hiding. He might as well work away at the center of the earth. Isolated and alone, he gives himself over to one scientific pursuit only, to the exclusion of everything else—family, friends, nature, even love—a pursuit that usurps God’s role: the creation of life. And so he asks himself the question that consumed the scientific community in the nineteenth century: “Whence . . . did the principle of life proceed? It was a bold question, and one which has ever been considered as a mystery; yet with how many things are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries.” Nothing can turn aside the obsessive genius, for the person blinded by such overweening pride, by definition, has to resist as flat-out silliness any warning to steer clear of forbidden knowledge. The ego can become the world’s insult.
And so, like Doctor Faustus, some three hundred years earlier, Doctor Victor Frankenstein defies every accepted boundary of knowledge. His misguided ego demands that he possess all knowledge, starting with the creation of life and ending with the elimination of death:
“ Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. . . . if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.”
He succeeds in achieving the first half of his dream, the secret of life: “After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.” He has not realized the second and more crucial half of his dream: the creation of life. And, for a brief moment, he’s not certain he wants to open that door. He hesitates. The story teeters; it can go either way. But that momentary pause, freighted with centuries of metaphysical meaning, passes like a heartbeat.
What follows may not be the very first passage in the new genre of science fiction, but it surely counts as one of the earliest, and Shelley gives it to us with a recognizable amount of tongue in cheek. In fact, this singular event has all the trappings of a parody of the gothic romance—a dark and rainy night, a candle nearly burned out, the dreary fall of the year, a woods both deep and creepy. At precisely one in the morning—with every solid citizen fast asleep—as the rain begins pattering against the windowpanes, Frankenstein “collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.” And then Doctor Victor Frankenstein does what only up to this point God has done. He creates life: “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.”
But Victor’s elation is shockingly short-lived. One brief paragraph later, Victor yearns to undo his miracle work: “Now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room . . . I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created.”
Frankenstein’s creature has a life—of sorts. But he lacks a soul. He faces the world as a lonely and baffled outsider—the ultimate deviant—desperately in need of a female partner. The monster (who remains unnamed throughout the novel) begs his creator for a soul mate, so that he, too, can create life—normal life. But the doctor recoils at the prospect of creating yet another aberration, another freak of nature. Suddenly, for the first time, Frankenstein looks his creation in the eyes, and offers us his only full-blown account of that alien, animated being. The description, once again, rivals any parody of the gothic:
Oh! no mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again imbued with animation could not be hideous as that wretch. I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then; but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived.
Throughout the rest of the novel, Victor flees from what he has done, only to have the monster confront him in the last several pages. Each thinks the other heartless, soulless, cruel, and wicked. Creator and creation merge, the reader recognizing them—doctor and monster—perhaps for the first time, as twin aspects of each other. Such merging must always take place, for whatever the endeavor, one cannot help but replicate oneself. What else is there? That’s why, when readers confuse the doctor with the monster, and refer to the latter as Frankenstein, they reveal a basic truth: The doctor and the monster live in effect, really, as one—opposing characteristics of a single, whole person.
Mary Shelley hints at this idea in her subtitle, The Modern Prometheus. For one cannot invoke Prometheus without raising the specter of his twin brother, Epimetheus. Where Prometheus stands for foresight, for a certain degree of prophesying, Epimetheus represents hindsight. That’s the only way he can see clearly, for he is befuddled by reality, and continually misinterprets the present. He promises to marry Pandora, but in keeping his word manages to let loose on the earth every evil known to humankind. He bumbles.
Victor, as I have said, exists both as himself and monster, creator and creation, light side and dark side, victor and victim—a seeming prophet, but in reality a man unwittingly bent on ruining everything he holds dear. According to Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology at the end of the nineteenth century, we are all twins, all of us in need of integrating the two halves of our divided soul. When Rimbaud writes, “Je est un autre,” he reminds us that, like Victor, we all live as part solid citizen and part monster, sometimes buoyed by brightness, and sometimes dragged down deep into our shadow selves.
The nineteenth century gives birth to a great number of twins because, as with Jung, many writers and philosophers find our basic human nature in that twinning: We pass our days as schizophrenic creatures. I offer only a few examples: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Double, Poe’s “William Wilson” and “Black Cat,” Kipling’s “Dream of Duncan Parrenness,” Guy de Maupassant’s “Horla,” and a good deal of the work of E. T. A. Hoffmann. The age courted so many doubles it needed a new word to describe the phenomenon, so the British Folklore Society fashioned one out of German and introduced it in 1895: doppelgänger, the “double-walker.”
We know the nineteenth century itself, as I said at the outset of this chapter, as a formidable and mighty twin—a century characterized by an energetic, lighter, and upbeat side, and a darker, more tragic one. That dichotomy helped fuel the search for meaning throughout the entirety of the nineteenth century, for in a large sense, meaning usually results in a degree of resolution. In the end, in a world more perfect, the nineteenth century, perhaps, might have reached some sublime integration.
But the age wanted little if any of that. We bump up against exceptions, of course—Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman—but for the most part professionals, from businessperson to biologist, craved Frankenstein’s power. That legacy has helped to shape the twentieth century, and it has gathered momentum in the first few years of the twenty-first century, in our avaricious political appetite for power and control and all-out victory at any cost. Mary Shelley’s warning about creating monsters and then having to live with them has gone unheeded. That’s the problem with nineteen-yearolds. No one listens to them. While generations of readers have embraced her novel as pure horror, Hollywood, of all industries, seems to have gotten it right. It read her story not just as horror, but horror leavened with a good deal of dark, sometimes very dark, humor. Frankenstein has provided solid material for both the prince of gore, Boris Karloff, as well as for those sillies Abbott and Costello and Mel Brooks. The formula has proved highly successful: Since 1931, Hollywood has released forty-six separate movies based on Mary Shelley’s teenage novel.
And even if Hollywood never releases another film about Frankenstein, the monster will never really die—on the screen or off—for, as we shall see, he keeps reappearing, in many different forms, all through the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He certainly stalks our own times. He is, many would argue, us. Which is to say that we have all had a hand not just in creating him. We have also