
no name, being referred to as ‘creature’, ‘daemon’, or ‘monster’. This accounts in part for the popular misusage by which the name Frankenstein has come to be transferred from the creator to the created—a mistake occurring first in Mary’s lifetime. The roles of the two chief protagonists also become interchangeable. The essential SF core of the narrative is the experiment which goes wrong. This prescription is to be repeated later, many times, in Amazing Stories and elsewhere.
Victor Frankenstein’s is a Faustian dream of unlimited power, but this Faust makes no supernatural pacts; he succeeds only when he throws away the fusty old reference books, outdated by the new natural philosophy, and gets to work on research in laboratories. Paracelsus out, Science in.
This is the new perception. This is the revolt of Shelley’s generation. Kick out the old laws. Kick the Ottomans out of fair Greece. Get rid of those old spells. The new formulae of science, of a new age, have more power—even the power of life over death.
Mary Shelley in her Journals speaks of a tyrannical buried life she was forced to lead, ‘an internal life quite different from the external one’. It is a revealing remark—and not an uncommon discomfort. For our hopes themselves come trailing a shadow side. And with the bold new experiments designed to change the world, a bill is always presented. Victor Frankenstein himself begins work with what are, on the surface, the best of motives. ‘What glory would attend the discovery’, he says in Chapter II, ‘if I could banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!’
But SF is not only hard science. Related to the first core is a second, also science-fictional, the tale of an experiment in political theory which relates to William Godwin’s ideas. Frankenstein is horrified by his creation and abjures responsibility. Yet the monster, despite its ugliness, is gentle and intelligent, and tries to win its way into society. Society repulses it. Hence the monster’s cry, ‘I am malicious because I am miserable’, a dramatic reversal of Christian thinking of the time.
The richness of the story’s metaphorical content, coupled with the excellence of the prose, has tempted commentators to interpret the novel in various ways. Frankenstein’s subtitle, The Modem Prometheus, points to one level of meaning. Prometheus, according to Aeschylus in Prometheus Bound, brings fire from Heaven and bestows the gift on mankind; for this, Zeus has him chained to a rock in the Caucasus, where an eagle eats his viscera.[1] Another version of the legend, the one Mary Shelley had chiefly in mind, tells of Prometheus fashioning men out of mud and water. She seized on this aspect of the legend, whilst Byron and Shelley were writing Prometheus and Prometheus Unbound respectively. With an inspired transposition, she uses electricity as the divine fire.
By this understanding, with Frankenstein acting God, Frankenstein’s monster becomes mankind itself, blundering about the world seeking knowledge and reassurance. The monster’s intellectual quest has led David Ketterer, in Frankenstein’s Creation: The Book, The Monster and Human Reality (University of Victoria, 1979), to state that ‘basically Frankenstein is about the problematical nature of knowledge’. Though this interpretation is too radical, it reminds us usefully of the intellectual aspects of the work, and of Mary’s understanding of the British philosophers, Locke, Berkeley and Hume.
Leonard Woolf, in The Annotated Frankenstein,[2] argues that Frankenstein should be regarded as ‘psychological allegory’. This view is supported by David Ketterer, who thinks that therefore the novel cannot be science fiction. Godwin’s Caleb Williams is also psychological, or at least political allegory; it is nevertheless regarded, for example by Julian Symons in his history of the detective novel, Bloody Murder,[3] as the first crime novel. Many good SF novels are psychological allegory as well as being science fiction. Algis Budry’s Who? is an example.
By understanding the origins of ‘real’ science fiction, in which humanity seizes on new powers, we understand something of SF’s function; hence the importance of the question. Not to regard Frankenstein but, say The Time Machine or even Gernsback’s 1920’s magazines as the first SF—as many did only a few years ago—is to underestimate the capabilities of the medium. Alternatively, to claim that Gilgamesh or Homer or the satirical Lucian of Samosata started it all is to claim that almost anything is SF.
Mary Shelley wanted her story to ‘speak to the mysterious fears of our (i.e. humankind’s) nature’ … Is that not what SF still excellently does—or can do, for instance in Rob Holdstock’s Mythago Wood?
No doubt the novel gave voice to Mary Shelley’s own mysterious fears. What makes our flesh creep is not Boris Karloff or Christopher Lee in funny make-up, but the terror that there may be an enemy trapped within ourselves, waiting to leap out and betray us. This was the tyranny of Mary’s inner life. It was also the tyranny inherent in another scientific experiment, written later in the century, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).
[Jekyll] thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing: … that what was dead, and had no shape, should unsurp the offices of life.
In his book, In Frankenstein’s Shadow (OUP, 1987), Chris Baldick speaks of Stevenson’s short novel as ‘the clearest presentation of Victorian writers’ concern with ‘‘the divided self”. Mary Shelley’s fear of further sexual reproduction is embodied on the one hand in Victor, while her rage and loneliness is embodied on the other hand in the creature. But the game is not as simple as that.
That the destructive monster stands for one side of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s nature and the constructive Victor for the other is convincingly argued by another critic, Christopher Small, in Ariel Like a Harpy.[4] Mary’s passion for Shelley, rather than blinding her, gave her terrifying insight. Mary Shelley herself, in her Introduction to the 1831 edition of her novel, means us to read it as a kind of metaphor when she says ‘Invention … does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but it cannot bring into being substance itself’.
In referring to Frankenstein as a diseased creation myth (Billion Year Spree, 1973), I had in mind phrases with sexual connotations in the novel such as ‘my workshop of filthy creation’, used by Frankenstein of his secret work. Mary’s experiences showed her life and death closely intertwined. The genesis of her terrifying story came to her in a dream, in which she saw ‘the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy half vital motion’. The words suggest both a distorted image of her mother dying—in those final restless moments which often tantalizingly suggest recovery rather than its opposite—and the stirrings of sexual intercourse. ‘Powerful engine’ is a term which serves in pornography as a synonym for penis.
The critic Ellen Moers, in ‘Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother’,[5] disposes of the question of how a girl still in her teens could hit on such a horrifying idea (though the authoress was herself the first to raise it). Most female writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were spinsters and virgins; Victorian taboos operated against writing about childbirth. Mary experienced the fear, guilt, depression and anxiety which attend childbirth, particularly in situations such as hers, unmarried, her consort a married man with children by another woman, beset by debt in a foreign place. Only a woman, only Mary Shelley, could have written Frankenstein. As Beard’s girlfriend says, ‘She was the only one of the lot of them who knew about life’.
It is commonly accepted that the average first novel relies for its material on personal experience. We do not deny other interpretations—for a metaphor has many interpretations—by stating that Mary sees herself as the monster. This is why we pity it. She too tried to win her way into society. By running away with Shelley, she sought acceptance through love. The move carried her further from society; she became a wanderer, an exile, like Byron, like Shelley, like Trelawny, and Claire Clairmont, who spent many years abroad. Her mother’s death in childbirth must have caused her to feel that she, like the monster, had been born