Frankenstein at 202: A review of “Frankenstein and Its Environments, Then and Now”
Hogle, Jerrold E., ed., “Frankenstein and Its Environments, Then and Now.” Huntington Library Quarterly 83, no. 4 (Winter 2020). A special issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly, online now. You can also watch a video interview by our current Communications Fellows with Professor Jerrold Hogle and Professor Anne K. Mellor, discussing the collection and the 2018 conference it stemmed from. Today on the Blog we’re delighted to share this new review of the edition by former Communications Fellow Carly Yingst.
“Frankenstein and Its Environments, Then and Now” brings together revised and expanded essays originally presented at a 2018 conference on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein held at Huntington Library—part of that year’s international celebration of the novel’s 1818 publication. With roots in Frankenstein’s bicentennial, this collection sets out to reexamine the origins and afterlives of Shelley’s first novel. In doing so, it looks both backward and forward: backward to the contexts of Frankenstein’s composition and the many critical traditions that have flourished around it; and forward to countless ongoing issues to which this novel still speaks, from bioethics to climate change to the legacies of the institution of slavery. As the collection’s editor, Jerrold E. Hogle, writes of that ongoing significance, “[a]lmost no text this old speaks to so many of the concerns of right now as much as [Frankenstein] does” (644).
While Frankenstein’s particular claim to ongoing resonance was, perhaps, briefly surpassed in 2020 by Shelley’s The Last Man, with its tale of pandemic taken up as prescient in venues from the New York Times to the Washington Post, several public projects over the last two years have returned Shelley’s first novel to its central place in both the popular imagination and accounts of its author’s life and writing. Whether we consider the lately opened Mary Shelley museum in Bath, with its almost exclusive focus on Frankenstein and its afterlives, or the recently announced biopic, Mary’s Monster—the second film in around five years to intertwine Frankenstein’s genesis with Shelley’s life—interest in this story’s origins and legacies continues apace as we enter the third century since Shelley endued her creation with life.
The critical essays that comprise “Frankenstein and Its Environments,” then, not only join these most recent remediations and reimaginings, but also offer valuable, generative new frames for understanding why and how this novel continues to provoke such revisitations of its story and its author’s life. These investigations begin in the collection’s first essay. Here, Susan J. Wolfson reviews myriad familiar elements of Frankenstein’s formation—Shelley’s loss of her mother and children, the ghost story contest at the Villa Diodati, the dream recounted in the 1831 preface—alongside discussions of, among other things, Frankenstein’s publication history, the novel’s own plots of origin, and the mysterious origins of the “wild boy,” Victor de l’Aveyron. In linking some of the most recited tales of the novel’s conception with contexts less familiar, this rich meditation presents a compelling account of the ongoing preoccupation, both in and around Frankenstein, with the question of origins itself.
A similar interest in revisiting and reframing Frankenstein’s oft-rehearsed origin story recurs throughout the essays that follow. Gillen D’Arcy Wood’s vital ecocritical approach, for instance, narrows in on one aspect of the Diodati gathering: the weather in 1816. In doing so, D’Arcy Wood readjusts accounts of the impact, on Shelley’s imagination, of that infamously cold and damp summer. More than a gloomy, atmospheric backdrop for ghost stories, the weather here becomes a context for understanding Frankenstein’s relation to climate change—a context that ultimately asks us to consider that summer in terms not only of Shelley’s experience with unseasonable weather, but also of her encounters with the famine and broader humanitarian crisis that weather incited. Part of Maisha Wester’s remarkable essay, meanwhile, emphasizes another of aspect of the 1816 story: Shelley’s early acquaintance with Matthew Lewis, who both visited the Villa weeks after the story contest and met with Percy Shelley several times that summer (734-5). Recently returned from his inherited Jamaican plantations, Wester suggests, Lewis would likely have introduced discussions of slavery and revolt—discussions at the center of Wester’s broader consideration of contemporaneous debates about the responsibilities of “masters” to the enslaved. Considering Shelley’s novel in relation to these debates, Wester brings attention to several under-considered aspects the novel’s thinking on race and slavery: its treatment of insurrection and its interrogation of Britain’s responsibility for the consequences of the slave trade, consequences ongoing in the wake of abolition.
Along with these considerations of climate change and the legacy of slavery, around half of the collection’s essays turn to another set of pressing questions: questions about the ethics and politics of science. While such questions have, for some time, been key touchpoints for contemporary invocations of the Frankenstein myth, essays by Alan Richardson and Alan Bewell, for just two examples, offer new, fascinating arguments by returning to the scientific contexts of the novel through the eyes of more recent intellectual formations. Richardson, for instance, brings together brain science and newer work in animal studies to consider anxieties about human-animal hybridity as it bears on Frankenstein’s relation to Romantic conceptions of the brain. Bewell, meanwhile, reads twentieth-century conceptions of biotechnology backward in order to reexamine the creature in light of both nineteenth-century practices of animal breeding and the global traffic in bodies, both human and animal.
While each essay reveals numerous notable insights, it is from this overarching emphasis on origins or reading backward that this reviewer’s few reservations about the collection overall simultaneously arose. For, even as many of the essays draw on recent ideas, the collection as a whole ultimately seems to lean more toward the “then” of its title than the “now.” Indeed, only two main entries (Henry T. Greely’s essay on modern bioscience and Anne K. Mellor’s interview with playwright Nick Dear) take more recent afterlives of Frankenstein as their express central focus. Given that relative emphasis on the “then,” then, I also at points wondered about the collection’s critical tilt toward new historicism. What else, I found myself asking, might have been seen anew by foregrounding other critical environments—digital humanities, new formalism, or more recent queer theory, to name a few—at work “now”?
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Other recent critical and popular approaches aside, though, neither the emphasis on origins nor this critical commitment are necessarily limitations in themselves. Indeed, each essay’s illuminating contributions clearly demonstrate that much remains to be seen by attending to Shelley’s first novel in relation to the science, politics, philosophy, and literature of its time, especially in light of recent intellectual currents. Both in its individual arguments and as a whole, then, this excellent collection gives students and scholars of Frankenstein much to consider, take up, and engage with, with Hogle’s annotated bibliography of recent criticism likely to prove an invaluable resource, as well. Thus, alongside other recent projects and publications, “Frankenstein and Its Environments” marks an auspicious start to what I anticipate being a vibrant new century for both scholarship and reflection on Frankenstein—which, as ever, goes forth to prosper.
Carly Yingst (Harvard)
