2 - Science and sympathy in Frankenstein

Summary

Perhaps because the tale is familiar, we often forget how odd it is that Frankenstein began as an entry in a ghost-story contest. The monster, after all, is an unlikely candidate for a ghost – constructed by a scientist out of dead body parts into a grossly oversized, undeniably living organism. How did a hyper-physical creature come to stand in for a ghost? As Mary Shelley recalls in her 1831 preface, her “unbidden” imagination worked with the diverse materials at hand – which by chance included transcendental fantasy and reports of scientific experiment. A “wet, uncongenial summer,” so the story goes, confined her party – including her husband Percy, Lord Byron, and his doctor, John Polidori – to the house. They entertained one another by reading aloud German ghost stories until Byron proposed that they “each write a ghost story.” A few nights later, Mary was racking her brain for an idea when she listened in on a discussion between her husband and Lord Byron:

During one of these [conversations], various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated. They talked of the experiments of Dr. Darwin (I speak not of what the Doctor really did or said that he did, but, as more to my purpose, of what was then spoken of as having been done by him), who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.