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Physician Giovanni Aldini (1762-1834) conducted experiments
using electricity on newly executed criminals that produced an opening
of the eyes, a quivering of the jaw and contortion of muscles. This illustration
from his essay on galvanism shows doctors reanimating corpses. Shelley
made explicit references to Galvanism in her revised 1831 edition of Frankenstein.
Films from the 1930s produced this enduring image
of Victor Frankenstein's monster, here on a U.S. postage stamp.
A portrait of Mary Shelley writing.
References to Frankenstein continue to shape public
debate and fears about new scientific advances, such as cloning, interspecies
organ transplants and genetic engineering. Opponents of genetically altered
foods created this postcard.
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Exhibit on Frankenstein looks at the intersection of scientific knowledge,
creative power and human arrogance.
By Rachel Engers
With his flattened pate, horrid scars and a set of neck bolts to keep
his head on straight, the monster popularly known as “Frankenstein”
is a lurching, grunting, remorseless killer. This image, made famous by
a series of 1930s films starring Boris Karloff, can be seen on everything
from cereal boxes to postage stamps and has come to represent the notion
of science out of control. Any new technology that calls into question
our traditional understanding of what it means to be human, from cloning
to xenotransplantation, seems inevitably to raise the specter of author
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s hideous monster. Nearly two centuries after
its creation, Frankenstein continues to haunt us.
According to Susan E. Lederer, Ph.D., associate professor of the history
of medicine, the story continues to maintain its hold on the popular imagination.
“It’s alive and it’s escaped,” says Lederer. “These represent
primal fears about human agency and responsibility for creation.”
Lederer was the chief curator of “Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets
of Nature,” a 1997 exhibit at the National Library of Medicine (NLM),
and mounted a modified version of the show this summer in the rotunda
of the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library. From the Yale archives, she added
rare books on galvanism and the supposed reanimation of the dead that
influenced Shelley’s 1818 novel. The exhibit examines how the author used
the “scientific advances and controversies of her era as a metaphor
for issues of unchecked power, self-serving ambition and their effect
on the human community.” It also looks at how playwrights, filmmakers
and cartoonists have transformed the image of the monster and how Frankenstein’s
monster continues to emerge in debates about modern science. Over the
next four years the traveling exhibit, drawn from the exhibit sponsored
by the NLM and the American Library Association, will visit 80 libraries
across the country.
While the idea for Frankenstein came to 18-year-old Mary Shelley
in a dream, the monster reflected the curiosity of physicians and natural
philosophers of her era in reviving the drowned and reanimating dead tissue
using electricity. These researchers, according to the exhibit text, aimed
to benefit humankind and end death and disease through their investigation
into the mysteries of nature.
Assembled in secret from body parts gathered from graveyards and slaughterhouses,
scientist Victor Frankenstein’s creation has flowing hair, black lips
and shriveled yellow skin, which “scarcely covered the work of muscles
and arteries beneath.” Despite his grisly appearance, the nameless
monster is intelligent and sensitive. He seeks human companionship and
educates himself by reading the works of Homer, Milton and Goethe. Only
after his maker rejects him does the creature turn to rage and murder.
The tragedy of the story is Victor Frankenstein’s arrogance and failure
to take responsibility for his creation.
The monster in the novel is different from and more complex than the version
that has been popularized. The collection of artifacts shows an 1823 English
playbill for “Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein,” which
portrayed the monster as a speechless brute. This marked the beginning
of the simplification of the author’s tale that continues in films and
commercial culture today.
The exhibit also explores the novel’s often-forgotten subtitle, The
Modern Prometheus. This figure in Greek mythology was a symbol of
optimism to Mary Shelley, who noted that he used “knowledge as a
weapon to defeat evil by leading mankind beyond the state where they are
sinless through ignorance, to that in which they are virtuous through
wisdom.” Thus despite Victor Frankenstein’s utter failure, the exhibit
points out, the author suggests the possibility that we can make responsible
choices about scientific discovery.
Rachel Engers is a freelance writer in Branford, Conn.
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