20 - Science and the Gothic: the three big nineteenth-century monster stories

Summary

We have seen in Part IV that some seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors treated the precursors to science (magic, alchemy and natural philosophy) with considerable cynicism. Science did not get off to a good literary start and Haynes has shown that Western literary culture continued to view science in a poor light. This literary image of science was further blackened by its role in three of the best-known and long-surviving nineteenth-century horror stories, which are constantly retold in new stage and screen adaptations.

These are Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (1818 and revised in 1831), Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). The overall conclusion from these stories is that science can lead to horrible consequences, exemplified by acronyms like ‘Frankenfoods’ to describe foodstuffs prepared from genetically modified crops. But the associations in these stories were initially more subtle, the science often being a force for good, rather than a cause of evil. The ambivalent position of science in these stories mirrors the ambivalent relationship between reason, progress and good government in so-called Enlightenment thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and its antithesis in traditional, aristocratic and reactionary government epitomized by feudalism. The literary expression of the tensions between progress and reaction is the Gothic; in which horror is often associated with science. […]