06/29/2016
“Mary Shelley is a dissenting voice”: Inga Pierson on Frankenstein and the Age of Science
“Mary Shelley is a dissenting voice”: Inga Pierson on Frankenstein and the Age of Science January 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, and the occasion has been commemorated with celebrations, conferences, retrospectives, editorials, and more. Clearly, the book belongs to the twenty-first century, as much as it […]
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You think that you can help your way, so you stroke my feet, be litters, with your
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Let it be known for all posterity that today's show is being recorded on the summer solstice of 2016,
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Our plan is to resume our broadcast in 2017, so no need to despair. Hang in there.
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[Music]
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Our topic today is Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, which belongs to the twenty-first century as much as it belonged to the
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twentieth, not to mention the nineteenth. In 2018, a year and a half from now, we're all going to be bombarded with Frankenstein
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reruns, Frankenstein commentaries, conferences, editorials, memorabilia, retrospectives, and bicentennial celebrations.
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Yes, the novel was published for the first time in 1818, but it was two hundred years ago to the day, or almost to the day, that Mary Shelley had a feverish dream on Lake Geneva,
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sometime between June 16 and June 21, 1816. In her dream, she envisioned Dr. Frankenstein giving life to his creature.
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I quote from her preface to the 1831 edition. I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.
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I 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-fital motion.
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I opened my eyes in terror. Swift as light was the idea that broke in on me. On the morrow, I announced that I had thought of a story.
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On entitled opinions today, we're commemorating the true bicentennial anniversary of Frankenstein. I mean the moment of conception itself, and we're going to approach it with our typical reflective calm, without all the hype that will be surrounding this novel in 2018.
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I'm joined in the studio today by Dr. Inga Pearson. She was my guest on entitled opinions a couple of years ago for a show on the French thinker, Simone Vay.
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Inga Pearson got her Ph.D. from NYU with a dissertation on Italian cinema. She has since taught at Stanford as a lecturer in Stanford's thinking matters program, and as a visiting assistant professor in the Department of French and Italian.
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She is currently teaching at Sacred Heart in Atherton, just up the road from here. Inga is taught Frankenstein to Stanford undergraduates and Sacred Heart High School students alike.
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So it's a pleasure to welcome her back to entitled opinions. Inga, thanks for joining us today.
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Thank you for having me, Robert. It's wonderful to be back.
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I mentioned the date when Mary Shelley conceived of Frankenstein, and I also mentioned Lake Geneva, but of course there's a lot more to the circumstances surrounding this novel's jet.
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But before we flesh out that story, why don't we take a step back and talk about Mary Shelley's own genesis? Because she had quite a pedigree both on her mother's side and her father's side. Is that right?
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That's true.
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And in Mary's world, literature had co-mingled with life such that it was very difficult to separate the one from the other.
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So it's a good idea to start with her parents. They were both rather famous and lightened mint intellectuals, and they were already well established by the time Mary was born in 1797.
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I think her mother was about 38 and her father was probably 40. Her father, William Godwin, had written an inquiry that he's probably most famous for,
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"Enquiry, Concerning Political Justice," which was something of an anarchist treatise in which he argued against systemic injustice and impressive institutions, including the penal system and even marriage.
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His living room was a gathering place for poets, philosophers, and radicals. For example, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a good friend and Mary grew up listening to his recitations. There's a nice little passage in her journal where she talks about hiding behind the couch.
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Her mother, Mary Wallstonecraft, is probably best known today for her work of indication of the rights of woman.
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But she also wrote a vindication of the rights of man before Thomas Paine, in fact, a book on the French Revolution and numerous essays on child rearing and the education of girls in particular.
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She also wrote a lovely book or published a lovely book of letters that she had written while traveling in Scandinavia. She was very much a journalist in our own modern sense of that word.
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She was a staff writer for Joseph Johnson's journal, The Analytical Review, and he sent her a broad to Paris. So when she was writing about post-revolutionary France, she was actually doing it on location in Paris.
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Is it true that Godwin fell in love with Mary Wallstonecraft after reading her letters from Scandinavia?
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That's true actually. He said as he was reading the book, the author felt so close at hand.
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So while she's discussing Rousseau's theory that feelings can lead to ideas or Edmund Burke's work on the sublime, she's also talking about her own experience as an English woman in her 30s, traveling through Northern Europe with a small child because she had a child from a previous relationship.
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It's a very unadorned, straightforward style, isn't it? Right, and that is her style not only in the essay, in the letters from Scandinavia, but also in her serious philosophical treatises.
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And she defends her choice actually in a vindication of the rights of women. She speaks plainly because she values frankness of speech and candor.
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And that in her view, this kind of aesthetic integrity is tied to civic virtue, so it's actually very important. And I think her daughter inherits that lesson.
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So she marries Godwin. They're both famous literary people. Today we might call a power couple. Is that going too far?
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No, that's a great way of describing them actually. Yeah, they were literary celebrities, and so it was very exciting in their circle when they got together.
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So Mary Shelley is born to the two of them, however Mary Wilsoncraft had already had a child from some previous relation.
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Yes, she had her first child in Paris when she was about 35. Well, and it sounds like a happy story, a happy ending because that was a difficult relationship.
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So when she got together with Godwin, it was also very nice for her, gave this other child a father.
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But it was actually rather tragic because Wilsoncraft died 10 days after Mary was born. She contracted an infection.
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So the woman we know as Mary Shelley grew up in a composite household. She had a stepmother with whom she was always in conflict.
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A step sister, her name is Claire Claremont, and she's kind of important to the story, so I mentioned that. And a half sister, of course.
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All three girls were about the same age, so there was a lot of competition to among them. And she meets her husband or her future husband, Percy Bischeli, because Shelley, who was then about 21, was an admirer of her father and her father's work.
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And he got in touch with Godwin, and Godwin was interested in Shelley not so much for his ideas, but because he was a baronet, and Godwin was always strapped for cash.
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So eventually he invites Percy to dinner, and he instructs the whole family that they should ingratiate themselves to this young man, because he's hoping to get a loan out of him.
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And you can imagine at this point Mary is about 16. She feels oppressed by her stepmother, and maybe also her step sister.
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And in walks Percy Bischeli, who at this point is more of an incorrigible troublemaker than a famous poet, he got himself kicked out of Oxford for atheist pamplatering.
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He deloped with a young woman against that woman's families, wishes, and he was generally at war with his father. But at the same time, he was also a dashing baronet, a published poet.
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And I think you did a show on Rembo a couple weeks ago. And I think he had a similar type of punk rock attitude, which you know, to a teenager, which Mary Shelley was then is pretty exciting.
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And on Percy's side, the attraction was also quite strong. Mary was intelligent, precocious, well read, of course. And she was a literary heir. She was the daughter of Wollstonecraft and Godwin.
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And this was a famous union, and she was the product of that union. And he immortalizes her pedigree in his poem, the Revolt of Islam a couple years later.
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So we're talking here about 1814, right?
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Right.
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They meet in Godwin's house. They go off to Europe. The two of them whack, actually with the stepsister, is that correct?
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Great. So, you know, just a few months after meeting, they end up running away. Mary, Percy, and Claire, the step sister. And they go to Paris.
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I mean, that trip is actually pretty much a disaster after the first couple weeks. And when the three of them returned to England, they were outcasts.
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I mean, Percy was a married man. Mary and Claire were about 16 years old.
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They were rejected by everyone from polite society to their own families. And in particular, it was very painful that for Mary that her father rejected her. And I think that's something she suffered all of her life.
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So, we fast forward two years, I believe, in 1816, the famous bicentennial anniversary now.
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Right.
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And we're recording the show on. Yes.
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It's a second trip to Europe, to the continental Europe. In particular, I think, you know, to Switzerland, can you reconstruct the important circumstances surrounding the genus of the novel there on that trip?
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Absolutely. I just want to say one little thing before we move on to that. And that's that Mary and Percy had a child in the meantime between 1814 and 1816.
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Actually, they had two children. And one died a couple weeks after being born. So, rather disturbing, haunting experience for young Mary.
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And the second one was the second one is called William and he'll live to about three years old, but he dies a couple years after this journey that we're talking about now when she started writing Frankenstein. He dies in Italy.
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So, she and Percy and Claire decide to take a trip to Switzerland. And they plan the trip together with Lord Byron and his household.
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We're talking about the summer, right? Right. We're talking about the summer of 1816. They had to Geneva.
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That it's a strange summer.
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Absolutely. It's a strange summer because of the weather. And so this has a bearing on the novel.
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It was the coldest summer in history of a volcano had erupted in Indonesia and had changed the weather patterns all over Europe rather dramatically.
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So, when they got to Geneva, there was still snow on the ground. And not only that, it continued to storm.
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So, I think I mentioned the two households, the Shelly household and Byron's household set up camp on the lake in two different villas.
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Byron's villa was called is the famous Villa Diodati, which they were all excited about because apparently Milton had stayed there.
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But because of the weather and the storms, they end up having to not they have a dinner party at Byron's place, but they also it also turns into a sleepover.
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And that goes on for a couple days. Now, remember, they're in very exciting company. Byron was the 19th century equivalent of a rock star.
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The eccentric Berlin to rich promiscuous, the steps is to declare who engineered this whole vacation was madly in love with him.
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With Byron was a young man, Dr. John Polydory, his traveling companion, personal physician, but who was also secretly employed by a gossip columnist to report on Byron's.
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The tabloids were alive and well-known at that time. They were indeed. And this group gave them plenty of fuel.
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So, they're cooped up in Byron's villa and they start talking about ideas. So, cutting edge, scientific theory and discovery, evolution, materialism, electricity.
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And what is life? What is life? And that question. What is the animating principle of life? If it's not God, then what is it?
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They're reading ghost stories, gothic tales, and they're reciting coal ridge. They're talking about their own dreams.
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And in particular, Mary wonders about the dead child keeps appearing in her dreams.
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So, lots of different things going on. And finally, Byron gets bored of all this and says, "Well, we should stop reading other people. Let's write our own ghost stories."
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And so, the four of them, Mary, Percy, Byron, and Polydory, set about working on their tails.
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And Mary has her famous fever dream that you recited from in your intro.
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And Byron and Shelley both kind of abandoned their efforts after not too long.
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But Polydory successfully composes a tail called the vampire, which became something of a bestseller.
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And of course, we know Frankenstein continues to be read all over the world.
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It's quite amazing that she was 18 or 19 when she began the novel, right?
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She was 18, that's not right.
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She was 18, that's not right.
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That's not that different from Hambault. We did a show on a few weeks ago who 18-19 is when he wrote all that astonishing poetry that he's most remembered for.
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This Frankenstein is one of the most canonical novels of the 19th century, at least in the Anglophone world today.
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And more read, I think, on college campuses than many other novels, certainly of the Victorian period.
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So, I mean, it's a big deal. She is turning into a bigger deal than her husband, you know, Percy.
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Well, yeah. I think, you know, young people today may very well have read Frankenstein.
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It's very unlikely that they've read Prometheus on Bound.
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That's right. So, what do you think is the fascination of the novel?
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Well, you know, one thing for me, what makes this novel so much fun to teach is the concept of the sublime.
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Young people, college students, high school students, they get very excited about it because they can relate.
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And in the novel, they start writing this, you know, famous evening around 15th 16th of June,
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but she continues to work on it throughout the summer.
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And she and Percy and Claire traveled up to Shumuniques, which is a village pretty high up in the Alps at the base of Mont Blanc.
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And she describes, well, in the novel, Victor describes, of course, what Mary had seen in her own journey.
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And that's these glittering peaks precipitous a sense, the thundering sound of ice cracking and breaking.
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There's a glacier that runs down one side of one face of Mont Blanc.
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Is that La Mergiglass?
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Yes, the Mergiglass.
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And it was a, I wouldn't say a popular destination because it was quite difficult and dangerous to get up there on horseback.
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But it was certainly something that would have appealed to a rebel like Percy.
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So the sublime landscape, very present in the novel, you say, exerts a certain fascination on the reader, especially the younger reader.
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Especially the younger, because all of a sudden, you know, they can go on a hike.
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They could hike the Stanford dish near campus here, which is, you get a nice view of all of the valley.
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But it's far from sublime in that sense.
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But they relate to it that way.
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Because in Edmund Burke's treatise on the sublime, he talks about the primary feeling or effect of the sublime is astonishment.
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So in addition to that astonishment landscape, there's also the idea of creating a new life form with artificial means, which makes it especially pertinent to our own contemporary bio-technology driven society.
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I think that's true.
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I mean, things like the creation of life are in the news all the time.
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You can be sure that in 2018, in the year and a half from now, journalists and other commentators aren't going to be talking so much about the sublime landscapes,
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they're going to be talking about what it means for Victor Frankenstein to have created an artificial life form using contemporary bio-technology theories and instruments now.
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I'm sure that's true.
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So it fascinates on very many different levels.
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There's landscape technology also psychologically.
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It's, wouldn't you say, that there's a psychology of the creature as well as his creator that really draws the reader in.
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And raises a number of troubling questions about the responsibility and the failure of Victor Frankenstein, the creator of the monster, to take responsibility for the actions that he has nevertheless committed.
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Yes, that's true. And that's another big issue that you hear people talking about in the news certainly is that what is your responsibility as a scientist?
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Because Victor rejects and abandons his creation.
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Absolutely.
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The scientist, when they create something, the scientist, I'm talking very generally.
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Oftentimes, if they create a monstrosity, they will probably have the same reaction as Victor Frankenstein, which is disown it and be horrified and repelled by it and not want to take responsibility for the consequences of what they've created.
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Do you have any idea of theory of why Victor Frankenstein is so prompt to repudiate his creature?
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Well, I think we can maybe go back to Burke on this, right? Do you have the passage?
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Yeah. Well, I have my own theory about it.
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Okay. Well, and I'm glad that you brought up Burke because I think it's theory, not of the sublime, but more of the beautiful in the sublime because he has his treatise on the sublime and the beautiful, what's it called?
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Philosophical inquiry into the origins of our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful.
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Let's look at the passage. It's in volume one and chapter four, and I think it bears reading at some length.
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So maybe I'll read that moment when Frankenstein is about to electrify life into the inanimate corpse that he has assembled from different body parts.
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It was on a dreary night in November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils with an anxiety that almost amounted to agony.
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I collected the instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.
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It was already one in the morning, the rain, patter, dismally against the pains, and my candle was nearly burnt out when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw that
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dull yellow eye of the creature open. It breathed hard and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.
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How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form?
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His limbs were in proportion and I had selected his features as beautiful, beautiful, great God.
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I'm going to stop there a minute and say you would imagine that this is a moment of exhilaration or enormous thrill when the creature comes to life.
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After all these years that he's been working on that, but instead there is a horror rather than an exhilaration.
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And why? I think it has to do, because of the aesthetic revolution that Victor experiences when he sees his creature come to life, I'll continue.
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His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath.
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His hair was of a lustrous black and flowing, his teeth of a pearly whiteness, but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes that seemed almost of the same color.
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As the done white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips.
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Now going back to Edmund Burke, our colleague here at Stanford, Denise Giganthe, she's been a guest on entitled opinions a few times.
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Actually she's written an article called "Facing the Ugly about Frankenstein."
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And I think she's absolutely right to point out that the predominant theories of ugliness in the Enlightenment and also in Edmund Burke's treatise is that of a privation of the beautiful.
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It's the absence of the beautiful. And she argues, I think, undeniably that there is more here than the absence of the beautiful.
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There's a positive presence of the ugly, an aggressive presence of the ugly. And that this creature, as she puts it, doesn't only fail to please it really actively displeases.
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And the question is, what is ugliness? And here we could go a little bit deeper into the question because if you read Burke on the beautiful, I think he says a few things that Mary Shelley must have had in mind when she composed this particular passage.
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He writes, "I imagine ugliness to be in all respects the opposite of those qualities which we have laid down for the constituents of beauty."
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Burke goes on to speak about these pleasing illusions and super-added ideas to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature.
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Now what is our naked, shivering nature? I think it's our bodily, biological, organic nature that he's talking about.
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And he says that these pleasing illusions cover it over. The problem with the monster is that he does not have the proper epidermis. His skin is defective.
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You can see the arteries and you can see all the organic horror through in his face and appearing forward.
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That is what the ugliness is. It's a kind of excess of the presence of the organic chaos or what shelling the German philosopher, 19th century philosopher. He said that there's a horror at the core of all existence that is ever present but universally repressed.
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And the ugly reminds us of that horror while beauty deflects it or transcends it. And this immediate confrontation with the organic substrate of the creature, I think is what Horrifies Victor Frankenstein and turns him into completely failed parent in many ways.
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That's a very eloquent explanation of why the creature Horrifies him. I do think you're right that she has Edmund Burke in mind that she's working through his theories.
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Because we already talked about the sublime a little bit. She mentions the picture-esque. Here she's dealing with beauty and if you look at Burke on ugliness, he makes an interesting note that you also find in the novel.
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He says that his limbs were in proportion. Burke's note on ugliness is that it's the opposite of beauty or those traits that constitute beauty.
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Except that proportion and usefulness or fitness were components or constituents of beauty.
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And he says those can also be constituents of ugliness. So usefulness can be ugly.
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Right. So his yellow skin scarcely covered the world of muscles and arteries beneath. That bad.
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| 00:26:46.600 |
He also, Burke writes the following. I think that the beauty of the eye consists first in his clearness.
|
| 00:26:55.600 |
None are pleased with an eye whose matter to use that term is dull and muddy. We are pleased with an eye in this view on the principle upon which we like diamonds, clear water, glass, and such like transparent substances. Mary Shelley will subsequently describe Elizabeth, the fiance of Victor Frankenstein, had this beautiful eyes, blue eyes, clear and clear emphasize the clearness of the eye.
|
| 00:27:21.600 |
Cloudless blue eyes. Cloudless blue eyes. Here on the contrary, it's this dull yellow. How does he put it? I had it right here. I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature opened.
|
| 00:27:37.600 |
And he speaks about these luxuriances, those limbs that you were referring to only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes that seemed almost of the same color as the done white sockets in which they were set.
|
| 00:27:50.600 |
So it seems to begin an end with an aesthetic revulsion.
|
| 00:27:55.600 |
Yeah. I mean, I like your theory especially about the aggressive presence of the organic of matter of this, let's say, raw meat, which is what he composed.
|
| 00:28:08.600 |
The inanimate corpse was an assemblage of these kind of organs of body parts now.
|
| 00:28:15.600 |
Dead men's body parts, which he selected with great care, he says, but the ensemble is still horrifying.
|
| 00:28:22.600 |
And if you remember they were talking about materialism and if you're worried about what happens to being when you exclude God from the equation, that organic matter becomes all the more horrifying.
|
| 00:28:36.600 |
Well, it doesn't, but at the same time, I wonder if Victor had an expectation that if he had fastened on the animating principle of life, that if he infused his creature with the animating principle of life, that that animating principle would have made him beautiful.
|
| 00:28:51.600 |
And in fact, it didn't make him beautiful. And in that sense, he is a failed God. If you think of Genesis, after the sixth day, God looks at his creation and says, it's good.
|
| 00:29:04.600 |
It's turned out well, it's beautiful. Here, it's not beautiful, it's an abortion.
|
| 00:29:10.600 |
Yeah, and you wonder is this a comment to all the enlightenment ideas, because Victor says that he's building the monster that he's an enlightened intellectual. He's not afraid of graveyards, he doesn't believe in ghosts, he doesn't worry about God.
|
| 00:29:26.600 |
But he's forgetting one thing, he's not paying attention to the aesthetic.
|
| 00:29:31.600 |
That's true. Or, yeah, he's not paying attention, or maybe he thought the aesthetic would take care of itself.
|
| 00:29:37.600 |
Yet, the funny thing is that the novel doesn't end there, it begins there, and the strange paradox here is that although the monster is ugly and seems to reveal an excess of organic raw materiality, it seems that for better or for worse, he does have what we call a soul, or what that tradition called a soul.
|
| 00:30:00.600 |
And that it could be even a beautiful soul, or let's say it could have been turned into a beautiful soul, had he been properly socialized and educated.
|
| 00:30:11.600 |
Well, right, and he is in the beginning. So he starts out once the monster, Victor Van and Sim, but the monster comes to life very much like a human child would.
|
| 00:30:20.600 |
And so there's the part about him, I mean, he, there's a wonderful discussion of him opening his eyes for the first time, and you can imagine Mary Shelley, you know, knew what that looked like because she'd had infants, she'd been caring for infants.
|
| 00:30:33.600 |
Then he talks about distinguishing one sensation from the next hunger, thirst, cold, and right?
|
| 00:30:39.600 |
I'm very like Locke, John Locke's theories of how the mind synthesizes sense data.
|
| 00:30:45.600 |
Right, and tries to find it to figure out its way in the world. And but in the same passage where he's distinguishing cold from hunger, he sees the moon, and he looks up.
|
| 00:30:59.600 |
So it seems to me that's evidence of a soul of sorts, this poetic inclination of the mind, which could also be the religious inclination that maybe those are one and the same.
|
| 00:31:09.600 |
So there is something in the creature that yearns for the heavens would say. And then he learns about emotions and feelings.
|
| 00:31:18.600 |
Yeah, can you tell us how is education takes place?
|
| 00:31:21.600 |
So he runs away into the woods and he ends up finding shelter in a huddle that is, this is a little complicated plot device.
|
| 00:31:30.600 |
It's a huddle which is attached to a cottage in which there lives a family, a father with two children, Felix and Agatha. The family name is Delacie.
|
| 00:31:40.600 |
He's in this huddle. He realizes very quickly that he horrifies human beings, so he hides, but he can see into the cottage.
|
| 00:31:48.600 |
And so he first learns about feelings.
|
| 00:31:50.600 |
Now the Delacies are French, but they're in Germany because they're refugees from the French Revolution, is that right?
|
| 00:31:56.600 |
Well, there are exiles from France for political reasons.
|
| 00:31:59.600 |
We don't know if it's a reservoir. Yeah, it's not exactly the revolution, but they wind up in this cottage in Germany as exiles.
|
| 00:32:06.600 |
The father is blind. It ends up being an important detail.
|
| 00:32:10.600 |
So he's looking into the cottage, they don't know he's there. The monster is looking into the cottage.
|
| 00:32:15.600 |
And we're chink in the wall and we're chink in the wall. They're around the fire.
|
| 00:32:19.600 |
Yeah, it's a poetic reality TV.
|
| 00:32:23.600 |
So he learns about feelings by watching the father with his daughter, and he understands what tenderness is.
|
| 00:32:30.600 |
He ends up learning a history of ideas, world history and language because another character arrives.
|
| 00:32:37.600 |
And that is the long lost love interest of Felix Delacie, and her name is Safie.
|
| 00:32:44.600 |
She is the daughter of a Turkish merchant and a Christian mother.
|
| 00:32:53.600 |
And so she's been raised with her mother's principles.
|
| 00:32:56.600 |
And this might be a little bit of a regression, but I think it's important to the novel that Safie is educated just like a young man would be educated.
|
| 00:33:06.600 |
She's educated because she doesn't speak French.
|
| 00:33:09.600 |
She doesn't speak French.
|
| 00:33:11.600 |
Felix has a teacher French, and in the process the creatures learns French.
|
| 00:33:17.600 |
And he teaches her all these other things and he learns at the same time, right?
|
| 00:33:21.600 |
Right.
|
| 00:33:22.600 |
So now go on to your point is very, I think it's an important point about her education.
|
| 00:33:26.600 |
So this is another way the monster learns. He reads alongside Safie, he learns French alongside Safie,
|
| 00:33:32.600 |
but he also learns from Safie's story, which is something of a novel.
|
| 00:33:36.600 |
So I'm just going to read a brief passage from the text where Safie talks about her mother and how her mother educated her.
|
| 00:33:43.600 |
Safie related that her mother was a Christian Arab.
|
| 00:33:46.600 |
Seized and made a slave by the Turks.
|
| 00:33:48.600 |
Recommended by her beauty, she had won the heart of the father of Safie, who married her.
|
| 00:33:53.600 |
The young girl spoke in high and enthusiastic terms of her mother, who born in freedom, spurned the bondage to which she was now reduced.
|
| 00:34:01.600 |
She instructed her daughter in the tenants of her religion and taught her to aspire to higher powers of intellect and an independence of spirit for bidden to the female followers of Mao-Mae.
|
| 00:34:13.600 |
This lady died, but her lessons were indelibly impressed on the mind of Safie.
|
| 00:34:19.600 |
So the monster is also learning civic and personal virtues from Safie's story.
|
| 00:34:26.600 |
That is to aspire to the higher powers of the intellect, to an independence of spirit, to value freedom, justice, and candor above tyranny and deceit, even if it makes you an outcast.
|
| 00:34:39.600 |
And these are all values that Mary would have gotten from her mother, Mary Wallstonecraft.
|
| 00:34:44.600 |
From her mother's writing.
|
| 00:34:45.600 |
From her mother's writing.
|
| 00:34:46.600 |
And it almost, to me, this passage seems like a direct reference to a passage in a vindication of the rights of women.
|
| 00:34:54.600 |
Because she talks about, she uses Islamic culture, what she calls "malment" and "ism" as an emblem, or as the emblem of a society that aims systematically to repress women.
|
| 00:35:05.600 |
But malment and "ism" can happen anywhere in the world.
|
| 00:35:08.600 |
This kind of repression of women.
|
| 00:35:10.600 |
And she talks about what we would call today microaggressions.
|
| 00:35:14.600 |
So the books of instruction that are written for women by men are written to infieble their minds,
|
| 00:35:20.600 |
to we are them to be alluring mistresses instead of rational mothers.
|
| 00:35:25.600 |
Because she was very clear that motherhood required actually critical thinking skills to be.
|
| 00:35:30.600 |
We're talking about Mary's mother.
|
| 00:35:32.600 |
We're talking about Mary Wallstonecraft and her treatise of indication of the rights of women.
|
| 00:35:36.600 |
And you believe that Mary Shelley subscribes entirely to her mother's theory.
|
| 00:35:40.600 |
I think she does, and not only Mary Shelley, I think also Percy does.
|
| 00:35:43.600 |
So her goal for women was to be rational mothers, but also to be worthy companions for their husbands.
|
| 00:35:49.600 |
And that is their equals.
|
| 00:35:51.600 |
And in order to be their equals, they had to be educated like their husbands.
|
| 00:35:55.600 |
They had to be able to discuss ideas.
|
| 00:35:57.600 |
And true lovers are equals.
|
| 00:35:58.600 |
And that's something she has in common with other that Wallstonecraft has in common with other 19th century thinkers.
|
| 00:36:03.600 |
Stondal comes immediately to mind.
|
| 00:36:06.600 |
And in that respect, she was not on the same page with who so,
|
| 00:36:10.600 |
who otherwise she was quite aligned with.
|
| 00:36:14.600 |
Exactly.
|
| 00:36:15.600 |
I mean, a lot of you can read this story of the delays he's in the way that the monster is educated as a reference to Roseau's Emile.
|
| 00:36:23.600 |
But with this important caveat that Wallstonecraft wasn't admirer of her so.
|
| 00:36:28.600 |
But she took issue with him on his treatment of women because Rosau did not believe that women should be educated in the same way that men should be educated.
|
| 00:36:36.600 |
So it's a nice little, if Mary is recalling Rosau's Emile, which she was reading at the time, there's a nice little coup in the fact that the education happens to this young woman, Safie.
|
| 00:36:48.600 |
And I think we have to give Kudos here to Percy because he, as you said, he was a real champion of women's education.
|
| 00:36:55.600 |
And he did enormous amount to educate Mary Shelley.
|
| 00:36:58.600 |
He would not only recommend books, he would read to her.
|
| 00:37:01.600 |
And he's the one who encouraged her to write this book.
|
| 00:37:05.600 |
And he also edited it significantly.
|
| 00:37:09.600 |
Now, some people believe that some of his revisions were counterproductive, that he kind of over adorned the style of the manuscript,
|
| 00:37:21.600 |
where Mary Shelley was more in the line with her mother.
|
| 00:37:25.600 |
He was in straightforward Anglo-Saxon words and a kind of open candor-cander style.
|
| 00:37:33.600 |
He used Latinate terms.
|
| 00:37:35.600 |
However, he did a great deal.
|
| 00:37:39.600 |
He played a huge role in her education.
|
| 00:37:42.600 |
Yeah, and I think that's because, I mean, on the editing of the novel, he's, you know, one of the things, she had read very well,
|
| 00:37:49.600 |
and she grew up with this very important father, and she grew up also reading her mother's book.
|
| 00:37:54.600 |
So her mother wasn't alive to educate her, but in a way she educated her through her work.
|
| 00:37:59.600 |
But she didn't, she hadn't had any formal training, so she didn't know where to put a comma.
|
| 00:38:03.600 |
So a lot of the work that Percy did was also, I mean, in editing the manuscript was on that level, was teaching her how to write for publication.
|
| 00:38:09.600 |
But he himself was a disciple of Wallstonecraft.
|
| 00:38:14.600 |
So this idea of educating women, he took very seriously, in fact.
|
| 00:38:17.600 |
He liked to think of himself as a liberator of women.
|
| 00:38:20.600 |
He really liked the fact that he'd liberated not only Mary, his future wife, but her sister.
|
| 00:38:25.600 |
He wished he could liberate his sisters as well, and he even invited his abandoned wife to join them in this liberated community.
|
| 00:38:34.600 |
So, and part of liberation was education.
|
| 00:38:37.600 |
So, thanks, for that summary.
|
| 00:38:40.600 |
We have the monster who is in a hovel looking at this family, the delays he's learning about human emotions, human values.
|
| 00:38:50.600 |
He learns geography, history, ideas, and even philosophy, and how to read.
|
| 00:38:56.600 |
And he's largely self-educated to a great degree.
|
| 00:39:01.600 |
And he certainly speaks very eloquently in those passages of the book where he's speaking in his own voice, no?
|
| 00:39:07.600 |
Yes.
|
| 00:39:08.600 |
So, you would say this is a case of someone who has overcome enormous obstacles to put himself in a position to be integrated fully into human society.
|
| 00:39:20.600 |
He's learned French, which is the language of culture of the time.
|
| 00:39:24.600 |
By the way, it's amazing that people think that he's speaking in beautiful English, but the fact is we have to remember that Frankenstein is himself, Swiss, and I think.
|
| 00:39:36.600 |
And, Franklin, his Francophone, and his creature is basically Francophone.
|
| 00:39:41.600 |
So, everything that we read in English in Mary Shelley's text, we have to re-translate back into French.
|
| 00:39:46.600 |
The point being is what goes wrong then?
|
| 00:39:49.600 |
Why is the creature unable to perform that miracle of self-education and integration into human society?
|
| 00:40:00.600 |
I think it goes back to that rejection that you brought up earlier.
|
| 00:40:05.600 |
And it's the great question of the novel.
|
| 00:40:07.600 |
What goes wrong?
|
| 00:40:08.600 |
He's the perfect being, according to rationalist enlightenment principles.
|
| 00:40:15.600 |
He's also a vegetarian, right?
|
| 00:40:17.600 |
He's the family that he's staying with, although unbeknownst to them, he tries to help them by doing their chores.
|
| 00:40:26.600 |
So, he has all the right aspirations and inclinations to start with.
|
| 00:40:31.600 |
And Victor does not ever get seduced by him.
|
| 00:40:36.600 |
He seduces the wrong word, but he has never won over by all those speeches that we, the readers, are won over by where we kind of take the side of the creature, right?
|
| 00:40:48.600 |
Yeah, the monster's rhetoric has no effect on Victor.
|
| 00:40:50.600 |
Why is that?
|
| 00:40:51.600 |
Is this his problem, the creature's problem or is it Victor's problem?
|
| 00:40:56.600 |
Well, I think what there are circumstances in the novel by the time Victor meets the monster again, the monster has killed his little brother.
|
| 00:41:05.600 |
But I also think that there's a problem with education and it's not the monster's education.
|
| 00:41:10.600 |
Mary Shelley gives the monster all the best books.
|
| 00:41:12.600 |
In addition to the Delacie family, he finds Paradise Lost, the sorrows of Verte and Plutarch's lives under a tree.
|
| 00:41:18.600 |
She gives it all the best books.
|
| 00:41:20.600 |
Victor's education, on the other hand, happens at Ingles, the University of Inglesstadt, which was famous for natural philosophy.
|
| 00:41:27.600 |
And natural philosophy is the 19th century term for STEM.
|
| 00:41:32.600 |
So, he studies mathematics, chemistry, anatomy and physiology.
|
| 00:41:37.600 |
And that's it.
|
| 00:41:39.600 |
He talks about how he studied monomonatically.
|
| 00:41:42.600 |
So, yeah, he has a very limited education you're saying that there's...
|
| 00:41:46.600 |
Well, he lacks that humanist education that you and I value.
|
| 00:41:50.600 |
And that perhaps that's the, you know, it's not the monster's education, it's Victor's.
|
| 00:41:54.600 |
How do you have that education?
|
| 00:41:55.600 |
Things would have turned out differently, maybe.
|
| 00:41:57.600 |
Well, maybe.
|
| 00:41:58.600 |
So, going back to Victor, the figure of Victor, we should maybe point out that the subtitle of the Frankenstein novel is the modern Prometheus.
|
| 00:42:08.600 |
And I'm assuming that Prometheus there refers primarily to Victor.
|
| 00:42:13.600 |
I don't know if you have a different idea about that.
|
| 00:42:16.600 |
No, I think, you know, initially...
|
| 00:42:18.600 |
...who is Prometheus?
|
| 00:42:19.600 |
To me, there's that question when you read the novel and I like to ask students that who is Prometheus.
|
| 00:42:24.600 |
But I think ultimately you're right, I think it's Victor.
|
| 00:42:27.600 |
And if you go to the title page, we have this nice genealogy of creation stories.
|
| 00:42:32.600 |
Because we have the title itself, Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus.
|
| 00:42:36.600 |
And then we have a quotation from Paradise Lost.
|
| 00:42:39.600 |
It's Adam questioning his creator.
|
| 00:42:41.600 |
And he says, "Did I ask you to mold me man?"
|
| 00:42:45.600 |
And it sounds like more of an accusation.
|
| 00:42:49.600 |
It sounds like an accusation.
|
| 00:42:51.600 |
Who was Prometheus?
|
| 00:42:52.600 |
He wanted to remind our listeners.
|
| 00:42:54.600 |
He was at Greek God, belonged to the order of the titans, no?
|
| 00:42:57.600 |
He was one of the titans.
|
| 00:42:59.600 |
And there are different versions of the story, but some he created man out of clay.
|
| 00:43:04.600 |
But I think what's more important to Mary Shelley is his sympathy for mankind.
|
| 00:43:08.600 |
But he sides with mankind against Zeus.
|
| 00:43:10.600 |
He revolts against Zeus in stealing the fire to bring to mankind.
|
| 00:43:16.600 |
And that fire represents, especially for someone like Mary Shelley, enlightenment.
|
| 00:43:22.600 |
This was very powerful myth for the young people of her generation, following on the heels of the revolutions.
|
| 00:43:29.600 |
But the Prometheus in her subtitle is a question mark.
|
| 00:43:34.600 |
In other words, it's not like her husband Percy, who wrote Prometheus Unbound in which Prometheus becomes the great champion of human liberty and liberation from tyranny.
|
| 00:43:48.600 |
Right here, Prometheus is a failure.
|
| 00:43:51.600 |
Well, if he is associated with the victory, he's overreaching.
|
| 00:43:56.600 |
And it's not so unproblematic.
|
| 00:43:59.600 |
So she was not always on the same page with her husband, was she?
|
| 00:44:02.600 |
No, I think as you said, Shelley saw things much more clearly, almost like Marx, that there's an oppressor.
|
| 00:44:08.600 |
And somebody rises up against him, revolts, and triumphs.
|
| 00:44:13.600 |
Right, there's no triumph. Anyone who's read the novel, there's not a triumphant character among the three.
|
| 00:44:20.600 |
Right? Because there's Victor, there's the monster.
|
| 00:44:23.600 |
And then there's also this Walton, whose letters are featured in the beginning and in the end.
|
| 00:44:28.600 |
And he's sailing toward the North Pole, and he has to turn around before he discovers the pole.
|
| 00:44:32.600 |
So I think she questioned that kind of grandiloquence that her husband embraced.
|
| 00:44:38.600 |
I think she saw it as a form of hubris, and I think she saw it also in her father's work.
|
| 00:44:43.600 |
That we should be wary.
|
| 00:44:46.600 |
We haven't mentioned anything about Walton yet, but he's the frame narrative, no?
|
| 00:44:52.600 |
Yeah. He's an explorer. He's also like the creature he's self-educated.
|
| 00:44:57.600 |
He mentions that more than once, then he's taught himself what he knows.
|
| 00:45:02.600 |
He's a searcher after knowledge, so he's a figure of the question.
|
| 00:45:08.600 |
And it leads him up to the North Pole.
|
| 00:45:11.600 |
And the whole end of the novel goes into this weird, arctic ice and bleak,
|
| 00:45:18.600 |
the desolate landscape that clearly has at this point in the narrative some kind of objective,
|
| 00:45:24.600 |
correlative relation to what has happened to certainly the soul of the creature who has now surrendered all those humane emotions he had learned from the delays.
|
| 00:45:36.600 |
And has become a bitter, highly-embittered enemy of his own creator as well as humankind,
|
| 00:45:43.600 |
because Victor Frankenstein, after promising the creature that he would create for the creature a mate so that he could have someone to go off and leave humankind alone.
|
| 00:45:54.600 |
Right. The monster gets this idea from reading Paradise Lost that he could have an Eve.
|
| 00:45:59.600 |
He could have an Eve, exactly.
|
| 00:46:00.600 |
But Victor seems to have some scientific scruples at this point, and he decides not to provide the monster with me.
|
| 00:46:06.600 |
Wisely so, maybe. Because it could have created a race of monsters.
|
| 00:46:11.600 |
So this North Pole, what do you do with this arctic landscape that the novel culminates with?
|
| 00:46:17.600 |
Yeah, that's another thing that is like the creation of the monster itself that is so original.
|
| 00:46:23.600 |
I mean, what did Mary Shelley know of the poles?
|
| 00:46:26.600 |
But it's another sublime landscape. I think that's the easy answer.
|
| 00:46:31.600 |
But then I think there's another reason why.
|
| 00:46:33.600 |
So the monster is floating away on a block of ice into the nether regions of the world.
|
| 00:46:39.600 |
And as you mentioned, this is a way of putting his desolation into form.
|
| 00:46:45.600 |
Right. The coldness that he feels inside is mirrored in the landscape.
|
| 00:46:50.600 |
And also the fact that he is a creature alone, a drift with who's friendless, motherless and friendless.
|
| 00:46:58.600 |
So you mentioned that the last lines of the novel, and it's quite interesting if you look at the original manuscript because we do have Mary Shelley.
|
| 00:47:08.600 |
Mary Shelley's version of the last sentence, which was then edited by Percy.
|
| 00:47:13.600 |
Let me read what Mary Shelley wrote originally.
|
| 00:47:17.600 |
She writes, "He sprung."
|
| 00:47:20.600 |
This is the creature, the creature, springing from the cabin window.
|
| 00:47:24.600 |
It's a ship that's blocked in the ice in the arctic.
|
| 00:47:27.600 |
He sprung from the cabin window as he said this upon an ice raft that lay close to the vessel.
|
| 00:47:33.600 |
He was pushed off and pushing himself off. He was carried away by the waves.
|
| 00:47:38.600 |
And I soon lost sight of him in the darkness and distance.
|
| 00:47:43.600 |
Percy, this is his version.
|
| 00:47:45.600 |
He sprung from the cabin window as he said this upon the ice raft which lay close to the vessel.
|
| 00:47:52.600 |
He was soon born away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.
|
| 00:47:59.600 |
So in Percy's version, there's a strong suggestion that the monster has disappeared for good that he's been lost in darkness and distance.
|
| 00:48:07.600 |
It could be a kind of hell, but that he has found his eternal exile or damnation.
|
| 00:48:13.600 |
It Mary's version, it's a nice, neat conclusion.
|
| 00:48:16.600 |
Yes, in Mary's version, it's the idea that I soon lost sight of him in the darkness and distance doesn't mean at all that this creature has gone into another world.
|
| 00:48:27.600 |
It means that she just lost sight of him and that he may still be with us and present in our own world.
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| 00:48:33.600 |
And this would lead me to a question for you which is why in the 21st century, why is this still a novel for the 21st century?
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And what lessons can we maybe derive from it that speak directly to our own times?
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Well, I was going to say just a moment ago, Mary seems to be more forward thinking in terms of a leaving room for a sequel.
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But in spite of Percy's edit, that impulse has remained because there are so many filmic versions of Frankenstein.
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There's a new one that just came out last year.
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And the postmodernists have a field day with Frankenstein, no?
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I think, well, because I like to think of it as a, when I was going back, when I was talking about the genealogy of creation stories that we have an ancient myth with Prometheus, then we have a modern creation story in Paradise Lost, right?
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And those people's perspectives, and most importantly, the creature Adam is questioning his creator, the doubt.
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And then with Frankenstein, we have a postmodern creation myth.
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He's composed of spare parts, stitched together.
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Everything about his experience and his education is governed by contingency alone.
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And incidentally, earlier when we were talking about the ugliness or what frightens a victor,
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when he sees the monster, it made me think of a problem that you have or that we have been creating artificial life,
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and in particular, Androids, and it's called the Uncanny Valley.
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But if you build a robot to look lifelike, it has to be, you have to be very careful because the slightest variants, right?
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That word Uncanny, of course, comes from Freud, will horrify the beholder rather than delight him or her?
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That's right. That happens in Star Trek all the time with Dado, sometimes when he gets into trouble, and his epidermis is removed,
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and you see that he's made nothing up, he's made up of circuits.
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No, this would be the equivalent of the organic, but this is actually electronic.
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Right, and in Frankenstein's cases, you point out it's just the eye.
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Yeah.
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And the arteries and all the arteries, the evidence.
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But the idea that the anthropomorphism, the veil of illusion of anthropomorphism, it's lifted in the scenes that you're talking about.
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Yeah. But I think you asked me about the, is there a lesson here?
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| 00:50:58.600 |
Well, yes. And going back to, I guess, the intro where we're talking about the genesis of Frankenstein, the novel,
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and we're talking about the genesis of Frankenstein's creature, and the way in which our age in its biotechnological drive is so obsessed with mastering the processes of genesis,
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and bringing them in under our direct control and manipulation, and nowhere more so than in the gene, and the genome,
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and genetic processes of artificial life, and so forth.
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And so you talked about the myth of giving a new life in a new way in our, for our own age.
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In one respect, you could say that the creature is a new archetype, and there are very few new archetypes since the Greeks.
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There might be two or three, we've done a show on entitled opinions on mythology.
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David Lummis said, "Maybe Hamlet is a new archetype, but he has his predecessor and he's maybe Don Giovanni is a new archetype."
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Certainly, I claim once at Thelman Louise is an archetype, a feminine friendship that you don't have anywhere in the preceding mythologies, but Frankenstein's creature is an archetype of something that does seem to hold sway over a certain area of very dynamic research in our own time.
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You mentioned that there are no heroes, positive heroes in this novel, and that raises a question about Victor Frankenstein.
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Clearly, if he is the hero of our times, then we're all in deep trouble.
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And I think Mary Shelley went to great efforts to forbid the reader from heroizing and making Victor Frankenstein into a model of emulation.
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What can we learn in terms of if we want to go down the path of trying to find a moral lesson, might even be mistaken to try to do that.
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But do you find, in Victor Frankenstein, maybe the first figure of an anti-hero?
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Yeah, I think that's another reason why this novel seems almost postmodern to me.
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Victor is a failure, he's a disaster, and you really don't have characters like that until the 20th century.
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In fact, one of my high school students one day put down his book, made a loud thump on the table, and he said, "Dr. Pearson, Victor Frankenstein is a wuss."
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But coming to your question about there being a lesson, I don't know that there's a lesson per se, but there's something that she's resisting.
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But there's a caution that what she calls in the 1831 edition, Victor's fervent desire to penetrate the secrets of nature is a problem.
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You know, if we do that, the way Victor does, it doesn't mean that everything's going to turn out well.
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No, far from it.
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And then the question is when things don't turn out well, in fact when things turn out badly, what degree of responsibility is one obliged to assume for it, and Victor assumes no responsibility?
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Yeah, and it makes me think we live in Silicon Valley, and there's a portion of the population who thinks that the singularity is not.
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That is that soon we're going to have machines as intelligent as we are operating in the world.
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And if you look at Frankenstein, even in spite of the rejection, Frankenstein still is in many ways a perfect creature.
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What happens is it all goes wrong when it comes to feelings and passions, like as long as we remain in the domain of the rational education, everything comes out okay.
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But then if we make robots to be like humans, they're going to have our weaknesses too.
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I'm not, I'm less worried about robots because they're not biological and they're not organic.
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I think a much more worried about genetic research and the stem cell research at all, this whole field where the technology has been able now to go in and edit the entire genetic makeup of organisms and remake the species of the earth according to our own master plan or what we decide to do.
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But we decide it's good and what we decide it's bad.
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So if mosquito is carrying malaria or bad, we can genetically modify other mosquitoes to eliminate them from the earth without ever thinking about what constant long-term consequences, these kinds of small decisions here and there amount to in a larger ecological biosphere.
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| 00:55:36.600 |
I think Mary Shelley would agree with you too. I think she's a dissenting voice in an era when people were very excited about scientific discovery.
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Yeah and her story reveals how easy it is to get all excited about creating something new and then how almost inevitable it is that when it goes bad, you disclaim authorship for it or you might feel guilty but it still,
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Frankenstein is still out there in many ways and as you say, he's an antihero, not that positive hero.
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| 00:56:11.600 |
Right and these kinds of experiments that Frankenstein represents, I mean you said he became, he's become an archetype but we use that expression as a popular expression.
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Oh no, I've created a monster.
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So in many ways you could apply the same if you want to use it as a little allegory onto the map that onto the French Revolution which was a grand experiment that failed miserably and violently.
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Well, Inga, our time is running out and I want to remind our listeners that we've been speaking about Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein with Dr. Inga Pearson, our one-time colleague here at Stanford and I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions.
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You mentioned earlier Inga that Frankenstein has had any number of remakes in this cinematic medium and the story of I've created a monster and so forth and we began with a song by Glasswave and we're going to end with a song by
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| 00:57:01.400 |
my last way which is called Creature and it is about Frankenstein and it's one place where this novel has found an afterlife in the musical sphere.
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So thanks again for coming on.
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Remind our listeners that this will conclude this season of entitled opinions that we're going on hiatus.
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We'll be back with you sometime in 2017 and the meantime you can enjoy the song by glasswave called Creature.
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Spoxin is the laughing I wish anyone is why he has to lie.
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