By Gary K. Wolfe, PhD, Roosevelt University’s Evelyn T. Stone College of Professional Studies
Although Mary Shelley knew about the popular plays based on her novel, she couldn’t possibly have foreseen what Frankenstein would spawn over the next two centuries. But she wasn’t trying to predict the future in Frankenstein; she was thinking about what she thought was possible given the science that was available at the time…
The Story Begins
It was in 1816 that the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley brought his 18-year-old wife, Mary, to visit his friend Lord Byron at Byron’s summer home in Switzerland, called the Villa Diodati. The weather was consistently too rainy to go outdoors because of the bad weather caused by a nearby volcano. In response to their isolation, Byron suggested an indoor activity, a sort of contest. They would each make up a ghost story and read them to each other on the chilly evenings. Byron wrote a fragment of a poem. Another visitor, his personal doctor, John Polidori, wrote a reasonably scary story called “The Vampyre”, which has a history of its own; seventy years later, it would be one of the inspirations for Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula.
The teenaged Mary based her story on a nightmare that she’d experienced the night before; it was scary enough that the others urged her to turn it into a novel, which she did. The creature in Frankenstein is probably the most famous monster in history. It’s interesting to think that the most famous monster in history and the most famous vampire in history may have come about, in part, because of that same evening’s storytelling. However, Victor Frankenstein was a scientist who rejected those old supernatural ideas.
Mary’s monster was created not by magic or alchemy, but by the application of electricity in an attempt to reanimate dead tissue. Mary had read about the Galvani experiments on dead frogs, and she wondered, not unreasonably, if electricity might be used to reanimate dead tissue.
This is a transcript from the video series How Great Science Fiction Works. Watch it now, Wondrium.
She was a pretty sharp teenager and was unusually well-educated in the sciences; very possibly, she invented modern science fiction at the age of 18. At least that’s the claim of the British writer Brian W. Aldiss, who, in his history of science fiction, Trillion Year Spree, cited Frankenstein as the first work of actual science fiction and Mary Shelley as the mother of the entire genre.
The Story You Don’t See In Movies
Those who’ve never read Mary Shelley’s novel and who come to it with preconceptions from the many films produced may be surprised at several key elements that are barely touched upon in the films. For one, the novel begins with a series of letters from an adventurer named Robert Walton to his sister. Walton, who has undertaken an arctic journey in hopes of discovering the North Pole, sees himself as something of a scientist:
“I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle and may regulate a thousand celestial observations that require only this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities consistent forever.”
Already we have evidence of the role scientific rationalism is going to play in this novel. Walton hopes to discover the source of the Earth’s magnetism and to clarify some astronomical observations, but instead, after his ship is trapped in the ice, he sees a dogsled off in the distance driven by a huge creature. The next morning another sled appears, with only one dog remaining alive, burying the emaciated Victor Frankenstein.
The story that Victor tells Walton makes up the more familiar part of the novel. But even then it’s not until we get to chapter five that Victor brings his famous creation to life. These early chapters in which Victor describes his family history and his early life, his childhood meetings with his lifelong love Elizabeth, his close friend Henry Clerval, and his student days, are crucial to the claim that Frankenstein might be regarded as the first work of modern science fiction. Elizabeth and Henry will play crucial roles in the melodrama that follows, but it’s Victor’s education we’ll focus on.
As a teenager, Victor became enamored of what was then called natural philosophy, and in particular, with the work of the 16th-century German alchemist Cornelius Agrippa. But when Victor’s father sees this, he says, “Ah! Cornelius Agrippa, my dear Victor, do not waste your time on this, it is sad trash.”
Victor later wishes he had instead taken the time to explain to his father that the principles of Agrippa had been entirely exploded. A modern system of science had been introduced which possessed greater powers than the ancient ones because the latter were chimerical, while those of the former were real and practical.
After learning about electricity and galvanism, Victor says, “I at once gave up my former occupations, set down natural history and all its progeny as a deformed and abortive creation, and entertained the greatest disdain for a would-be science which could never even step within the threshold of real knowledge. In this mood of mind, I betook myself to the mathematics and the branches of study appertaining to that science as being built upon secure foundations, and so worthy of my consideration.”
Learn more about some of the most important names in 19th-century science fiction
A Key Moment
Victor’s rejects alchemy and what he calls natural philosophy in favor of modern science. That’s a key moment in his education and the history of science fiction. Historically, natural philosophy was something of a catchall term referring to those branches of philosophy that considered the natural world, but not always in terms of experimental results in the manner of modern scientific methods.
Instead, patterns of quasi-scientific or pseudo-scientific thought that had built up over centuries became a kind of dogma. This sometimes resulted in beliefs that, by today’s standards, seem supernatural. Victor abandons all this, and so does Mary Shelley.
“Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabble among the unhallowed damps of the grave?” asks Victor. When the creature himself is brought to life, he’s described as the demoniacal corpse to which Victor had so miserably given life. “A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch,” says Victor. Rejected by his creator, the creature flees.
…the creature even learns to read and write, and one of the first books he reads is John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which he takes as a true history…
The monster is ugly for sure, but the next surprise for the first-time readers of this novel was that he’s far from inarticulate. For several chapters in the middle of the novel, the creature meets with Victor and tells him of his own experiences, learning that fire can be a source of warmth and also a source of injury, for example, and learning the language by eavesdropping on a poor family, the De Laceys. Eventually, the creature even learns to read and write, and one of the first books he reads is John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which he takes as a true history since he hasn’t mastered the distinction between imagination and reality.
The creature’s hunger for learning makes for an interesting contrast with Victor’s education, not to mention Victor’s various failures as a father or a teacher of his creation. Having achieved a scientific breakthrough, Victor simply abandons it and all responsibility for it. , Wounded at this rejection, the creature demands that Victor create a companion—not an unreasonable request for a creature which has already learned that he’s fated to be an outcast from society, like Milton’s Satan. Victor at first agrees, but then later reneges on his promise.
… Shelley, at the astonishingly young age of 18 not only invented one of the archetypal monsters of science fiction, but one of its central concerns as well…
In the novel, it’s not difficult to understand why the creature becomes vengeful. Shelley, at the astonishingly young age of 18 not only invented one of the archetypal monsters of science fiction, but one of its central concerns as well: That a scientific education divorced from moral education, and that the abandonment or responsibility for one’s creations or achievements, could lead to disaster.
Learn more about some of the most poignant portrayals of utopian and dystopian societies and the social contexts that inspired them
The Creature Escapes into the Mainstream
Of course, it wasn’t long before Frankenstein’s creature got entirely out of Mary Shelley’s hands. By the time she returned to England a few years later, her novel was already a hit stage play focusing on the horror story and almost entirely overlooking the science. A century later, one of these stage adaptations by a now-forgotten playwright named Peggy Webling gave the name Frankenstein to the creature itself. The creature was never named in the novel, leading to a misunderstanding that persists until this day.
Unfortunately, this confusion has existed ever since, with more than 50 movies and numerous comics, spin-off novels, action figures, and even breakfast cereals, like Franken Berry. Shelley couldn’t have predicted that almost 200 years later her story would be distorted almost beyond recognition, including the film, I, Frankenstein from 2014, would earn a 3% rating on the Rotten Tomatoes movie rating website.
Science fiction in movies can sometimes oversimplify and even degrade the ideas of science fiction novels. The first Frankenstein movie was made by the Edison Studios, a unit of Thomas A. Edison’s manufacturing company, in 1910. But the most famous came 21 years later when Boris Karloff virtually made his career by starring as the creature in James Whale’s 1931 version from Universal Studios and was based on Webling’s stage play.
There’s no doubt that this version of Frankenstein is a classic horror film, and a very well made one, but almost no one, either now or in the 1930s, viewed it as a science fiction film despite all the elaborate apparatus in Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. The same is true of all the dozens of Frankenstein movies ever since, some estimates put them at 60, and many of these films have reintroduced those very supernatural elements that Shelley so carefully excluded from her novel. Frankenstein meets Dracula or Frankenstein meets the wolfman, or demons, or gargoyles, etc.
There’s certainly some irony in how the first science fiction novel, in the modern sense, to introduce a monster created by rational scientific experimentation rather than incantations or the intervention of the gods, gave rise to a whole industry of monsters of the irrational. Unfortunately, that has always been one of the fates of science fiction.
At the same time, many actual science fiction movies have taken Shelley’s original idea, the idea of a creation turning on its creator, and produced some interesting films exploring that idea, like the Terminator series. Technology, not monster tales, is the real heritage of Frankenstein. It’s telling that the social historian Herbert J. Muller titled his 1970 study “The Children of Frankenstein”, arguing about how reliance on technological solutions leads us to neglect human values.
Even though Mary Shelley knew about the popular plays based on her novel, she couldn’t possibly have foreseen what Frankenstein would spawn over the next two centuries. But like most of the major science fiction writers since, she wasn’t trying to predict the future in Frankenstein anyway; she was thinking about what she thought was possible given the science that was available at the time.
That, in a nutshell, is the main difference between science fiction and fantasy. Science fiction is about the possible given what we actually know, and fantasy is about the impossible.
Learn more about the little-known gems that shaped modern science fiction
Common Questions About Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at 18 years of age.
Frankenstein is a completely fictitious story with limited scientific information.
Yes. A Frankenstein family exists as the Franconian Dynasts of Breuberg.
Frankenstein is the name of the scientist in the book. The monster has no name.
