Versatile
Monster
Marilyn Butler
- In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity
and 19th-century Writing by Chris Baldick
Oxford, 207 pp, £22.50, December 1987, ISBN 0 19 811726 4
London Review of Books – Vol.10, No. 9 – 5 May
1988 – p. 12-13
The plot of Frankenstein,
Chris Baldick points out, can be summed up in two sentences. ‘Frankenstein
makes a living creature out of bits of corpses. The creature turns against him
and runs amok.’ The mystery is why so many people know the plot of Frankenstein,
and have known it, as this book ably demonstrates, since shortly after the
work’s first appearance in 1818, without necessarily reading a line of Mary
Shelley’s prose. More than a century before it was filmed, it existed in two
rival stage versions. Cartoonists drew it, writers and politicians alluded to
it. The plot, rather like the monster, got away from its creator and walked the
world.
It’s for the range of its significations in changing
contexts that Chris Baldick is interested in Frankenstein.
‘This will not be an exercise in tracing Mary Shelley’s literary “influence”
(as far as prose style is concerned, it is just as well she had none), but a
study of that process of adaptation, allusion and revision by which a modern myth
is born and sustains its life.’ Baldick’s time-span is an extended 19th
century, from the Fall of the Bastille to the First World War. Some myths
invoked in Romantic writing, like Faust and Prometheus, have remoter origins
than the Frankenstein
fable. Other Gothic novels carried on, Baldick says, ‘safely retrospective
flirtations with feudal and Papal power’. But Mary Shelley’s novel is set at
the close of the Age of Reason. It’s a story of the 1790s, the decade which
ushered in a sixty-year-long cycle of European revolutions,
counter-revolutions, rapid social and economic change. Frankenstein, its
protagonist, is a man of his day – a scientist, imaginatively a social
scientist, who aspires to re-make the world of nature, social and political
forms, men and women.
Only eighty pages of Baldick’s book deal directly with
Mary Shelley’s. Of these the greater part examines either the myth of a
monstrous birth before Mary Shelley adopted it, or the fortunes of the idea
after she published it. This approach in effect re-distributes authorship of
the fable, and obliges us to consider it as a collaborative popular invention.
The idea of likening the French Revolution and particularly the Parisian mob to
a parricidal monster may have occurred first to Edmund Burke. Already in his Reflections on the
Revolution in France (1790), Burke saw the fomentors of revolutions
as sinister magicians, the Parisian municipal army as ‘a species of political
monster, which has always ended by devouring those who have produced it’.
After this there was a ready-made rhetoric of
unnaturalness and monstrosity on which colourful, emotive 19th-century writers
such as Carlyle loved to draw. As Conor Cruise O’Brien observed, the spectre
haunting Europe in the first sentence of The
Communist Manifesto ‘walks for the first time in the pages of
Burke’. Burke’s early opponents, English radicals such as Tom Paine and Mary
Shelley’s parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, tried to neutralise
the damage his imagery did to the popular side, by giving the monstrous child
an even more monstrous parent. If the Revolution was going bad, it was because
of the sins of the fathers. Aristocracy became a cruel and negligent parent
which reared a race of deformed children.
There have been many modern critical explanations,
especially in the last decade, of the power and ‘meaning’ of Frankenstein.
But most interpreters take the plot to be Mary Shelley’s own property, and
guess at the experiences which may lie behind it. She wrote about a birth
because she was a woman; about a hideous birth, followed by parental
abdication, either because she was Godwin’s daughter, or Shelley’s wife, or the
mother of dead babies. The long sweep of Baldick’s perspective makes all this
biographical guesswork look distinctly short-sighted. In its details, his
location of the plot’s governing metaphor in the revolution decade is not
original to him, as he acknowledges. But no one else has matched the
pre-history of Frankenstein
so well with the post-history, or indeed attempted a sustained account of what
could be called the book’s external relations.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v10/n09/marilyn-butler/versatile-monster
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