My odious handiwork: Frankenstein is about art, not science / Ed Simon. In: Aeon 06 November, 2018

The greatest English Romantic novel was written in a year without a summer. Mount Tambora in Indonesia had erupted in April of 1815, and a year later the northern hemisphere was afflicted with climate anomalies best summarised by one Massachusetts woman who noted: ‘Weather backward.’ Frost and snow came in June, and in that ‘wet, ungenial summer’ of ‘incessant rainfall’, an 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, then still a Godwin, eloped to Switzerland with her future husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. They stayed near Villa Diodati overlooking Lake Geneva, which was rented by the poet Lord Byron (whom one mistress had judged ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’) and the writer John William Polidori. Later that year, the Shelleys would be married, and she’d start on her novel, printed two years later in 500 copies and titled Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus.
Inspired by what the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge declared was ‘end-of-the-world Weather’, the group decided one night to entertain themselves with ghost stories. Shelley wrote that initially she could grasp only a ‘dull Nothing’ as her compatriots mined folklore. During those cold summer nights, they had many conversations to which Shelley was, by her description, ‘a devout but nearly silent listener’. The men, perhaps with performative swagger, discussed ‘various philosophical doctrines’, including ‘the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated’. On the docket were the experiments of Erasmus Darwin, the supposed reanimation of life by Luigi Galvani, and more ancient, occult forms of knowledge.

The Villa Diodati from an engraving by E Finden. Courtesy the Bodleian Library, Oxford

During the ‘witching hour’, Shelley gestated an idea, experiencing what the writer Joyce Carol Oates described as a ‘hypnagogic fantasy in her bed’. Like Coleridge drafting ‘Kubla Khan’ (1816), Shelley dwelled in that gloaming between dreams and wakefulness, and suddenly ‘My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me.’ In her room, she ‘saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.’
From that vision, Shelley would ultimately stitch together and animate Frankenstein. The book is often interpreted as an allegory about the dangers of unfettered science and technology. Margaret Atwood notes that: ‘Once upon a time there weren’t any scientists, as such, in plays or fictions, because there wasn’t any science as such, or not science as we know it today.’ In place of computers, there were scrying mirrors; rather than centrifuges, there were alchemical glasses; no robots but homunculi. These ‘alchemists and Faustian magicians certainly form part of the mad scientist’s ancestral lineage’, but Shelley introduced something entirely new. By stripping Frankenstein of magic, demons and incantations, and giving over her narrative to biology rather than theurgy, she birthed the mad scientist.
The scholar James Rieger, however, disagreed with this view, arguing in 1974 that the novel presents a ‘switched-on magic, souped-up alchemy, the electrification of Agrippa and Paracelsus’ rather than science fiction. Even as readers were attracted to Galvani with his twitching frogs’ legs, early modern science was still mostly a sober affair, defined more by the Royal Society than by insane genius. That the book is so often described as the first science-fiction novel doesn’t mean that concern with science is necessarily at its core. Frankenstein itself evidences that the novel is ‘about’ something else, even as it’s been long interpreted as concerned with science. Victor Frankenstein writes that he wished to ‘procure the whole works of [the medieval alchemist Cornelius Agrippa] and afterwards of Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus’, two similarly occult writers. The doctor explains that he ‘read and studied the wild fancies of these writers with delight; they appeared to me treasures known to few besides myself’, acknowledging this, though magic had been eclipsed, and that his fellow students are ignorant of those worthies. ... [mehr] https://aeon.co/ideas/my-odious-handiwork-frankenstein-is-about-art-not-science