frankenstein 200:
diodati Revisited
El Camino Community college
A pen, a knife, a house, a lake;
4 friends, 3 rainy days, and 1 proposition.
These are some of the elements that went into the creation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In the summer of 1816, Mary Shelley, along with Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori, spent three interminably rainy days inside the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. To pass the time, they read German ghost stories until Byron suggested they each write their own. The initial concept of Frankenstein was born in answer to that proposal.
Shelley desired to write a story “which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror.” To do this, she didn’t look back to haunted ruins of the past as other romantic writers of her day had. Instead, she roots her tale of terror in the modern technologies, scientific discoveries, and intellectual discourse of her time.
It is important to note that Shelley was well-versed in the advancements of the period and extremely knowledgeable of the great technological and intellectual changes occurring around her. She was writing during the advent of the Industrial Revolution, a time when the ability to construct, manipulate, and devise the world was beginning to feel limitless. For Shelley and others, it was if they were standing at the edge of a precipice with all of the secrets of the universe, even of life itself, lying before them. Like the romantic notion of the sublime, the feeling was awesome, terrifying, compelling and, even, destructive.
The Romantic notion of the sublime, as explored by other artists of the period, is often situated within the natural environment and is depicted as an scene of terrifying beauty that is both invigorating but also, possibly, life-threatening. Emphasis on the sublime marks a shift away from Neoclassical notions of pleasurable beauty towards the more visceral experience sought throughout Romanticism. Likewise, Shelley does, indeed immerse her characters in the natural sublime. Both Victor Frankenstein and the monster detail the soul-stirring effects of the natural environment as they travel through the mountainous landscapes of Northern Europe. However, it is in the way that she parallels those descriptions with those of Victor’s passionate pursuit of knowledge and the eventual conception of the monster, that she actualizes a new experience of the sublime, the technological sublime.
In his exuberance, Victor Frankenstein, creates a ‘monster’ or at least a being that is perceived as such by those who meet him. He is both horrible and beautiful, a creature of deep intellect and sentiment, but also vengeful and terrifying. In both his contrivance and his aspect, the monster represents an experience of the sublime produced not by nature, but by humanity itself.
A pen, a knife, a house, a lake; 4 friends, 3 rainy days, and
1 proposition.
Shelley, too is a creator. In its inception, Frankenstein is a story about technological making; one that examines the essential questions inherent in such an endeavor. Unlike her subject, Victor Frankenstein, she is acutely aware of the problems that accompany such a process and confronts them vigorously. She fashions her work by exposing the ideas that all writers, makers, inventors, designers, and technologists must ask as they move into the realm of the technological sublime.
These questions become increasingly relevant today as we find ourselves again in a period of drastic technological change. The advent of digital technologies allows us to manipulate the constructs of our daily realities bringing us once again to the precipice. As we look out at the endless technological possibilities, what are the questions we should be asking? As we select the tools for our next innovation, will we ask ourselves what are the monsters we should be wary of making?
