Impressively, Mary Shelley started to write her masterpiece, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, when she was just eighteen years old. She had been in Geneva, and to stave off boredom due to having to stay indoors as a result of inclement weather, Shelley, along with stepsister Claire Clairmont and other literary greats Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, decided to have a fiction writing contest. The person who could compose the best ghost story wins. Mary Shelley triumphed. It was the beginning of a book-length work that would cement her place in the panoply of master wordsmiths.
The story, having been told again and again, is common enough. A mad scientist assembles the better parts of a selection of cadavers to form one whole – a man – horrific, unsightly, monstrous, but alive. At first, the creature seeks affection, but when the scientist, Victor, and society at large reject him, the creature seeks revenge through terror and violence. Victor dies. The creature self-exiles to perish in the Artic ice.
Scholars, naturally, have pored over this story, pointing out the creature’s symbolic connection to Adam, our first parent, in the Garden of Eden and how both never asked to be made – indeed, how both were forced to wander the world in hardship. Others have highlighted the creature’s symbolic value as it pertained to technological advancement. Frankenstein’s monster, they say, is the result of pride. Humankind rejects God and assumes for himself the role of creator. The creature is a composite of dead things. What happens when we attempt to take the place of God? Death begets deaths. It will not turn out well for us.
But the lesson came with the book’s first publication in 1820. World wars were still to come. The A-bomb. Genocides. Technologies and activities from the bloated egos of those who beheld God then looked upon their own abilities and the world around them and concluded that they could do better.
Mary Shelley, then, was not proclaiming anything new; rather, she was underscoring a tendency that had been there all along and continues to tempt individuals today, and it begins with the notion that salvation is something humankind can deliver on its own if only we can figure out how best to use our natural talents and technological advancements. History time and time again asserts that this is an immensely fallacious worldview. Ask anybody who has lived under communist rule, for example. The beacon of that failed social experiment was always an illusion, and what was true of Soviet Russia and what continues to be true for North Korea and Communist China will still be true for anybody who dreams that proletariat rule will eventually dissolve on its own, leaving behind an idyllic worker utopia. It did not happen. It will not happen. That creature continues to wreak havoc on untold numbers of souls.
The takeaway then? How should we read a masterpiece penned by a 19th century teenage winner of a writing contest? As a cautionary tale, to be sure. But one that must be received with a hefty dose of humility. Pride gets us twice: in choice and in consequence. We can determine the former, but we cannot determine the latter. That is a creature long freed from the operating table.
