Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature

by Susan E. Lederer
Rutger University Press, London, 2002
78 pp., illus. b/w & col.
ISBN 0-8135-3200-0

Reviewed by Robert Pepperell
Polar (The Posthuman Laboratory for Arts Research)

pepperell@ntlworld.com

"The unnatural, that too is natural" remarked Goëthe. Given our genetic propensity for brutality and reckless curiosity one might add "the inhuman, that too is human". After all, the creature that resulted from Victor Frankenstein’s experiment was a composite man, with all the flaws and sensitivities we recognise in ourselves. Perhaps we find the darker aspects of our nature so uncomfortable that we bundle them up into mythical creatures – demons, monsters, beasts – that we can then safely repel.

Victor, the "pale student" of Mary Shelley’s novel whom we might now think of as a kind of prototypical obsessive nerd, gave birth to more than an alienated brute. He created a ‘star’, a figure that lives out an extraordinary existence on our behalf at the cost of ultimate personal tragedy. The almost immediate success of the original novel published in 1818, its rapid international spread, and the numerous media for which it was adapted are testament to its pervasive cultural resonance and the enduring appeal of the central character.

The historian of medicine and curator of the exhibition for which Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature is a catalogue, Susan E. Lederer, locates the novel’s gestation in a damp Swiss villa (an event almost as mythical as the creature itself) within the wider context of contemporary social upheaval, spectacular public medical experiments, alchemical and occultist science, and the literary avant-garde. Such are the potency and urgency of these forces as they impregnated the teenage Mary that one feels the resulting birth of the novel was almost inevitable.

The catalogue illustrations presented here certainly help to make this history vivid, and one senses that the longevity of the Frankenstein creature may be, in part, due to the fact that the very same questions that burnt in the imaginations of early nineteenth century intellectuals remain with us today. Could we postpone death indefinitely? To what extent can humans alter their own biological circumstances? What might be the repercussions of such interference? As Lederer argues, the frequent reference to ‘Frankenstein’ in current debates about cloning, xenotransplantation and genetic engineering often betray not only a misunderstanding of the story itself but also a misrepresentation of the practice of science. However, it should be recognised that this book, and the exhibition it accompanied at the US National Library of Medicine, have an avowedly didactic function, namely "to make the latest and most accurate scientific information about health and disease readily available to the widest possible public" (p. ix). The message is that only a well-informed public can make a meaningful intervention in the controversies surrounding the various scientific questions of our day. One can hardly argue with the sentiment, but the task looks more daunting given that the most highly-informed scientists are often unable to agree on even the most basic issues surrounding the benefits or dangers of certain kinds of experimentation.

Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature is a sparkling little book from which one can learn, amongst other things, that the "bolts" we often see on the creature’s neck were actually devised by Boris Karloff’s make up artist, Jack Pierce, as electrical inlets, and that the Edison Manufacturing Company produced a fifteen-minute silent version of the book in 1910 with a truly ghastly looking monster that emerges from a vat of boiling chemicals. Moreover, it manages within a short space to make intelligent links between popular culture, the history of science and ideas, and contemporary ethical debates. It would serve as a useful reference book and as source material for stimulating discussion.