“Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature” by Yale professor Susan E. Lederer, might not be in any child’s bag of goodies this Halloween, but aficionados of the legendary monster will likely find the book a timely treat.
The richly illustrated volume, recently published by Rutgers University Press, is a complement to a traveling Frankenstein exhibition curated by Lederer, who teaches in Yale’s history and history of medicine departments. The exhibition will be touring libraries across the country through March 2006.
The mixed-media display of “Frankensteinalia” traces the various guises of the man-made monster, from his origin as the beleaguered protagonist of Mary Shelley’s novel, to his present-day role as the apotheosis of the ethical limitations of science.
As Lederer explains in the book, the popular American perception of Frankenstein as the personification of science run amok was virtually created by Hollywood.
“Today many people know the Frankenstein monster from film and television rather than the novel, yet there are striking differences between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the twentieth-century myth of scientific ambition and destruction,” Lederer writes.
In images ranging from book illustrations to scientific inventions, like the “Voltaic Pile” and the “crown of cups” battery, Lederer’s catalog captures the spirit of the times surrounding publication in 1818 of Shelley’s novel, “Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus.”
Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, the creator, can be understood in the context of burgeoning medical discoveries and intense scientific experimentation. His creation of a new man was commensurate with experiments in raising the dead with galvanic batteries and other primitive sources of electric current that were especially popular in late 18th- and early 19th-century England. As images of human deformities and severed limbs attest, Shelley’s contemporaries were also captivated by the macabre.
“Mary Shelley’s terrifying vision of a pale student assembling a man out of body parts collected from the graveyard and dissecting rooms vividly parallels the public demonstrations by physicians in which decapitated human bodies, frog legs, and ox heads moved in response to electrical stimuli,” writes Lederer.
The second part of the catalog examines the evolution of the Frankenstein monster from Shelley’s sympathetic victim of his creator’s inhumanity to Hollywood’s implicit admonishment to the public not to transgress “natural and divine laws.”
The merchandising of “the celluloid monster” provides a treasury of images: movie stills, Hollywood posters, bubble gum cards, masks and plastic toys, among them.
Author of “Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War,” Lederer is an expert on bio- and medical ethics. She devotes the third part of the exhibition and catalog to examining how the myth and metaphor of Frankenstein serve to articulate the human dilemma of modern science. In this chapter, Lederer offers historical perspective on public reaction to scientific research from Shelley’s day, when the smallpox vaccination revolutionized immunology, to contemporary scientific developments such as cloning and genetically altering animal organs to serve as human transplants.
“How do we resolve the conflict between the desire to advance scientific knowledge and the fears that such progress will create undesired consequences (a monster, Mary Shelley might say)?” Lederer asks.
She cautions that in a democratic society, citizens must make an attempt to stay informed and to engage in political discourse about the ethics and human consequences of scientific advances. “Unlike Mary Shelley’s day, where access to medical and scientific knowledge was limited to the wealthy and educated elite, today we have unparalleled access to such information….” Arming ourselves with information and the tools of evaluation, Lederer suggests, is the best hope of keeping Frankenstein at bay.
