Frankenstein
Many, if not most of us, have read the novel or viewed the movie derived therefrom entitled Frankenstein. However, few of us have probably ever taken the time to delve into the facts behind the writing of this long- lived story and the message it conceals. It reveals the story of a conflict that existed in the soul of a young woman, resulting in her writing the world's most famous horror story. A talk given by Dr. E. Michael Jones at a high-school commencement ceremony in June, 1995, analyzes this conflict in a remarkable way. It follows:
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Frankenstein
I'd like to begin tonight by talking to you about a girl your age. Her name is Mary. Mary led a sad life in many ways, and just why it was sad is the point of our talk tonight because her sadness was a very influential sadness. Her sad story has been with us for almost two- hundred years now. It has never gone out of print; it has been made into plays and numerous movies, one of which was just newly released on video a few days ago. But why was this young lady's life so sad?
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To begin with, her mother, who was also a famous writer in her day, died ten days after Mary was born. From just about the time Mary came into the world she had no mother, which is a sad state of affairs. Her father tried to raise both Mary and her half sister, Fanny, the best he could by himself. But, within a few years decided to marry again and so Mary eventually found herself growing up in a household with an unsympathetic stepmother and another half sister by the name of Jane, although she soon changed her name to Claire. Mary's father, like her mother, was a famous writer too. In fact, Mary's parents taken together were probably the most famous radicals of their day. They were both passionately concerned with social justice and were at no loss in proposing schemes for the betterment of man. As a result, their house became a magnet for the political radicals of their day. Mary grew up in a household where just about everyone had a scheme for overturning the current order of things and substituting what they considered a better order in its place. All of this was primarily the result of a book Mary's father had written.
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One day when Mary was sixteen years old she met a young man three years older than she who had been influenced by her father's book on social justice. This young man was, as time would show, one of the most talented men of his generation. In fact, this young man would turn out to be one of the most talented writers who ever wrote in the English language. His name was Percy and not only was he talented, he was also rich, standing to inherit from his father and grandfather a fortune which would give him an income of $200,000.00 a year--- roughly twenty times what the average worker would earn in a year, and this was before income tax, because there was no income tax. Percy was not only rich and talented, he was also handsome, in the slightly feminine was that young men in the aristocracy were handsome. And on top of that he seemed more than a little interested in Mary. He would spend long hours with her, sitting on her mother's grave talking about his plans; plans for the poetry he planned to write, plans for how he was going to reform society--- beginning, of course, with the Irish.
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Needless to say, Mary soon fell in love with Percy and Percy with Mary. Mary pledged her undying love, and Percy---with all the sensibility of a young poet of impeccable education and sensibility, where both nature and nurture combined to produce something that could be considered the flower of his generation---pledged his as well. Mary and Percy decided that a union as promising as this one could not wait, so they decided to elope. Taking Mary's half sister Jane along for good measure, they left before dawn on the carriage to Dover, and then took ship for the continent, where they travelled extensively admiring the scenery of the Alps and the castles along the Rhine at a time when Europe was yet innocent of things like saturation bombing, superhighways, strip malls and EuroDisney world. It sounds a bit like a fairy tale and so it must have seemed to the teenagers who were involved in this lark.
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Two years after they eloped, Mary and Percy were back in Europe again, this time on the shores of Lake Geneve. On a clear day you could see Mont Blanc from the Villa Diodati, where they spent much of their time. This time with another young aristocrat who was also extremely wealthy, extremely handsome, and also destined to become one of the greatest poets in the English language. Since the weather was bad this summer, this poet, whose name was George, suggested that Mary and her friends should while away the rainy days by writing stories at his villa. Now at this point I would like to ask you a question: If you were a young lady of eighteen living a life like this with the most handsome, richest, and without a doubt most talented people of your generation at the foothills of the Alps; if you were living in a castle with Mont Blanc as part of the backdrop to your own personal little domestic drama with a man who had the family connections of John F. Kennedy, Jr., the face of Tom Cruise, the talent of Stephen Spielberg, and the money of Bill Gates, what kind of story would your write? Cinderella? Sleeping Beauty? Paradise regained? Love Story?
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The story that Mary wrote, the one just released as a video last week, was called Frankenstein, subtitled The Modern Prometheus. Which brings us to a further question: Why did a lady in a situation as promising as this write the world's most famous horror story? Before we write this off as an aberration, we should say that just about everyone there at the Villa Diodati wrote horror stories as well. George, or as the world would come to know him, Lord Byron, brought a physician with him who anticipated Bran Stoker some seventy years by writing the first vampire story in English literature, The Vampire by John Polidori. The vampire in question was Lord Byron. And as anyone who has read Mary Shelley's novel can see, Frankenstein was modeled on the other paradigm of English romantic poetry, the man who was eventually to become her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. But the question remains: Why did Mary write a horror story? In fact, a whole series of questions remain. Why was Frankenstein such a popular story, popular to the point of never going out of print, to the point as I said of just being released as yet another movie just a week or so ago? Let me frame the question another way with the young ladies in the audience specifically in mind. If you were romantically involved with a man who had the good looks and family connections of John F. Kennedy, Jr., and the money of Bill Gates and the talent of Stephen Spielberg, what kind of story would you write? Would you write a horror story?
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Well, it depends. And the perceptive among you may have concluded rather cleverly that the "it" here depends on what I mean by being "romantically involved." The term is a euphemism more often than not for illicit sexual behavior, even though with reference to Byron and Shelley, the term romantic has other associations as well. And it is here that we find the thread that unravels the tangled sleeve of history and biography surrounding the ever-popular cultural artifact that Frankenstein has become.
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To begin with, to go back a few steps in our narrative, Shelley may have been only 19 when he met the 16-year- old Mary Godwin, but he was already married and the father of two children at the time. Shelley had married Harriet Westbrook when she was 16, and now he was---as he would tell her brutally in his letters---growing tired of her. He even went so far as to say that he wanted to be just friends. In fact, his illicit passion for Mary Godwin convinced him that he had never loved her in the first place. This was, as we have come to expect with people like this, not the last time this sort of thing would happen. Roughly six years after their trip to Lake Geneva in 1816, Shelley was intimating the same sort of thing to an attractive American lady by the name of Jane Williams, who could and would play the guitar as Shelley and Jane sailed the Bay of Spezia with Jane's husband in the sailboat that would eventually kill both of them.
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Making brutal personal moves against your 18-year-old wife, especially when she is pregnant with your second child, is usually not without consequences either. And the consequences are usually not good. So roughly six months after the famous summer with Byron, the summer during which Mary Godwin gave birth to Frankenstein, Shelley got some bad news. His first wife Harriet was found drowned in the Serpentine, an obvious suicide. We know it was a suicide because Harriet wrote a few notes: one asking for help for her children, the other about the kind of person Shelley had become. The language, I think, is instructive. In a letter to a friend, Harriet Westbrook Shelley wrote just before she died that
"Mr. Shelley has become profligate and sensual, owing entirely to Godwin's Political Justice...Next month I shall be confined. He will not be near me. No, he cares not for me now. He never asks after me or sends me word how he is going on. In short, the man I once loved is dead. This is Vampire."
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On 9 November, Harriet disappeared. A little over a month later her body was discovered in the Serpentine, Hyde Park. The body was, as one might expect, swollen by over a month's immersion in water. and Shelley later floated the rumor that she died pregnant by another man. Since the rumor was never substantiated, its existence is probably more attributable to Shelley's guilty conscience than anything else. The fact remains that Harriet was dead and her death was traceable to Shelley's sexual desires---first, in his acting on them and second, and more important, by his attempt to justify them by his appeal to his father-in-law's free love ideology. The current object of Shelley's desires, Mary Godwin, could spend the bleak winter of 1816-17 mulling over the fate of her lover's first wife and wondering how her life fit into that fate. Frankenstein is the result of that meditation.
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But let's return to our original question: Why did Mary Godwin write a horror story? If you are familiar with Frankenstein and Shelley's life, the question becomes easier to answer. Victor Frankenstein, the young medical student at the University of Ingolstadt, gets expelled from the University of Ingolstadt much as Shelley got expelled from Oxford. In both instances, the students challenged God. In Shelley's instance, it was a pamphlet on atheism; in Frankenstein's, the challenge was more direct. Frankenstein wanted to be the author of life. He in fact becomes the author of life but on his own terms, which in effect means he creates a monster, which in turn destroys people he loves. One of the people who gets destroyed is Frankenstein's brother, William. The name is interesting. It was Mary's father's name; she was the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the world's first feminist. It was also the name Godwin and Wollstonecraft had chosen for Mary herself, who they obviously thought was going to be a boy. It was also the name Shelley and Mary chose for their first child, the scion of the Shelley family, William, who was to die at the age of four in Rome of gastroenteritis.
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By separating procreation from love, by accomplishing procreation in the laboratory and not where God intended it, which is to say in marriage, Frankenstein created a monster, whose major work was death and horror. Which leads us to answer our question about why a young lady connected with the cream of English society at the time, people of undeniable talent and seemingly unlimited promise, would write a horror story as the best evocation of their lives together. It is because sex disconnected from the moral order leads to horror. This is not a new story, although it seems to be a story that each generation has to learn in its own way. Euripedes said something similiar in the Bacchae thousands of years ago. As soon as the Asiatic god Dionysos became an object of worship in any State, someone is going to die. Sex disconnected from the moral order leads to death. As soon as the women leave their looms and go off to dance naked on the mountain side, horror is soon to follow. The mother of young Pentheus, the king of Thebes, listened to the music of undoubtedly thinking that she was engaging in some form of liberation. When the intoxication finally wore off, she found herself sitting with her son's head in her lap, and in answer to her father's question about what she saw, replied, "I see horror; I see suffering; I see grief."
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This tripartite phrase could be the epitaph for our culture and of my generation as well. The same sort of bitter realization dawned on Victor Frankenstein in the chargrined aftermath of his experiments with life. "When I thought of him," Frankenstein says of the monster he created, "I gnashed my teeth, my eyes became inflamed, and I ardently wished to extinguish that life which I had so thoughtlessly bestowed." How many people in our time have had the same thought about "life...thoughtlessly bestowed" and have had recourse to abortion as a solution, and in recourse to that solution have created horror instead? Then as now, sex disconnected from the moral law leads to horror. It happened in Mary Shelley's time too. The seminal political event for her parent's generation was the French Revolution. William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft were the revolution's major propagandists in England. Then as now, what began in sexual excess ended in an orgy of terror. The crucial link in this progression was the Marquis de Sade, whom Erik Kuehnelt-Leddhim refers to as one if not the main progenitor of the French Revolution. In Leftism Revisited he refers to the Marquis de Sade as "the grandfather of modern democracy." "The French Revolution," he says at another point, "truly lived up to de Sade's visions. In a sense, the Divine Marquis is the patron saint of all leftist movements."
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The monster's second victim in Frankenstein is a woman by the name of Justine, the name of the Marquis de Sade's infamous pornographic novel. We know that Byron possessed a copy in April of 1816. We know that Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein in May of 1816 in Byron's villa. So it is not unreasonable to think that she was familiar with de Sade's classic piece of moral and political pornography. One person who clearly thinks Mary Shelley read the book is the British film director Ken Russell, who has Mary perusing an illustrated version in his film on the famous Byron Shelley summer of 1816, Gothic. I like to think that Mary Shelley was familiar with the book as well, and that Frankenstein is more than just a passing reference to de Sade. Frankenstein is at its deepest level a protest against what de Sade---and by extension the Enlightment---stood for. If you carelessly bring life into the world without regard to the moral law (which is another definition of sexual liberation) you invariably create monsters which will return and destroy not only you, but your friends and family, indeed, your entire culture as well.
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Mary Shelley felt this particulary acutely at the time. She was an 18-year-old girl, pregnant by a man who was at the time married to someone else, reading the Marquis de Sade's vision of the future. A vision which had already led to the horrors of the French Revolution. In gazing at the pornographic illustrations in Justine, she was smart enough to understand what role 18-year-old girls were going to play in the brave new world by revolutionaries like her father and soon to be husband. "Woman," said the divine Marquis in Justine, is a machine for voluptuousness." Sexual license is in its way ultimately just a way of treating people like machines, and as Mary must have understood by reading Justine, the fate of female machines was not a happy one. The trajectory of his novels is the trajectory of pornography itself. When sex is separated from the moral order, someone ends up getting tortured and killed.
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Frankenstein is a protest against the vision of the world proposed by the Enlightenment, whose vision was proposed in explicit terms by the Marquis de Sade. It keeps getting retold because we still live in that world. The protest is still necessary because the Enlightenment is still with us in the form of in-vitro fertilization, and test tube babies, and an $8 billion a year pornography industry. In his latest encyclical the pope denominates this world of the Enlightenment, the "culture of death."
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Why would anyone choose death, we ask? Or better still, how could anyone choose death over life? The answer is simple. The choice is made in installments, and the first installment is the separation of sexual desire from the moral law. Everything follows therefrom as a matter of course. The summer of love in San Francisco almost 30 years ago, to give an example closer to home, always ends up with something like the Manson murders as its logical outcome. This is not a new revelation for Christians. In his epistle to the Christians of his day, St. James says that passion leads to disordered desire and when that disordered desire is acted upon that it gives birth to sin, and that when sin reaches its maturity it too gives birth, this time to death. "Everyone who is tempted is attracted and seduced by his own wrong desire. Then the desire conceives and gives birth to sin, and when sin is fully grown, it too has a child and that child is death" (James 1:14-15). Disordered passion leads to horror and death every bit as inexorably as the sun comes up in the morning. The fact that we are here right now means that we had to learn that truth, for the only alternative to learning it was to die, as many of my friends had to learn the hard way, and perhaps many of your parents' friends as well.
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The good news is that truth and life are embodied in one and the same person, Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. His yoke is easy; his burden is light. His truth is the truth that rescues all our desires from the jaws of death, which is where they inevitably tend without Him and without the law of morality which God has written on our hearts.
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Mary Godwin Shelley may have been just 18 years old when she wrote Frankenstein, but she was smart enough to see that the alternative of conforming our passions to the law of the Lord of Life was, in Victor Frakenstein's own words, "the birth of that passion, which afterwards ruled my destiny." Or as the monster himself says to Victor Frankenstein the "modern Prometheus," "you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou are bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life?"
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So, since it is customary to leave the graduating class with some charge, some grandfatherly admonition, I, a new frandfather, leave you the new graduates with this one, "don't sport with life." There is no practice life; not in the one you live or the one you create. This is the only life you have. It is also eternal, but can be spent in an eternity of suffering or an eternity of bliss. Since you are the next generation, the ones who will carry the torch beyond where we left it, it is the only life we have as well. Those who sport with life find, as Victor Frankenstein did, that their desires beget monsters, and the life they created so thoughtlessly will return to destroy them.
Thank you,
E. Michael Jones
