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Monsters
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Spring 2002
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Frankenstein
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All
of the Following Images and text were provided by http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/frankenstein/frankhome.html
Mary Shelley
Corbis-Bettmann
Hollywood did not give birth to Frankenstein;
Mary Shelley did. More than a century before actor Boris
Karloff, helped by make-up artists, made the monster in his
image, came Shelley and her creation.
The mother of Frankenstein
came from the rarefied reaches of the British artistic and
intellectual elite. While Mary Shelley drew her inspiration
from a dream, she drew her story's premises about the nature
of life from the work of some of Europe's premier scientists
and thinkers. The sophisticated creature that billowed up from
her imagination read Plutarch and Goethe, spoke eloquently,
and suffered much.
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A
Dark and Stormy Night
In the summer of 1816, nineteen-year-old
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her lover, the poet Percy
Shelley (whom she married later that year), visited the poet
Lord Byron at his villa beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland.
Stormy weather frequently forced them indoors, where they and
Byron's other guests sometimes read from a volume of ghost
stories. One evening, Byron challenged his guests to each
write one themselves. Mary's story, inspired by a dream,
became Frankenstein.
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| To make his creature,
Victor Frankenstein "dabbled among the unhallowed damps
of the grave" and frequented dissecting rooms and
slaughterhouses. In Mary Shelley's day, as in our own, the
healthy human form delighted and intrigued artists,
physicians, and anatomists. But corpses, decaying tissue, and
body parts stirred almost universal disgust. Alive or dead,
whole or in pieces, human bodies arouse strong emotion--and
account for part of Frankenstein's enduring hold on us.
The time was the early 1970s. The
speaker was the mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, warning
against a proposed DNA laboratory at Harvard University.
Today, we almost expect to hear references to
"Frankenstein"--whether monster, scientist, novel,
film, image, or myth is often unclear--whenever some powerful
new technology poses risk to humankind or challenges our ideas
of what it means to be human. The atomic bomb, interspecies
organ transplants, genetic engineering, and cloning, among
many others, have each prompted such warnings; Mary Shelley's
hideous brainchild continues to embody and express our fears.
Baby Fae
UPI/Corbis-Bettmann
This infant, known only as Baby Fae
to protect her privacy, was born with a fatal heart defect. In
1984, she became the first infant to receive a baboon heart
transplant; she died twenty days later.ore Mary
Shelley's time to our own.
The Visible Human
The images like the above are
available from the National Library of Medicine's Visible
Human website.
In early 1997 word reached America
that Scottish researchers had cloned a
sheep--"Dolly." There was widespread excitement and
amazement at what these scientists had achieved. But there was
also troubled speculation.
Can we let scientists who hold the
kind of power cloning represents proceed without constraint?
Dare we embrace such a breakthrough's benefits heedless of its
risks? This time, society answered "no" to both
questions. Newspapers, magazines, and broadcast media seized
on the cloning issue. People wrote letters to the editor,
called talk shows, took to the Internet. President Clinton
asked the National Bioethics Advisory Commission to
investigate; in the meantime, he issued a moratorium on human
cloning.
Mary Shelley's scientist, Victor
Frankenstein, had done just as he pleased, in secret, with
disastrous consequences to himself and others. Scientists
involved in cloning in the United States, on the other hand,
are able to pursue their research only with the oversight of
an alert and knowledgeable citizenry and its social and
governmental institutions.
For those few months in early 1997,
cloning epitomized society's struggle to navigate the shoals
of unsettling scientific change. But as science more deeply
penetrates the secrets of nature, issues like cloning will
arise again and again. Each time they do, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
will sound its note of warning. |
Frankenstein:
The Modern Prometheus
Did I
request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?
Lines
from John Milton's Paradise Lost
From the title page of Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheuse, 1818
In Frankenstein, the intelligent
and sensitive monster created by Victor Frankenstein reads a
copy of Milton's Paradise Lost, which profoundly stirs
his emotions. The monster compares his situation to that of
Adam. Unlike the first man who had "come forth from the
hands of God a perfect creature," Frankenstein's creature
is hideously formed. Abandoned by Victor Frankenstein, the
monster finds himself "wretched, helpless, and alone."
With feverish excitement, Victor
Frankenstein pursues nature to her hiding places. By moonlight,
he gathers the body parts he needs by visits to the graveyard,
to the charnel house, to the hospital dissecting room and the
slaughterhouse. Although he finds his solitary preoccupation
repulsive, he is not deterred from his quest to restore life.
There Stalked a
Multitude of Dreams, 1969
Federico Castellon
Photographic reproduction of a lithograph
 National
Library of Medicine Collection
I collected the instruments of life
around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the
lifeless thing that lay at my feet. . . . His yellow skin
scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his
hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing . . . [it] formed a
more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of
the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set,
his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips.
Fra
Untitled,
1779
J.F. Declassan
Photographic reproduction of an illustration from Jacques
Gamelin (1739-1803),
Nouveau Recueil d'Osteologie et de Myologie, 1779
National Library of Medicine Collection
But where were my friends and
relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had
blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my
past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I
distinguished nothing. From my earliest remembrance I had been
as I then was in height and proportion. I had never yet seen a
being resembling me. . . . What was I?
The Monster
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, 1818
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Martin Irvine,
Georgetown University
http://www.georgetown.edu/irvinemj/technoculture/cyborgy/
Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein and Hollywood movie tradition:
Origin of the cyborg.
The first
cyborg as response to new technology: Industrial Revolution, the
body, and electricity. The
new body from reanimated (electrified) body parts birth
from asexual reproduction, bypassing female motherhood and sex
 (
Left: Advertisement for Thomas Edison's
1910 silent "Kinetoscope" movie, and movie poster for
James Whale's 1931 Universal Pictures Frankenstein.)
Check the Link below for some
Philisophical and Mythological contemplations related to
Frankenstein
http://www.georgetown.edu/irvinemj/technoculture/myths.html
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Below to See More Examples of
http://www.cityu.edu.hk/ls/research/frankenstein/item1.htm
  
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Boris
Karloff Being Transformed into the Monster
Hollywood
Just as Shelley's story
was shaped by the science of the day, so was Hollywood's
influenced by some of the scientific and pseudo-scientific
preoccupations of its day, including eugenics, robots,
and surgical transplants.
Images below provided by
http://www.filmsite.org/fran.html
 
 
 
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