Note to students: These are my comments on the Frankenstein narrative as it has appeared in literature and film. Please keep in mind that they are not—I repeat, NOT—an interpretation of Mary Shelley’s novel. In fact, the history of the narrative parts company with Shelley quite early—within six or seven years after she published the novel, there were already several very different versions of the story making the rounds on the English stage. The narrative, like Dr. Frankenstein’s “monster,” had taken on a life of its own. The comments which follow are concerned with the life of that narrative.

Some Reflections on the Frankenstein Narrative

The Frankenstein story is one of the few truly modern narratives that has developed something like the cultural meaning and power of myth. It has been told and retold hundreds of times, and has probably been adapted in one way or another thousands more. Like a myth, its basic shape remains the same, and even minor details may be preserved from one retelling to another, but its interpretations and its sub-texts change as the culture changes.

To appreciate this modern “myth’s” place in science fiction and in modern consciousness, we need to do four things. First, we need to give a quick overview of the narrative itself—not a summary of Shelley’s novel or of Whale’s film or of any particular telling of the story, but a sketch of the basic elements that make up the narrative as it gets repeated and reinterpreted. Second, we need to get a sense of some of the historical analogues of the Frankenstein narrative. Frankenstein echoes or resembles quite a number of older stories, and it reworks powerful themes that have been around for thousands of years; we need to have a sense of the narrative’s roots in the past to understand what makes it continue to speak so strongly to the present. Third, we need to examine what is uniquely modern about the narrative. It is not just an old story told in a modern setting: it is a narrative which would not have been possible in a pre-scientific age, and it is one which is especially well suited to the modern imagination. Finally, we should take a look at some of the permutations that the narrative has undergone over the past 180 years or so—the ways in which Shelley’s original tale has been retold, adapted and transformed in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Basic Story

Like a myth, the basic elements of the story are fairly consistent over time. The most popular version of the narrative runs something like this. An isolated individual scientist, usually one whose work is scorned by his peers, labors to create life by stitching together the parts of dead bodies and then infusing them with some life-giving “force”—an electrical shock from a lightning rod in the classic film versions. He succeeds, but he is horrified at the results: he has created a monster. For one thing, his creation is horribly ugly, and neither he nor anyone else can stand the sight of it. More important, he discovers that it is beyond his control; although he has created this new life, it is not a part of him, and it does not respond to his will—it has become an independent creature, with its own will to create or destroy. It is also immensely powerful, physically much stronger and less vulnerable to injury than the mere humans around it. And so a conflict ensues between the creator and his creation. Ultimately, the monster is destroyed, but it also destroys its creator. 

But let’s step back from the specifics of this story for just a moment. We are all familiar with the obsessed scientist in his dark and drafty castle, the dead body parts stolen from graveyards, the hideous monster strapped to a bare table in the laboratory. But they aren’t the most important elements of the Frankenstein narrative. What is important is the story’s shape, and many of the heirs of Frankenstein preserve that shape without including all—or even any—of the details. The more general version of the narrative is a story that focuses on two things. The focus is partly on the scientist—often but not always a lonely and isolated genius—who pursues knowledge into dangerous territory with an unjustified confidence in his own ability to control it. A larger part of the focus, though, is on the scientist’s creation. What he creates is always threatening, and threatening in a particular way—it is inhumanly powerful, and it gets beyond his control and begins to act with a will of its own. Ultimately, the creation has to be destroyed. Often the scientist himself has to help destroy his own creation, and often he is killed while doing it. 

It doesn’t really matter whether the scientist is called Dr. Frankenstein or not, or whether he is a lonely individual genius, a secret government research group, or a corporate cabal. It doesn’t even matter whether or not he has created a “man,” like Shelley’s original monster; the creation may be an artificially intelligent supercomputer instead, or a clever and powerful android, or even a group of genetically reanimated dinosaurs. What matters most is that human technology has created something of awesome power which it can no longer control. This is the basic Frankenstein narrative, and it is this which has exercised such a powerful fascination on modern audiences.

A story of this kind can be chillingly effective because it highlights two disturbing and related concerns: the questionable assumption that we can always control what we create, and the possibility that we could be overwhelmed by our own creations. It is a kind of “cautionary tale” about human arrogance, about “forbidden” knowledge, and about the dangers of great technological power.

There is another way of looking at it, as well. Because of the kind of story it is, the Frankenstein narrative is always a narrative with two themes. On the one hand, it presents the age-old theme of hubris, of the destructive consequences of individual arrogance or pride. In the popularized narrative, Dr. Frankenstein is betrayed by his scientific hubris: he is over-confident of his own scientific knowledge and eagerly grasps the power which his knowledge offers to him, only to discover that he does not have the capacity to control it. On the other hand, however, the narrative also presents a more modern theme—the theme of the new and purely human power of science and technology. Because Dr. Frankenstein fails to understand the potential of this power, he does not foresee the dangers of his own creation. He meddles with a new kind of “forbidden” knowledge and unleashes forces which ultimately threaten to destroy him. 

Precursors and Analogues

Neither of these two themes is entirely new, of course. The fascination with the destructive consequences of hubris, in particular, is part of a tradition which extends far back in western literature. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is the classic example and the one that is most often cited. Oedipus defies a divine oracle which has foretold that he will kill his father and marry his mother. He is a clever man and very strong-willed, and he devises a plan which will make it impossible for the oracle’s prophecy to come true. He knows what must be done, and he trusts his own knowledge. Ironically, everything he does to defeat the oracle actually contributes to the fulfillment of the prophecy. When he discovers what he has unwittingly done, his fate is terrible—he gouges out his own eyes and goes into exile as a blind wayfarer. 

Even the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve, from the book of Genesis, deals with this theme. Tempted by the serpent, Eve believes that she can become greater than Adam, perhaps even the equal of God, if she eats the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Both she and Adam suffer for their presumptuousness, and their fate is even more terrible than Oedipus’—they lose God’s grace and they and their descendants are exiled from the earthly paradise to a life of toil and suffering. 

There are plenty of other familiar examples, some of them without all the dark overtones of Oedipus or Adam and Eve. The old story of the sorcerer’s apprentice, made famous in modern times by Dukas’ whimsical music and Disney’s charming (if a little cutesy) animation in Fantasia, is also an example of the hubris/forbidden knowledge theme. Here the destructive chaos unleashed by the meddling and disobedient apprentice is finally controlled by the higher power of the master sorcerer. The punishment of the apprentice is less severe, in keeping with the lighter tone of tale, but the theme remains similar: human capacities are limited, and there are consequences for trying to push beyond those limits.

The second element does not have such a robust tradition, but there are still some tales in the older, pre-scientific literary tradition which seem to hint at the theme of technological power. They are not, however, usually linked to a concern over hubris. The closest analogues of the Frankenstein narrative are the golem stories, which originated in European Jewish culture of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. These are stories of a human being actually trying to create a being in his own likeness—to create something like another human, in other words. The golem is a manlike figure, created out of clay or earth by a learned rabbi, endowed with a life-force of its own, and put to work. Here we have something very like the quest for “technological” power, and it is driven by scholarly knowledge. But these tales do not generally center around the arrogance or over-confidence of the human creator, and there is little emphasis on the destructive consequences of reaching after “forbidden” knowledge. Even in the versions which include some fear of the golem (such as the fear that it will continue to grow uncontrollably), there is little emphasis on the punishment of those who were presumptuous enough to create it. 

The Modern Character of the Frankenstein Narrative

So, before Shelley’s novel, there isn’t anything quite like Frankenstein. The reason for this is that it is only in the modern era that the quest for technological power and the theme of hubris are joined together. The real Frankenstein story didn’t become possible until the nineteenth century: there couldn’t be a Frankenstein until science and technology had begun to give at least a plausible promise of conferring nearly god-like power on human beings. It was only at this point that hubris could be divorced from transgression against a higher authority and linked with simple human achievement in the natural world.

Think about the difference this makes. In all the earlier examples of hubris that have been mentioned, a human being is pitted against a supernatural order of some kind. Oedipus is trying to defy a divine oracle. Adam and Eve defy God’s command to leave the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge untouched. In each case there are terrible consequences for the individuals who dared to meddle in forbidden matters, and often terrible consequences for those around them and those who come after them. But the consequences occur inside of a supernaturally ordained moral order—the gods hold all the cards, so to speak, and the supernatural order itself is reaffirmed by the punishment of the humans who tried to usurp power. Even in a lighter tale like the sorcerer’s apprentice, the master sorcerer, acting as the higher authority, punishes the apprentice for meddling with arcane knowledge that did not belong to him. As a result, these stories make it clear that ordinary humans don’t have real power of their own; instead, they must transgress against a higher authority in order to steal power that rightfully belongs elsewhere, and the higher authority is ultimately in control.

In the Frankenstein narrative, all this changes. The human being is more independent and more isolated. There is nothing supernatural about his universe and there is no higher authority. His power is the knowledge of the natural sciences, and that power is entirely his own. As a result, he isn’t struggling against the gods or against any other universal order; instead, he is pitted against the consequences of his own creation. When he struggles, he must struggle with the monster itself. And when he is destroyed, he is destroyed by the monster, not by the gods or by any other authority that he has defied. In the Frankenstein narrative hubris is destructive, not because one human has done something that is forbidden by a higher power, but because humans themselves have acquired powers of their own that they cannot control.

This is a disturbing situation. There are no checks and balances left. The Frankenstein narrative raises the possibility that one human being could unleash a power that would rage unchecked, without any higher authority to step in and reclaim that power. In a world beset with fears born of technology—fears of weapons of mass destruction, of catastrophic climate change, of global extinctions—Frankenstein strikes a resonant chord.

The Development of the Frankenstein Narrative

One of the most impressive things about the Frankenstein narrative is the way that it has spread and mutated. Since Shelley’s novel, it has become almost an archetype, a kind of fundamental pattern which forms the foundation for widely divergent works, particularly in popular literature and film. The final thing we need to do is to take a brief look at some of the works in which this archetype appears. 

Andreas Rohrmoser has done an excellent job of tracing the film history of direct adaptations of Frankenstein. I strongly recommend that you take a look at his Frankenstein: A Face for the Monster web site, but I am not going to try to cover the same material here. Instead, I would like to point out some other, less direct, parallels. 

The first one is fairly obvious, and it is from one of the works that begins this course: the computer, HAL, in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL (whose name is one letter back from IBM) is the classic type of a human technological creation which develops a will of its own and becomes a danger to the humans around it. HAL has been deliberately designed to have considerable freedom of action, so that he can run the spaceship Discovery without constant assistance from the human crew. So far as the crew is concerned, he is virtually all-powerful, because he controls the environment upon which their lives depend. 

But HAL is not simply an evil machine who runs amok. He becomes dangerous to humans because of what humans themselves have asked him to do. He has been programmed for secret mission objectives, and when his commitments to the human crew threaten to interfere with those objectives, he turns on his “masters” and begins to destroy them. In the end Dave Bowman, the only surviving crew member, has to incapacitate HAL; Bowman himself is not actually killed as a result, but he is transformed into something more than human and can never again be part of the human race. 

Most of the elements of the Frankenstein narrative are here. There is little emphasis on the creator—Dr. Chandra, who designed HAL, is back on Earth—but almost everything else is present. HAL is the perfect golem: he is a very powerful human construct; he is made in man’s image (he carries on human conversations, plays games, etc.); he does work so that humans will not have to do it. But he is also a deadly product of hubris. The humans who designed him and gave him his instructions had great confidence in their technological ability but failed to foresee its consequences—they are actually responsible for HAL’s “malfunction.” Humans unleashed the power of HAL, only to find that they could not control what they had created. As a result, they must struggle against their “monster” and be destroyed in the process.

Countless other examples are familiar from popular entertainment. Michael Crichton’s very popular thrillers seem to specialize in the Frankenstein motif. Jurassic Park features a supreme technological achievement, dinosaurs brought back to life; but the dinosaurs are independent creatures, not extensions of human will, and they get quickly and destructively out of control. The nanotechnology of Prey becomes uncontrollable and threatens world-wide cataclysm. Even the supposedly failsafe Wildfire complex in his early novel The Andromeda Strain almost produces the very result that it was intended to prevent, so that the human characters’ final struggle is against their own technology instead of against the alien “invader.” 

The Frankenstein pattern is also present in a surprising number of recent blockbuster films and film franchises. The Wachowski brothers’ Matrix films present the pattern on an especially grand scale. Humans create artificial intelligence and then are enslaved and all but destroyed by their own machines. The Terminator films are based on much the same premise. Even a recent comic-book film like Spiderman includes the Jekyll-and-Hyde plot of Norman Osborne/Green Goblin, in which Osborne’s over-confidence in his own technology turns him into his own “monster.”

It is pointless to keep giving examples—once you start looking for them, they are easy enough to find. But there are also twists to the pattern which are not so obvious, and sometimes the pattern itself gets turned inside out. A case in point is the final entry in the “Frankenstein” section of this course: “Demon with a Glass Hand,” from the Outer Limits. Here the “monster” is not an evil construct which has turned against its creator. Quite the contrary—it is the only hope of the human race. But what happens when a creation of human technology, endowed with a will and a consciousness of its own, does not turn against its creators? Seen from the “monster’s” point of view, the answer is incredible isolation and loneliness—the same sort of consequences that drove Mary Shelley’s original monster to murder and brought it to a final confrontation with its creator.

So we end up back with Mary Shelley. Her novel started it all, but her narrative of a monster and its creator quickly escaped her control and took on a life of its own. The Frankenstein narrative has become one of the archetypal narratives of modern science fiction. It has penetrated modern consciousness to such an extent that one can scarcely pass a bookstore or a movie marquee without being reminded of it. Above all, it has become the supremely modern archetype: by joining the age-old concern with hubris to the modern obsession with technological progress, it speaks to an era in which humans’ greatest fears may be the consequences of their own creations.