La complejidad de lo real

The influence of Darwin upon Frankenstein is undeniable. His biographer Desmond King-Hele claims that ‘Darwin stands, then, as a father-figure over this first and most famous work of science.’78 In her preface, Mary Shelley describes a conversation between Byron and Shelley relating to D arw in’s experiments with artificial life. This may have triggered off the waking dream which sparked off her nightmare:

Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of these, various philosophi­ cal doctrines were discussed, and among others the na­ ture of the principle o f life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and com muni­ cated. They talked o f the experiments o f Dr Darwin (I speak not of what the doctor really did, or said that he did, but, as more to my purpose, o f what was then spo­ ken o f as having been done by him), who preserved a piece o f vermicelli in a glass case till by some extraor­ dinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given to­ ken of such things: perhaps the component parts o f a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.79

Attempting to authenticate the foundations of her fiction, M ary Shelley calls upon the authority o f Darwin to confirm that reanimation was ‘not of impossible occurrence.’80

D arw in’s biological interests are evident from his poems, Zoonomia

or the Laws o f Organic Life (1794-6), described as the ‘most original

book ever written by man,’81 The Temple o f Nature (1804) and The B o­

tanic Garden (1791). Shelley had read these books82 and communicated

his enthusiasm for Darwin’s poetry to Mary. A less well known Darwin­ ian source for the monster may be found in The Botanic Garden, which contains a description of the creation of a monstrous being. It is based on a mythological superstructure of the Rosicrucian spirit-world which Dar­ win claims to have derived from Francis Bacon:

The Rosicrucian doctrine of Gnomes, Sylphs, Nymphs, and Salamanders, was thought to afford a proper ma­ chinery for a Botanic poem; as it is probable, that they were originally the names o f hieroglyphic figures repre­ senting the elements or o f Genii presiding over their operations. The fairies of more modern days seem to have been derived from them, and to have inherited their powers.83

According to Peter Tomory, Darwin regarded the Rosicrucian spirits as vital symbols of physiological and chemical processes.84 The presence of

MARY SHELLEY AND THE MORTAL IMMORTAL

these life-giving forces is known to the ‘A dept’ o f ‘Hermetic art’85 re­ ferred to by Darwin in the poem. He goes on to describe a monstrous be­ ing ‘castled on ice,’86 which puts us in mind o f the image o f the Franken­ stein monster cast out on the Arctic wastes. In The Botanic Garden, the first faltering steps of Mary Shelley’s creation seem to be almost antici­ pated:

IMMORTAL LIFE, her hand extending, courts The lingering form, his tottering step supports, Leads on to Pluto’s realms the dreary way, And gives him trembling to Elysian day.87

Like Frankenstein’s monster, Darwin’s creature inspires terror in all who see it:

His mass enormous to the affrighted South; Spreads o ’er the shuddering line his shadowy limbs, And Frost and Famine follow as he swims.88

D arw in’s monster is eventually redeemed and hailed by nations as the ‘M onarch o f the A ir.’ The sylphs have been instructed by the Goddess of Botany how to bring about this change:

Sylphs! round his cloud-built couch your band array, And mould the monster to your gentle sway

Charm with soft tones, with tender touches check, Bend to your golden yoke his willing neck

With silver curb his yielding teeth restraint.89

In The Botanic Garden, Darwin explores his interest in the artificial pro­ duction o f life through the allegory and myth o f the Rosicrucian tradition.

In his other botanic poem, Zoonomia, Darwin had noted that environ­ mental conditions could mould monstrosities. Possibly as a response to this, Mary Shelley shows how environment rather than heredity is re­ sponsible for poisoning the mental, spiritual and psychic faculties of the Frankenstein monster. Darwin’s theory o f generation, founded on the be­ lief that gender and other genetic inheritances are determined by the mind of the male parent, may also have significance in relation to the Franken­ stein creation.

Victor Frankenstein is the architect o f an immortality which is inde­ pendent of woman. Usurping the female reproductive role, he symbolically slays the goddess. The monster, though literally o f woman born, is a dire warning of the dangers of solitary paternal propagation. As a grim para­

ble of Lockean empiricism, it is fed on a diet of primarily patriarchal sense impressions. Maternal deprivation accelerates mental and physical de­ generation, moral and spiritual decline. Mary Shelley debunks the m ascu­ line myth that woman was born o f man by portraying the offspring o f a male mother as a monster. Frankenstein’s Luciferian folly of pride and failure o f the imagination is posited on the belief that men, basking in the illusion of the dispassionate objectivity o f so-called scientific rationality rather than relying on the workings o f nature, can produce a higher form of life than that brought about by sexual reproduction and nurturing by the female. Although professing to shy away from polemic, Mary Shelley challenges the historically pervasive and culturally validated polarization o f rational science with masculinity which marginalizes instinctual nature and feminity. Her own procreation o f fictional monstrosities amplifying the monstrous consequences o f male narcissism, shows the scientist striving to subjugate nature and denying the value o f domestic relations - - a m atter which had aroused Godwin’s attention in St Leon.

Anne Mellor develops this argument by showing how Mary Shelley deploys a feminist critique o f science predicated on the way in which sci­ entific developments sometimes employ metaphor and imagery. Virile male science pitted against a passive and subdued nature for the purpos­ es of violation and penetration was a predominant image of the Scientific Revolution. This is the imperative uttered in Frankenstein when Profes­ sor Waldman urges the young Victor to adhere to the example o f those scientists who penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding places. Mellor cites Bacon’s famous injunction: ‘I am come in very truth leading to you Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave.’90 Regarded generally as the fa­ ther o f the scientific method, Bacon does not here explicate his role mere­ ly in the prose o f paternity but instead resorts to the highly charged lan­ guage o f the slave trader.

The Rosicrucian tradition may have attracted Mary Shelley as an ide­ ological alternative to this bifurcation of magic and science and binary op­ position between male and female. The Rosicrucian Invisible College had been outlawed, presumably because of its refusal to locate science, magic and nature, male and female within incommensurable paradigms. The cen­ tral symbolism, the rose on the cross, is a representation of the unity of the male and female compounding the name of the legendary founder, Christian Rosencreutz. The androgyny o f this system o f symbolism grounded in the iconography o f alchemy may be suspect to present day thinking, since androgynous compromises invariably end up by privileging the male and as such do not offer a satisfactory alternative to the gender­

MARY SHELLEY AND THE MORTAL IMMORTAL

ing of male science and female nature.91 Nevertheless, the marrying of the male and female principles celebrated in the Hermetic allegory, The

Chemical Wedding, accepted generally as the third Rosicrucian manifesto,

may well have appealed to Mary Shelley as preferable to the denial of the feminine, as in the case of Victor Frankenstein’s experiments.

The public way in which she defines herself through her fiction belies her projected private image of docility and submission, when we consider such denunciations of her novel as W illiam Beckford’s verdict that it was ‘perhaps, the foulest toadstool that has yet sprung up from the reeking dunghill o f the present tim es.’92 The idea o f a woman conjuring up sacrile­ gious visions of the grotesque and gargantuan desire o f the mad scientist defied patriarchal precepts governing constructs of femininity. Beckford’s pronouncement that Frankenstein was the Gothic novel’s most ‘hideous progeny’ would have been endorsed by those who regarded it as a mon­ strosity penned by a woman. Less threatening were the kind produced by men, even in the case of the Jacobin monster, which proved to be a far more political animal than that which Mary Shelley had created.