Frankenstein; or, The Modern Lift Master (part one)

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4:08 – “This is why Zeus decreed that Prometheus would be chained to a rock and tortured forever… his liver being eaten out of him by eagles every day only to regenerate overnight for the next round.”

There are many variants of the Promethean myth.  In Hesiod’s Theogony and Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, for instance, Prometheus is not technically a Titan but only the son of one.  There are also variations concerning Prometheus’s motivation for stealing the fire for the humans: in Hesiod’s version, Zeus withheld the fire from humans to punish Prometheus for trying to trick him (528); in Aeschylus, Prometheus provides fire among many other gifts to the humans to save them from Zeus’s plan to execute the human race upon his succession as leader of Olympus (446-466).  The last relevant variant concerns Zeus’s punishment of Prometheus.  In Hesiod’s telling, the eagles eat Prometheus’s liver every day (521).  In variations including that of Aeschylus, Prometheus suffers this living torture only every third day (1015).

4:30 – “Subtitling her novel ‘The Modern Prometheus’ casts Shelley’s protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, as a similar figure who filches knowledge from the divine realm – only he does so at the University of Ingolstadt in the late 18th century.”

As has been pointed out by Gary Harrison and William Gannon in their witty imagining of Victor Frankenstein’s Institutional Review Board proposal and by Christa Knellwolf and Jane Goodall in their collection titled Frankenstein’s Science, Ingolstadt was widely known in the early nineteenth century as the seat of the Illuminati, whose founder Johann Adam Weishaupt (1748 – 1811) hailed from the town and worked at the university as a professor of law (Harrison and Gannon 1146; Knellwolf and Goodall 4).  In my interview with Paul Monod, he affirmed this association and maintained that “as soon as [Shelley] said ‘Ingolstadt,’ she has implied that there is some connection with the Illuminati.” (9).  Without putting too fine a point on it, it seems at the very least that choosing this setting was meant to invoke the kind of occult, forbidden knowledge that modern scientists disdained.

6:28 – “[Victor’s] startling appearance – coupled with the fact that Walton’s ship is trapped in a motionless sea of ice – gives Victor good reason to tell his tale…”

It has also been widely acknowledged that Walton’s expedition into uncharted territory mirrors Victor’s own quest for knowledge – an example of the common “doubling” device in early novels that allows Victor (/Shelley) the opportunity to reiterate the ‘moral’ of his tale.  Frances Ferguson has argued that Walton and Victor represent a model of the Romantic notion of “generation” that allows for mutual instruction – a type of pedagogy that Mary Shelley implicitly promotes (117). Steven Marcus’s less favorable reading is that the comparison reveals both Walton and Victor as “adventurous overreachers” who are situated as Other in human society and yet who also cast Nature as Other (195, 198).  Anne Mellor has an interesting take: she argues that Walton withholds judgment of the creature because – unlike everyone else in the novel besides the elder De Lacey – he first learns about the creature through Victor’s story and not through direct sight of him.  This circumstance, Mellor argues, reveals Shelley’s argument that visual perception is a misleading path to knowledge, and that humans typically interpret the unfamiliar, the abnormal, and the unique as evil” (129-130, 134).  See also Rauch and Swingle.

8:06 – “Frankenstein has widely – famously – been read as a novel about hubris. Overreaching ambition and pride.”

David Punter goes so far as to argue that the “seeker after forbidden knowledge” is a well-worn trope of Gothic fiction, and he casts Victor Frankenstein as the archetype of the genre (87).  

8:24 – “…but in my reading, it’s not God that Victor is challenging. It’s his teachers.”

A Foucauldian reading might hold that, in terms of the knowledge-constructing apparatuses of power, the distinction between God and other authority figures like teachers is unimportant because they are part of the same hierarchical system of oppression.  I would argue, however, that interpreting Victor’s oppressors in terms of power/knowledge as his teachers rather than an abstract figure like God allows for a different reading of Shelley’s critical intentions in the novel.  Rather than being a work of philosophical or even theological criticism, Frankenstein becomes Shelley’s commentary on concrete, historical concerns over educational practices. 

10:06 – “[Victor] doubled down in his obsession with the occult, determined to demonstrate the worthiness of his interests despite his father’s attempts to divert them.”

There are those who interpret this moment in the opposite way.  Samuel Vasbinder argues that Victor loses interest in the occult after his father’s discouragement, and his later re-animation project is founded solely in modern science: “Victor’s retreat to an attic room and his nocturnal collecting expeditions are not alchemic but dictated by necessity, as will be shown in the last chapter. Why should we attempt to read otherwise?” (60).  I would say that Victor’s discussions of occult philosophy with M. Krempe and M. Waldman at Ingolstadt indicate his continued interest in the subject and suggest we should read otherwise.

11:00 – “…the spot we’re waiting to enter is actually four and a half floors of poorly lit brutalist architecture that was recently voted the ugliest building in the state of Iowa.”

According to a reader poll conducted by Business Insider.

22:53 – “Because why is it, exactly, that M. Krempe and Alphonse Frankenstein are so quick to disregard Victor’s interests? A lot of critics take the answer for granted...”

There have been hundreds of books and articles produced by scholars about Frankenstein in the last fifty years, but only a handful come close to addressing this question.  Two of the big voices in Mary Shelley scholarship – Anne Mellor and U.C. Knoepfelmacher – presuppose, like most, that Agrippa et. al are, by modern standards, pseudo-scientists (Mellor 90; Knoepfelmacher 317).   Similarly, James Rieger famously calls all of the science in Frankenstein nothing more than “souped-up alchemy” (xxvi).  Most major scholars of Frankenstein seem to take for granted that Victor’s teachers were right – that the occult truly holds no value in Shelley’s story.  However, I think the question is worth more consideration; Shelley seems to have found something redeeming about these older works since she placed them at the center of her protagonist’s intellectual struggle.  Stuart Peterfreund also argues that there may be more value to be found in Shelley’s inclusion of Paracelsus, in particular; he reads the narrative structure and Victor’s psychological development as an enactment of the Paracelsian injunction for self-knowledge in natural philosophy (85).

23:28 – “Despite [Krempe and Alphonse’s] discouragement, [Victor] secretly pursues those interests in an effort to prove them wrong, which turns out to work.”

As if to re-emphasize the point that pre-creature Victor’s work is an act of defiance, throughout the momentous scene in which he’s pent up in his room building and animating a human, Shelley creates a scenario in which Victor is constantly at odds with the voice of his father.  While in his state of creative frenzy, Victor first recalls his father’s injunction that he must keep up regular correspondence during his time at Ingolstadt (83); later, Victor tells Walton that his father’s letters expressed increasing concern over how he was occupying his time (84).  Victor ignores him and presses on in his secret act of creation, but – in my reading – he eventually ends up internalizing the voice of his father (and, by extension, that of Krempe) at the moment he sees the creature come to life.  I’ll talk more about this in the next episode, but in most readings of the novel, this is the central tragedy: Victor’s abandonment of the creature.  As Smith, Butler, and others have discussed, it is t’s Victor’s sudden change of heart – or mind, rather – that condemns the inherently innocent being to a life of misery and rejection.

23:40 – “Combining occult knowledge with modern science, Victor discovers the method to re-animate dead matter, which is an astounding accomplishment in the realm of human knowledge.”

As discussed in the note above (8:06), most readers of Frankenstein have interpreted Victor’s discovery less favorably – as a mere act of hubris rather than a scientific breakthrough with boundless positive applications.  Alan Rauch acknowledges that the creature “should be considered a remarkable creation,” only Victor’s “ignoring the human qualities that clearly make knowledge effective, particularly nurturing and caring” negates the positive possibilities (228).  

24:27 – “What epistemic gate had been constructed in modern science that Victor worked all those years to furtively tear down, only to end up abandoning it and siding with the Lift Masters after all? To answer this question for myself…”

There’s maybe been only one other person who’s taken seriously this question of why Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus were persona non grata for Victor’s teachers, and that is Samuel Vasbinder – a Ph.D. student in the 70’s who wrote a dissertation titled Scientific Attitudes in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The project sets out to prove that Mary Shelley knew more about science than most previous critics had given her credit for, and in the process Vasbinder addresses the question of Alphonse Frankenstein’s reaction to his son’s interest in Agrippa.  Vasbinder points out that, soon after calling Victor’s interests “sad trash,” Alphonse gives his son a lesson in electricity, using a kite to attract lightning a la Benjamin Franklin.  Like others since him, Vasbinder reads this moment as one in which Victor (at least nominally) gives up on those occultists… claims the “lords of [his] imagination” were “overthrown.”  And according to Vasbinder, it’s because of his father’s “demonstration of new science and its learning” (60, emphasis mine). So, although it’s never explicitly stated, Vasbinder says Alphonse disdains Agrippa simply because his ideas are “old,” as he sets out to prove with the kite.  He doesn’t mention Krempe at all.

26:46 – “Monod talked about this when I asked him about Albertus Magnus… who’s not actually in his book Solomon’s Secret Arts because – as it turns out – he was never really an occultist.”

As Monod explains, “The reason Albertus Magnus is in [Frankenstein] is because of a fallacy.”  Early editions of Magnus’s theological works include as an appendix a “little treatise on alchemy that he was supposed to have written,” but “he never wrote it. It was not by him” (Monod, personal interview).  Although Albertus renounced alchemy, people mistook him for an alchemist because of this editorial error until later in the nineteenth century “when they started reading him again” (Monod, personal interview).

28:34 – “In my reading, it was never that he wanted to prove that the old way was the right one – just that the rationalist distinction his father and Krempe were making was too simplistic and closed-minded.”

As noted by Janelle Schwartz in Worm Work: Recasting Romanticism, there is a “certain mystique” surrounding the methods Victor actually uses to animate his Creature (151); nonetheless, she too regards his methodology to be a combination of old and new – specifically, “a filtering of old philosophies through new theories” (161).