in the period: Orpheus descending into the underworld and returning to the world of the heroic and the unexpected; and Alice dropping down the rabbit hole of possibility, only to return to the land of the normal and the expected.
Both Orpheus and Alice descend beneath the earth, and return home radically altered. Both their stories prompted the same questions: Who are we? What does it mean to be a human being? Who is alive, or more alive? Who is really dead? Does the deviant live life more fully, know death more intimately, than so-called normal persons? Do things have meaning only when the Red Queen says they do? Many intellectuals confronted the century as such a bafflement. Henry David Thoreau gives us this account of an unsettling dream, mid-century, in Walden: “After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what—how—when—where?”
In the context of the nineteenth-century search for deep meaning, Thoreau’s refusal to pay six years of delinquent poll tax in protest of the Mexican-American War and slavery takes him one more step in his journey to answer those nagging questions—what? when? how? where? In July 1846, a judge sentenced Thoreau to a night in jail as punishment for his actions. To refuse the tax, to “Say no in thunder!” in the words of Herman Melville, is to say yes to oneself. In the face of the machine bearing down, a person must resist at whatever level he or she finds.
The question remains, “How can I maintain the autonomy of my own self?” For Thoreau, it meant refusing to pay a tax. It also meant publishing his ideas in an essay, in 1849, titled “Civil Disobedience.” By civil, he did not mean polite; he meant the private as opposed to the government. Theories of civil disobedience—the stirrings of one body against the machine of government—start here with Thoreau. Such resistance provides one way of maintaining the autonomy of the self. Thoreau offers a kind of self-controlled deviance.
Scientists, philosophers, artists and even educators believed that they could only arrive at answers to Thoreau’s dreamy questions by finding the bedrock of human essence, but through means other than civil disobedience. For some, that meant finding deep meaning through experiments with drugs. For others, the secret lay in fingerprints, or genes, or in the words we use, or in the images we dream. No matter—whatever the defining characteristic a person might choose, the quest betrays a great irony. Human beings, undergoing vast changes in their own nature, were trying, at the same time, to define what was essential about themselves—something akin to a person attempting to draw a self-portrait while staring into a distorted mirror. No one could see things clearly. There was no foundation, no starting place, and certainly no solid ground on which people could stand to define that elusive creature, the human being.
As a result, experts often conflated the process and the product. They substituted the search for the answer. So, for example, in their experiments with drugs, chemists confused feelings of euphoria with essential change. Instead of claiming that heroin, say, had altered perception, the alteration itself served as proof, for them, that they had finally found the secret of life. Scientists never discussed how heroin actually interacted with the brain. Chemical reactions did not matter. Alteration and change were all. Such experiments had the look of someone trying to throw a ball off the wrong foot: The whole enterprise lacked grace and accuracy, the trajectory off target by a wide margin. Worse yet, no one could get a clear bead on the target.
The move to define human essence, in a great many instances, took on a coarseness and grossness. The century did not interest itself in the meaning of life, but more in what it meant to be alive. It did not ask, What is life? Instead, it went after What is aliveness? Early in the nineteenth century, only drugs could deliver the philosopher’s stone—opium and morphine and heroin serving as the alchemical key to universal understanding. Scientists confined their questions to matters of control—could they induce feelings of euphoria, say, and then reduce them, suspend them? They framed their questions the only way they knew how, for theirs was fast becoming a material and mechanical age, or rather, an age falling more and more under the sway of one machine or another. If machines produced, people would have to consume. And consume they did. And while people did not want to think or act like machines, the process of mechanization moved at a rapid clip, and exerted too much power for anyone to stop its advance. People did not, in many cases, know it, but the machine was clearly getting under their skin. It altered their perception. It framed their thinking.
As commerce raced rapidly forward and religion receded in people’s lives, science eroded faith, as well, by describing nature clicking away like some well-oiled engine. Consider Darwin’s theory of random, materialistic forces propelling life on its course. He even reduced human emotions and behavior to a series of chemical reactions in the brain. If chemists or psychologists could push a button or throw a switch, and with such an act activate the secret of life, that would have satisfied their urge. T. H. Huxley, the biologist, known in his day as “Darwin’s bulldog,” and who coined the word agnostic, described the new evolutionary world in this thoroughly mechanistic way: Man is “mere dust in the cosmic machinery, a bubble on the surface of the ocean of things both in magnitude and duration, a byproduct of cosmic chemistry. He fits more or less well into this machinery, or it would crush him, but the machinery has no more special reference to him than to other living beings.”
One of the Grimm brothers, Jacob, had retold the sixteenth-century story of the golem in 1808. Grimm was prescient. By 1808, he could already see that the golem perfectly captured the philosophical spirit of the age. In the original Jewish legend, a famed rabbi named Judah Low of Prague breathes life into a lump of clay, just as God had done with Adam, but, instead of creating human life, produces a creature called the golem. While the rabbi intends the golem to protect the Jews against attacks from the gentiles, in Jacob Grimm’s retelling, the golem assumes its own life, then grows monstrously large and out of control, so that its creator must eventually destroy it. Grimm had Goethe in mind, specifically his “Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” a 1797 ballad based loosely on the legend of the golem. In the “Apprentice,” a scientist’s supernatural powers, which he uses to animate inert life, once again lurch wildly out of control. Both Goethe and Grimm offered warnings to whoever would listen.
But neither Goethe nor Grimm seized the popular imagination. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley did; and I want to spend some time with her story here, for she frames the period so well. In some ways, the search for the secret of life, as it must inevitably be, was naïve and immature. And that’s one reason, at least, that a young person, Shelley, could see with such astonishing clarity into the heart of the period. Shelley published her popular novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, in 1818, at barely nineteen years of age, and settled on Prometheus for her subtitle with good reason, for she had written an allegory about an act of cosmic disobedience—stealing fire from the gods, or, in the context of the novel, discovering how to create life from inert matter. We can thus read Frankenstein as the ultimate pursuit for that one grand prize, life itself. But, like Grimm and Goethe before her, she also wanted her novel to serve as a warning, alerting scientists that they were chasing after the wrong thing, and that, in the end, the pursuit would ultimately destroy them. Shelley, who spent two years writing her book, invested Frankenstein with a great deal of humor and ironic detachment. She begs us to read her narrative in anything but a straightforward way. She makes us see the silliness in the search.
The search for the secret of life, because of its forbidden nature, found little favor with the general public and sank to the level of underground activity, pure and simple. Shelley understood that. Doctor Victor Frankenstein leaves home and follows his obsession and, in so doing, resembles many of the period’s own scientists: “From this day natural philosophy, and particularly chemistry, in the most comprehensive sense of the term, became nearly my sole occupation. . . . My application was at first fluctuating and uncertain; it gained strength as I proceeded, and soon became so ardent and eager, that the stars often disappeared in the light of morning whilst I was yet engaged in my laboratory.”
As Victor plunges deeper into his studies in natural philosophy, he moves more and more to the edges—becoming a fringe character—and, at the same time, deeper and deeper underground. The light goes out in the novel: Most of the action takes place at night, for Victor sees most clearly, he believes, by the dull reflected illumination of