Christa Knellwolf and Jane Goodall, eds. Frankenstein’s Science (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), x + 225 Pps., $99.95.
Christa Knellwolf is a Visiting Professor of English and Cultural Theory at the University of Konstanz and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Australian National University. Jane Goodall is a Professor with the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. Together, they edit a series of texts that seek to reopen the question of how science and scientific ambitions are portrayed in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Currently, this is the only book-length study that contextualizes this novel in contemporary scientific and literary debates. The essays in this volume are written by leaders in their fields and provide new historical scholarship into areas of science and pseudo-science that generated fierce controversy in the early nineteenth century: anatomy, electricity, medicine, teratology, Mesmerism, quackery, and proto-evolutionary biology. While “Frankenstein” is often read as a cautionary tale of the dangers of scientific experimentation, several essays in this text contend that within the period in which it was written, experimenters and radical thinkers viewed science as the herald of social innovation that would counter the backlash in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Let’s look at these essays a little closer.
Patricia Fara begins the volume with an essay concerning women and the scientific literature of the nineteenth century; in her essay, which constitutes chapter two, Fara overviews the various publications that Mary Shelley may have been exposed to in her education, and which in part may have furthered her imagination. Chapter three, written by Judith Barbour, furthers this exploration of what Shelley may have read by offering detailed insight into the contents of the Juvenile Library, a serial encylopaedia published in 1807; Barbour contends in part that the various controversies about mankind’s purpose, which were documented in the Juvenile Library, fuelled her speculations regarding the potentials of then-contemporary science. Knellworth’s own contribution, chapter four, documents the difficulty of trying to map and chart the phenomena of the mind in that time period.
In chapter five, Anita Guerrini discusses then-contemporary debates about the sanctity of life, and argues that early 19th century debates about vivisection were in part motivated by an attempt to explore the depths of the mysteries of life. Melinda Cooper, in chapter five, explores the linkage between the book by Shelley, and the furthering of the budding science of teratology (i.e. the study of defects). Joan Kirby analyzes the spiritual ideas underpinning the story of Frankenstein in chapter seven, whereas Jane Goodall traces the development of the electrical experimemnt in the latter decades of the eighteenth century in chapter eight. In what may very well be the best essay of the lot, Allan K. Hunter shows how Shelley’s character, Frankenstein, draws from various threads of then-contemporary science; e.g., she draws from the materialist philosophy of the Scottish enlightenment, especially with regard to its effort to explain social dynamics (139-40).
Interestingly, Ian Jackson (chapter ten) explores the idea of whether or not one may be apropos in assuming that the debates of 1814, involving natural scientists, regarding the potential existence of a ‘life-force’ within humanity was the immediate background of Shelley’s novel, a notion that she co-opted into electricity. The eleventh chapter is a reflection how Frankenstein’s adventures in life may be parallel to the increased emphasis that the collection of specimens experienced in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century science. The volume is rounded-out by Robert Markley’s chapter, covering the seemingly autonomous development of planetary science in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; notably, he herein suggests that Shelley’s novel may speak to the potential problem of the relationship between humanity and the world, much alike unto H.G. Wells’ novels.
All in all, this collection of essays will be an invaluable resource for people who specialize in Romanticism or cultural history, as it elucidates the contexts from which this fine novel emerged.
Bradford McCall
Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA