tag:theconversation.com,2011:/id/topics/frankenstein-19671/articlesFrankenstein – The Conversation2024-01-22T00:33:57Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2185912024-01-22T00:33:57Z2024-01-22T00:33:57ZMy favourite fictional character: Wintering’s grotesque widows reveal the ‘monstrous’ woman as wise and progressive<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562103/original/file-20231128-15-9grq5p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=18%2C9%2C6211%2C4138&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Phil Robson/Unsplash</span></span></figcaption></figure><blockquote>
<p>A coven of faces. All women, all weathered. Old, middle-aged, younger; one teenager among them. […] They sat and breathed in each other’s stale exhalations. Breath like the grave. Jessica couldn’t help thinking that they were rotting inside. And now she was one of them. She had started to decompose.</p>
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<p>The widows are foul, unwashed, rank. They gather at an old farmstead with peeling wooden boards and “holes in the veranda you could put a fist though”. They give off a “urinous fug of sweat and unwashed clothing”. A woman in “a brown shapeless dress, sweat-stained at the armpits” grows long, dark hairs from her upper lip and neck. Their partners have all disappeared. And so has Jessica’s.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562842/original/file-20231130-21-hy19jl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562842/original/file-20231130-21-hy19jl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562842/original/file-20231130-21-hy19jl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562842/original/file-20231130-21-hy19jl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562842/original/file-20231130-21-hy19jl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562842/original/file-20231130-21-hy19jl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562842/original/file-20231130-21-hy19jl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562842/original/file-20231130-21-hy19jl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>These women are from Kris Kneen’s novel <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/wintering">Wintering</a>, which includes one of my favourite depictions of monstrosity – a man–thylacine hybrid, a type of werewolf, that stalks remote southern Tasmania, turning people into monsters (in a recognisable <a href="https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/gothic.2019.0003">gothic tradition</a>). </p>
<p>But it’s not the man–thylacine monster that has stayed with me all these years. It’s the second type of (metaphorical) monster, the widows, who speak to me far more profoundly.</p>
<p>Initially, the stories these widows tell – about monster hunting – are easy for the novel’s protagonist, Jessica, to reject. They’re the kind of ramblings she might hear from people she’d stand next to at the liquor store and joke about afterwards.</p>
<p>But there’s more to their monstrosity than the grotesque. The widows present as a collection of disparate elements — a Frankenstein’s creature composed of fragments. They are a collective aberration, in a society bent on advancing women who meet social expectations while rejecting those who do not. </p>
<h2>What monsters mean</h2>
<p>Monsters – millennia old – continue to populate our imaginations. The gothic novels of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, have menaced shelves for hundreds of years.</p>
<p>More recently and closer to home, Lisa Fuller’s <a href="https://www.uqp.com.au/books/ghost-bird">Ghost Bird</a> and First Nations anthology <a href="https://www.uqp.com.au/books/this-all-come-back-now">This All Come Back Now</a> (edited by Mykaela Saunders) depict monsters from Indigenous perspectives, while novels such as Trent Jamieson’s <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/day-boy">Day Boy</a>, which inventively reimagines the vampire, breathe new life into gothic monsters.</p>
<p>As American philosopher and cultural theorist <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/431308">Noel Carroll points out</a>, monsters are not just physically threatening – they threaten and challenge our ways of thinking, too. And in this way, Kneen’s mismatched collection of othered women prompts me to reflect on our assumptions about women and the social norms we’ve constructed for them.</p>
<h2>Monsters represent the ‘other’</h2>
<p>I’m fascinated by the many ways we interpret monsters. Dracula represents concerns about <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3827794?searchText=&searchUri=&ab_segments=&searchKey=&refreqid=fastly-default%3A46f3d5f5ebb26c8d1ece805ef054b7d5&seq=2">racial otherness and imperial decline</a>. No, it’s about fears of <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337689065_Supernatural_surveillance_and_blood-borne_disease_in_Bram_Stoker%27s_Dracula_Reflections_on_mesmerism_and_HIV">AIDS infection and supernatural surveillance</a> – no, it’s about <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40754849">homoerotic desire</a>. Zombies <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1pwt6zr">illuminate</a> rampant consumerism, slave labour and, by pushing them to their limits, the intricate workings of human communities. (If you’ve read or watched The Walking Dead, this last one will be familiar to you.) </p>
<p>These readings attempt to project and inscribe a specific cultural meaning, belonging to a particular time and place, onto a monstrous creature. “The monstrous body is pure culture,” writes Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, who <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttsq4d">researches the cultural function of monsters</a>. It “exists only to be read”. And maybe this is why monsters preoccupy me.</p>
<p>Monsters often depict the so-called “other”: the outside, the beyond and all that we perceive as distant and distinct from us … but actually comes from within. Monsters, after all, always require a creator. They exist only because we design them, constructing them from our deepest fears.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Monsters exist because we design them – constructing them from our deepest fears.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Monsters reveal how societies define – and decide how to punish – difference and deviance. And by doing so, they also call into question <a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Ashgate-Research-Companion-to-Monsters-and-the-Monstrous/Mittman-Dendle/p/book/9781472418012%20we%20base%20these%20definitions%20on">the very social structures</a> on which those decisions are based.</p>
<p>By creating monsters, <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/classic-readings-on-monster-theory/99074C8C5753F78E0B6F677F7C19ECBF">we police</a> social boundaries and define community norms. In Wintering, Jessica does this by rejecting the widows. Initially, she sees them as something other: something to be avoided, something lesser.</p>
<p>At the same time, though, Kneen’s widows subvert and challenge – even reappropriate – their categorisation as “other”. They are women who don’t meet conventional beauty standards, who flout social expectations. They are women who are older, single, who are sole parents. In short, they’re characters who <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-16/history-of-female-monsters-greek-mythology-australia-indonesia/102856324">transgress ideas of traditional womanhood</a> – a transgression traditionally punished by derision and exclusion. </p>
<p>But Jessica’s initial repulsion gradually shifts into acceptance and eventually respect. Later, she’ll view widow elder Marijam as a window onto her future self: </p>
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<p>[…] she felt dizzy, seeing her future staring into her eyes. And it wasn’t so bad really. Tough, solitary, self-sufficient. Wise? Maybe.</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/bram-stokers-dracula-bats-garlic-disturbing-sexualities-and-a-declining-empire-186392">Bram Stoker's Dracula: bats, garlic, disturbing sexualities and a declining empire</a>
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<h2>Reframing ‘monstrous’ women as wise</h2>
<p>Literature is a powerful vehicle for revealing and naturalising different ways of thinking. I first read Wintering after having children, when I was experiencing a newfound respect for the wisdom and strength of my own mother – and by extension, all those who have carried, lost, terminated, delivered or nurtured babies. </p>
<p>It was a time when I really started to unpack monstrous tropes for what I think they are – particularly those of the female monster, so often <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780203820513/monstrous-feminine-barbara-creed">maligned for their reproductive experiences</a>. Maybe this is why Kneen’s creation spoke to me so profoundly (especially Marijam, the wise, wrinkled old lady, who’s quick on a walking stick and slick on a monster hunt).</p>
<p>Kneen’s reframing of the widows contributes to our ongoing process of dismantling internalised misogyny. It alerts me to a different view of those women society might have us trivialise or ignore. Certainly, this is the journey Jessica takes in the novel, eventually viewing herself as a member of the widows. </p>
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<p>“Well,” the old lady said, her smile, unbelievably, wrinkling her face even more. “We are glad you are with us, love.”</p>
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<p>Wintering’s widows leave me thinking about the women in my own life – about my own coven – and how they’re strong and wise in ways not always recognised or endorsed by the mainstream. </p>
<p>These covens have seen me through. They have decimated the idea we’re all write-offs to some degree, depending on how near or far we are from meeting “ideal” social expectations. They have shown me that together, we can be monstrously powerful. </p>
<p>And they’ve shown me it’s my job to pass this knowledge forward: the way Marijam passes hers to Jessica. </p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-clearings-investigation-of-the-family-invites-us-to-ask-whats-the-appeal-and-risk-of-crime-stories-based-on-real-events-206514">The Clearing's investigation of The Family invites us to ask: what's the appeal – and risk – of crime stories based on real events?</a>
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<h2>More work to do</h2>
<p>Unpicking harmful tropes, of course, is an unfinished task. We have more work to do, especially for women whose identities include further marginalisation surrounding disability, race, class and gender. Monsters are particularly well equipped to help us do this. </p>
<p>Wiradjuri writer Jeanine Leane, for instance, writes about <a href="https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/saunders-this-all-come-back-now/">how Indigenous speculative fiction</a> – including fiction containing monsters – “unwrites settler control and knowing of the future and the present and the past” and re-establishes First Nations ways of knowing, being and telling.</p>
<p>There’s another, more literal, monster in Wintering – the man–thylacine werewolf – which skilfully picks at the threads of coercive control, domestic abuse and violence. It deserves its own analysis. </p>
<p>But it’s the monstrous widows who have remained with me, long after finishing the novel. They’ve invited me to reject the label of “monstrous” woman as an indication of shame or exclusion – and to reassign it as a symbol of progress.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/218591/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martine Kropkowski does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Monsters reveal how societies define and punish deviance. Wintering’s widows make me think about the women I know who are strong and wise in ways neither recognised nor endorsed by the mainstream.Martine Kropkowski, PhD Candidate and Casual Academic, The University of QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2120362023-10-25T15:48:37Z2023-10-25T15:48:37ZGothic getaways: the rise and evolution of ‘dark tourism’ festivals<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553456/original/file-20231012-23-38rraq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C701%2C1531%2C999&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A participant of the 'Stokerland' event in Dublin, in front of St Patrick's Cathedral, goes the extra mile, with an ornate costume and even stilts. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Luisa Golz</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>That Halloween is a commercial event is a platitude akin to saying that the sky is blue, or that chocolates are widely eaten on Valentines Day. Mention October 31st and the mind instantly fills with images of trick-or-treating and the inevitable paraphernalia of pumpkins, polyester cobwebs, and witch hats. Despite its superficiality today, the origins of Halloween can be traced back to the Celts and their <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samhain">Samhain</a> celebrations, which marked the end of the autumn harvest and the beginning of winter. It was also a day when, according to Celtic beliefs, the veil between the living and the dead is particularly permeable.</p>
<p>Mexico’s <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/top-ten-day-of-dead-mexico"><em>el Día de los Muertos</em></a> (Day of the Dead) is another tradition with deep roots, possibly combining pre-Colombian rites and European celebrations such as All Saints Day. In Asia, Ghost Festivals, part of both Taoist and Buddhist traditions, are when people pay tribute to their deceased ancestors, who are believed to be able to return briefly from the afterlife.</p>
<p>A more recent addition to the “spooky” calendar of events are Gothic festivals, which could be considered a form of “dark tourism”. The name comes from the inspiration they take from Gothic literature, which has its roots in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Notable authors included Mary Shelly, Walter Scott, Edgar Allen Poe, and especially Bram Stoker, whose classic <em>Dracula</em> was published in 1897. Common themes included monsters, murders, and mysteries, with an undercurrent of dread and fear. </p>
<h2>Dracula rising</h2>
<p>One of the better known “dark tourism” festivals is the <a href="https://www.whitbygothweekend.co.uk/">Whitby Goth Weekend</a>, which takes place in the Yorkshire town where Stoker spent his holidays and from which he drew inspiration for <em>Dracula</em>. In the novel, Stoker gives a detailed account of the town’s layout, architecture and spooky atmosphere. Since the mid-1990s the bi-annual event attracts participants from a range of subcultures as well as mainstream visitors. Many of the “new” participants do not necessarily identify as “Goth”. Instead, some simply observe the spectacle, others come to celebrate Halloween and many belong to the <a href="https://theconversation.com/goth-steampunk-and-the-state-of-subculture-today-68192">“Steampunk” subculture</a>.</p>
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<img alt="Attendees of the Whitby Goth Weekend, some costumed." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555842/original/file-20231025-25-m7kafh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555842/original/file-20231025-25-m7kafh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555842/original/file-20231025-25-m7kafh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555842/original/file-20231025-25-m7kafh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555842/original/file-20231025-25-m7kafh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555842/original/file-20231025-25-m7kafh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555842/original/file-20231025-25-m7kafh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Crowds at the Whitby Gothic Weekend are often part of the spectacle.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Luisa Golz</span>, <span class="license">Fourni par l'auteur</span></span>
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<p>Stoker’s life and work are also celebrated in Dublin, the city where he was born in 1847. The <a href="https://www.bramstokerfestival.com/">Bram Stoker Festival</a> is a playful celebration of his most famous literary creation. It includes the family-friendly theme park <a href="https://www.bramstokerfestival.com/sessions/stokerland-2023/">“Stokerland”</a>, literary walking tours, and lectures about his life and legacy. The festival attracts everyone from families looking to entertain their children over the Halloween weekend to Gothic fiction enthusiasts.</p>
<p>While firm numbers are hard to come by, the popularity of these and other Gothic festivals appears to be growing. At the Bram Stoker Festival, attendance increased from approximately 25,000 in 2019 to more than 49,000 in 2022, recovering from a two-year hiatus over the Covid-19 pandemic. This cuts against the common belief that such events only attract niche audiences, members of a particular subculture, or those with an interest in Gothic fiction or literature. </p>
<h2>When participation becomes co-creation</h2>
<p>At the Whitby Goth Weekend, the boundary between spectator and participant becomes particularly permeable. Many are there for the alternative music events, shopping at the local markets, or socialising. Others take it to the next step, dress up in highly creative outfits, parading through Whitby’s cobbled streets, and retracing the imagined footsteps of Dracula. </p>
<p>These attendees become part of the spectacle, as many of those who visit come to marvel at the costumed creatures in Whitby’s Gothic atmosphere. This intersection of participation and observation draws in many photographers when the festival takes place in April and October. Participants pose for photos, while others actively perform in this staged environment.</p>
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<img alt="Tents at the Stokerland event in Dublin, Ireland." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555846/original/file-20231025-21-au0jrt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555846/original/file-20231025-21-au0jrt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555846/original/file-20231025-21-au0jrt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555846/original/file-20231025-21-au0jrt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555846/original/file-20231025-21-au0jrt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555846/original/file-20231025-21-au0jrt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555846/original/file-20231025-21-au0jrt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">The ‘Stokerland’ event in Dublin, Ireland, is more family oriented.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Luisa Golz</span>, <span class="license">Fourni par l'auteur</span></span>
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<p>As a result, the dressed-up participants do not simply experience the festival as passive attendees, they become a festival attraction themselves, co-creating the festival experience. Some simply enjoy the performance aspects, while others use them to express what they see as their “true” identities. Festival organisers and local businesses enable this experience, which takes place within the town’s music venues, retail spots and hospitality spaces.</p>
<h2>Selling darkness</h2>
<p>What makes such events that are initially appealing to a niche audience become more popular among wider audiences? While some may remind us of long-standing traditions, as is the case of the Celtic celebration Samhain, others show clear signs of commodification. </p>
<p>As Gothic festival content can be co-created, so too is the marketing. With smartphones in every hand, festival-goers capture immense amounts of visual material, which they then show on social media. In this way, they spread the word about Gothic festivals, and in turn traditional media outlets can pick up the trend. </p>
<p>Thus participant’s online word-of-mouth recommendations work hand-in-hand with traditional forms of advertising. Together, they become an integral part of the “commodification of darkness”, making them an under-recognised component of festival marketing.</p>
<h2>Dark tourism destinations</h2>
<p>Ready for a spooky escape? Here are five personal recommendations for the ultimate Gothic getaway.</p>
<ul>
<li><p><a href="https://www.whitbygothweekend.co.uk/">Whitby Goth Weekend</a>, Whitby, United Kingdom, October 27-29.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://www.bramstokerfestival.com/">Bram Stoker Festival</a>, Dublin, Ireland, including <a href="https://www.bramstokerfestival.com/sessions/stokerland-2023/">Stokerland</a>, 28-30 October.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://www.festivalofthedead.com/">Salem Festival of the Dead</a>, Massachusetts, United States; the month of October.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://derryhalloween.com/">Derry Halloween Festival</a>, Derry, Northern Ireland, Oct 28-31.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://www.wave-gotik-treffen.de/english/">Wave Gotik Treffen</a>, Leipzig, Germany, May 26-29, 2024.</p></li>
</ul><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/212036/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Luisa Golz ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.</span></em></p>A recent addition to the “spooky” calendar of events are Gothic festivals, inspired by Gothic literature classics such as “Dracula”.Luisa Golz, PhD candidate and co-owner of Desmond Tours, Technological University of the ShannonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2157252023-10-17T16:42:47Z2023-10-17T16:42:47ZFoe review: a Frankenstein tale of the not-so-distant future<p>Science fiction is never really about the future. The best sci-fi makes use of an imagined future world to provide a critical distance from our current time; <a href="https://oxfordre.com/literature/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-136">to ask questions about what we are doing rather than where we are going</a>. </p>
<p>Director Garth Davis’ Foe, adapted from the <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-intangible-thing-that-makes-us-human/">novel</a> by Iain Reid, is sci-fi for a future that has already happened. Filmed in Australia, where the existing landscape does a good job of standing in for the aftermath of the climate apocalypse, Foe is a forceful meditation on relationships, technological determinism and the power of advanced capitalism to, literally, construct identities.</p>
<p>Henrietta (Saoirse Ronan) and Junior (Paul Mescal) live in isolation in the American midwest. The year is 2065 and a powerful tech corporation called OuterSense is spearheading migration to The Installation, an orbiting artificial world designed as refuge from a dying planet Earth. </p>
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<p>Junior, it transpires, has won a lottery that he wasn’t aware of entering and has been chosen for a two-year sojourn on The Installation. All the couple needs to do is make temporary room in their home for Terrance (Aaron Pierre), an OuterSense scientist. Terrance will study Junior and his interactions with Hen in order to craft a “biological replacement” – a lab-grown substitute husband complete with Junior’s personality and physiology. What, we are primed to ask, could possibly go wrong?</p>
<h2>Not quite human</h2>
<p>The techno-doppelgänger is a standard trope of sci-fi and one of its most successful in terms of posing questions about the human condition. There are nods here to Ridley Scott’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/under-the-influence-of-the-cult-film-blade-runner-62874">Blade Runner</a> and Bryan Forbes’ 1975 <a href="https://ew.com/movies/2017/10/23/the-stepford-wives-1975-history/">adaptation</a> of Ira Levin’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/suburban-living-did-turn-women-into-robots-why-feminist-horror-novel-the-stepford-wives-is-still-relevant-50-years-on-186633">novel The Stepford Wives</a> in which a group of men replace their feminist wives with compliant cyborgs. Both, I think, were sci-fi cinema landmarks because they had scripts that offered acting talent the chance to play not-quite-humans while questioning what “human” means in the first place, but without costumes or CGI.</p>
<p>Foe asks similar questions. Keeping the techno-wizardry to a minimum and presenting a recognisable world in a strange context allows audiences to gain a new perspective on their own realities. This is known as <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-handbook-of-stylistics/defamiliarisation/AB4D8F62116F2926E34D82D517CE63FA">defamiliarisation</a>, which is a feature of the sci-fi genre that enables strangeness to emerge through subtle clues in the script, rather than futuristic or other-worldly sets. </p>
<p>In Foe, flying cars (again reminiscent of Blade Runner) make a brief and sudden appearance towards the end to reinforce the sense that the future – if there is one – is elsewhere. And like both Blade Runner and The Stepford Wives, the costume design for Foe gestures towards the past and a time when, at least in the US, the future looked both hi-tech and utopian.</p>
<p>Where Foe stands out is that it allows nuanced performances from Ronan and Mescal that strike just the right balance between the easy conformity of a happy relationship and the unsettling friction that emerges as Junior begins to suspect that he is being manipulated. My personal standout, however, would go to Aaron Pierre as Terrance who plays his part with just a hint of the kind of indulgent benevolence you might reserve for a child.</p>
<h2>Who’s the monster?</h2>
<p>Most of the action takes place in Hen and Junior’s house, which is both a sanctuary and a prison. It provides shelter from the extreme weather but is also where Hen and Junior are trapped as OuterSense asserts control over them. It is also a laboratory where, it gradually emerges, Terrance is leading an experiment to harvest parts of Junior’s personality in order to create an AI copy just a bit more pliable to Henrietta’s concerns than the original.</p>
<p>In this sense, Foe is, like much sci-fi, a sort-of retelling of Mary Shelley’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/eight-things-you-need-to-know-about-mary-shelleys-frankenstein-93030">Frankenstein</a> story, but with an evil corporation in the role of transgressing scientist. OuterSense is clearly representative of the kinds of <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarwantsingh/2017/11/20/transhumanism-and-the-future-of-humanity-seven-ways-the-world-will-change-by-2030/?sh=309acbb27d79">transhumanist</a> startups supported by tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel. </p>
<p>Transhumanists believe that, with planet Earth doomed, our only recourse is to employ bioengineering to manufacture the next stage of evolution. <a href="https://www.communication-generation.com/transhuman-companies/#:%7E:text=A%3A%20Transhumanist%20companies%20are%20organizations,merging%20of%20humans%20and%20machines.">Transhumanist companies</a> are developing techniques that will enable us to live forever in a paradise beyond the stars, but only if we have sufficient medical insurance. In Foe, OuterSense offers insurance against a dying world with Hen and Junior the lab rats who will prove the concept and attract the necessary financial investment.</p>
<p>While OuterSense fights to “save” humanity, throughout the film we see rhinoceros beetles. These serve as a subtle cinematic device that remind us there are other lifeforms better placed than us to inherit the future.</p>
<p>Victor Frankenstein’s monster threatens that he will be with him on his wedding night. What Foe asks us to consider is whether we’ve already made room for the monster and allowed it to take up residence in our homes. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Debra Benita Shaw has previously received funding from the British Academy. </span></em></p>Set in the not-so-distant future, Foe poses questions about humanity and what it means to be human in the face of environmental collapse.Debra Benita Shaw, Associate professor, University of East LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1755202022-06-19T19:53:09Z2022-06-19T19:53:09ZFrankenstein: how Mary Shelley’s sci-fi classic offers lessons for us today about the dangers of playing God<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452995/original/file-20220318-12943-b0cfo5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster.</span> </figcaption></figure><p><em>In our Guide to the Classics series, experts explain key works of literature.</em></p>
<hr>
<p><a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/frankenstein-9780241425121">Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus</a>, is an 1818 novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Set in the late 18th century, it follows scientist Victor Frankenstein’s creation of life and the terrible events that are precipitated by his abandonment of his creation. It is a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_fiction">Gothic novel</a> in that it combines supernatural elements with horror, death and an exploration of the darker aspects of the psyche. </p>
<p>It also provides a complex critique of Christianity. But most significantly, as one of the first works of science-fiction, it explores the dangers of humans pursuing new technologies and becoming God-like.</p>
<h2>The celebrity story</h2>
<p>Shelley’s Frankenstein is at the heart of what might be the greatest celebrity story of all time. Shelley was born in 1797. Her mother, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wollstonecraft">Mary Wollstonecraft</a>, author of the landmark A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), was, according to that book’s introduction, “the first major feminist”. </p>
<p>Shelley’s father was <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/godwin/">William Godwin</a>, political philosopher and founder of “philosophical anarchism” – he was anti-government in the moment that the great democracies of France and the United States were being born. When she was 16, Shelley eloped with radical poet <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley">Percy Shelley</a>, whose <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias">Ozymandias</a> (1818) is still regularly quoted (“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”).</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A pretty woman sitting between two men, looking anxious." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452987/original/file-20220318-19-lnulc8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452987/original/file-20220318-19-lnulc8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452987/original/file-20220318-19-lnulc8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452987/original/file-20220318-19-lnulc8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452987/original/file-20220318-19-lnulc8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452987/original/file-20220318-19-lnulc8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452987/original/file-20220318-19-lnulc8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Douglas Walton Percy Shelley Elsa Lanchester Mary Shelley and Gavin Gordon Lord Byron in the film The Bride of Frankenstein.</span>
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<p>Their relationship seems to epitomise the Romantic era itself. It was crossed with outside love interests, illegitimate children, suicides, debt, wondering and wandering. And it ultimately came to an early end in 1822 when Percy Shelley drowned, his small boat lost in a storm off the Italian coast. The Shelleys also had a close association with the poet <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Byron">Lord Byron</a>, and it is this association that brings us to Frankenstein.</p>
<p>In 1816 the Shelleys visited Switzerland, staying on the shores of Lake Geneva, where they were Byron’s neighbours. As Mary Shelley tells it, they had all been reading ghost stories, including Coleridge’s <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43971/christabel">Christabel</a> (Coleridge had visited her father at the family house when Shelley was young), when Byron suggested that they each write a ghost story. Thus 18-year-old Shelley began to write Frankenstein.</p>
<h2>The myth of the monster</h2>
<p>The popular imagination has taken Frankenstein and run with it. The monster “Frankenstein”, originally “Frankenstein’s monster”, is as integral to Western culture as the characters and tropes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. </p>
<p>But while reasonable continuity remains between Carroll’s Alice and its subsequent reimaginings, much has been changed and lost in the translation from Shelley’s novel into the many versions that are rooted in the popular imagination.</p>
<iframe width="100%" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TBHIO60whNw" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>There have been many varied adaptations, from <a href="https://youtu.be/TBHIO60whNw">Edward Scissorhands</a> to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGzc0pIjHqw">The Rocky Horror Picture Show</a> (see <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/feb/11/the-20-best-frankenstein-films-ranked">here</a> for a top 20 list of Frankenstein films). But despite the variety, it’s hard not to think of the “monster” as a zombie-like implacable menace, as we see in the <a href="https://youtu.be/BN8K-4osNb0">trailer to the 1931 movie</a>, or a lumbering fool, as seen in <a href="https://youtu.be/nBV8Cw73zhk">the Herman Munster incarnation</a>. Further, when we add the prefix “franken” it’s usually with disdain; consider “frankenfoods”, which refers to genetically modified foods, or “frankenhouses”, which describes contemporary architectural monstrosities or bad renovations. </p>
<p>However, in Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein’s creation is far from being two-dimensional or contemptible. To use the motto of the Tyrell corporation, which, in the 1982 movie Bladerunner, creates synthetic life, the creature strikes us as being “more human than human”. Indeed, despite their dissimilarities, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoAzpa1x7jU">the replicant Roy Batty in Bladerunner reproduces Frankenstein’s creature’s intense humanity</a>. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452988/original/file-20220318-10625-19lfw2e.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452988/original/file-20220318-10625-19lfw2e.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=244&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452988/original/file-20220318-10625-19lfw2e.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=244&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452988/original/file-20220318-10625-19lfw2e.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=244&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452988/original/file-20220318-10625-19lfw2e.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=307&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452988/original/file-20220318-10625-19lfw2e.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=307&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452988/original/file-20220318-10625-19lfw2e.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=307&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Roy Batty as a replicant in Blade Runner, delivering his famous tears in rain speech.</span>
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<h2>Some key elements in the plot</h2>
<p>The story of Victor Frankenstein is nested within the story of scientist-explorer Robert Walton. For both men, the quest for knowledge is mingled with fanatical ambition. The novel begins towards the end of the story, with Walton, who is trying to sail to the North Pole, rescuing Frankenstein from <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0c/Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Das_Eismeer_-_Hamburger_Kunsthalle_-_02.jpg/1280px-Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Das_Eismeer_-_Hamburger_Kunsthalle_-_02.jpg">sea ice</a>. Frankenstein is being led northwards by his creation towards a final confrontation. </p>
<p>The central moment in the novel is when Frankenstein brings his creation to life, only to be immediately repulsed by it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Victor Frankenstein, like others in the novel, is appalled by the appearance of his creation. He flees the creature and it vanishes. After a hiatus of two years, the creature begins to murder people close to Frankenstein. And when Frankenstein reneges on his promise to create a female partner for his creature, it murders his closest friend and then, on Frankenstein’s wedding night, his wife.</p>
<h2>More human than human</h2>
<p>The real interest of the novel lies not in the murders or the pursuit, but in the creature’s accounts of what <em>drove</em> him to murder. After the creature murders Frankenstein’s little brother, William, Frankenstein seeks solace in the Alps – in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderer_above_the_Sea_of_Fog#/media/File:Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Wanderer_above_the_sea_of_fog.jpg">sublime nature</a>. There, the creature comes upon Frankenstein and eloquently and poignantly relates his story. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452989/original/file-20220318-36080-1qgz6sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452989/original/file-20220318-36080-1qgz6sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452989/original/file-20220318-36080-1qgz6sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452989/original/file-20220318-36080-1qgz6sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452989/original/file-20220318-36080-1qgz6sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1087&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452989/original/file-20220318-36080-1qgz6sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1087&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452989/original/file-20220318-36080-1qgz6sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1087&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">New York Public Library</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>We learn that the creature spent a year secretly living in an outhouse attached to a hut occupied by the recently impoverished De Lacey family. As he became self-aware, the creature reflected that, “To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being.” But when he eventually attempted to reveal himself to the family to gain their companionship, he was brutally driven from them. The creature was filled with rage. He says, “I could … have glutted myself with their shrieks and misery.” More human than human.</p>
<p>After Victor Frankenstein dies aboard Walton’s ship, Walton has a final encounter with the creature, as it looms over Frankenstein’s body. To the corpse, the creature says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Oh Frankenstein! Generous and self-devoted being! What does it avail that I now ask thee to pardon me? I, who irretrievably destroyed thee by destroying all thou lovedst.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The creature goes on to make several grand and tragic pronouncements to Walton. “My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy; and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change, without torture such as you cannot even imagine.” And shortly after, about the murder of Frankenstein’s wife, the creature says: “I knew that I was preparing for myself a deadly torture; but I was the slave, not the master, of an impulse, which I detested, yet could not disobey.”</p>
<p>These remarks encourage us to ponder some of the weightiest questions we can ask about the human condition:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What is it that drives humans to commit horrible acts? Are human hearts, like the creature’s, fashioned for ‘love and sympathy’, and when such things are withheld or taken from us, do we attempt to salve the wound by hurting others? And if so, what is the psychological mechanism that makes this occur?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And what is the relationship between free will and horrible acts? We cannot help but think that the creature remains innocent – that he is the slave, not the master. But then what about the rest of us? </p>
<p>The rule of law generally blames individuals for their crimes – and perhaps this is necessary for a society to function. Yet I suspect the rule of law misses something vital. Epictetus, the stoic philosopher, considered such questions millennia ago. He asked: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>What grounds do we have for being angry with anyone? We use labels like ‘thief’ and ‘robber’… but what do these words mean? They merely signify that people are confused about what is good and what is bad.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Unintended consequences</h2>
<p>Victor Frankenstein creates life only to abandon it. An unsympathetic interpretation of Christianity might see something similar in God’s relationship with humanity. Yet the novel itself does not easily support this reading; like much great art, its strength lies in its ambivalence and complexity. At one point, the creature says to Frankenstein: “Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.” These and other remarks complicate any simplistic interpretation.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/453199/original/file-20220321-21-1fulrev.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/453199/original/file-20220321-21-1fulrev.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453199/original/file-20220321-21-1fulrev.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453199/original/file-20220321-21-1fulrev.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453199/original/file-20220321-21-1fulrev.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453199/original/file-20220321-21-1fulrev.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453199/original/file-20220321-21-1fulrev.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption"></span>
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<p>In fact, the ambivalence of the novel’s religious critique supports its primary concern: the problem of technology allowing humans to become God-like. The subtitle of Frankenstein is “The Modern Prometheus”. In the Greek myth, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus">Prometheus</a> steals fire – a technology – from the gods and gives it to humanity, for which he is punished. In this myth and many other stories, technology and knowledge are double-edged. Adam and Eve eat the apple of knowledge in the Garden of Eden and are ejected from paradise. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, <a href="https://youtu.be/RWCvMwivrDk">humanity is born when the first tool is used</a> – a tool that augments humanity’s ability to be violent.</p>
<p>The novel’s subtitle is referring to Kant’s 1755 essay, “The Modern Prometheus”. In this, Kant observes that: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is such a thing as right taste in natural science, which knows how to distinguish the wild extravagances of unbridled curiosity from cautious judgements of reasonable credibility. From the Prometheus of recent times Mr. Franklin, who wanted to disarm the thunder, down to the man who wants to extinguish the fire in the workshop of Vulcanus, all these endeavors result in the humiliating reminder that Man never can be anything more than a man.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Victor Frankenstein, who suffered from an unbridled curiosity, says something similar: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind … If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>And also: “Learn from me … how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.” </p>
<p>In sum: be careful what knowledge you pursue, and how you pursue it. Beware playing God.</p>
<p>Alas, history reveals the quixotic nature of Shelley and Kant’s warnings. There always seems to be a scientist somewhere whose dubious ambitions are given free rein. And beyond this, there is always the problem of the unintended consequences of our discoveries. Since Shelley’s time, we have created numerous things that we fear or loathe such as the atomic bomb, cigarettes and other drugs, chemicals such as DDT, and so on. And as our powers in the realms of genetics and artificial intelligence grow, we may yet create something that loathes us.</p>
<p>It all reminds me of sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson’s relatively recent (2009) remark <a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780191826719.001.0001/q-oro-ed4-00016553">that</a>, “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/175520/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jamie Q Roberts does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The possibilities of ‘more human than human’ artificial intelligence and the dangers of playing God and are not new – they’re the subjects of one of the world’s first science-fiction novels.Jamie Q Roberts, Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1722012021-11-25T14:36:05Z2021-11-25T14:36:05ZThe Brontës, the Shelleys, Kingsley and Martin Amis: new research suggests literary relatives share similar writing styles<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433712/original/file-20211124-23-h33ebd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=31%2C25%2C4217%2C2796&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Brontë, by their brother Branwell (c. 1834).</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bront%C3%AB_family#/media/File:The_Bront%C3%AB_Sisters_by_Patrick_Branwell_Bront%C3%AB_restored.jpg">National Portrait Gallery, London</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>From <a href="https://theconversation.com/jane-austen-200-years-on-why-we-still-love-her-heroes-heroines-and-houses-80451">Jane Austen</a> to <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-you-dont-need-to-write-much-to-be-the-worlds-bestselling-author-75261">James Patterson</a>, every author has their own way of writing. And that writing is often discussed in terms of “style”. Essentially, style refers to “how” something is written – it is more concerned with form than content. So when, for example, someone remarks that they “enjoyed the story” but “didn’t like how it was written”, they are commenting on the style. </p>
<p>If you want to see an example of different styles in action, just compare something like <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-hobbit-by-jrr-tolkien?gclid=CjwKCAiA4veMBhAMEiwAU4XRr7cigsxJpjSWLMLikwn2NxblATlqMVFk_t1WnvPNZqTvN-GgjSuXbxoCjJMQAvD_BwE">The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien</a> to <a href="https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/an-introduction-to-ulysses">Ulysses by James Joyce</a>. The Hobbit is written for a general audience, it’s a good old-fashioned story told through clear, accessible language. Ulysses is a more difficult read, full of obscure terms, complex phrasing, and cryptic references to other materials. </p>
<p>Obviously, Joyce still tells a story in Ulysses (and a great one at that), but he isn’t solely concerned with telling his tale. Joyce is also using the novel’s structure and language to experiment with form and challenge established ideas of what literature should look like.</p>
<p>But while style differs across authors, it would seem it doesn’t change so much across writers who are part of the same family. In <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2021.101620">my recent research</a>, I looked at the literary styles of authors related to each other to see how their writing compared. Most members of the same literary families that I looked at tended to write in similar ways.</p>
<h2>Literary families</h2>
<p>Examining an author’s style based on their tendency to choose particular words is increasingly done with a process called “stylometry”. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9wzrem5NkM">Stylometry</a> uses computers to statistically measure the most frequent words in a text. Authors are consistent with the regularity with which they use certain words, so counting words can give an indication as to how a particular author or group of authors tend to write. </p>
<p>Stylometry is most often used for authorship attribution, answering (usually unfounded) questions around who really wrote a particular novel, as has been the case with <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqaa031">Wuthering Heights</a> and <a href="https://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/70">Go Set A Watchman</a>.</p>
<p>But stylometry isn’t just useful in cases where a text’s authorship is disputed, it can also be used to analyse stylistic similarity more generally. And literary families present a unique opportunity to study why authors write in certain ways because relatives tend to develop within similar social environments. </p>
<p>In my <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2021.101620">research</a>, I used stylometry to look at the writing styles of the following literary families: Kingsley and Martin Amis (father-son), Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë (sisters), William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley (father-mother-daughter), A.S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble (sisters), W. Somerset and Robin Maugham (uncle-nephew), John le Carré and Nick Harkaway (father-son). </p>
<p>The results show that relatives involved usually wrote in similar styles. Without exception, each of the authors tested clustered with the other members of their family. This means that the computer was able to tell different families apart, based on their respective writing styles, with 100% accuracy. The next stage would be doing a larger study with more families to see if this trend holds more widely.</p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2021.101620">This recent experiment</a> was prompted by my previous <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqaa031">study on the Brontës</a> (perhaps one of the most famous literary families), which shows that, compared with a selection of their peers, the Brontë siblings all share a remarkably similar literary style. This is perhaps unsurprising when you consider the extent to which the Brontës are known to have <a href="https://doi.org/10.1179/1474893215Z.000000000148">collaborated</a>, but this trend also seems consistent across other families. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/432991/original/file-20211121-26-ucmwwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A dendrogram showing stylometric clusters of literary families" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/432991/original/file-20211121-26-ucmwwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/432991/original/file-20211121-26-ucmwwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/432991/original/file-20211121-26-ucmwwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/432991/original/file-20211121-26-ucmwwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/432991/original/file-20211121-26-ucmwwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/432991/original/file-20211121-26-ucmwwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/432991/original/file-20211121-26-ucmwwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">A stylometric analysis of several literary families represented on a ‘dendrogram’. Dendrograms use lines to represent the similarity between whatever is being measured. The shorter the line between authors, the more similar their style.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The</span></span>
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<p>The creative collaboration seen with families like the Brontës is common practice among relatives who all write. But it’s still significant to see that familial influence is so strong that it can be detected using stylometric techniques. This could indicate that essential characteristics of an author’s voice might be inherently connected to their formative environments and upbringing. </p>
<h2>Nature v nurture</h2>
<p>But such findings also revive the (perhaps tired) debate between nature and nurture. Mary Shelley, who is best known for writing <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/13/frankenstein-at-200-why-hasnt-mary-shelley-been-given-the-respect-she-deserves-">Frankenstein</a>, clusters alongside her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. </p>
<p>While the stylistic similarity between the other literary families analysed might be attributed to collaboration, Mary Shelley never knew her mother as she died ten days after Mary was born. And yet, they still share similar literary styles. </p>
<p>Her mother’s only novel was published before she began her relationship with Godwin, so it is unlikely that his influence is simply connecting the female members of his family. Again, perhaps Mary Shelley had a similar upbringing to Mary Wollstonecraft. </p>
<p>Or perhaps there is something else beyond nurture, something genetic that simply passed from mother to daughter. While such an explanation seems highly unlikely, what is undeniable is that Mary Shelley, without having known her mother, grew to resemble her literary style. </p>
<p>Perhaps then, being an author is just in one’s blood.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/172201/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James O'Sullivan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>New research shows that literary relatives tend to share a similar writing style.James O'Sullivan, Lecturer in Digital Arts & Humanities, University College CorkLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1540822021-05-17T05:22:55Z2021-05-17T05:22:55ZDownloading our thoughts to the mainframe may be the stuff of science fiction — but humans have been imagining it for centuries<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398569/original/file-20210504-18-maei50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C4096%2C2029&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">In Altered Carbon, bodies just become 'sleeves' for downloaded human brains to occupy.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Netflix</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Modern <a href="https://humanityplus.org/philosophy/transhumanist-declaration/">transhumanism</a> is the belief that, in the future, science and technology will enable us to transcend our bodily confines. Scientific advances will transform humans and, in the process, eliminate ageing, disease, unnecessary suffering, and our earthbound status. </p>
<p>Artistic representations of humans uploading their minds to cybernetic devices or existing independently of their bodies abound. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2261227/">Altered Carbon</a> (2018-2020) we are introduced to a future where human consciousness can be downloaded onto devices called “cortical stacks”. This technology reduces physical bodies to temporary vehicles or “sleeves” for these storage devices which are implanted and swapped between various bodies. </p>
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<p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/">The Matrix</a> (1999, 2003) depicts humans living in a digital simulation while their bodies remain inactive in liquid-filled pods. The artist <a href="https://www.agsa.sa.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/2020-adelaide-biennial-australian-art-monster-theatres/stelarc/">Stelarc</a> explores our transhuman future in “monstrous” creations examining the boundaries between human and machine. </p>
<p>But these speculations are not limited to art and science fiction. </p>
<p>The public intellectual Sam Harris and world-renowned physicist David Deutsch imagine a future where we are able to <a href="https://samharris.org/podcasts/finding-our-way-in-the-cosmos/">download conscious states</a> and live in matrix-like virtual simulations. The historian <a href="https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/a-big-history-of-the-future/">Yuval Noah Harari</a> suggests, in the not too distant future, these technological advancements will transform us into new godlike immortal species. </p>
<p>Some thinkers, like the philosopher <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3542867?refreqid=excelsior%3A5222f242f58f682b666eff74abe59aaa&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">Nick Bostrom</a>, believe we might already be living in a computer simulation. Elon Musk is developing brain-machine interfaces to <a href="https://theconversation.com/neuralinks-monkey-can-play-pong-with-its-mind-imagine-what-humans-could-do-with-the-same-technology-158787">connect humans to computers</a>.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-could-our-entire-reality-be-part-of-a-simulation-created-by-some-other-beings-146840">Curious Kids: could our entire reality be part of a simulation created by some other beings?</a>
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<p>These imaginings of our transhumanist future take many divergent forms, but they share the idea science will enable us to free our minds from bodily constraints. </p>
<p>But these ideas aren’t modern. In fact, the desire to transcend our nature is a continuation of the Enlightenment ideal of human perfectibility: today’s ideas of transhumanism can be directly traced back to two 18th century thinkers. </p>
<h2>Marquis de Condorcet: life will have ‘no assignable limit’</h2>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Condorcet">Marquis de Condorcet</a> (1743-1794) was a French revolutionary who believed science would bring about unprecedented progress. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398567/original/file-20210504-22-2ca3tv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Oil painting of an old man." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398567/original/file-20210504-22-2ca3tv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398567/original/file-20210504-22-2ca3tv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=741&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398567/original/file-20210504-22-2ca3tv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=741&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398567/original/file-20210504-22-2ca3tv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=741&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398567/original/file-20210504-22-2ca3tv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=932&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398567/original/file-20210504-22-2ca3tv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=932&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398567/original/file-20210504-22-2ca3tv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=932&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Marquis de Condorcet, painted between 1789-1794.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>Condorcet was a mathematician who aimed to apply a scientific model to the social and political dimensions of society. He thought improvement in education would produce more knowledge, which in turn would further improve education — creating an ever upward spiral of progress. </p>
<p>His reception speech to the French Academy in 1782 captured the optimistic spirit of the age. He declared: “the human mind will seem to grow and its limits to recede” with the advancement of science. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketch_for_a_Historical_Picture_of_the_Progress_of_the_Human_Mind">Outlines of an Historical View</a> (1795) he wrote: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Would it even be absurd to suppose […] a period must one day arrive when death will be nothing more than the effect either of extraordinary accidents, or of the flow and gradual decay of the vital powers; and that the duration of the middle space, of the interval between the birth of man and this decay, will itself have no assignable limit?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Condorcet imagined science would lead to humans transcending their bodies and, in the process, attaining immortality. </p>
<h2>William Godwin: the extinction of anguish, and passion</h2>
<p>Enlightenment thinker <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Godwin">William Godwin</a> (1756-1836) was convinced science would lead to human perfectibility. </p>
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<span class="caption">William Godwin painted by James Northcote in 1802.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>Godwin was a political radical whose sympathies lay with contemporary French revolutionaries like Condorcet. He believed an expansion in knowledge would lead to improvements in our understanding, and thereby increase our control over matter. </p>
<p>Godwin outlined this vision in his book <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enquiry_Concerning_Political_Justice">Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness</a> (1793). </p>
<p>He wrote that human passions and desires would become extinct along with disease, anguish, melancholy and resentment. This was a future in which people no longer had sex nor reproduced. The Earth instead would be populated by disembodied humans who have achieved immortality. </p>
<p>“There will be no war”, wrote Godwin, “no crimes, no administration of justice as it is called, and no government”. Scientific progress for Godwin not only meant we would be rid of ailments plaguing the physical body, but also those affecting society. </p>
<p>For Godwin, like Condorcet, human perfectibility was unlimited and, more importantly, achievable.</p>
<p>Godwin’s daughter, Mary Shelley, went on to write one of the earliest literary works to depict transhumanism, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45035018-frankenstien">Frankenstein</a> (1818). Her vision of a scientific future was much less rosy.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/frankenstein-at-200-and-why-mary-shelley-was-far-more-than-the-sum-of-her-monsters-parts-90206">Frankenstein at 200 and why Mary Shelley was far more than the sum of her monster's parts</a>
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<h2>Science fact or science fiction?</h2>
<p>Godwin and Condorcet imagined humans progressing towards perfect harmony, transcending bodily existence and achieving immortality without desires nor suffering.</p>
<p>Like their modern transhumanist descendants, they believed these radical transitions would occur in their own lifetime. <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00033790.2020.1823479">Critics</a> thought their work to be fantastical; more fiction than fact.</p>
<p>As we now know, the critics were right: neither Godwin’s nor Condorcet’s extraordinary visions came to fruition. It has been more than 200 years, and we are still waiting for science to deliver us from our bodies.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/neuralinks-monkey-can-play-pong-with-its-mind-imagine-what-humans-could-do-with-the-same-technology-158787">Neuralink's monkey can play Pong with its mind. Imagine what humans could do with the same technology</a>
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<p>This does not seem to deter transhumanist punters. Will we become the immortal human-machine gods, as Yuval Noah Harari predicts? Or will we still be waiting to transcend our fleshy bodies in the 23rd century? </p>
<p>Only time will tell. But, for those of us who prefer to hold on to our bodies for a little while longer, the fate of Godwin and Condorcet’s visions should be good news.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/154082/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Henry-James Meiring does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Leaving our earthly bodies and living forever as a machine isn’t just a thing of modern science fiction. These transhumanist ideas date back to the 18th century.Henry-James Meiring, PhD Candidate, The University of QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1185532019-08-25T11:29:14Z2019-08-25T11:29:14ZMary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ legacy lives through women’s prison poetry project<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/289118/original/file-20190822-170922-1vzf77i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C98%2C995%2C564&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'Frankenstein' is traditionally read as a critique of science — but also portrays many forms of imprisonment.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>August 30th is Mary Shelley’s 222nd birthday, an occasion on which to reflect upon the enduring legacy of her 1818 novel, <em>Frankenstein</em>. It’s also a chance to reflect on the ways that scholars feted the book for the 200th anniversary of its publication. </p>
<p>In 2018, major celebrations for the novel’s bicentennial anniversary included scholarly projects and events. These included <a href="https://frankenreads.org">worldwide readings of the full text of the novel</a>, <a href="https://romantics200.org/event/k-saabyron-society-symposium-the-publication-of-frankenstein/">conferences</a> and <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/frankenstein">new editions</a>. </p>
<p>However, some communities have traditionally been excluded from such processes of knowledge creation and commemoration. For example, what role have incarcerated people had in shaping how our broader culture or scholars think about important writing or literature? </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1035212630737256450"}"></div></p>
<p>In the essay <em>Prison Writing/Writing Prison in Canada</em>, Deena Rymhs and Roxanne Rimstead note that “… <a href="https://canlit.ca/article/prison-writingwriting-prison-in-canada/">the writing of prisoners is almost entirely absent from the literary archives that we construct</a>.” Rymhs is a professor in the department of English language and literatures at University of British Columbia and Rimstead is a professor in the department of arts, languages and literatures at Sherbrooke University.</p>
<p>The omission finds an uncanny parallel in Shelley’s novel, which is traditionally read as a critique of science — but also portrays many forms of imprisonment, a theme often overlooked.</p>
<p>These oversights became a pressing concern for me on several accounts. I’m both a literature professor at the University of New Brunswick, and <em>Frankenstein</em> is a beloved novel I regularly teach. I am also involved in education and critically rethinking our society’s engagement with people impacted by the criminal justice system with federally incarcerated women at the <a href="https://www.csc-scc.gc.ca/institutions/001002-3006-eng.shtml">Grand Valley Institution for Women</a> in Kitchener, Ont. </p>
<h2>Walls to Bridges program</h2>
<p>Since 2016, I have facilitated a number of small, in-prison poetry workshops at the Grand Valley Institution with the Walls to Bridges Collective. This network of incarcerated and non-incarcerated women serves as a think tank for the the national <a href="http://wallstobridges.ca">Walls to Bridges program</a> <a href="https://students.wlu.ca/programs/social-work/msw/walls-to-bridges.html">based at Laurier University’s Faculty of Social Work</a>. </p>
<p>Walls to Bridges is a university-based program that brings together campus-enrolled students (on the “outside”) with incarcerated ones (on the “inside”) to study together in term-length courses. Every student gets course credit. (You might think of it as the Canadian equivalent of the American <a href="https://www.insideoutcenter.org">Inside/Out Prison Exchange Program</a>).</p>
<p>In Canada, federal prisons only provide up to high-school education. Post-secondary and vocational educational opportunities are rare because they fall outside of Correctional Service Canada’s mandate. </p>
<p>Walls to Bridges has offered courses at 10 different universities across Canada, and has gathered data, including <a href="http://wallstobridges.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Impact-on-Students-RED.pdf">student feedback</a>, on the positive impact of these courses. I became aware that most courses fell under sociology, social work and criminology. There was an interest in growing arts-based programming.</p>
<h2>Frankenstein in public</h2>
<p>I teamed up with colleagues Sue Sinclair, a poet and professor of literature at University of New Brunswick, Shoshana Pollack, professor of social work at Laurier University and the director of Walls to Bridges, and the Walls to Bridges Collective. We developed and directed a public humanities project titled <a href="https://erasingfrankenstein.org"><em>Erasing Frankenstein</em></a>. </p>
<p>Why public humanities? In creating an original, collaborative artistic adaptation of <em>Frankenstein</em>, we involved broad prison, campus and community voices. We also hoped to launch an inclusive and creative corrective to the ongoing exclusion in both scholarship and literary culture of the voices of women who are incarcerated. One definition of public humanities work is the following:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“ … scholarly or creative activity integral to a faculty member’s academic area. It encompasses different forms of making knowledge about, for, and with diverse publics and communities. Through a coherent and purposeful sequence of activities, it contributes to the public good and yields artifacts of public and intellectual value.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That’s as defined by a network of American academics who champion the role of public research in the arts and humanities through their <a href="http://imaginingamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/TTI_FINAL.pdf">Imagining America Tenure Team Initiative</a>.</p>
<p><em>Erasing Frankenstein</em> involved a unique exchange between University of New Brunswick university students, federally incarcerated women and non-incarcerated members from the Walls to Bridges Collective. </p>
<h2>Erasing</h2>
<p>Participants collectively created what we know as first-ever adaptation or translation of <em>Frankenstein</em> into a contemporary book-length erasure poem — a poem created by piggybacking on an existing text. Some words are erased or blacked out, and what’s left is the poem. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="InstagramEmbed" data-react-props="{"url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/BsPSrYmBpb_","accessToken":"127105130696839|b4b75090c9688d81dfd245afe6052f20"}"></div></p>
<p>Well-known examples of erasures include <em><a href="http://www.tomphillips.co.uk/humument">A Humument</a></em> by British artist Tom Phillips, <em><a href="https://www.wavepoetry.com/products/a-little-white-shadow">A Little White Shadow</a></em> by American author Mary Ruefle and <em>The Place of Scraps</em> by Nisga'a writer Jordan Abel. Abel’s book uses <a href="http://www.jordanabel.ca/the-place-of-scraps/">erasure to develop a new narrative</a> out of an early 20th century ethnographer’s text. </p>
<p>Creating an erasure poem can be a way of engaging with and commenting on the themes of the source text. Erasure-as-art questions what or who is allowed to be in the foreground, what or who is reduced to the background and why — and explores how <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2013.863493">negation can be creatively used to open new possibilities</a>. </p>
<p>Participants were each responsible for transforming <em>Frankenstein</em> page-by-page, to make a single collective creation we bound together. We made individual pages by blacking out or colouring over words with crayons, pastels, markers, pencil crayons and whiteout tape. We negated any unwanted words to form a new poem from the remaining words. Then, the team collected and reordered the selectively-erased pages. </p>
<h2>Being accepted</h2>
<p>Public exhibitions of the completed work took place at <a href="https://erasingfrankenstein.org/kitchener/">the Kitchener Public Library</a>, the Fredericton Public Library and University of New Brunswick Harriet Irving Library. Pages from the project appear in <a href="https://thefiddlehead.ca/issue/276"><em>The Fiddlehead</em></a>. </p>
<p>Sharing <em>Erasing Frankenstein</em> artwork with an even greater public through publications, public talks and exhibitions allowed participants meaningful participation in public life. It also allowed for a critical engagement with the histories and present realities of the criminal justice system. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/288735/original/file-20190820-170914-8qdcfn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/288735/original/file-20190820-170914-8qdcfn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=913&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288735/original/file-20190820-170914-8qdcfn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=913&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288735/original/file-20190820-170914-8qdcfn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=913&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288735/original/file-20190820-170914-8qdcfn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1147&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288735/original/file-20190820-170914-8qdcfn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1147&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288735/original/file-20190820-170914-8qdcfn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1147&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Page from ‘Erasing Frankenstein.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Elizabeth Effinger)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This is especially important to those incarcerated, many of whom will be released into our communities at the end of their sentences and face <a href="https://uottawa.scholarsportal.info/ottawa/index.php/jpp/article/view/2284">the challenges of reintegration, such as being accepted, building networks and finding employment.</a></p>
<p>In the end, to use Shelley’s famous words, we made our own wonderful “hideous progeny” out of hers. </p>
<p>Greater opportunities should exist for diverse audiences to experience positive, collaborative campus-to-community exchanges. </p>
<p>I hope projects like this encourage the university to see itself as part of a larger community, and to think about the meaningful connections and exchanges that can occur with community partners, including people who are imprisoned. </p>
<p>Publicly showcasing the creative, collaborative work of incarcerated people helps those on the outside hear these marginalized voices in our communities. Such projects are also one way we can redress the lack of attention to prison writing in literary culture.</p>
<p>[ <em>Like what you’ve read? Want more?</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/ca/newsletters?utm_source=TCCA&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=likethis">Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/118553/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Elizabeth Effinger receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). This project was made possible by SSHRC Connection Grant funding, and support from Walls to Bridges, the Grand Valley Institution for Women, the University of New Brunswick, Kitchener Public Library, Fredericton Public Library, Broadview Press, and The Fiddlehead.</span></em></p>In the project Erasing Frankenstein, students, educators and incarcerated women collaborated to created an erasure poem of Mary Shelley’s classic text, and publicly showcase their work.Elizabeth Effinger, Associate professor, University of New BrunswickLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1052362018-10-29T11:49:01Z2018-10-29T11:49:01ZFantasmagoriana: the German book of ghost stories that inspired Frankenstein<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242705/original/file-20181029-76413-65m8ga.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Frontispiece from the original German version of Fantasmagoriana.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Schnorr von Carolsfeld</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The story of how Frankenstein was born is well known, and largely relies on the account given by Mary Shelley in her preface to the <a href="https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/1831v1/intro">1831 edition</a> to her novel. She and her (soon-to-be) husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, were summering on the shores of Lake Geneva and close by Lord Byron and his personal physician John Polidori. It was 1816 – the so-called “<a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/1816-the-year-without-summer-excerpt/">year without a summer</a>” and the inclement weather kept the party indoors, reading ghost stories as a pastime. </p>
<p>In one of the most <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/mary-shelley-frankenstein-and-the-villa-diodati">famous propositions in literary history</a>, Lord Byron suggested that each of them should try their hand at writing a supernatural tale. Ironically, it was the two novice writers, Mary Shelley and Polidori, whose works have endured. Almost out of nothing, the pair invented modern horror. Polidori’s story, The Vampyre, <a href="https://theconversation.com/older-than-dracula-in-search-of-the-english-vampire-105238">would inspire Bram Stoker</a> 80 years later to write Dracula, while the 18-year-old Shelley wrote Frankenstein – which also has a good claim to be the first science fiction novel.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/older-than-dracula-in-search-of-the-english-vampire-105238">Older than Dracula: in search of the English vampire</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The book the Shelleys, Byron, and Polidori were reading during their trip was called <a href="http://www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=1214">Fantasmagoriana</a>. It was an anthology of eight stories of the supernatural published in Paris in 1812 but translated from the German. No indication of authors or of original sources was given and readers were invited to think of stories as of embellished versions of real supernatural cases. The title joyfully played with this ambiguity, evoking the kind of shows, popular at the time, which were known as <a href="https://www.historyextra.com/period/stuart/phantasmagoria-creating-the-ghosts-of-the-enlightenment/">phantasmagorias</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242519/original/file-20181026-7050-925rrh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242519/original/file-20181026-7050-925rrh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242519/original/file-20181026-7050-925rrh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242519/original/file-20181026-7050-925rrh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242519/original/file-20181026-7050-925rrh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242519/original/file-20181026-7050-925rrh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242519/original/file-20181026-7050-925rrh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Victorian depiction of a phantasmagoria, or magic lantern show.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">William Heath (1794–1840)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Based on the magic lantern (an ancestor of cinema), these shows enabled audiences to see ghosts floating in the air, devils appearing and disappearing, young girls transforming into skeletons. In the end, the impresario came upon the stage, explaining it was all a trick. But in Paris, around 1798-99, such shows had been briefly shut down by the police, when rumours had spread that the phantasmagoria could bring the king, Louis XVI, <a href="https://www.historyextra.com/period/stuart/phantasmagoria-creating-the-ghosts-of-the-enlightenment/">back from the dead</a>. The book read by our holidaying writers proposed a similar gallery of horrors. As Mary Shelley recalled:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There was the History of the Inconstant Lover, who […] found himself in the arms of the pale ghost of her whom he had deserted. There was the tale of the sinful founder of his race, whose miserable doom it was to bestow the kiss of death on all the younger sons of his fated house […] he advanced to the couch of the blooming youths, cradled in healthy sleep.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s worth looking into the <a href="http://mentalfloss.com/article/87949/read-ghost-story-anthology-inspired-three-classic-scary-stories">influence of such stories</a> on Frankenstein. At some point in Shelley’s novel, Victor Frankenstein dreams to hold in his arms the “pale ghost” of his bride to be, which may remind us of the story Shelley referred to as <a href="http://www.romtext.org.uk/frankenstein-and-fantasmagoriana-story-4-la-morte-fiancee/">History of the Inconstant Lover</a> (in truth, La Morte Fiancée or The Corpse Bride, by <a href="http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100447843">Friedrich August Schulze</a>). </p>
<p>Frankenstein’s “Creature” is a gigantic being who causes the extermination of an entire family – a plot device that may have been inspired by what she calls “<a href="http://www.romtext.org.uk/fantasmagoriana-2/">tale of the sinful founder of his race</a>” who “bestows the kiss of death” on his descendants (actually a story called <a href="https://archive.org/stream/talesofdead00utte#page/n17/mode/2up">Le Portraits de Famille</a> – or The Family Portraits, by <a href="http://sf-encyclopedia.uk/fe.php?nm=apel_johann_august">Johann August Apel</a>). </p>
<p>But if we read Frankenstein with Fantasmagoriana in mind, we see that the influence of those stories is definitely more profound than a simple inspiration.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242521/original/file-20181026-7062-1vx3sfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242521/original/file-20181026-7062-1vx3sfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242521/original/file-20181026-7062-1vx3sfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242521/original/file-20181026-7062-1vx3sfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242521/original/file-20181026-7062-1vx3sfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242521/original/file-20181026-7062-1vx3sfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242521/original/file-20181026-7062-1vx3sfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Illustration from the 1922 edition of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Cornhill Publishing Company</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>While trying to describe in the <a href="https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/1831v1/intro">preface to the book</a>: “How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea,” Shelley describes her mental processes as a phantasmagorical show. Imagination, in her words, is a screen onto which stories project impressions. At night, in her bed, Shelley sees “with shut eyes, but acute mental vision” the central scene of her novel to be – the idea of the novel comes first as an image, not as a plot. </p>
<p>It is an image she knows perfectly not to be true – but which is nonetheless frightening: like the ghosts of phantasmagoria shows or of Fantasmagoriana, which were explained to be tricks of the mind, but still left the imperceptible feeling of the uncanny. In Les Portrais de Famille, Shelley read of a ghost “advanc(ing) to the couch of the blooming youths, cradled in healthy sleep” – half asleep she imagines a man in bed, beholding “the horrid thing” he created “stand(ing) at his bedside, opening his curtains”. The story read, in other words, mirrors and anticipates the story to be written. </p>
<p>At her bedside, Shelley too is visited by a ghost – in this case, the ghost of the novel: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/105236/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Fabio Camilletti's research on Fantasmagoriana is funded by the British Academy through a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant.</span></em></p>The story of how Mary Shelley dreamed up Frankenstein is famous. Less well-known, however, is the reading material that inspired her to write.Fabio Camilletti, Head of Italian Studies, University of WarwickLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1050762018-10-26T09:33:52Z2018-10-26T09:33:52ZFrankenstein: the real experiments that inspired the fictional science<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242246/original/file-20181025-71032-1uut1t2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Giovanni Aldini's experiments with a human corpse.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://wellcomecollection.org/works/ev95hgj9?query=L0023895&page=1">Wellcome Collection</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>On January 17 1803, a young man named George Forster was <a href="https://www.exclassics.com/newgate/ng464.htm">hanged for murder</a> at Newgate prison in London. After his execution, as often happened, his body was carried ceremoniously across the city to the Royal College of Surgeons, where it would be publicly dissected. What actually happened was rather more shocking than simple dissection though. Forster was going to be electrified. </p>
<p>The experiments were to be carried out by the Italian natural philosopher Giovanni Aldini, the nephew of Luigi Galvani, who discovered “<a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/luigi-galvani-theory-animal-electricity-1991692">animal electricity</a>” in 1780, and for whom the field of galvanism is named. With Forster on the slab before him, Aldini and his assistants started to experiment. The Times newspaper reported:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>On the first application of the process to the face, the jaw of the deceased criminal began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process, the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>It looked to some spectators “as if the wretched man was on the eve of being restored to life.”</p>
<p>By the time Aldini was experimenting on Forster the idea that there was some peculiarly intimate relationship between electricity and the processes of life was at least a century old. Isaac Newton <a href="http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/NATP00051">speculated along such lines</a> in the early 1700s. In 1730, the English astronomer and dyer Stephen Gray demonstrated the principle of electrical conductivity. Gray suspended an <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=geTQAQAAQBAJ&lpg=PA168&ots=pDcPRGSXpj&dq=stephen%20gray%20suspended%20orphans&pg=PA168#v=onepage&q&f=false">orphan boy on silk cords in mid air</a>, and placed a positively charged tube near the boy’s feet, creating a negative charge in them. Due to his electrical isolation, this created a positive charge in the child’s other extremities, causing a nearby dish of gold leaf to be attracted to his fingers. </p>
<p>In France in 1746 Jean Antoine Nollet entertained the court at Versailles by causing a company of 180 royal guardsmen to jump simultaneously when the charge <a href="https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/magazine/leyden-jar-battery">from a Leyden jar</a> (an electrical storage device) passed through their bodies. </p>
<p>It was to defend his uncle’s theories <a href="https://www.academia.edu/10267364/Luigi_Galvani_and_the_Debate_on_Animal_Electricity">against the attacks of opponents</a> such as <a href="https://www.theiet.org/resources/library/archives/exhibition/medical/debate.cfm">Alessandro Volta</a> that Aldini carried out his experiments on Forster. Volta claimed that “animal” electricity was produced by the contact of metals rather than being a property of living tissue, but there were several other natural philosophers who took up Galvani’s ideas with enthusiasm. Alexander von Humboldt <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=XTk2_iYk_HEC&lpg=PA12&ots=7kozvFjCEX&dq=humboldt%20animal%20tissues&pg=PA11#v=onepage&q&f=false">experimented with batteries</a> made entirely from animal tissue. Johannes Ritter even carried out electrical experiments <a href="https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/revpolarography/54/2/54_2_99/_pdf">on himself</a> to explore how electricity affected the sensations. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242243/original/file-20181025-71023-1jhvznv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242243/original/file-20181025-71023-1jhvznv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242243/original/file-20181025-71023-1jhvznv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242243/original/file-20181025-71023-1jhvznv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242243/original/file-20181025-71023-1jhvznv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242243/original/file-20181025-71023-1jhvznv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242243/original/file-20181025-71023-1jhvznv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242243/original/file-20181025-71023-1jhvznv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Actor Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster, 1935.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Frankenstein%27s_monster_(Boris_Karloff).jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The idea that electricity really was the stuff of life and that it might be used to bring back the dead was certainly a familiar one in the kinds of circles in which the young Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley – the author of Frankenstein – moved. The English poet, and family friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was fascinated by the connections between electricity and life. Writing to his friend the chemist Humphry Davy after hearing that he was giving lectures at the Royal Institution in London, <a href="http://inamidst.com/coleridge/letters/letter397">he told him how</a> his “motive muscles tingled and contracted at the news, as if you had bared them and were zincifying the life-mocking fibres”. Percy Bysshe Shelley himself – who would become Wollstonecraft’s husband in 1816 – was another <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1279684/">enthusiast for galvanic experimentation</a>.</p>
<h2>Vital knowledge</h2>
<p>Aldini’s experiments with the dead attracted considerable attention. Some commentators poked fun at the idea that electricity could restore life, laughing at the thought that Aldini could “<a href="http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/roynotesrec/63/3/263.full.pdf">make dead people cut droll capers</a>”. Others took the idea very seriously. Lecturer Charles Wilkinson, who assisted Aldini in his experiments, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=IpM5AAAAcAAJ&dq=%E2%80%9Can%20energising%20principle%2C%20which%20forms%20the%20line%20of%20distinction%20between%20matter%20and%20spirit%2C%20constituting%20in%20the%20great%20chain%20of%20the%20creation%2C%20the%20intervening%20link%20between%20corporeal%20substance%20and%20the%20essence%20of%20vitality.%E2%80%9D&pg=PA298#v=onepage&q&f=false">argued that</a> galvanism was “an energising principle, which forms the line of distinction between matter and spirit, constituting in the great chain of the creation, the intervening link between corporeal substance and the essence of vitality”. </p>
<p>In 1814 the English surgeon John Abernethy made much the same sort of claim in the annual <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=d3lJAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=john+abernethy&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjV99TW0KHeAhUCU1AKHRbkAbw4ChDoAQguMAE#v=onepage&q=john%20abernethy&f=false">Hunterian lecture</a> at the Royal College of Surgeons. His lecture <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9xYFAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=william+lawrence+abernethy&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiMh7Oe0aHeAhUFJVAKHbRICXAQ6AEIWzAJ#v=onepage&q=william%20lawrence%20abernethy&f=false">sparked a violent debate</a> with fellow surgeon William Lawrence. Abernethy claimed that electricity was (or was like) the vital force while Lawrence denied that there was any need to invoke a vital force at all to explain the processes of life. Both Mary and Percy Shelley certainly knew about this debate – Lawrence was their doctor.</p>
<p>By the time Frankenstein was published in 1818, its readers would have been familiar with the notion that life could be created or restored with electricity. Just a few months after the book appeared, the Scottish chemist Andrew Ure carried out his own electrical experiments on the body of Matthew Clydesdale, who had been executed for murder. <a href="http://scienceonstreets.phys.strath.ac.uk/new/Galvanisation.html">When the dead man was electrified</a>, Ure wrote, “every muscle in his countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful action; rage, horror, despair, anguish, and ghastly smiles, united their hideous expression in the murderer’s face”.</p>
<p>Ure reported that the experiments were so gruesome that “several of the spectators were forced to leave the apartment, and one gentleman fainted”. It is tempting to speculate about the degree to which Ure had Mary Shelley’s recent novel in mind as he carried out his experiments. His own account of them was certainly quite deliberately written to highlight their more lurid elements.</p>
<p>Frankenstein might look like fantasy to modern eyes, but to its author and original readers there was nothing fantastic about it. Just as everyone knows about artificial intelligence now, so Shelley’s readers knew about the possibilities of electrical life. And just as artificial intelligence (AI) invokes a range of responses and arguments now, so did the prospect of electrical life – and Shelley’s novel – then. </p>
<p>The science behind Frankenstein reminds us that current debates have a long history – and that in many ways the terms of our debates now are determined by it. It was during the 19th century that people started thinking about the future as a different country, made out of science and technology. Novels such as Frankenstein, in which authors made their future out of the ingredients of their present, were an important element in that new way of thinking about tomorrow. </p>
<p>Thinking about the science that made Frankenstein seem so real in 1818 might help us consider more carefully the ways we think now about the possibilities – and the dangers – of our present futures.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/105076/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Iwan Morus receives funding from the AHRC as part of the Unsettling Scientific Stories project. </span></em></p>Frankenstein might look like fantasy to modern eyes, but to its author and original readers there was nothing fantastic about it.Iwan Morus, Professor of History, Aberystwyth UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1042782018-10-03T13:11:46Z2018-10-03T13:11:46ZWhy true horror movies are about more than things going bump in the night<p>Critics seem to have been shocked by horror films in the past few years. Of all people, they shouldn’t be, as shock is one of the cheap tricks for which they have always denigrated horror movies. Shock is easy and effective, but it’s vulgar. And scary movies are an amusement ride that rack up tension towards a peak, then drop us into a trough with a scream. It’s the same ride every time and we loop back to where we began. They are that mechanical.</p>
<p>But films such as Ari Aster’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jun/01/hereditary-review-horror-toni-collette-brilliant-fear">Hereditary</a>, Jordan Peele’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2017/nov/17/get-out-golden-globes-race-horror-comedy-documentary-jordan-peele">Get Out</a>, and Robert Eggers’ <a href="https://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-witch">The Witch</a> have changed that. They have been praised in the mainstream press for their lofty ambitions, their social consciences, and their worthiness. The critical impulse, however, has been to file them away as categorical errors: they can’t possibly be horror films, because horror films are just thrill rides. </p>
<p>But horror stories have long grappled with deeper themes of human experience. Frankenstein is rich with questions about the meaning of nurture and of empathy. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde explores the duality of man. “Shock horror” films are different, feeling much closer to pornography than art – the story doesn’t matter, it’s about the extremity of what you see. Indeed, after pornography, horror is the highest-grossing genre of film. No wonder critics attempted to move the films they like out of such company and rehabilitate them, as has been done with <a href="https://lithub.com/10-works-of-literary-horror-you-should-read/">classic horror literature</a>.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239148/original/file-20181003-52684-16ud0ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239148/original/file-20181003-52684-16ud0ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239148/original/file-20181003-52684-16ud0ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239148/original/file-20181003-52684-16ud0ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239148/original/file-20181003-52684-16ud0ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239148/original/file-20181003-52684-16ud0ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239148/original/file-20181003-52684-16ud0ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Sketch from Penny Illustrated Paper showing scenes from the 1888 West End production of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>Prominent articles in the <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/inside-high-end-horror-films-shaking-up-cannes-1111210">Hollywood Reporter</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/with-a-quiet-place-and-get-out-horror-is-having-a-mainstream-moment-will-that-alienate-fans/2018/04/13/99bbcbb0-3db1-11e8-974f-aacd97698cef_story.html">Washington Post</a> attempted to reclassify films such as Get Out and Hereditary as “elevated horror”, “smart horror”, or “post horror” – all terms that, while they may seem to qualify the genre, still just mean horror. They are films that do the thing that horror films do: through metaphor and fantasy, they reveal a dark truth. </p>
<p>The way we classify films can be misleading. A scary film, for example, is not the same thing as a horror film. A scary film scares you – and a scare takes place in an instant. It’s a “jump-out-of-your-chair” moment. It’s that same chair flying across the room, a door slamming, someone behind you going “BOO!” A scare is always accompanied by a sigh of relief. It’s fun – the thing wasn’t really there. Add enough of them together and you get a 90-minute scary movie.</p>
<p>A horror film, on the other hand, is much longer than that. Horror is the slow, dawning realisation that the worst thing is true. Unlike the scare, there is no relief from it. The scare and the horror are opposite extremes: the scare is just behind you, but the horror is right in front of your eyes.</p>
<h2>House of horrors</h2>
<p>When the producers came to me with their idea for the film that became my debut feature, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/movies/the-devils-doorway-review.html">The Devil’s Doorway</a>, it could have been a scary movie. They wanted to make a found-footage film – think The <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/may/21/how-we-made-the-blair-witch-project">Blair Witch Project</a> or <a href="https://www.metacritic.com/movie/paranormal-activity">Paranormal Activity</a>, films that purport to be unedited footage shot by the characters in the film themselves. And they wanted it set in an abandoned <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/magdalene-laundries-i-often-wondered-why-were-they-so-cruel-1.3521600">Magdalene Laundry</a>, one of the haunted remnants of Ireland’s recent past, where woman – unmarried mothers, troublesome girls, lesbians – were condemned to live their lives in wash houses run by the Catholic church, kept from society and washing the country’s dirty linen.</p>
<p>In other hands, it could have been a race through empty rooms, pursued by the vengeful spirit of a mistreated girl – all caught on GoPro. That, however, would have missed the horror of the situation, using the history of those places as a mere backdrop for the film’s mechanics, like erecting a theme park there. I proposed we make a horror film instead.</p>
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<p>In 1960, two priests enter a working laundry, charged with documenting the supposed Marian miracle that has taken place there. As they gather footage and interview defensive nuns, it becomes clear that something else is going on. However, it is not the Gothic revelations in the film that make it a horror film – rather it is the thing that the two priests really document. There is spooky stuff, but the real horror is the slow dawning for the priests – and through them, the viewers – of the real-life situation that exists and is being perpetuated by the Catholic church and the state that condones it.</p>
<h2>Visceral reaction</h2>
<p>A horror film set in <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/magdalene-laundries-i-often-wondered-why-were-they-so-cruel-1.3521600">a Magdalene Laundry</a> may yet shock critics at home, simply because of the risk that it might be in bad taste. The Channel 4 sitcom, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/feb/24/hungry-irish-famine-sitcom-comedy-hot-potato">Hungry</a>, set during the Irish potato famine, <a href="https://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/channel-4-scraps-plans-for-controversial-comedy-set-during-great-famine-374797.html">was panned</a> before it aired over similar questions. </p>
<p>But horror and comedy are linked in the way that our responses are pre-analytical – we are horrified or amused because we recognise something as being true without having to think about it? You either respond or you don’t. It is no surprise that Jordan Peele, who <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/03/oscars-2018-jordan-peele-best-original-screenplay-get-out">won a Best Screenplay Oscar</a> for Get Out, started his professional career writing comedy. </p>
<p>And like comedy, horror also should punch up – recognising and challenging those misusing their power at the top rather than merely making monsters of those at the bottom. There is nothing we can’t joke about – as long as we joke in good faith. And, similarly, there is nothing in the world so horrific that it is off limits to horror films. Indeed, we will only know it is a horror film if we feel truly horrified.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/104278/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aislinn Clarke is the director of The Devil's Doorway which was funded by Northern Ireland Screen.</span></em></p>Proper horror should be more than just monsters and suspense.Aislinn Clarke, Lecturer in Film Studies, Queen's University BelfastLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/991482018-07-03T20:10:24Z2018-07-03T20:10:24ZThe film, Mary Shelley, shows Frankenstein is always a story for our times<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/225852/original/file-20180703-116143-1vqcx6q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Elle Fanning as the author Mary Shelley. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">IMDB</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The lives of young Romantic artists continue to fascinate filmmakers, from Ken Russell’s Gothic (1986) about Lord Byron, to Jane Campion’s Bright Star (2009) about John Keats. With the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein upon us, a new film focuses on its author, Mary Shelley. </p>
<p>Frankenstein was conceived by the 18-year old Mary Shelley while she was with her stepsister Claire Clairmont, the poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Byron’s physician John Polidori. The setting was grey, wet Geneva, in the so-called “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer">year without a summer</a>”, 1816, when the volcanic ash of a huge volcanic eruption in Indonesia blotted out the sun, wreaking havoc across the globe’s climate system. Crops failed, livestock died, famine was widespread, and the apocalypse appeared nigh — a perfect setting for a ghost story competition. </p>
<p>Unable to go boating or walking, and cooped up inside Byron’s chalet by the lake, Polidori drafted The Vampyre. But Mary Shelley (played by Elle Fanning in the film) won the competition with Frankenstein, her “hideous progeny” as she called it — the moving tale of the mad scientist Frankenstein and his abandoned, unnamed creature. While the poetry of Shelley and Byron is not much read today, Frankenstein is one of the world’s most popular and admired books. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-curse-of-frankenstein-how-archetypal-myths-shape-the-way-people-think-about-science-42077">The curse of Frankenstein: how archetypal myths shape the way people think about science</a>
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<p>Mary Shelley is the latest release by director Haifaa al-Mansour, Saudi Arabia’s first female filmmaker, best-known for her critically acclaimed <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2258858/">Wadjda</a> (2012). Al-Mansour directed Wadjda via walkie talkie from the back of a van in Riyadh because Saudi women are forbidden to mix publicly with men. Unsurprisingly, the film focuses on her country’s gender oppression: 10-year old Wadjda longs to own a bicycle so that she can race against her friend Abdullah but bikes are not for girls. </p>
<p>Mary Shelley transposes these themes of gender oppression to the business of writing and literary celebrity in the early-19th century. The film opens to the sounds of furious scribbling and incantatory snatches of lurid gothic prose, composed and jotted down by Mary, the 16-year old daughter of two revolutionaries, the political philosopher William Godwin and the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. </p>
<p>With her mother dying soon after childbirth, the young Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin is growing up in a straitened, loveless household run by a shrewish stepmother (Joanne Froggatt). An avid reader, especially of ghost stories, Mary longs to be a writer herself, the challenge being to find her own voice. </p>
<p>To assist her in this quest, the radical, young (but married) poet Percy Shelley (Douglas Booth) arrives on the scene, drawn like a magnet to the child of two giants in his pantheon of free thinkers. After a brief courtship centred on Wollstonecraft’s grave and inspired by high-sounding poetry and the revolutionary ideals of sexual equality, free love and communal living, Mary elopes with Percy, taking Claire, her complicated and troublesome stepsister, along with her.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/between-innocence-and-experience-the-sexualisation-of-girlhood-in-19th-century-postcards-87328">Between innocence and experience: the sexualisation of girlhood in 19th century postcards</a>
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<p>In its focus on abandonment and loneliness, and the ways in which free love and sexual liberation can go badly wrong for women, and even worse for their children, the film is fired by today’s #MeToo movement. Many of the painful, actual details of the writers’ lives are condensed, but the high cost of male libertinism is a message powerfully delivered by Al-Mansour. Percy’s abandoned first wife Harriet drowns herself, the narcissist Percy accuses Mary of hypocrisy when she refuses a sexual liaison with his friend Hogg, and Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge) monsters the pregnant Claire (Bel Powley) by describing their affair as a “lapse in judgement”. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/225853/original/file-20180703-116129-lb1dqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/225853/original/file-20180703-116129-lb1dqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/225853/original/file-20180703-116129-lb1dqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/225853/original/file-20180703-116129-lb1dqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/225853/original/file-20180703-116129-lb1dqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/225853/original/file-20180703-116129-lb1dqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/225853/original/file-20180703-116129-lb1dqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/225853/original/file-20180703-116129-lb1dqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Claire Clairmont (Bel Powley), Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley (Douglas Booth), and Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">IMDB</span></span>
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<p>Although there are some good scenes on the fashionable science of <a href="http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Nicholsn/galvanis.html">galvanism</a>, the film’s interest in the novel Frankenstein is marginal. Nevertheless it does something quite clever. It reads the miserable women as incarnations of Frankenstein’s cruelly abandoned creature.</p>
<p>One of the film’s most original moves is to bring the controversial Claire Clairmont centrestage, where she always wanted to be. Bolder than her stepsister, Claire tired of having to share Percy with Mary so she targeted her own poet, one richer and more famous than her stepsister’s. Graphic evidence of Claire’s pursuit of Byron, the rock star of his generation, has survived in her extraordinary letters to him, the first of which warns him that “the Creator ought not to destroy his Creature” in refusing her proposed tryst. She got her way and while Byron later acknowledged Claire’s child as his own, he suspected the “brat” was Percy’s. </p>
<p>Entangled sexually, Elle Fanning captures Mary Shelley’s quietly fierce but loyal nature. Although her idea of Heaven was “a world without a Claire”, she is always protective and compassionate towards her rival, an historical detail well conveyed by the film. Later in life, long after Shelley and Byron were dead, the now childless and still grieving Claire bitterly denounced both poets for their “free love” philosophy, a creed which made them “monsters of lying, meanness, cruelty and treachery”. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-moby-dick-by-herman-melville-52000">Guide to the classics: Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville</a>
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<p>Frankenstein is a book which lives in its present moment. In 1824, it was mobilised in the British Parliament to oppose the abolition of slavery. The fear was that the suddenly freed slave would resemble Frankenstein’s creature, a man in physical strength and sexual passion, but an infant intellectually. </p>
<p>In our own times sympathy for the creature as victim often jostles with fear. Ahmed Saadawi’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30780005-frankenstein-in-baghdad">Frankenstein in Baghdad</a> (2017), a novel set amid the violence of contemporary Iraq, features “Whatshisname”, a grotesque figure assembled from the body parts of suicide bombers and their victims. At first he seeks revenge for the dead that he embodies but he then turns to killing the innocent. </p>
<p>Last year also saw the publication by MIT of an edition of <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/frankenstein">Frankenstein</a> for scientists, carrying extensive footnotes concerning the creator’s duty of care towards his creation, be that a robot or an atom bomb. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, despite its powerful and innovative focus on the two injured women at the heart of this story, the film ends with a disappointingly conventional message. While Mary has found her authorial voice, she trails off into sentimentality when she reassures Percy (with a kiss) that, despite all the suffering entailed by his romantic idealism, she regrets nothing.</p>
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<p><em>Mary Shelley opens in Australian cinemas on July 5.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/99148/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Deirdre Coleman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The author Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was 18. A new film investigates the gender politics of the novel’s creation.Deirdre Coleman, Robert Wallace Chair of English in the School of Culture and Communication, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/947892018-05-08T10:46:50Z2018-05-08T10:46:50ZWhat Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein teaches us about the need for mothers<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/217974/original/file-20180507-46341-1ckau0h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Frankenstein's monster in the Hollywood Wax Museum. The fictional character first appeared in Mary Shelley's novel in 1818.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/download/confirm/763424533?src=H_fynK5q3mYVw9RRdY2D6g-1-0&size=huge_jpg">www.shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Motherhood is getting considerable attention, even if much of the news is concerning. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/upshot/the-us-fertility-rate-is-down-yet-more-women-are-mothers.html">Fertility rates</a> are falling in America as millennials decide not to have children. This should hardly come as a surprise. The cost of raising a child to adulthood has been <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/09/pf/cost-of-raising-a-child-2015/index.html">increasing</a> and <a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N">real median household income</a> has only just regained its 1999 level. </p>
<p>At this time, when it could be argued that maternity is in decline, <a href="https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/MShelley/bio">Mary Shelley’s</a> classic work of literature, “Frankenstein,” celebrating its 200th anniversary this year, invites us to reflect on the deeper importance of mothers in our lives. </p>
<p>Shelley, who published the work at the age of only 19, had many reasons to make motherhood a major theme. Her mother, the feminist <a href="http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Wollston/bio.html">Mary Wollstonecraft</a>, had died from complications arising from her birth. Shelley’s own attempts at motherhood would result in multiple miscarriages and the deaths of three children. Not surprisingly, mothers in “Frankenstein” are conspicuous by their absence – with disastrous consequences.</p>
<h2>The creation of Frankenstein</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/217960/original/file-20180507-46335-8wuihg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/217960/original/file-20180507-46335-8wuihg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=738&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/217960/original/file-20180507-46335-8wuihg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=738&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/217960/original/file-20180507-46335-8wuihg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=738&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/217960/original/file-20180507-46335-8wuihg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/217960/original/file-20180507-46335-8wuihg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/217960/original/file-20180507-46335-8wuihg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Portrait of Mary Shelley.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RothwellMaryShelley.jpg">Richard Rothwell</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Frankenstein tells the tale of young scientist Victor Frankenstein, who is so horrified at the prospect of death that he seeks a means of restoring life to the deceased. He creates an 8-foot-tall humanoid creature, whose appearance renders it loathsome to all and to which he never gives a proper name. Spurned by its creator, the creature develops a desire for revenge and soon takes the lives of everyone dear to Victor. </p>
<p>At numerous points, the novel highlights the devastating effects of maternal absence.</p>
<p>To begin with, mothers in Frankenstein are quite short-lived. Victor Frankenstein’s mother, an orphan, dies of scarlet fever while nursing Victor’s “cousin” and eventual wife, Elizabeth. While on their honeymoon, Elizabeth too is killed by the monster. Justine, the Frankensteins’ housekeeper, is falsely convicted of the murder of Victor’s younger brother, also grows up motherless.</p>
<p>Frankenstein’s most dramatic instance of motherlessness is the monster itself, a human being created by a man alone. Reflecting on this feat, Victor remarks that “no father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely” as he would deserve of the new race of creatures he sought to create. </p>
<p>Simply put, he devises a new way of bestowing life that completely sidesteps the need for conception, pregnancy and childbirth.</p>
<p>Yet Victor had not done away entirely with the need for maternity. For though he had “selected the creature’s features as beautiful,” the moment he beholds it stirring, he recoils. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Unbound by any maternal affection or calling, Victor is “unable to endure” the being he had created and rushes out of the room. His creation was never part of him, and he feels at liberty to abandon it.</p>
<h2>When the creator matters more</h2>
<p>The roots of the problem lie largely in the fact that Victor has moved procreation from the domain of the natural – the purview of Mother Nature – to that of the technological. </p>
<p>His quest is a purely scientific one – a study of chemistry, anatomy and the decay of the human body. It is so devoid of any regard for the sanctity of life that Victor came to regard a churchyard as nothing more than a “receptacle of bodies deprived of life,” implying that a living child might be little more than a body not yet deprived of life.</p>
<p>To him, there is nothing mysterious about life and death. The animation of lifeless matter looms before him as nothing more than a daunting but purely technical challenge. He dreams of the power “to renew life” and becomes so engrossed in this one pursuit that his eyes “become insensible to the charms of nature,” including the unfolding of the seasons around him. A “single great object” swallows up “every habit of his nature.” In short, his scientific quest has left him with no appreciation for life’s beauty and mystery.</p>
<p>What long reigned as one of the most mysterious and awe-inspiring experiences in human life – the birth of a human being – has in Victor’s mind become little more than proof of his own greatness:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I was surprised that among so many men of genius who had directed their enquiries toward the same science, I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>To Victor, the act of creation says much less about the creature than the creator.</p>
<p>Devoid of the feminine, bringing forth new life becomes a completely masculine act, an exercise of mastery and control over a reluctant but ultimately compliant nature. Victor’s cold detachment from his creation contrasts sharply with the experience of childbirth as described by those who have been through it – a description not of conquest but endurance and the unfolding of something that resists control. </p>
<h2>The experience of labor and birth</h2>
<p>Consider this account of labor by the 20th-century activist Dorothy Day in her <a href="http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/583.pdf">essay</a>, “Having a Baby: A Christmas Story”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Where before there had been waves, there were now tidal waves. Earthquake and fire swept my body. My spirit was a battleground on which thousands were butchered in a most horrible manner.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is not difficult to imagine Day having just read Frankenstein’s account of bringing forth new life when she penned these lines about men giving birth: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“‘What do they know about it, the idiots?’ I thought. And it gave me pleasure to imagine one of them in the throes of childbirth. How they would groan and holler and rebel. And wouldn’t they make everybody else miserable around them?” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In Day’s account, gestation and child birth are not like pushing buttons on a control panel but a journey along which the mother is swept – something she does not so much choose as endure. And when it is over, she is presented with a baby fashioned less by her than in her and through her. The form of the baby, from its generic sex to its distinctive features, is a joyful surprise even to the woman who has served as the home of its development for over three-quarters of a year. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/217964/original/file-20180507-46353-15dbio9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/217964/original/file-20180507-46353-15dbio9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/217964/original/file-20180507-46353-15dbio9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/217964/original/file-20180507-46353-15dbio9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/217964/original/file-20180507-46353-15dbio9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/217964/original/file-20180507-46353-15dbio9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/217964/original/file-20180507-46353-15dbio9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dorothy Day in a 1916 photo.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Dorothy_Day_1916.jpg">Unknown photographer</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For Victor, the process is quite different. He too is surprised, but his surprise reflects the fact that, although he has in fact painstakingly selected each of the creature’s features, the end result turns out radically different from what he envisioned. He thought every aspect of the creature was subject to his control, but instead of a superman he has produced a monster. His horror is magnified by the fact that his creature is his product, while Dorothy Day receives her daughter as something more akin to a gift.</p>
<h2>What does a mother add?</h2>
<p>Thanks to “Frankenstein,” we can pose a question the answer to which would have seemed obvious throughout most of the course of human history: What does a mother add? The answer, in simplest terms, is that mothers add to life something that Victor Frankenstein – who treats the whole process of creation as nothing more than a challenge to his own ingenuity – is unable even to recognize, let alone wield: the power of a love that puts creature before creator.</p>
<p>Victor has made something new, but it was never a part of him, and from the moment he lays eyes on it he seeks to disassociate himself from it. Because the creature’s appearance disappoints him, he feels within his rights to turn his back on it – to abandon it to a world utterly unprepared to receive it. The circumstances of the creature’s birth may be monstrous, but it is not yet a monstrosity. Only by depriving it of any semblance of love does Victor create a true monster.</p>
<p>By showing us a world from which mothers are largely absent, Mary Shelley reminds us that the genius of motherhood lies less in biological reproduction than in the capacity to love. Human beings need love to develop and thrive. We honor this capacity of mothers when we say that someone has a face that “only a mother could love.” </p>
<p>Perhaps Victor’s creature would never had developed into a monster in the first place, if only it had enjoyed the love of a mother.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/94789/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Gunderman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>By showing us a world from which mothers are largely absent, Mary Shelley reminds us that the genius of motherhood lies less in biological reproduction than in the capacity to love.Richard Gunderman, Chancellor's Professor of Medicine, Liberal Arts, and Philanthropy, Indiana UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/930302018-03-14T15:12:17Z2018-03-14T15:12:17ZEight things you need to know about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210309/original/file-20180314-113458-oens6x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://pixabay.com/en/frankenstein-monster-boris-karloff-394281/">Pixabay/Universal Pictures</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In his acceptance speech at the 2018 <a href="http://www.bafta.org/about">BAFTA</a> awards, Mexican director <a href="https://www.biography.com/people/guillermo-del-toro-92115">Guillermo del Toro</a> – a creator rather fond of monsters himself – praised the writer <a href="https://www.bl.uk/people/mary-shelley">Mary Shelley</a> for giving a “voice to the voiceless”. <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/1831-edition-of-frankenstein-or-the-modern-prometheus">Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus</a> was Shelley’s first novel, written at the tender age of 18. Here are some things you might not know about her most famous creation, first published 200 years ago in 1818.</p>
<h2>1. Matters of life and death</h2>
<p>Young Mary Shelley (née Godwin) never got to know her mother, the pioneering feminist and philosopher <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/wollstonecraft_01.shtml">Mary Wollstonecraft</a>, author of the radical treatise <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/mary-wollstonecraft-a-vindication-of-the-rights-of-woman">A Vindication of the Rights of Woman</a>, which was published in 1792. Wollstonecraft died shortly after the birth of Mary, her second child. As a young woman, Mary Shelley herself suffered multiple infant mortalities. The miracle of birth was for her haunted by the brutality of death, which she dramatises so powerfully in Frankenstein.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210307/original/file-20180314-113455-p9di99.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210307/original/file-20180314-113455-p9di99.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210307/original/file-20180314-113455-p9di99.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210307/original/file-20180314-113455-p9di99.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210307/original/file-20180314-113455-p9di99.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1168&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210307/original/file-20180314-113455-p9di99.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1168&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210307/original/file-20180314-113455-p9di99.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1168&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">James Whale’s 1931 film starred Boris Karloff as the monster.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Frankenstein-252859133-large.jpg">Universal Pictures</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>2. Thunder, lightning and scary stories</h2>
<p>During unseasonably stormy weather in the summer of 1816, Mary and her future husband, the poet and philosopher <a href="https://www.bl.uk/people/percy-bysshe-shelley">Percy Bysshe Shelley</a>, playboy poet <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/lord-byron-19thcentury-bad-boy">Lord Byron</a> and other members of their party passed the time at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva by concocting ghost stories. After a feverish dream, Mary hit on the core premise of her first novel, which she hurriedly committed to paper. She recast this early work into the draft of a two-volume edition in 1816/17, using two notebooks <a href="http://shelleygodwinarchive.org/contents/frankenstein/">whose pages</a> survive in the <a href="https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/about/history">Bodleian Library</a> at the University of Oxford.</p>
<h2>3. The man who wrote Frankenstein?</h2>
<p>Gay rights activist <a href="http://www.paganpressbooks.com/jpl/BIO.HTM">John Lauritsen</a> continues to argue that Mary Shelley was not the true author of Frankenstein. Rather, he believes, her husband Percy wrote it in secrecy to air his latent homosexuality. <a href="https://www.biographyonline.net/writers/germaine-greer.html">Germaine Greer</a> wrote <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/apr/09/gender.books">a scathing riposte</a> in curiously dismissive terms – Frankenstein, she argues, was clearly written by a teenage Mary because it’s not a good book. Lauritsen’s <a href="http://paganpressbooks.com/jpl/GUARDIAN.HTM">reply</a> in The Guardian derided Greer’s “old feminist misinterpretations of Frankenstein: motherhood, dead or aborted babies, and so on.” Instead, he argued, Frankenstein “is about male relationships: romantic friendship, companionship and, for the poor monster, ostracism.”</p>
<h2>4. Mary Shelley’s Scotland</h2>
<p>The origins of Frankenstein go back a little further than Shelley’s feverish dream in Switzerland. At the age of 14, she was sent to live with the Baxter family on the outskirts of Dundee. Much later, in the 1831 introduction to a revised edition of Frankenstein, she spoke fondly of her days by the Tay river: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Parts of Frankenstein are set in Fife, Edinburgh and Orkney. In a rundown hut on Orkney, most notably, Victor creates – and destroys – the Bride, fearing the hideous race of creatures Frankenstein’s monster and the Bride would produce.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210294/original/file-20180314-113475-193q9md.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210294/original/file-20180314-113475-193q9md.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=737&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210294/original/file-20180314-113475-193q9md.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=737&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210294/original/file-20180314-113475-193q9md.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=737&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210294/original/file-20180314-113475-193q9md.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210294/original/file-20180314-113475-193q9md.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210294/original/file-20180314-113475-193q9md.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mary Shelley’s first novel has influenced popular culture since it first appeared in 1818.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley#/media/File:RothwellMaryShelley.jpg">National Portrait Gallery</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>5. The monstrous birth of science fiction</h2>
<p>Frankenstein has many of the required ingredients associated with <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/the-origins-of-the-gothic">Gothic fiction</a>: maddened ambition, gruesome death, a monster. But it doesn’t have supernatural elements. It doesn’t even have ghosts or vampires – though Victor does invoke Gothic tropes when referring to his creation figuratively as “my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave”. More accurately, Frankenstein is science fiction: if there is magic here it is the magic of science – AI, human and cross-species transplantation, animal testing, reanimation, and more.</p>
<h2>6. What’s in a name?</h2>
<p>As pedants like to remind us, Frankenstein is the name of the creator rather than his creation, whom we tend to refer to as Frankenstein’s “monster” or “The Creature”. <a href="http://www.okehampton-today.co.uk/article.cfm?id=422541&headline=Opening%20the%20lid%20on%20The%20%E2%80%98Prof%20of%20Goth%E2%80%99&sectionIs=news&searchyear=2017">Nick Groom</a>, “Prof of Goth” at the University of Exeter, has offered a far more humane term: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/04/frankenstein-monster-200th-anniversary-electricity-mary-shelley">Frankenstein’s Being</a>. </p>
<p>The Being is given many labels throughout the novel. Referencing the first humans, Adam and Eve, he calls himself “thy Adam”. Peggy Webling’s 1927 stage adaptation was perhaps the first to misname the Being as “Frankenstein”. <a href="http://members.aon.at/frankenstein/frankenstein-universal.htm">James Whale’s iconic 1931 film</a> billed Boris Karloff’s visually imposing character simply – and enigmatically – as “?”.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1qNeGSJaQ9Q?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Universal Pictures/YouTube.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>7. Frankenstein at the movies</h2>
<p>From <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059199/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl">Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster</a> (1965) to <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1142977/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ql_stry_2">Frankenweenie</a> (1984), <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2014/01/22/frankenstein-movie-history/4458425/">many quirky adaptations</a> of Shelley’s material have made it to the big screen (IMDB currently lists <a href="http://www.imdb.com/find?q=frankenstein&s=tt&ttype=ft&ref_=fn_ft">173 separate titles</a>). Whale’s version remains the most famous, though Mel Brooks’ comic masterpiece <a href="https://inews.co.uk/culture/film/young-frankenstein-first-scene-gene-wilder-mel-brooks/">Young Frankenstein</a> (1974) also retains a prominent place in the popular imagination.</p>
<p>Various new films appear to be in development, including a 2019 <a href="http://deadline.com/2017/10/bride-of-frankenstein-postponed-bill-condon-javier-bardem-angelina-jolie-1202182510/">remake</a> of The Bride of Frankenstein starring Javier Bardem and Angelina Jolie as the monster and his mate. Mary Shelley herself has also appeared on screen many times, most recently brought back to life by Elle Fanning in <a href="http://www.indiewire.com/2017/09/mary-shelley-review-elle-fanning-biopic-1201875795/">Mary Shelley</a> (2017). Now a further biopic is in development: <a href="http://variety.com/2014/film/news/sophie-turner-cast-in-mary-shelleys-monster-1201281941/">Mary Shelley’s Monster</a> will see the young author strike a Faustian bargain with her alter-ego as she works on her seminal novel.</p>
<h2>8. Frankenstein spin-offs</h2>
<p>Frankenstein has also been reworked by fellow novelists, most notably Peter Ackroyd, author of <a href="2008">The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein</a>, in which a scientist (Victor) and a poet (Percy Bysshe Shelley) form an unlikely but intellectually stimulating friendship. </p>
<p>The hugely enjoyable young adult novel, <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/313423/man-made-boy-by-jon-skovron/9780142427439/">Man Made Boy</a> (2013) by Jon Skovron, is a wildly imaginative tale about Boy, the teenage son of Frankenstein’s Being and the Bride. Wearied by his family’s secretive existence in a lair beneath Times Square, Boy embarks on a road trip across America with the granddaughters of Jekyll and Hyde, who introduce him to malls and diners, love and heartbreak.</p>
<p>Mary Shelley’s first and most famous novel has shaped our imaginations in diverse, profound and enduring ways. It would be fair to say that no teenager in history has influenced popular culture to such an extent. Frankenstein is very much alive! Alive!</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/93030/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daniel Cook does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Written by a teenager, Frankenstein is an extraordinary novel that still endures 200 years after its first publication.Daniel Cook, Senior Lecturer in English, University of DundeeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/917352018-03-06T11:39:42Z2018-03-06T11:39:42ZBioengineers today emphasize the crucial ingredient Dr. Frankenstein forgot – responsibility<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/206067/original/file-20180212-58318-1g4ttxj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=703%2C461%2C4097%2C2792&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Victor Frankenstein’s mistakes serve as cautionary lessons.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/silhouette-of-man-running-on-forest-217660/">Etienne Marais/Pexels</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Mary Shelley was 20 when she published “Frankenstein” in 1818. Two hundred years on, the book remains thrilling, challenging and relevant — especially for scientists like me whose research involves tinkering with the stuff of life.</p>
<p>The story of Dr. Victor Frankenstein is familiar: A deranged scientist muddles with corpses and creates a monster. Or, a naive young man makes a mistake and is forced to live with it. Or, a college student dives headfirst into biotechnology without once considering the consequences.</p>
<p>The prose may be a bit dated, but the issues at the heart of “Frankenstein” feel modern. Biotechnology and bioengineering are real things now. Scientists can still be blinded by their passions. And, just as true today as in pre-Victorian Britain, the future is hard to predict.</p>
<p>“Frankenstein” endures because it addresses a perennial fear: What if science goes too far? What happens if we build something we don’t understand and can’t control? Are there certain roads in science or technology that we just shouldn’t go down?</p>
<p>As a doctoral student in synthetic biology, my day job is to try to engineer life. And after rereading “Frankenstein,” I couldn’t shake one thought: If Mary Shelley were writing the book today, Victor would surely be a synthetic biologist.</p>
<h2>Building life</h2>
<p>Victor Frankenstein, the character who creates the Creature (who, in the book, has no name), was 17 when he left home to study natural science at university. An eloquent professor sparks a passion in him. Victor resolves to take science further than anyone – to “explore unknown powers,” as he puts it. Within three years, Victor begins digging up dead bodies.</p>
<p>Clearly Victor takes his passion — or perhaps obsession — too far. But what Victor did – taking different parts from living things and stitching them together — is not on the face of it that different from the field of research I work in.</p>
<p>Synthetic biology seeks to <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-62703-625-2_1">engineer new biological systems</a> such as biomolecules, metabolic pathways or cells, using either natural or synthetic parts.</p>
<p>A synthetic biologist looks at life with an engineer’s eye. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0800442106">Antibiotic resistance can be rolled back</a> by infecting certain bacteria with the right protein. Algae, when <a href="https://doi.org/doi:10.1038/nature11479">genetically reprogrammed</a>, can synthesize biofuels. <a href="https://boltthreads.com/">Bolt Threads</a>, a Bay Area startup, is <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/in-the-future-well-all-wear-spider-silk?intcid=mod-latest">making clothes from synthetic spider silk</a>. And to understand more about the basic code of life, synthetic biologists have stripped microbes down to only their <a href="https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aad6253">most essential stretches of DNA</a>.</p>
<p>My own doctoral research is focused on trying to <a href="https://theconversation.com/enzymes-versus-nerve-agents-designing-antidotes-for-chemical-weapons-75986">design new biomolecules that break down chemical weapons</a>. Before starting grad school, I worked for a company that’s turning agricultural plant waste into liquid fuels by stringing together fungal enzymes that naturally degrade wood. Biology is powerful, and much its complexity is only now becoming known.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208967/original/file-20180305-146703-q5rao4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208967/original/file-20180305-146703-q5rao4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208967/original/file-20180305-146703-q5rao4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208967/original/file-20180305-146703-q5rao4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208967/original/file-20180305-146703-q5rao4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208967/original/file-20180305-146703-q5rao4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=552&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208967/original/file-20180305-146703-q5rao4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=552&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208967/original/file-20180305-146703-q5rao4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=552&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Today’s synthetic biologists piece together biomolecules, not body parts.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giovanni_Aldini,_Essai_theorique...sur_le_galvanisme_Wellcome_L0029560.jpg">Wellcome Images</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But talk of “engineering biology” makes a lot people squeamish. The sanctity of life is violated <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s11693-009-9028-5">when man tries to play God</a>, they argue. It’s a fool’s errand, or worse. That is one plausible interpretation of “Frankenstein.” Perhaps Shelley meant to show us, over 200 gripping pages, the agony that awaits anyone arrogant enough to tinker with life.</p>
<p>It’s this interpretation of “Frankenstein,” more or less, that has taken root in modern society, especially with regard to biotechnology. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2003.tb00218.x">Since 1992</a>, genetically modified foods have been derided as “Frankenfoods,” even though the vast majority of scientists regard them as <a href="https://www.nap.edu/catalog/23395/genetically-engineered-crops-experiences-and-prospects">safe</a> and <a href="http://www.who.int/foodsafety/areas_work/food-technology/faq-genetically-modified-food/en/">beneficial</a>. Like the hostile townsfolk and farmers who rejected the Creature, many in modern society believe biotechnology is something to run away from.</p>
<h2>Running from responsibility</h2>
<p>But in the book, it’s Victor who runs.</p>
<p>“Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room,” says Victor, moments after bringing the Creature to life. The new being, who cannot yet speak, eventually wanders outside only to be driven from society. The Creature spends most of the rest of the book aching for genuine connection – in town squares, farmyards and icy plains. Without exception he is met with violence and scorn. With his innocence shattered, the Creature turns toward revenge.</p>
<p>Technology can turn monstrous, but I read Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” not as an injunction against bioengineering as such. Rather, the story reveals what can happen when we – scientists and nonscientists alike – run away from the responsibilities that science and technology demand.</p>
<p>Victor is a deeply flawed scientist. He is solitary, lacks foresight and is blinded by a selfish desire for power. He abandons his work when he realizes it could be dangerous, but at that point it’s already too late. This is alien to the community of synthetic biologists I know, who are vocal about the potential dangers of the technologies they develop and are actively working to ensure their safety.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.sculptingevolution.org/kevin-m-esvelt">Kevin Esvelt</a>, the MIT biotechnologist who <a href="https://theconversation.com/gene-drives-could-wipe-out-whole-populations-of-pests-in-one-fell-swoop-81681">created a method for editing the DNA of wild organisms</a> at will, has shifted the focus of his lab toward the responsible development and deployment of the technology – going so far as to state that the system as currently constructed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1101/219022">should not be used by anyone</a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://rna.berkeley.edu/">Jennifer Doudna</a>, a pioneer of CRISPR gene-editing technology, has <a href="https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aab1028">called for a moratorium</a> on potentially irreversible gene editing in humans. <a href="http://zlab.mit.edu/">Feng Zhang</a>, another CRISPR co-inventor, likewise has stated that “we need be very careful and proceed with a lot of caution.” Speaking about the dangers of runaway biotechnology at <a href="https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2018/sessions/future-shocks-precision-extinction">the 2018 World Economic Forum</a>, Zhang stated that “it would be important to engineer containment mechanisms” into any bioengineered cells. These would be akin to a genetic fail-safe should something unexpectedly go wrong.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208975/original/file-20180305-146694-5brzco.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208975/original/file-20180305-146694-5brzco.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208975/original/file-20180305-146694-5brzco.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208975/original/file-20180305-146694-5brzco.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208975/original/file-20180305-146694-5brzco.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208975/original/file-20180305-146694-5brzco.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208975/original/file-20180305-146694-5brzco.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208975/original/file-20180305-146694-5brzco.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Modern bioengineers order DNA ingredients through the mail, with no need for grave robbing.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/departmentofenergy/10169162155">U.S. Department of Energy</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A modern Victor Frankenstein</h2>
<p>If written today, Victor would be stitching together bits of DNA in a sterile lab somewhere. But I like to think his perspective on bioengineering would become modern as well. The synthetic biology community I know practices openness, prudence and self-restraint. Instead of running from responsibility, we try to embrace it – perhaps in part because of cautionary stories like “Frankenstein.”</p>
<p>In an early moment of irony and foreshadowing, Victor invites the reader to wonder “how many things are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries.” He means to be awe-inspiring, but readers familiar with the tale understand his statement to be quite the opposite.</p>
<p>Victor Frankenstein was certainly careless and perhaps a coward, unable to own up to the responsibility of what he was doing. We now know that science is best conducted with humility, forethought and in the light of day.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/91735/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ian Haydon works at the Institute for Protein Design and is a Special Advisor for SynBioBeta, a leading community of entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers and enthusiasts devoted to the responsible growth of the synthetic biology field.</span></em></p>If Mary Shelley wrote the book today, Victor would surely be a synthetic biologist. But those fiddling with living things in 2018 have hopefully learned from her cautionary tale.Ian Haydon, Doctoral Student in Biochemistry, University of WashingtonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/906592018-02-28T13:50:53Z2018-02-28T13:50:53ZHow Black Mirror combines a disturbing future with a familiar past<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208050/original/file-20180227-36671-1o6a5x5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Netflix</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Netflix series <a href="https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/70264888">Black Mirror</a> is a supreme example of contemporary television fantasy. It is hard to think of any other modern show that is so constantly unpredictable, aesthetically accomplished, stylistically eclectic or downright disturbing. </p>
<p>Over 19 self-contained episodes split into four series, Black Mirror seamlessly blurs genre boundaries – science fiction, horror, thriller and satire all meld into one another. </p>
<p>But despite the eclectic sense of genre, Black Mirror is united by the theme of digital technology. The name of the programme itself refers to a turned off phone, television or any of the other screens that dominate our lives – the haunting black screen like a mirror. It seeks to identify the radical changes brought about by digital technology and push them to their logical conclusion. </p>
<p>Just as the pioneering science fiction of the 19th century incorporated the scientific discoveries and technology of the industrial revolution, so Black Mirror pushes our contemporary experience of the digital revolution into possible projections of the future. </p>
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<p>Some episodes of Black Mirror can even be seen as adaptations of much older literature. One striking example is <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2290780/">Be Right Back</a> from series two, a clever reworking of <a href="https://theconversation.com/frankenstein-at-200-and-why-mary-shelley-was-far-more-than-the-sum-of-her-monsters-parts-90206">Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein</a> from 1818. </p>
<p>In the Black Mirror version, after a man is killed in a car accident, his distraught widow purchases a biosynthetic model of her husband. It downloads all the extant digital documentation of her late husband and comes alive as a seemingly faultless imitation of the dead man. </p>
<p>Tragedy is inevitable of course. Despite his superficial perfection (it is even, in some respects, an improvement on the original), the resurrected figure – like Frankenstein’s creature – can never be human. And once she has passed through the euphoria and solace she finds in the biosimulation, the widow gradually comes to regard her reconstructed partner with horror. </p>
<p>Be Right Back is an effective re-imagining of Frankenstein for the 21st century. It updates Shelley’s ethical questions to assert that the digital presence which surrounds us is no more the vital essence of humanity than Frankenstein’s assemblage of body parts. But while Frankenstein explores the tragic relationship between the creation and his creator, Be Right Back focuses on the creation and the consumer.</p>
<p>That consumer is also centre stage in the satirical comedy <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5497778/">Nosedive</a>, from series three. Set in a not so distant future where social media “likes” determine a person’s job, lifestyle and prospects, its story could have been framed within any number of genres. Here it is presented as a sardonic farce in which a young woman has a journey from hell travelling to a wedding where she is due to be maid of honour. </p>
<p>Far from comedic is <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5710984/">Metalhead</a> (series four), a tale of ultra-surveillance and materialism. It is told as a super-stylish monochrome horror story in which security systems have created anti-theft machines that have become so vigilant they have killed off nearly all living creatures. </p>
<p>The supreme irony in this episode is that the dystopia has not destroyed the very materialism that created the surveillance technology in the first place. When it is revealed what the group of human survivors were risking their lives for, we realise that although it was emotive and humane, it seemed an absurd risk to take. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208043/original/file-20180227-36686-1uj3w0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=34%2C21%2C2841%2C1427&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208043/original/file-20180227-36686-1uj3w0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208043/original/file-20180227-36686-1uj3w0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208043/original/file-20180227-36686-1uj3w0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208043/original/file-20180227-36686-1uj3w0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208043/original/file-20180227-36686-1uj3w0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208043/original/file-20180227-36686-1uj3w0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Brooker: the man behind the mirror.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Netflix</span></span>
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<h2>Dark reflections</h2>
<p>Black Mirror is the creation of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0111765/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm">Charlie Brooker</a>, a figure formerly best known for his satirical journalism and biting assessments of popular culture. Appearing on BBC’s Desert Island Discs radio programme, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09kx840">he recently recounted</a> how he spent years screaming at the television: “I could do better than that!” With Black Mirror, he probably has. </p>
<p>As well as drawing on the foundations of science fiction, Black Mirror belongs to the rich tradition of dark fantasy on television. Even the monochrome opening sequence of a buffering signal and cracking screen pays homage to the opening credits of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056777/">The Outer Limits</a> – the 1960s TV series which informed viewers they had lost control of their televisions. </p>
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<p>The Outer Limits and Black Mirror both draw emphatic attention to the very technology being used by viewers. Half a century ago, The Outer Limits (and the even more successful <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052520/?ref_=nv_sr_1">The Twilight Zone</a>) used television to present metaphors of social anxieties, including communism, the loss of social values and technophobia. These were quintessential examples of television fantasy. Where better to disquiet and unnerve us than in the safety and comfort of our own homes? </p>
<p>Black Mirror is a direct descendant of these shows. It examines the increasingly complex technological systems of our domestic environments and ways of living in the 21st century – making both seem dangerous and fragile.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/90659/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Hand does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Netflix hit, Black Mirror, follows in the footsteps of other forward-thinking sci-fi storytellers.Richard Hand, Professor of Media Practice, University of East AngliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/902062018-01-23T11:18:35Z2018-01-23T11:18:35ZFrankenstein at 200 and why Mary Shelley was far more than the sum of her monster’s parts<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/202811/original/file-20180122-46244-y1z3q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The frontispiece to the 1831 Frankenstein by Theodor von Holst, one of the first two illustrations for the novel.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley#/media/File:Frontispiece_to_Frankenstein_1831.jpg">Tate Britain. Private collection, Bath.</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s <a href="https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/frankenstein/">Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus</a> was published anonymously 200 years ago in January, 1818. It has since become the most analysed and contested novel of all time. </p>
<p>It is cited today in debates on the ethics of scientific progress. The “Frankenstein effect” has become synonymous with questionable advances in genetics, in vitro fertilisation and artificial intelligence, evoking the spectre of dangerous science. It has become an example of what goes wrong when science goes too far.</p>
<p>When we return to Frankenstein’s origins, however, we uncover a different story. <a href="http://www.uwp.co.uk/book/mary-shelley-hardback/">As Shelley was later to document</a>, the story was forged during the Summer of 1816 in debates that took place between herself, her partner (later husband) Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, her stepsister Claire Clairmont and John Polidori at the <a href="http://shelleysghost.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/diodati-the-residence-of-lord-byron">Villa Diodati</a> on the shores of Lake Geneva.</p>
<p>There, she records, the group was debating the arguments of poet and chemist <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/davy_humphrey.shtml">Sir Humphry Davy</a> and discussed “the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated”. </p>
<p>Shelley had accompanied her father William Godwin to hear Davy give his lectures on chemistry at the Royal Institution in 1812, and later, in 1816, she read his <a href="https://archive.org/details/elementschemica00davygoog">Elements of Chemical Philosophy</a> as she was composing Frankenstein. </p>
<p>Davy’s account of science was mesmerising for the sheer excitement that it conveyed: “Science has … bestowed upon [man] powers which may be called almost creative,” he declared. Frankenstein, drawing upon the scientific advancements of its age, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Erasmus-Darwin">Erasmus Darwin’s</a> early theory of evolutionary development in the 1790s, vitality, galvanism and Davy’s quest to determine the “hidden origins” of nature, partakes of the fascination and anxiety about scientific progress. But it is wrong to read the novel as being straightforwardly sceptical of scientific advancement.</p>
<h2>‘A torrent of light’</h2>
<p>Victor Frankenstein’s aims in creating new life are, after all, commendable. Reflecting the mixed aspirations of his mythological counterpart Prometheus, <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/84/84-h/84-h.htm#chap04">Frankenstein wishes to</a> “pour a torrent of light into our dark world” and in so doing “renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption”. He seeks to eradicate diseases which corrupt the human frame before its time. </p>
<p>These are not bad ambitions. But it is the way in which he pursues nature to “her hiding places” that makes his quest so fatal. Ventriloquising Shelley’s views, Frankenstein later observes that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule.</p>
</blockquote>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/202189/original/file-20180116-53307-16pezg6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/202189/original/file-20180116-53307-16pezg6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202189/original/file-20180116-53307-16pezg6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202189/original/file-20180116-53307-16pezg6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202189/original/file-20180116-53307-16pezg6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202189/original/file-20180116-53307-16pezg6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202189/original/file-20180116-53307-16pezg6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">A manuscript page from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/FrankensteinDraft.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>Knowledge, Shelley argued, should always be pursued in tranquillity; creation should always be the intellectual fruit of a “peaceful mind”.</p>
<p>The words that Frankenstein utters can be read, too, as an expression of Shelley’s approach to authorship. Much has been made of her comparative youth when she wrote Frankenstein. The novel was begun when she was 18. </p>
<p>Despite the fact that Matthew Gregory Lewis, known to both Shelleys, published his own Gothic tale – <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93157.The_Monk">The Monk</a> (1796) – at the age of 21, some ask how such a young woman could have composed Frankenstein, and falsely ascribe authorship to Percy Bysshe Shelley. </p>
<p>Sir Walter Scott, reviewing Frankenstein for Blackwood’s Magazine, was the first to commit this error, commenting that it “is said to be written by Percy Bysshe Shelley, who, if we are rightly informed, is son-in-law to Mr Godwin”. </p>
<p>Shelley’s response to Scott’s review of her novel was swift. Writing to Scott on June 14, 1818, she pointed out his error, noting, “I am anxious to prevent your continuing in the mistake of supposing Mr Shelley guilty of a juvenile attempt of mine.”</p>
<p>Shelley’s response to Scott’s mistake was decisive in her assertion of authorship. Her journal further illustrates the intensive work that she invested in her manuscript. </p>
<p>Percy Bysshe Shelley may have edited her work, but this was the gesture of one who wished to support and encourage another’s authorial career. Frankenstein was the first in a line of seven novels by Shelley that she published across three decades. </p>
<p>It may be the one for which we now celebrate Shelley, but all of her works reveal an assertion of women’s rights to create as authors and artists, associating these rights with a calm pursuit of knowledge. Shelley, author of Frankenstein, cautious supporter of scientific advancement, was much, much more than the sum of the parts of her first monster.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/90206/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Angela Wright is a Professor of Romantic Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her fifth book Mary Shelley, published by the University of Wales Press, was published in January 2018, and benefitted from a British Academy small research award. </span></em></p>On its 200th anniversary, why is it a surprise that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at such a young age – just because she’s a woman?Angela Wright, Professor of Romantic Literature, University of SheffieldLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/886792018-01-01T11:50:14Z2018-01-01T11:50:14ZTwo centuries on, Frankenstein is the perfect metaphor for the Anthropocene era<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199906/original/file-20171219-27562-yvxfyz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">frankenstein</span> </figcaption></figure><p>According to popular understanding, New Year’s Day 2018 belongs to the 68 years since the dawn of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/scientists-still-dont-understand-the-anthropocene-and-theyre-going-about-it-the-wrong-way-70017">Anthropocene Epoch</a> – where human activity has so dramatically altered the Earth that natural phenomenon is now human phenomenon. Science fiction and fact, indeed all fiction and fact, are persistently mediated by humans. The effects of this blurring show that the role of fictional art (art that is fantasy) is as impactful as ever – perhaps more so, due to its ability to remind us that humans are capable of so much, but are less attentive to our culpability. </p>
<p>Humans now set the trajectory for the current epoch, yet we have little idea how that trajectory will look. We are active, able, creative agents in the world – the makers of the world. And we remain absolutely without a clue as to why we are, or what we are. Whether religious, secular or ecologically concerned, we are still chaotic accidents of organisms who ask the same questions as in other epochs and are responded to with the same resounding silence: why are we here? What are we? What is our purpose? </p>
<p>Increasingly, the value of humans is being questioned in the Anthropocene Epoch – an era which seems to <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-anthropocene-is-a-nuclear-epoch-so-how-can-we-survive-it-69393">threaten disaster</a> as much it promises longer and better life. Two centuries ago one of the earliest examples of science fiction appeared on New Year’s Day that also asked these questions. Mary Shelley – a political radical, the daughter of the world’s most famous feminist and the wife of an infamous atheist – published <a href="https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist257s02/students/Becky/prometheus.html">Frankenstein: Or The Modern Prometheus</a>. </p>
<p>Even in the title we see that Shelley understood the persistence of the above questions that each age jealously feels belongs only to their particular existential crisis. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199916/original/file-20171219-27544-d3jg27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199916/original/file-20171219-27544-d3jg27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199916/original/file-20171219-27544-d3jg27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1032&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199916/original/file-20171219-27544-d3jg27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1032&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199916/original/file-20171219-27544-d3jg27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1032&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199916/original/file-20171219-27544-d3jg27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1296&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199916/original/file-20171219-27544-d3jg27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1296&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199916/original/file-20171219-27544-d3jg27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1296&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Frankenstein 18181 edition title page.</span>
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<p>In Shelley’s frontpiece quote from <a href="http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170419-why-paradise-lost-is-one-of-the-worlds-most-important-poems">Milton’s Paradise Lost</a>, where Adam laments being created, Shelley immediately reminds us that there is a persistent tension in all tales of human existence between a creator who has the ability, but perhaps not the wisdom, to be accountable and responsible for their acts of creation – and a subject who knows not what to do with the life and knowledge they have been given without their consent or request. </p>
<p>Shelley invoked a monster filled with pathos, humble curiosity and ultimately despair – and a creator whose hubris elucidated him as lacking in empathy, megalomaniacal and whose pride was more important than its effect on other living beings. </p>
<p>While one could say the same of every age, the Anthropocene Epoch seems to be performing Shelley’s tale on a global scale – where a single monster is now many species of non-human, or minorities and oppressed humans. The creator, meanwhile, is governments, nation-driven patriots and multinational companies, much like Shelley’s overweening creator, Dr Frankenstein. </p>
<h2>Horror made flesh</h2>
<p>Shelley’s Frankenstein legacy has a surprisingly unique offshoot. It spawned, due to the creative genius of the famed make-up artist <a href="http://universalmonstersuniverse.com/2016/03/24/making-up-monsters-jack-pierce/">Jack Pierce</a>, a reimagining of a literary character so different from the original that it has entirely replaced it to become a concrete icon of horror – the monster as incarnated by Boris Karloff in Frankenstein (1931) and the more faithful (to the book at least) adaptation, The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199905/original/file-20171219-27595-ervbbw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199905/original/file-20171219-27595-ervbbw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199905/original/file-20171219-27595-ervbbw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199905/original/file-20171219-27595-ervbbw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199905/original/file-20171219-27595-ervbbw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199905/original/file-20171219-27595-ervbbw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=583&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199905/original/file-20171219-27595-ervbbw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=583&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199905/original/file-20171219-27595-ervbbw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=583&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jack Pierce turning Boris Karloff into Frankenstein’s monster in the 1930s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">By not known - Image source: http://www.lagorgona.es</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>While the book had already inspired one of the earliest horror cinema adaptations (the 1910 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-fM9meqfQ4">Charles Ogle film</a>), James Whale’s 1931 film for Universal Pictures was the point which reversed the monster with the creator as the most important locus of the story, so turning it from tale to myth. The shift from focus on the God complex of Frankenstein to the wretched existence of the unloved monster marks a moment of humble self-reflection for audiences who identify more with a pieced together, almost mute, bumbling mass of flesh who simply seeks a “friend”, than with the irresponsibly power-mad scientist. </p>
<p>Perhaps reflecting humans’ focus from their maker (whatever that may be) to themselves, the spectacle of Karloff – placed gnarled, deformed and doubtful of the relevance of his existence after the first world war and heralding the imminent concerns of Sartre’s existentialism – is life meaningful? Are we hear for a reason? Do these questions matter? – evoked the dread and ugliness of a meaningless existence at the intersection of biology and technology made flesh.</p>
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<p>Cinematically we have not seen a return to the Gothic Shelley adaptation. Recent versions seem twee compared to Hammer’s 1950-70s viscerality – and the sci-fi robot or genetic creation has overtaken Victorian aesthetics. Sleeker, stronger creations of more metal and less flesh allay our horror at simply being a cluster of mortal cells. </p>
<p>While vampires, werewolves and even zombies are sparkly, sexy and utterly hygienic, it has been a while since we have had a truly corporeally flawed yet articulate monster whose body as a patchwork reminds us of the patchwork of identities and ideologies we are. </p>
<p>Empathy with the monster may be an ideal means of navigating this age. We must embrace difference and vulnerability and reflect on the Frankensteinian powers we exert at the expense of others. We should focus not on why we are here, but how we can be here more creatively, more accountably – as part of a world which, in a way, is its own kind of sewn-together organism of multiple different parts without reason or meaning.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/88679/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Patricia MacCormack does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Mary Shelley’s novel asked questions about the human condition that are more relevant today than ever.Patricia MacCormack, Professor of Continental Philosophy, Anglia Ruskin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/888562017-12-26T18:18:06Z2017-12-26T18:18:06ZWhat can be done about our modern-day Frankensteins?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200474/original/file-20171222-16518-9f9hlq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Can technology be tamed? Or have we already lost complete control?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/randar/29249221823">Tom Simpson</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1797, at the dawn of the industrial age, Goethe wrote “<a href="https://germanstories.vcu.edu/goethe/zauber_e4.html">The Sorcerer’s Apprentice</a>,” a poem about a magician in training who, through his arrogance and half-baked powers, unleashes a chain of events that he could not control. </p>
<p>About 20 years later, a young Mary Shelley answered a dare to write a ghost story, which she shared at a small gathering at Lake Geneva. Her story would go on to be published as a novel, “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus,” on Jan. 1, 1818. </p>
<p>Both are stories about our powers to create things that take on a life of their own. </p>
<p>Goethe’s poem comes to a climax when the apprentice calls out in a panic: </p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> Master, come to my assistance!
Wrong I was in calling
Spirits, I avow,
For I find them galling,
Cannot rule them now.
</code></pre>
<p>While the master fortunately returns just in time to cancel the treacherous spell, Shelley’s tale doesn’t end so nicely: Victor Frankenstein’s monster goes on a murderous rampage, and his creator is unable to put a stop to the carnage.</p>
<p>Who foretold our fate: Goethe or Shelley? </p>
<p>That’s the question we face on the 200th anniversary of “Frankenstein,” as we find ourselves grappling with the unintended consequences of our creations on Facebook, to artificial intelligence and human genetic engineering. Will we sail through safely or will we, like Victor Frankenstein, witness “destruction and infallible misery”? </p>
<h2>Will science save us?</h2>
<p>In Goethe’s poem, disaster is averted through a more skillful application of the same magic that conjured the problem in the first place. The term for this nowadays is “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexive_modernization">reflexive modernity</a>” – the idea that modern technology can be applied to deal with any problems of its own creation and that whatever problems arise from technoscience, we can fix with more technoscience. In environmentalism, this is known as <a href="https://orionmagazine.org/article/evolve/">ecomodernism</a>. In transhumanist circles, it is called the <a href="http://www.maxmore.com/proactionary.html">proactionary principle</a>, which “involves not only anticipating before acting, but learning by acting.”</p>
<p>“Frankenstein,” by contrast, is a precautionary tale. Imbued with the impulse to transform nature, humans risk extending beyond their proper reach. Victor Frankenstein comes to rue the ambition to become “greater than his nature will allow.” </p>
<p>He laments: “Learn from me…how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world.” </p>
<p>Hubris, he seems to warn, will be the death of us all. </p>
<h2>The rise of the Silicon Valley refuseniks</h2>
<p>This same worry over hubris appears to be creeping up among today’s scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, many of whom seem to be getting cold feet. After creating something, they’ve turned around and denounced their very creations. </p>
<p>Are they like the apprentice calling for the master to rescue him? Or are they, like Frankenstein, engaged in a futile quest to squelch something that is already beyond our control? </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200476/original/file-20171222-16505-kjrlwg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200476/original/file-20171222-16505-kjrlwg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=802&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200476/original/file-20171222-16505-kjrlwg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=802&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200476/original/file-20171222-16505-kjrlwg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=802&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200476/original/file-20171222-16505-kjrlwg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1007&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200476/original/file-20171222-16505-kjrlwg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1007&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200476/original/file-20171222-16505-kjrlwg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1007&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sean Parker has now dubbed himself a ‘conscientious objector’ of Facebook, the company he helped spawn.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Sean-Parker/da0ba5e485b642708b12ae98061d2214/10/0">Paul Sakuma/AP Photo</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Consider Sean Parker. The co-founder of Napster and an early investor in Facebook recently <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/9/16627724/sean-parker-facebook-childrens-brains-feedback-loop">announced</a> his status as a social media “conscientious objector.” Facebook, he claims, is likely damaging children’s brains and definitely exploiting human psychological weaknesses. </p>
<p>There are more Silicon Valley refuseniks. Justin Rosenstein, the inventor of the Facebook “like” button, has <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/facebook-like-inventor-deletes-app-iphone-justin-rosenstein-addiction-fears-a7986566.html">deleted</a> the app from his phone, citing worries about addiction, continuous partial attention disorder and the demise of democracy at the hands of social media. Former Google employee Tristan Harris and Loren Brichter, who invented the slot machine-like, pull-to-refresh mechanism for Twitter feeds, are both <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia">warning us</a> about the dangers of their creatures. </p>
<p>Anthony Ingraffea spent the first 25 years of his engineering career trying to figure out how to get more fossil fuels out of rocks. From 1978 to 2003, he worked on both government and industry grants to improve hydraulic fracturing. His own research never panned out, but when he learned of the success of others and the magnitude of chemicals and water required, he was “aghast” and <a href="http://www.sustainablecampus.cornell.edu/blogs/news/posts/cornell-professor-speaks-out-against-fracking">said</a>, “It was as if [I’d] been working on something [my] whole life and somebody comes and turns it into Frankenstein.” Over the past 10 years he has become one of the nation’s leading fracking opponents. The industry that once funded him now regularly trolls and attacks him. </p>
<p>Jennifer Doudna is one of the main scientists behind the gene-editing technique known as CRISPR. In her new book, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Crack-Creation-Editing-Unthinkable-Evolution-ebook/dp/B01I4FPNNQ">A Crack in Creation</a>,” she writes that CRISPR could eliminate several diseases and improve lives, but it could also be used in ways similar to Nazi eugenics. Doudna has revealed that she has nightmares where Hitler asks her to explain “the uses and implications of this amazing technology.”</p>
<p>Elon Musk <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/elon-musk-billion-dollar-crusade-to-stop-ai-space-x">worries</a> that with artificial intelligence we are “summoning the devil.” AI is, for him, “our greatest existential threat.” Musk has gone beyond Dr. Frankenstein’s initial impulse of evading his abominable creation: He is working on interplanetary colonization so that we can run all the way to Mars when AI goes rogue on planet Earth. </p>
<h2>Treating technology like a child</h2>
<p>The anthropologist Bruno Latour chastised Musk for this kind of thing. The way Latour <a href="https://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/past-issues/issue-2/love-your-monsters">sees it</a>, the moral of Frankenstein is not that we should stop making monsters but rather that we should love our monsters. The problem wasn’t Dr. Frankenstein’s hubris, but his unfeeling – he abandoned his “child” rather than educating it so that it could learn how to behave.</p>
<p>Latour’s point is that no amount of technological advance will give us total control and a blissful detachment from the world. Instead, technology, like parenting, will always require being constantly folded into new developments, tending, fretting and caring. </p>
<p>Musk’s initiative <a href="https://openai.com/">OpenAI</a>, which seeks to develop safer AI technologies, is more what Latour has in mind.</p>
<p>As it turns out, Latour is putting his own advice to the test. He is the creator-in-chief of the scariest monster of our times. This creature is not actually a product of science, but rather a way of thinking about science. Latour spent his career showing how scientific facts are <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Laboratory-Life-Construction-Scientific-Facts/dp/069102832X">socially constructed</a>, and that there is no such thing as unbiased access to truth. </p>
<p>In short, he argues that objectivity is a sham and science is never really settled or certain. </p>
<p>Now, of course, he’s watching in horror as this spirit of deconstruction and distrust takes root in our post-truth age of alternative facts, climate change denialists and partisan media bubbles. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/latour-qa">In a recent interview</a>, Latour admitted that he now regrets his earlier “juvenile enthusiasm” in attacking science and vows to reverse course:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We will have to regain some of the authority of science. That is the complete opposite from where we started doing science studies.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In order to love our monsters, we have to have some basic agreement about when they are misbehaving and what to do about it. That agreement comes through widespread trust in the traditional institutions of truth: science, the media and universities. Latour sought to liberate us from the paternalism of the experts inhabiting these institutions, and it was a noble quest. </p>
<p>But his acid, combined with the chaos of social media and the greed of big money, has corroded things more deeply than he imagined. Now it is bias all the way down, everything is susceptible to a knee-jerk accusation of “fake news.” Climate change may be the ultimate abomination or maybe it’s a hoax. Who can tell? The skepticism-induced paralysis is hardly conducive to chasing monsters.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/88856/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adam Briggle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Much like the fictitious Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s novel, more and more scientists are running away from their real-life creations.Adam Briggle, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion Studies, University of North TexasLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/650802016-10-28T23:07:21Z2016-10-28T23:07:21ZWhy we’ll always be obsessed with – and afraid of – monsters<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143701/original/image-20161028-15779-exv7yq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-72504520/stock-vector-frankenstein.html?src=PIrTu0jPNP6auVWrYo3rxA-1-51">'Frankenstein' via www.shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Fear continues to saturate our lives: fear of nuclear destruction, fear of climate change, fear of the subversive, and fear of foreigners.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/why-were-living-in-the-age-of-fear-w443554">But a Rolling Stone article about our “age of fear”</a> notes that most Americans are living “in the safest place at the safest time in human history.”</p>
<p>It continues:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Around the globe, household wealth, longevity and education are on the rise, while violent crime and extreme poverty are down. In the U.S., life expectancy is higher than ever, our air is the cleanest it’s been in a decade and, despite a slight uptick last year, violent crime has been trending down since 1991.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So why are we still so afraid? </p>
<p>Emerging technology and media could play a role. But in a sense, these have always played a role. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143704/original/image-20161028-15783-ngp5ux.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143704/original/image-20161028-15783-ngp5ux.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143704/original/image-20161028-15783-ngp5ux.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143704/original/image-20161028-15783-ngp5ux.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143704/original/image-20161028-15783-ngp5ux.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1189&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143704/original/image-20161028-15783-ngp5ux.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1189&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143704/original/image-20161028-15783-ngp5ux.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1189&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The title page of Cotton Mather’s ‘Wonders of the Invisible World,’ which describes the execution of witches in Salem, Massachusetts.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/ModestEnquiry.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the past, rumor and a rudimentary press coverage could fan the fires. Now, with the rise of social media, fears and fads and fancies race instantly through entire populations. Sometimes the specifics vanish almost as quickly as they arose, but the addiction to sensation, to fear and fantasy, persists, like a low-grade fever. </p>
<p>People often create symbols for that emotions are fleeting, abstract, and hard to describe. (Look no further than <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/11/emojis-rapid-evolution.html">the recent rise of the emoji</a>.) </p>
<p>For over the last three centuries, Europeans and Americans, in particular, have shaped anxiety and paranoia into the mythic figure of the monster – the embodiment of fear, disorder and abnormality – a history that I detail in my new book, <a href="http://yalebooks.com/book/9780300203806/haunted">“Haunted.”</a> </p>
<p>There are four main types of monsters. But a fifth – a nameless one – may best represent the anxieties of the 21st century. </p>
<h2>Rejecting rationality</h2>
<p>The 1700s and 1800s were an era of revolutionary uprisings that trumpeted a limitless future, when the philosophers and scientists of the Enlightenment proclaimed that reason had the power to change the world. <a href="http://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/%7Emsavihu/AvihuZakai/Zakai-RRR.pdf">Emotion was pushed out of the intellectual sphere by scientific reasoning</a>; awestruck spirituality had been repressed in favor of the Clockmaker God who set the universal laws into motion.</p>
<p>Of course, humans have always been afraid. But while the fears of the demonic and the diabolical characterized medieval times, the changes wrought by the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution created a whole new set of fears tied to advancements in science and technology, and an increasingly crowded and complex world. </p>
<p>During this age of political upheavals and aggressive modernization, tales of Gothic horror, haunted castles, secret compartments and rotting corpses were the rage. The novels and stories of writers such as Horace Walpole, Matthew G. Lewis, Anne Radcliffe and Mary Shelley soon became bestsellers. These writers – and many others – tapped into something pervasive, giving names and bodies to a universal emotion: fear.</p>
<p>The fictional monsters created during this period can be categorized into four types. Each corresponds to a deep seated anxiety about progress, the future and the human ability to achieve anything like control over the world. </p>
<p>“The monster from nature” represents a power that humans only think they have harnessed, but haven’t. The Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, King Kong and Godzilla are all examples of this type. An awesome abnormality that we can’t predict and scramble to understand, it strikes without warning – like the shark in “Jaws.” While the obvious inspiration are real ferocious animals, they could also be thought of as embodied versions of natural disasters – hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis. </p>
<p>“The created monster,” like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, is the monster we have built and believe we can control – until it turns against us. His descendants are the robots, androids and cyborgs of today, with their potential to become all too human – and threatening. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143736/original/image-20161028-15799-1bz3plq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143736/original/image-20161028-15799-1bz3plq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143736/original/image-20161028-15799-1bz3plq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143736/original/image-20161028-15799-1bz3plq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143736/original/image-20161028-15799-1bz3plq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143736/original/image-20161028-15799-1bz3plq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143736/original/image-20161028-15799-1bz3plq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">James Cameron’s Terminator is a descendent of Frankenstein.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Terminator.JPG">stephen bowler/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>“The monster from within” is the monster generated by our own repressed dark psychology, the other side of our otherwise bland and blameless human nature (think the Mr. Hyde to our Dr. Jekyll). When nondescript and seemingly harmless young men turn into mass-murdering killers or suicide bombers, the “monster from within” has shown his face. </p>
<p>“The monster from the past,” like Dracula, comes out of a pagan world and offers an alternative to ordinary Christianity with his promise of a blood feast that will confer immortality. Like a Nietzschean superman, he represents the fear that the ordinary consolations of religion are bankrupt and that the only answer to the chaos of modern life is the securing of power. </p>
<h2>Zombies: A vague, nameless danger</h2>
<p>Recently, our culture has become fixated on the zombie. The recent explosion of zombie films and stories illustrates how fear – while it may be a basic human trait – assumes the shape of particular eras and cultures. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/10/how-america-erased-the-tragic-history-of-the-zombie/412264/">The zombie</a> emerged from the brutal Caribbean slave plantations of the 17th and 18th centuries. They were the soulless bodies of undead slaves who stalked plantations grounds – so the myth went. But director George Romero’s pioneering films, like “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077402/">Dawn of the Dead</a>” (1978), generalized the figure into an unthinking member of a mass consumer society. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Yd-z5wBeFTU?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The theatrical trailer for ‘Dawn of the Dead.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The central distinction between the traditional monsters – such as the Frankenstein monster, Dracula or Mr. Hyde – is that the zombie exists primarily as part of a group. Unlike earlier monsters, who all stand alone, even in a kind of grandeur, one zombie is barely distinguishable from another. </p>
<p>What might the horrific image of mindless hordes out to eat our brains represent in the 21st century? It could symbolize whatever we fear will overwhelm and engulf us: epidemic disease, globalization, Islamic fundamentalists, illegal immigrants and refugees. Or it could be something less tangible and more existential: the loss of anonymity and individuality in a complex world, the threat of impersonal technology that makes each of us just another number in an electronic list.</p>
<p>In 1918, German sociologist Max Weber announced the triumph of reason: “There are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play,” <a href="http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Weber-Science-as-a-Vocation.pdf">he wrote in “Science as a Vocation.”</a> “One can, in principle, master all things by calculation.”</p>
<p>“The world,” he continued, “is disenchanted.”</p>
<p>Weber may have been a bit optimistic. Yes, we are committed, in many ways, to reason and analytic thinking. But it seems that we need our monsters and our sense of enchantment as well.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/27CNwOpvzuM?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Author Leo Braudy discusses his book ‘Haunted.’</span></figcaption>
</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/65080/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Leo Braudy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>All the popular monsters you’ll see out trick-or-treating, from Frankenstein to Dracula, were born out of fear and anxiety about change and technology.Leo Braudy, Leo S. Bing Chair in English and American Literature, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and SciencesLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/518332015-12-04T16:23:25Z2015-12-04T16:23:25ZMeet the real Frankenstein: pioneering scientist who may have inspired Mary Shelley<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/104460/original/image-20151204-14451-1tsdrkf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">James McEvoy playing with fire.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">20th Century Fox</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Following in the illustrious footsteps of the likes of Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr, Peter Cushing and Gene Wilder, James McAvoy plays the mad scientist <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1976009/">Victor Frankenstein</a> in the latest film version of Mary Shelley’s gothic novel, this time with Daniel Radcliffe in tow as his assistant Igor. </p>
<p>The film promises all the lightning, grave-robbing, and fantastical elements we’ve come to expect from the story. But it also has echoes of a real scientist, working mysteriously in the heart of the English countryside.</p>
<p>In the early years of the 19th century, strange stories began to be told about an isolated Somerset country house in the Quantock Hills. Its owner, Andrew Crosse, was known to locals as the “Wizard of the Quantocks”.</p>
<p>Crosse, also nicknamed “the thunder and lightning man” – and, more simply, “the electrician”, was born in 1784 and was an early pioneer in the study of electricity. He inherited Fyne Court in 1805 and transformed the house and wooded grounds into a laboratory for his experiments in investigating atmospheric electrical charges and the potential creative power of lightning strikes. Tim Mowl and I did some <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40649673">archaeological work in the grounds</a> recently – and traces of the garden laboratory survive today.</p>
<p>Crosse’s revelations on the power of electricity challenged orthodox creation theories: here was a power that could be controlled, an alternative to divine power. Mary Shelley’s diaries reveal that in 1814 she and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley attended a lecture that Crosse, “the thunder and lightning man”, delivered in London.</p>
<p>Mary published <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2Zc3AAAAYAAJ&">Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus</a> in 1818, featuring a “Modern Prometheus” who defied the Gods by creating a monster reanimated by the power of electricity. Could Andrew Crosse have inspired the real Frankenstein?</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/104451/original/image-20151204-29724-1a9i35m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/104451/original/image-20151204-29724-1a9i35m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=770&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104451/original/image-20151204-29724-1a9i35m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=770&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104451/original/image-20151204-29724-1a9i35m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=770&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104451/original/image-20151204-29724-1a9i35m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=967&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104451/original/image-20151204-29724-1a9i35m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=967&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104451/original/image-20151204-29724-1a9i35m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=967&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Andrew Crosse, unkwown artist.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Harnessing lightning bolts</h2>
<p>Spending the family inheritance on scientific equipment, Crosse constructed a complex register for measuring the strength of electrical charges in the air, not just during thunderstorms, but in all weather conditions. Crosse used a third of a mile of copper wire, threaded from poles attached to the tallest trees to create a gathering web and connected this down to a battery of 50 Leyden jars stored, apparently, in the organ loft of Fyne Court’s music room. Recent geophysical work has demonstrated the presence of buildings beneath the modern car park which may also have formed part of the laboratory complex.</p>
<p>When atmospheric conditions were favourable the in-surge of electrical power was so great that batteries would charge and discharge each time with a monstrous flash and a massive explosion of sound. What impressed visitors was the way in which Crosse manipulated the deadly forces with an insulated rod, directing them into batteries and experimental jars, or out into the earth.</p>
<p>The flashes and explosions gained Crosse local notoriety – as one visitor reported: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>You can’t go near his cursed house at night without danger of your life; them as have been there have seen devils, all surrounded by lightning, dancing on the wires that he has put up round his grounds.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But in the wider world of science he was a respectable member of the London Electrical Society, working at a time when it was being suggested that electricity was the primal creative force behind not only all living things, but also inanimate materials. Michael Faraday, a leading experimental physicist and pioneer of electricity, was a close friend of Crosse, and Benjamin Franklin – whose experiments with kites and lightning flashes have obvious links with Crosse’s work – was one of his father’s acquaintances.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/104462/original/image-20151204-16482-dewp6b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/104462/original/image-20151204-16482-dewp6b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104462/original/image-20151204-16482-dewp6b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104462/original/image-20151204-16482-dewp6b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104462/original/image-20151204-16482-dewp6b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104462/original/image-20151204-16482-dewp6b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104462/original/image-20151204-16482-dewp6b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">VF.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">20th Century Fox</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Vital forces</h2>
<p>On December 28 1814, Mary Shelley attended a lecture that Crosse gave at Garnerin’s London lecture rooms, where he gave a vivid account of the explosive fires that he, like Prometheus, brought down from the heavens. Mary’s journal entry provides proof that she attended Crosse’s presentation:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Shelley and Clary out all the morning. Read French Revolution in the evening. Shelley & I go to Gray’s Inn to get Hogg: he is not there; go to Arundel Street; can’t find him. Go to Garnerin’s. Lecture on Electricity; the gasses & the Phantasmagoria, return at ½ past nine Shelley goes to sleep.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the course of the lecture, Crosse explained how he tapped into and controlled thunderstorms, which must have seemed a case of humanity equalling or even cheating the gods. Such claims were combined with hints that electricity could, when controlled as Crosse could control it, heal the sick. It was only a short leap on Mary Shelley’s part to advance from cures for rheumatism and hangovers to invent that ugly and dangerous – yet tragic – monster of Frankenstein’s devising.</p>
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</figure>
<p>Crosse scandalised conservative critics when (in the 1830s, long after the publication of Frankenstein) he claimed to have produced living creatures in his electrical experiments: beetles which he named “<em>Acarus crossii</em>” after himself.</p>
<p>Andrew Crosse is buried under an obelisk shaped tombstone in Broomfield churchyard – in an area usually reserved for outsiders and miscreants, which may indicate how the local parishioners viewed him. His inscription describes his as: “Humble towards God and Kind to his Fellow Creatures”. Yet he was a man who, through his scientific achievements, was more challenging than humble when it comes to the almighty. </p>
<p>Mary Shelley’s book was a cynical but imaginative advance on the thunder flashes and fire balls that Crosse produced at Fyne Court and described in his lecture. Like Crosse’s electrical experiments, Shelley’s Modern Prometheus could be taken as a direct challenge to God. They both offered an alternative theory of creation, one which the writer and the scientist seem to have shared on that December evening in 1814.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/51833/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stuart Prior does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Mary Shelley’s diaries reveal that in 1814 she attended a lecture that Andrew Crosse, “thunder and lightning man”, delivered in London.Stuart Prior, Senior Teaching Fellow in Archaeological Practice, University of BristolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/464252015-08-21T05:34:34Z2015-08-21T05:34:34ZOur endless appetite for zombies is because we’re looking at ourselves<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92604/original/image-20150820-7208-10dxjsv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&language=en&ref_site=photo&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&use_local_boost=1&autocomplete_id=&searchterm=zombie&show_color_wheel=1&orient=&commercial_ok=&media_type=images&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&color=&page=1&inline=159025058">Nebojsa Markovic</a></span></figcaption></figure><blockquote>
<p>The zombie apocalypse has upended the entire TV business.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.tvguide.com/News/Cable-Vs-Broadcast-Walking-Dead-1055456.aspx">Those were</a> the words of America’s TV Guide in response to <a href="http://www.amc.com/shows/the-walking-dead">The Walking Dead</a>, the smash-hit show for cable channel AMC in 2012. Based on an equally popular <a href="https://imagecomics.com/comics/series/the-walking-dead">graphic novel series</a>, it centres around Rick Grimes, a deputy sheriff who wakens from a long coma to find that the world has been overrun by a zombie apocalypse. It was the number one entertainment series on TV among 18 to 49-year-old adults at the time, a “<a href="http://www.tvguide.com/News/Cable-Vs-Broadcast-Walking-Dead-1055456.aspx">landmark accomplishment</a> for a cable show”. </p>
<p>The monster ratings <a href="http://variety.com/2015/tv/ratings/amcs-walking-dead-returns-with-15-6-million-viewers-saul-premiere-solid-behind-it-1201428816/">continued</a> through to this year, so no wonder AMC is now launching a prequel series. Fear the Walking Dead will take place at the start of the zombie apocalypse and follow a different group of survivors. Teasers, trailers and speculation have been all over the internet for months ahead of the August 23 premiere, making it one of the most hotly anticipated across the globe for a some time.</p>
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<p>While the main show is itself returning for a <a href="http://www.amc.com/shows/the-walking-dead/video-extras/official-comic-con-trailer-the-walking-dead-season-6">sixth season</a> in October, there are also numerous other big-budget zombie stories in the offing. World War Z is being followed by a <a href="http://www.cinemablend.com/new/World-War-Z-2-May-Go-Completely-Different-Direction-69286.html">sequel in 2017</a>, while the odder mash-up phenomenon that is <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1374989/">Pride and Prejudice and Zombies</a>, adapted from a novel of the same name, is due for release in 2016. </p>
<p>And that’s just the tip of the zombie-berg. They stretch into any number of forms that encourage participation in popular culture: video games, such as Wii U console launch title <a href="http://www.metacritic.com/game/wii-u/zombiu">Zombi4U</a>; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59An70D3xg8">augmented reality games</a>; <a href="http://www.deadyourself.com/walkers">phone apps</a>; and immersive <a href="http://deathbyzombie.com/?pc=walks">zombie walks</a> across the globe. There are <a href="http://www.zombieevacuation.com/">zombie runs</a>, where participants are “encouraged” along by zombie attacks; the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-berkshire-17461708">zombie shopping mall experience</a> and even the I Survived a Zombie Apocalypse <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/culture/tvandradioblog/2015/mar/02/i-survived-a-zombie-apocalypse-is-a-reality-show-with-real-bite">game show</a>. </p>
<h2>Zombie origins</h2>
<p>The zombie is not a new figure in popular culture, but interestingly it neither comes from the folklore of medieval Europe nor from Romantic or Victorian literature – unlike Dracula or Frankenstein’s monster, for example. If we are talking about origins it comes from the Caribbean island of Haiti. Yet the myth <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Monsters-Monstrous-Metaphors-Interface-Boundaries/dp/9042022531">only entered</a> western consciousness in the 20th century, mainly through the US occupation of Haiti (1915-34). This was through the publication of stories such as <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/605545.The_Magic_Island">William Seabrook’s Magic Island</a> in 1929, which has <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1542-734X.2008.00668.x/full">been credited with</a> drawing the attention of the American public from the Old World to the New. </p>
<p>Today’s zombie is even more recent, however. It did not exist before George Romero’s groundbreaking film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063350/">Night of the Living Dead</a> from 1968. Prior to that, zombies in film were more like their Haitian antecedents. One writer <a href="http://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/the-dead-that-walk/author/halliwell-leslie/">has described</a> the zombies of films such as <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0023694/">White Zombie</a> (Victor Halperin, 1932) or <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036027/">I Walked with a Zombie</a> (Jacques Tourneur, 1943) as “dead people who are revived, more or less intact, to serve the purposes of the living”. They are raised by black magic to become the mindless slave of the magician who creates them, and in reality the “monster” of these films is not the zombie but its master. </p>
<p>With Night of the Living Dead the rules changed. It became about mass outbreaks where the dead rise up to consume the living, and any cause given is fragmentary and inconclusive. It might be a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puvjr9kDQuU">(man-made) virus</a> which reanimates the brain stem of the dead; or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IGf83NMCKo">radiation</a>; or some force from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgdBNAApOmo">outer space</a>. Importantly it is no longer the result of occult black magic practices, making the genre arguably more science fiction than horror. They still have little character of their own, intent only on devouring the living, but the zombies’ main characteristic has now become their relentlessness.</p>
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<h2>Why zombies and why now?</h2>
<p>Zombie narratives offer multiple possible points of identification for audiences, and simultaneously play to many different concerns at once. Some viewers, perhaps most, will identify with the survivors, whom the zombies inexplicably rise up to attack over and over again. It is a very simple narrative from that point of view – in The Walking Dead world the survivors keep fighting, but every time the group think they have found a secure location they are overrun once more. </p>
<p>It has been <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Shadow_and_Evil_in_Fairy_Tales.html?id=YHKBAAAAMAAJ&hl=en">suggested that</a> the survivors might be said to embody “a heroic chivalrous ideal that man has to fight evil, be involved in fighting it actively – doing something about it.” Yet this <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Shadow_and_Evil_in_Fairy_Tales.html?id=YHKBAAAAMAAJ&hl=en">very western</a> approach doesn’t get them very far – the zombies never give up and never go away. Yet the survivors fight on and on and on. </p>
<p>What the survivors forget is that the zombies are also them – to be bitten by a zombie is to become one. In The Walking Dead the survivors realise that they are all infected already and will inevitably all turn when they die whether they are bitten or not. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92605/original/image-20150820-7225-eonmdu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92605/original/image-20150820-7225-eonmdu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92605/original/image-20150820-7225-eonmdu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92605/original/image-20150820-7225-eonmdu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92605/original/image-20150820-7225-eonmdu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92605/original/image-20150820-7225-eonmdu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92605/original/image-20150820-7225-eonmdu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92605/original/image-20150820-7225-eonmdu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Do you see these people at the watercooler?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/caioschiavo/6309585830/in/photolist-aByh3A-ikeMty-9VDGgn-8FCLy5-dq9GQF-gtPyE6-dq9JFa-8akZTE-dq9U7j-94zTWo-6kPP1Z-kp5ny-75EWAU-7BNVQT-75B4yk-5xEA3o-kppYh-5x1d2v-f1AtjU-4jhoxv-8HQd6h-5vEiHj-8FCLyf-ps9op4-rBoHq3-7BXAu1-p6uNKN-9uXWJi-dmqD7J-dq9UYK-iJ6PD5-6YnmFZ-asAsAN-wrYLsv-4nJABK-7bHUwg-8M79Lk-5Fgww-pxRmgG-poWP2-7awxXb-7cSKD7-npTjdu-6PLC88-rsGfDA-JrfjN-dhSYKQ-66Gzbc-afbKA9-6QP4Jc">Caio Schiavo</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>These kinds of insights make some of the audience identify with the zombies: lacking emotion, lacking joy, only feeling the relentless urge to consume. And perhaps the majority of the audience unconsciously suspect that zombies really are us, a heedless plague of humanity consuming the world. </p>
<p>Ultimately the zombie, like all good monsters, holds our attention because it raises many questions about the nature of the monster itself and about our response to it. This matters because what we are really looking at is ourselves.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/46425/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catriona Miller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>As new zombie TV spin-off Fear the Walking Dead premieres, why have these creatures ruled the horror roost for so long?Catriona Miller, Senior Lecturer in Media, Glasgow Caledonian UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.