The Age of Wonder (57 page)

So who had Mary Shelley been thinking of? The outstanding young German physiologist known in British scientific circles at this time was Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776-1810). His work at the university of Jena had been reported to Banks regularly at the turn of the century, and his election and move to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich in 1804, when still only twenty-eight, was closely followed.
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Banks and Davy kept a particularly keen eye on his work, since Ritter had anticipated Davy’s improvements on the voltaic battery, had invented a dry-cell storage battery, and had followed up Herschel’s work on infra-red radiation from the sun, by identifying ultraviolet rays in 1803. He was also known for certain undefined ‘galvanic’ experiments with animals, which were the talk of the Royal Society, although amidst a certain amount of head-shaking.
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But among his colleagues at Jena he was regarded as a portent. The young poet Novalis (Frederick von Hardenburg, also a mining engineer) exclaimed: ‘Ritter is indeed searching for the real
Soul of the World
in Nature! He wants to decipher her visible and tangible language, and explain the emergence of the Higher Spiritual Forces.’
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In September 1803 Banks received a confidential report from the chemist Richard Chenevix, a Fellow of the Royal Society and the recipient of the Copley Medal in 1803, who was on a scientific tour of German cities. Writing from Leipzig, Chenevix noted that the ‘most interesting’ work at Jena was being done by Ritter, who was using a huge voltaic battery to obtain ‘most capital results’, having ‘a very powerful effect upon the animal economy’ but without damaging ‘the most delicate organs’. Apparently holding back further details for a separate paper, Chenevix added to Banks: ‘In communicating these experiments to you who
are at the centre,
they will immediately find their way to other Philosophers of London. Mr Davy I am sure will be particularly interested.’
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But by August of the following year, when Ritter had moved to Munich, Chenevix’s reports had taken on a rather different tone. ‘Ritter the galvanist is the only man of real talent I have met with; and his head and morals are overturned by the new philosophy of Schelling. I have declared open war against these absurdities.’
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Chenevix’s final report, of 7 November 1804, while still praising Ritter, now has an openly sarcastic edge, and ends on a disturbing note, as if he had witnessed something terrible which he cannot quite bring himself to describe: ‘You may remember that I mentioned to you Ritter’s experiments with a Galvanic pile…Ritter is experimenter in chief, or as they term him,
Empyrie of the New Transcendent School.
I saw him repeat his experiments; and they appeared most convincing. Whether there was any trick in them or not I cannot pretend to say…Ritter with a large body of Professors and pupils, is gone from Jena; and Bavaria is now enlightened by their Doctrines. It is impossible to conceive anything so disgusting and humiliating for the human understanding as their dreams.’
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That these ‘dreams’ are related to those of the fictional Dr Frankenstein seems more than possible. Experiments that had been forbidden by the Prussian government in Jena were taken up again when Ritter moved to the traditionally more libertarian atmosphere of Munich. From his desultory and posthumous memoirs,
Fragments of a Young Physicist
(1810), it would seem that in Munich Ritter fell fatally under the influence of one of the wildest of the
Naturphilosophie
practitioners, a certain Franz von Baader. Experiments that began with water divining, ‘geoelectrical’ mapping and ‘metal witching’ turned to the revival of dead animals by electrical action, and possibly the ‘disgusting and humiliating’ revival of dead human beings, although there is no definitive evidence of this. At all events, Ritter’s Bavarian colleagues were gradually alienated, his students abandoned him, and his mental stability became increasingly fragile. He neglected his family (he had three children), withdrew into his laboratory, and grew increasingly remote and obsessive. Finally, his promising career was destroyed, and he died penniless and insane in 1810, aged thirty-three. In other circumstances his
Memoirs
might have been those of young Victor Frankenstein.
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Ritter’s tragic story was clearly known to Banks, to Davy, and very probably to Lawrence after his time in Göttingen with Blumenbach. Whether it was known to Dr Polidori, and whether it was he who told it to the Shelleys in 1816, is speculation. But they clearly knew from some source about ‘the physiological writers of Germany’. Moreover, the novel owes something else to Germany. Mary Shelley chose to narrate Frankenstein’s act of electrical reanimation, or blasphemous ‘creation’, in a gothic style that owes nothing to the cool British manner of the Royal Society reports, but everything to German ballads and folk tales.

It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when by the glimmer of the half extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open. It breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the Wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!-Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath. His hair was lustrous black and flowing; his teeth of pearly whiteness. But these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as his dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
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5

As her novel developed, Mary Shelley began to ask in what sense Frankenstein’s new ‘Creature’ would be human. Would it have language, would it have a moral conscience, would it have human feelings and sympathies,
would it have a soul
? (It should not be forgotten that Mary was pregnant with her own baby in 1817.) Many of Lawrence’s reflections on the metaphysics of the dissecting room and the theory of brain development seem to be echoed in ideas and even complete phrases used in
Frankenstein.
Here again it seems that Shelley, who was attending medical consultations with Lawrence throughout spring 1817, and may sometimes have been accompanied by Mary, made an opportunity for all three of them to explore these specialist themes.
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Mary Shelley’s idea of the mind was, like Lawrence’s, based on the notion of the strictly physical evolution of the brain. This is how Lawrence was provocatively challenging his fellow members of the Royal College of Surgeons in his lectures of 1817: ‘But examine the “mind”, the grand prerogative of man! Where is the “mind” of the foetus? Where is that of a child just born? Do we not see it actually built up before our eyes by the actions of the five external senses, and of the gradually developed internal faculties? Do we not trace it advancing by a slow progress from infancy and childhood to the perfect expansion of its faculties in the adult…‘
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Frankenstein’s Creature has been constructed as a fully developed man, from adult body parts, but his mind is that of a totally undeveloped infant. He has no memory, no language, no conscience. He starts life as virtually a wild animal, an orangutan or an ape. Whether he has sexual feelings, or is capable of rape, is not immediately clear. Although galvanised into life by a voltaic spark, the Creature has no ‘divine spark’ from Heaven. Yet perhaps his life could be called, in a phrase of the medical student John Keats, a ‘vale of soul-making’.

Almost his first conscious act of recognition, when he has escaped the laboratory into the wood at night, is his sighting of the moon, an object that fills him with wonder, although he has no name for it: ‘I started up and beheld a radiant form rise from among the trees.
^♣
I gazed with a kind of wonder. It moved slowly, but it enlightened my path…It was still cold…No distinct ideas occupied my mind; all was confused. I felt light, and hunger, and thirst, and darkness; innumerable sounds rung in my ears and on all sides various scents saluted me…Sometimes I tried to imitate the pleasant songs of the birds, but was unable. Sometimes I wished to express sensations in my own mode, but the uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again…Yet my mind received, every day, additional ideas.’
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From this moment the Creature evolves rapidly through all the primitive stages of man. Mary’s account is almost anthropological, reminiscent of Banks’s account of the Tahitians. First he learns to use fire, to cook, to read. Then he studies European history and civilisation, through the works of Plutarch, Milton and Goethe. Secretly listening to the cottagers in the woods, he learns conceptual ideas such as warfare, slavery, tyranny. His conscience is aroused, and his sense of justice. But above all, he discovers the need for companionship, sympathy and affection. And this is the one thing he cannot find, because he is so monstrously ugly: ‘The cold stars shone in their mockery, and the bare trees waved their branches above me, the sweet voice of a bird burst forth amidst the universal stillness. All, save I, were at rest…I, like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within me, and finding myself unsympathised with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin.’
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On the bleak Mer de Glace glacier in the French Alps, the Creature appeals to his creator Frankenstein for sympathy, and for love. ‘I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator would not call it murder, if you could precipitate me into one of those ice-rifts…Oh! My creator, make me happy! Let me feel gratitude towards you for
one
benefit! Let me see that I excite the sympathy of
one
existing thing. Do not deny me my request!’
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This terrible corrosive and destructive solitude becomes the central theme of the second part of Mary Shelley’s novel. Goaded by his misery, the Creature kills and destroys. Yet he also tries to take stock of his own violent actions and contradictory emotions. He concludes that his one hope of happiness lies in sexual companionship. The scene on the Mer de Glace in which he begs Frankenstein to create a wife for him is central to his search for human identity and happiness. The clear implication is that a fully human ‘soul’ can only be created through friendship and love: ‘If you consent [to make me a wife], neither you nor any other human being shall ever see us again. I will go to the vast wilds of South America. My food is not that of man. I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment. My companion will be of the same nature as myself, and will be content with the same fare. We shall make our bed of dried leaves; the sun will shine on us as on man, and will ripen our food. The picture I present to you is peaceful and human, and you must feel that you could deny it only in the wantonness of power and cruelty.’
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The Creature is here offering to go westwards to South America or the Pacific, and to return to that primitive Edenic state glimpsed by Cook and Banks. He and his mate will live as vegetarians, kill nothing, cook nothing, build nothing, and reject everything that European civilisation stands for. They will become, in fact, Noble Savages.

In response, Frankenstein goes to London (rather than Paris) to study the latest surgical techniques. He consults with ‘the most distinguished natural philosopher’ of the day in this ‘wonderful and celebrated city’, though this man is not named.
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He then sets up a second laboratory in Scotland, in the remote Orkney islands, where he plans to create a second Creature, a woman. Her companionship will satisfy the male Creature.

But Frankenstein is overcome with doubts. ‘Even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the New World, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the Demon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated on earth…Had I the right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations?’
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His eventual decision to destroy his handiwork is perhaps the grimmest scene in the novel. The laboratory is revealed as a place of horror and blasphemy: ‘I summoned sufficient courage, and unlocked the door of my laboratory. The remains of the half-finished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the flesh of a human being…With trembling hand I conveyed the instruments out of the room, cleaned my chemical apparatus, and put the relics of my work into a basket with a great quantity of stones.’
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There is something more than deathly about those stones. It is as if Frankenstein is burying scientific hope itself beneath the earth.

In his grief and fury the Creature revenges himself on his creator by destroying Frankenstein’s friend Clerval, and then his bride, Elizabeth. From thenceforth both are locked in a pact of mutual destruction, which eventually leads pursuer and pursued to the frozen wastes of the North Pole-the antithesis of the warm, Pacific paradise. In a sense, both have lost their own souls. Drawing on the Miltonic imagery of
Paradise Lost,
both see themselves as fallen angels, doomed to eternal solitude and destruction. The dying Frankenstein remains unrepentant as he gasps: ‘All my speculations and hopes are as nothing. Like the archangel who aspired to omnipotence, I am chained in eternal hell…I have myself been blasted in all my hopes…
Yet another may succeed.
’
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