Been Frankensteined

Pop culture vs the novel

This is a follow-up to my recent post “A Victorian Englishwoman wrote The Great Anti-Romance” (https://xhoyenauthor.substack.com/p/a-victorian-englishwoman-wrote-the).

In that post, I mentioned that “Wuthering Heights” (Emily Brontë, 1847) was akin to “Frankenstein” (Mary Shelley, 1818) but based on psychological deviances rather that biological ones. That’s definitely true. The psychological deviances in “Frankenstein” aren’t the focus of the story, they’re contrivances to enable the story.

I said I thought “Wuthering Heights” made “Frankenstein” look like simplistic, pop sci fi in comparison.

But at that writing, I hadn’t yet read “Frankenstein” and was basing that statement on what I’d absorbed about the story from pop culture renditions. And the closest thing to a cinematic rendition that I’ve ever seen remains “Young Frankenstein”, which itself is a sendup of the pop culture notion of the story.

Having now read the novel, I’m in a position to address the two points from a knowledgeable position.

I stand by my statement. The “science” in “Frankenstein” is as vague as the pre-psychology psychology in the later novel, except the later novel happens to get the psychology right whereas “Frankenstein” gets neither the physical science right (who could in 1818?) nor the psychology (there’s the rub).

Shelley’s chemical/alchemical basis for Victor’s creative discovery does what it needs to do from a science fiction writing device standpoint, of course. In fact, it’s far superior to the pop culture rendition, which involves surgically joining cadaver parts and dramatically running lightning through the thing via bolts on its neck. Hollywood found that more understandable and more dramatic to moviegoers.

The down side of “Frankenstein” is in the psychology. The mental states of the main characters are equally contrived in order to enable the story. I had trouble with this, especially at the end.

The examinations and revelations in “Wuthering Heights” about human psychology, on the other hand, had greater breadth and depth than those of the earlier novel, and almost never felt contrived to me.

“Frankenstein” belongs more to the Romantic school of literature, as I see it, since the main characters are in extreme emotional states all the time, driven by their sensory experiences of the outside world. It’s actually Victor’s violation of the Romantic principle that causes all the problems — he spends time “in his own head” rather than sensually enjoying life’s wonders as they are. That message strikes me as very anti-intellectual and indulgently anti-civic-minded. A later period of artistic expression, characterized by the Weimar Classicism promoted by Goethe, sought to reconcile intellect and emotion, sensory experience and practicality, rather than casting it as either-or as Shelley does.

The protagonist’s primary mental states are obsession with desired glory (his sin of not being sensory-motivated) and then completely mentally paralyzing self-pity, contrived to switch on disastrously the instant he completes his life-from-lifelessness project, later known as “the monster”.

The former state is used to kick off a 100% contrived mad scientist sin, which then triggers the events which lead to the latter state, repeatedly. Victor’s nearly continual state of mental debilitation and self-pity is used to contrive the pilings on of tragedies in a feedback loop, which makes it annoying. It’s not organic — if Victor, a smart, capable, warm person, hadn’t been contrived to completely mentally debilitating anguish merely upon seeing his creation come to life, none of the rest of the story would have happened.

From another standpoint, what did he expect would come of his work, and did he not plan what to do with the creature after he succeeded? Such notions are conveniently ignored by contriving Victor’s work as distractingly obsessive and all-consuming, which is a rather poor depiction of how scientists work, even in the 1700s.

The same goes for each subsequent step, all of which could have been avoided or corrected by a smart, capable, warm person. It’s that series of contrivances from which the novel mainly suffers, culminating in a rather tortured contrivance of Victor’s blindness to the danger in which he has placed the love of his life.

View his creation as a “problem child” and you’ll see what I mean. If he had done so, if he had treated it like his own child with a deformity, there would have been no monster at all.

On top of that, the whole thing is fashioned EXPLICITLY as a direct metaphor to the falling of the archangel Lucifer for “seeking the power of god”. “Mad scientist” equals “playing god”. More to the point, the message is “intellectual pursuits as opposed to sensory pursuits” means “playing god” means “mad scientist” means anti-intellectualism and anti-science. Not being steeped in Christian mythology, that stuff brings me nothing except the sense that the writer was indulging her audience, almost with a “product placement” feel to it. It’s a decidedly archaic JudeoChristian viewpoint, too. Even Catholicism recanted on the topic of Earth not being the center of the universe, etc. Chances are good that Mary Shelley was Christian and this was her take on things, especially coming out of the Romantic artistic period. An argument can be made that “Frankenstein” is one of the roots of modern Christian anti-intellectualism and anti-science.

As science fiction goes, there’s even less science in “Frankenstein” than retroactive psychology in “Wuthering Heights”, so it seems to me. The psychology of both the protagonist and antagonist in “Frankenstein” is contrived, not organic. Although the psychological arc of the “monster” is more organic and believable, the Lucifer product placement is contrived. Both characters switch instantly between extreme states. In “Wuthering Heights”, time and repetition of abuses create the extreme states, making them much more believable.

In the end, “Wuthering Heights” is more science fiction than “Frankenstein”, and better science fiction than “Frankenstein”.

“Frankenstein” has its good points, too, of course. There’s a reason it’s so bloody famous, aside from its Romantic either-or-ism about sensory living vs. intellectual living.

It’s a continents-spanning adventure. The outer frame story is an intrepid ship crew seeking an arctic passage; they encounter the monster and then Victor Frankenstein in pursuit, both on dog-powered sledges crossing a sea of ice. Exotic! The main story spans Switzerland, Germany, then-Holland, England, Scotland, the Orkney Islands, Ireland and back, from well-to-do homes to rustic cottages, woods, boats, ships, oceans, rivers and lakes, horses and horse-drawn carriages, mountains and glaciers, universities, and prisons. It’s NOT a castle, a la-bor-a-tor-y, and then villagers with pitchforks as in greatly simplified pop culture presentations.

The original idea behind Victor’s creation of a man from scratch (by chemically/alchemically animating inanimate matter, NOT surgically joining cadaver parts and hitting it with electricity) must have been frighteningly plausible at a time when the nature of life and cell death were still not understood, and life itself seemed a magical property.

Anyone with a heart would feel the weight of all the tragedies depicted, especially since people in 1818 were dying left and right from colds and anguish, according to both novels. Readers would have felt the pangs from direct experience. Note that Mary Shelley herself lost several children and her husband to the grim reaper shortly after this novel was published (anonymously, when she was 20). She would not have been unfamiliar with death. And as a reminder, poor Emily died the year after her masterwork was published. The late 1700s and early 1800s sucked.

“Frankenstein” has definitely been Frankensteined by pop culture simplifications. Nevertheless, even after reading the novel I stand by my statement comparing “Wuthering Heights” to “Frankenstein” — the older work really does come across as simplistic and pop compared to “Wuthering Heights”. Do they have different purposes? Am I comparing apples to oranges? I’m not so sure — Shelley contrives “Frankenstein” to be about the dangers of being intellectual and having ambitions to discovery, which creates a monster. Brontë shows how closed-mindedness and blindly following traditions created believable monsters with equally tragic and far more believable results. They’re very similar, as I see it, but Brontë’s character motivations and responses are all organic, whereas Shelley’s are forced in order to match the Lucifer myth. There is “playing god” in “Wuthering Heights”, committed by men as a matter of course in the cultural norms of the time, with a similar warning about it but without the “mad scientist” anti-intellectualism. It makes me wonder if Brontë intentionally wrote “Wuthering Heights” as a response to “Frankenstein”. If so, then “Frankenstein” might’ve been worth it.

Give Mary a break, you say, she was only 19, whereas Emily was a wily old 28. :)

Judge for yourself. Read (or re-read) them both. Project Guttenberg has a free version.