Mary Shelley\'s Frankenstein: The Original

MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN:

THE ORIGINAL "MAD SCIENTIST" NARRATIVE

First published in 1818, Mary Shelley's classic novel Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus concerns a young man named Victor Frankenstein who is obsessed with bringing life to the dead through a series of strange experiments based on the teachings of some rather esoteric alchemists, such as Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus. As Victor relates in Chapter Two of the novel, he has long been "embued with a fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature" (Shelley, 30), an indication that Victor is willing to go to almost any length to bring the dead back to life. Thus, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is quite possibly the first novel of its kind to introduce a character like Victor with the attributes of a true "mad scientist" long before such characters were commonplace in English literature and certainly before the advent of the cinema.

First of all, Victor proclaims that "under the guidance of my new preceptors," being the above-mentioned alchemists who lived some three hundred years before Victor's birth, "I entered with the greatest diligence into the search (for) the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life" (Shelley, 31), these being what alchemists claimed would allow a person to create life and to shape and mold the very nature of the natural world. Victor's goal, at least at this point in the story, is to discover some method to "banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!" (Shelley, 32). Thus, as his original goal, this shows that Victor possesses the mind of a true "mad scientist," due to the fact that the "philosopher's stone" and the "elixir of life," although completely fictional and based on pseudo-science, are necessary ingredients for resuscitating a dead body into a living being, something which Victor eventually does succeed at via his creation, referred to in Shelley's novel as his "creature" or "monster."

In Chapter Five of Frankenstein, after some years of long study and dedication to the alchemical arts and sciences, Victor brings the body of a dead man back to life, a body which he stole from a grave and reassembled part by part. "I collected the instruments of life around me," he says, "that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet" (Shelley, 51). These "instruments of life" includes what is known as a galvanic battery which provided the "spark of life" for Victor's creation. Then, after using this device, Victor proclaims that "by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light" (i.e., a nearly burnt-out candle), "I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs" (Shelley, 52). From this description, it is clear that Victor has evolved from a simply curious student into an actual "mad scientist," due to his belief that electricity and perhaps a few alchemical concoctions will restore a dead man to life.

After completing the task of reviving this inanimate being into a living entity, Victor admits that he is haunted by what he has done and that his heart is filled with "breathless horror and disgust" (Shelley, 52). Obviously, Victor has now entered the realm of true madness, due to realizing that his experiment with the dead has placed him in a very dangerous position. While trying to sleep on the night of his success, Victor sees the "miserable monster" staring at him through a shuttered window -- "His jaw opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks," and then, Victor calls the monster a "demoniacal corpse to which I

had so miserably given life" (Shelley, 53). Certainly, only a man whose mind and abilities would allow him to create such a hideous "monster" must surely be truly mad, considering that Victor goes so far as to contrast the "monster" with something that "even Dante could not have conceived" (Shelley, 53), a reference to Dante the poet, best-known for "Paradise Lost" and the "Divine Comedy" in which the narrator descends into Hell to sup with the Devil himself.