Full Moon: Mary Shelley's masterpiece

It's Friday. Hello.

I don't know if this will become a long post or a short one, but after writing about Twin Peaks a few weeks ago, there's another piece of art I have also thought I should write about because of how it lately feels as though it's calling me home, both as a matter of what I think art needs to be doing right now and as a matter of the art I need in my current struggles — with fertility, with ancestry, with the price being paid for exploitation of the Earth. This work is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, originally published in 1818. Frankenstein is one of my favorite books I've ever read, and if any readers here are looking for an old classic to finally pick up, perhaps now is the time and place for you to try it, but I also think I need to find some time to reread it cover to cover. It's been quite a few years since I did that rather than fishing for various passages piecemeal.

To some extent, I can't write about my prior concrete experiences with this novel, because if I fully described the ways I was introduced to it and the ways I have interfaced with it as a creative writer myself, I would come perilously close to revealing more about my legal identity here than I'm comfortable with. Let it suffice to say that while not a literature major I studied the novel and Mary Shelley's own life extensively when I was at university, and storylines or themes from the novel have appeared both directly and indirectly in work I've created outside of Salt for the Eclipse. In the jargon of autism, this is one of my "special interests." And I don't need to explain my history with Frankenstein to elaborate on why the novel matters, or why I am turning back toward it in the here-and-now.

Please note there will be some isolated but graphic descriptions of miscarriage experience(s) at a few points in this piece.

Addressing Frankenstein's meta-narratives first

The first thing that people learn when they hear about Frankenstein as a complex work of art — so much so that it's now the stuff of online memes — is that despite the common tendency to describe the character portrayed by the likes of Boris Karloff in cinema as "Frankenstein," this character is rather "Frankenstein's monster," i.e. the monstrous being that the gentleman researcher Victor Frankenstein has created through a notably unelucidated achievement in science and/or alchemy. The second thing that people learn, if they go a step further, is that Victor Frankenstein is arguably more of a monster, the "real" monster, compared to his creation; as soon as Victor animates this creature, he neglects him and assumes he's violent and terrifying, whereas the creation (which I will henceforth capitalize as the Creation for emphasis and clarity) only seeks companionship and to understand his place in the world — and in terms of violence would at first prefer to be so nonviolent that he chooses a vegetarian diet, although as the story eventually plays out of course he does turn to violent forms of revenge for how Victor and others have shunned him.

I think such analysis of Frankenstein goes much deeper than the surface, which is heartening given how most people who know about the novel these days still probably haven't read it, at most having seen the Universal films from the 1930s or — at this point more likely — some adaptations from later decades. But while accurate, this analysis treats the characters in a very formalistic way that doesn't particularly engage with what I believe are the novel's most powerful themes. And where those themes are concerned, I think one enormous popular misconception continues to persist among people who only know Frankenstein and its adaptations by proxy, or who have only watched adaptations, and sometimes those who have only read the revised edition from 1831; Mary Shelley herself edited the latter, so I cannot say she never intended for her work to be interpreted as it has been, and indeed these revisions showed Frankenstein to be a dynamic text like many others, but I do stand with scholars who view the first edition as more radical and emblematic of the era when it was published.

What is the misconception I am talking about? What is this thing missing from the first edition? It's the conceit that Shelley originally wrote Frankenstein as a morality tale about "the dangers of playing god." If later in life she saw reason to tease out that particular theme after all, so be it, but in terms of the novel's genesis and literary impact there is so much else afoot than such a Christian hegemonic cliché. When I first read the original 1818 edition, I encountered instead a heavily autobiographical treatise on human responsibility: as parents, as tool users, and as environmental stewards. I likewise found myself reading an elegy for beings (human and non-human) traumatized by relational disruption and paternalist exploitation, with dire warnings about what such pain can cause.[1]

I will expand on this soon enough, but one more meta-narrative meme about Frankenstein that deserves mention in the same context is the amount of ink, physical and digital, spilled over how Mary Shelley wrote and published the novel when she was quite young. She began writing it at age 18 and published it at age 20; some people like to mention how she managed this after not one but three teenage (or near-teenage) pregnancies, as if it's almost impossible that a "teen mom" could have the agency and intelligence to produce a monumental work of fiction. There are class, age, and gender assumptions built in to this wonderment, however. On the one hand I too am amazed by Frankenstein as a début novel, but on the other hand I would suggest that lots of teenage mothers have had to grow up quickly enough that they're amply positioned to write more mature fiction than a lot of their peers, and young people overall can possess extraordinary creative writing capacity due to instincts they have not yet been taught to ignore.

Shelley especially had met with a lot of distinctive hardship and adventure intermingled, both before she started Frankenstein and during the writing process: her mother Mary Wollstonecraft died from septicemia after delivering her; she was wooed by Percy Shelley at her mother's gravesite[2]; with that lover and her stepsister she traveled twice across war-torn European countryside; for her own first pregnancy she delivered a premature child who died in mere days; she endured the "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" company of Lord Byron by Lake Geneva; she met with the suicides of another sister and Percy Shelley's first wife. And for additional context young Mary, née Godwin, was highly educated by a philosopher father and generally regarded as a bookish girl long before she and Percy Shelley eloped; through her poet lover and eventual husband, she was also lucky (or unlucky, given some people involved) to fall in with a literary circle where publication was even a possibility for someone in her demographic.

All told, I think what's more remarkable than the fact that Frankenstein was published by such a young author is the fact that the book doesn't "merely" present a moving, compelling story — rather, at the time it was a story with ideas on the bleeding edge of modern industrialization, and furthermore the story has stayed entirely if not more relevant to the present day. In the process, Mary Shelley indisputably founded the entire science fiction genre as we know it, comparable to Tolkien's influence on fantasy. And somehow she did this while facing intense societal pressures to not become a writer at all; despite the factors in her favor for being published, it was still a rarity, and the first edition didn't bear her name. To this day, sometimes, Percy Bysshe Shelley sometimes receives credit instead, or his influence on the editing is grotesquely overstated. I marvel at how Mary's legacy has endured regardless, and I equally wonder how many other Mary Shelleys (or Mary Godwins) have existed in centuries past but have not been so lucky.

But now that I've had my fill of pedantry, I will delve properly into what about Frankenstein's first edition speaks to me so strongly.

Fertility horror, gender horror

The synopsis of this edition, not of any one adaptation, should go more or less as follows: an Arctic exploration vessel picks up Victor Frankenstein from the ice, and he explains how he got there to the ship's captain. He begins with how he was once an enthusiastic student of medicine, chemistry, early electrical science, and the occult. After his mother's death from illness, he heads off to university and rather quickly becomes obsessed with not only learning everything he can about those fields but also applying them to reanimate dead tissue and thus conquer death itself. When he finally determines how to do this[3], he steals an executed man's body and puts his method into practice. Unfortunately, the sight of a walking corpse horrifies Victor beyond measure, and he flees from the Creation, who is left to wander out of the laboratory and into the wider world — where with total amnesia about his past or anything he once learned about how that world works, he must discover anew how to fend for himself and simultaneously cope with other human beings' shocked, hateful reaction to his unusual appearance.

As the narrative remains chronological from Victor's perspective, we don't know this about the Creation at first; instead, we witness Victor's paranoia about anyone finding about about what he's made, and about what the Creation may be getting up to. Ultimately a child dies, for which a servant is unfairly blamed and hanged; Victor is certain the Creation is to blame, but can't bring himself to come forward about the truth to his community. When he and the Creation do encounter each other, he finds out this is revenge for abandoning the Creation to solitude and discrimination. And as the Creation tells his own life story at last, he does so with utmost eloquence and depth of feeling, convincingly comparing himself to the sympathetic villain Lucifer in Paradise Lost. He begs Victor to create a female companion for him of a similar nature, so that if he must hide from the world he won't do so completely alone. At first Victor agrees to do this and retreats from his community to build a new lab, but just before he reanimates this second corpse he decides he's too afraid of both his creations reproducing together and making more of themselves, so he destroys her.

In new revenge, the Creation kills Victor's childhood best friend, and then kills Victor's new bride on their wedding night. Victor vows to pursue the Creation to the ends of the earth to enact his own revenge in return. But the Creation eludes him as far as the Arctic, where Victor now concludes telling his tale to the ship's captain. Being in ill health, Victor dies soon after, and the Creation appears on the ship to retrieve his creator's body, which he claims he will burn and seemingly also immolate himself. The reader doesn't witness this directly, but having taken the body the Creation then disappears "in darkness and distance."

My favorite Frankenstein scholars awakened me early on to the powerful imagery around fertility and gender in such a saga. I especially love that there isn't just one gendered interpretation to apply to the lead characters. From one perspective, Victor is essentially like the Christian god as an absentee patriarch, but from another perspective the character also feels like a fertility goddess interrogating her own experience of the various horrors and mysteries when delivering new life. Though Mary Shelley never said as much directly, it's very likely that her mother's death due to childbirth had a distinct psychological impact on her own encounters with pregnancy, while the death of her own first child devastated her.[4] And even a healthy, safe pregnancy still brings someone face to face with the most profound, existential questions of life and death, and childbirth is as bloody as it is beautiful. So in biographical terms, Victor might be read as an analogue of Percy Shelley or various other men in Mary's life who tended to be at once progressive innovators and steadfastly patriarchal — but Victor might also be read as Mary herself. He could likewise be Mary's father, loving but disapproving of her relationship with Percy, or Mary's mother, traumatically absent from birth.

In parallel, the Creation is "Adam" to Victor's god, as well as Lucifer, but he could also be "Eve." He is arguably female not through being a matrix — indeed, he casts himself as infertile — but through the patriarchal gender framework wherein the female is that-which-is-gendered (and seen as horrific) next to the normative male gender-er that is Victor. This would also be in line with other literature and transfeminine experience around Woman As Monster, or Woman As Robot.

I used to, and still do, feel strong sentiments around the Creation's ambiguous gender, but ever since my miscarriage I understand such interpretations for Victor more than I did before. I remember the constant dizzying apprehension of myself as having another life inside me while pregnant. I was awed and I was afraid at the same time. I even more vividly remember the amount of blood that I passed on that November night — November, the month that the Creation is made as well — and the tissue that I forced myself to examine. There was the beginning of a placenta. There was no visible embryo within it, but I saw the gestational sac, gingerly touched it with a covered finger. Writing about it now is difficult because it summons my grief, but what I felt in the moment was mingled horror and admiration.

In the wake of that night, though, I also come back to the Creation's experience. One of his own stated sources of grief is the sense that he exists outside the regular cycles of life. This is the crux of my fear around potentially never bearing any children from my body. It's no requirement for everyone with a womb, but for me I am driven to take part in that cycle. The brief taste I've received was miraculous; the denial, agony.

Going further

But looking past my personal loss, I will admit that the analysis of Frankenstein above is not very new. Many other people have written similar things, too many to even bother citing. Recently, I have been feeling drawn to a view of this novel that I'm sure others have also addressed but that I have not yet personally encountered. And though Victor and the Creation might both be treated as the monstrous feminine for certain purposes, what I have thought about lately circles back to a context where at least Victor is more patriarchally coded. For leaving aside the horrors of physical birth, the narrative of parental neglect goes further.

Victor abandons his creation to the whims of the world. I think here we have shades of the Aun myth in the Nordic tradition, a cautionary tale where the old consume the young. More broadly, we are in a situation right now where past generations have willingly fed future ones to an apocalypse, and they gave birth to us and forged the technology around us without seriously considering our need for affection and connectedness. I feel the Creation's pain at this, too.

We also have people making "artificial intelligences" these days, which I am prone to griping about because:

• they are not intelligent
• they are plagiaristic
• they require excess resource extraction and are obscenely wasteful in general
• they are a socioeconomic danger given their intended implementations

... and while I am far less worried about "the Singularity" or the paperclip machine problem than many people are, this is usually because I think global ecological collapse will interfere with computing on a significant scale before such risks will meaningfully develop; the energy will not exist to support such terrors, not with all the work that capitalism is doing to destroy itself and everything in the next few decades. However, this doesn't preclude the severe dangers that such technology does present in the short term. And worse, even being skeptical that large language models will ever become something other than cursed image, text, or sound generators[5], I am just as concerned that if some humans actually made real AI they would then largely act like Victors to their Creations instead of recognizing the legitimate animacy and even personhood of those beings and treating them as they ought to be treated. I don't wish to avoid creating Blade Runner-esque replicants because they would be monstrous; I wish to avoid creating them because of the ethical quandaries that would immediately arise.

My argument is right in the Creation's own words to Victor:

I learned that the possessions most esteemed by your fellow creatures were high and unsullied descent united with riches. A man might be respected with only one of these advantages, but without either he was considered, except in very rare instances, as a vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profits of the chosen few! And what was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant, but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man. I was more agile than they and could subsist upon coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded theirs. When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?
I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me; I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge. Oh, that I had forever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst, and heat!

Sitting with the pain

I want to be a mother.

I also want womanhood to be predicated on more than motherhood.

I equally want the capacity for motherhood to be embraced societally, in all its strange beauty, mystery, and intertwined death.

I want to be a good ancestor.

I also want to feel less like one of the abandoned and drifting generations.

I equally want to quench the pain of our generations' existential abandonment, through destruction.

Frankenstein as a tragedy does not offer any straightforward demonstration of how to address these wishes. Nonetheless, it presents a complicated, multifaceted view of them through the ambiguity of its lead characters. I think in this exceedingly difficult time it may help to visit their pain, sit with them, and listen to what my inner child and my ancestors' voices have to say in turn. And as the novel was written right as industrialization was stripping the last of Euro-descendant land connection and starting to brutalize land, sky, and sea, I think it sends an echoing call from the past, pulling me toward staying in good relation, rebuilding the bonds that should unite us with each other and the other species that the Creation himself admires in his wanderings through the Alpine wilderness.

May we turn away from fear, abandonment, and rage, and toward love.

[1] I am moderately hopeful that Guillermo del Toro's forthcoming film adaptation will finally get this right. However, I've otherwise only encountered adaptations that go for the simplistic "playing god" angle (like the Universal classics) or that halfway explore the themes I've mentioned here but then devolve into making the Creation do horrific things just for shock value (some examples of this mistake include Danny Boyle's stage version and the television series Penny Dreadful). I more often feel as if someone knows what to do with Frankenstein when they don't directly adapt the story but instead engage with Mary Shelley's biography, such as Ken Russell's campy but oddly beautiful film Gothic.

[2] Though elevated somewhat to mythic status as well, it's fairly accurate to say that Mary Godwin more or less lost her virginity on her mother's grave. The greater controversy centers around how consensual this event really was. As she was 16 at the time and Percy Shelley was seven years older, this could be classified as statutory rape in various modern legal codes; it could simultaneously be argued that since Mary at least never spoke of her relationship with Percy in anything less than glowing terms, if she was taken advantage of in principle she never saw it as nonconsensual in practice. My own stance is that a) her persistent happiness and eventual agency with Percy are very important to consider, and past a certain point it feels performatively hyperbolic to refer to her as his "child bride" as some portions of the online left now enjoy doing, but also b) this doesn't mean their relationship began in an ethical way, because for a while there would surely have been an unequal power dynamic (moreso than lots of women and men already dealt with).

[3] Again, this is not directly explained in the text. Adaptations almost universally make some use of electricity, but the specific technique Mary Shelley had in mind is mostly worth speculating about in academic curiosity; I think the story is stronger for not getting bogged down in details of this nature.

[4] After the novel's publication, the two surviving children that Mary had birthed by then would also meet with death while very young, and her final pregnancy with Percy Shelley would end with a miscarriage that nearly killed her, famously staved off by her husband placing her in an ice bath to slow the bleeding. It would be unsettling enough if she wrote Frankenstein before all of these things had also happened, but I find it unfathomably eerie that her own life came to imitate her art after the fact.

[5] I do mean cursed literally. I refuse to interact with such programs or the content they generate.

Thank you for reading. Due to lunar timing, next week's post will be a Full Moon post again, but it will also be aligned with matters of the spring equinox, primarily turning an animist witch's lens on the Christian fertility myth of Easter. After that, there will be a post for paid subscribers on the relevance and methodology of building small, local or local-ish community for what is currently happening in the world.