Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Populating Emptiness
Much of the natural scenery in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is articulated as being authoritative, rugged, vast, solemn and isolated — or put more simply, sublime: terrifyingly beautiful and transcendental. Indeed, as Adam Roberts summarizes: “the extremities of experience in the novel, the extreme violence, the extreme fear, are Gothic attempts at sublimity, at articulating a state of being other than the ordinary. The polar landscapes of the novel’s conclusion are the apotheosis of this” (49).
Sure — I am interested in how the imagery of Shelley’s landscapes reflect and interrogate the gothic and romantic sensibilities of her times, but I would like to give a different kind of attention to one particular quality of Shelley’s illustrated landscapes: that of emptiness. I would like to at least initiate a conversation about how we imagine and then fill or compensate for that emptiness (if it all). How, indeed, does barrenness tie into certain narratives about creation and become a kind of prerequisite for the conception of life? What does the demand for this condition reveal to us about different modes of creation and intellectual inquiry?
Throughout the novel, Victor Frankenstein traverses or inhabits several unforgiving landscapes, all of which incite within him some terror and awe — sometimes elevating him to pleasure as well — push his physical body to its limits (death) and frame his pursuit to a godly secret (the “principle of life”). Besides the Creature that haunts him, he is often alone in these vast and empty landscapes. I might even argue that his laboratory is a rather vacant, insular space once his overwhelming, singular “genius” discovers the secrets of life, which had previously escaped the knowledge of so many others.
As a scientist examining the minutiae of the rich world around him, Victor is faithful to a rigorous and rational intellectual methodology and applies himself to the study of various hierarchies of causation, which govern the phenomena of the natural world. Yet, as a creator, we can see a lack of foresight and reflection on the ethics of his inquiries and the consequences of his “making”. To him, the world is secretive, it somehow purposefully withholds knowledge (that he feels entitled to) from him, and he must ruthlessly and diligently pursue its clues in order to unlock it. To unlock it, is to defeat its capriciousness, discipline it and bend it to his singular will — he alone will have its secrets, and he alone will govern it. The world he opens up is vacant, and by his duty and generosity he repopulates it and stands as god and father 2.0:
“A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs’” (Shelley, 37).
What we can see here is Victor’s conflation of creator and created. He is both father and child — for he sees this new species as a distillation of the virtues of himself and of his intellectual pursuit — these creatures are his evidence. We also see no consideration of how his new species would interact with the rest of the living world. Is he not, in some ways, simply reproducing himself in this vacant landscape?
Back at the beginning of the novel, Victor remarks:
“I was more calm and philosophical than my companion; yet my temper was not so yielding. My application was of longer endurance; but it was not so severe whilst it endured. I delighted in investigating the facts relative to the actual world; she busied herself in following the aerial creations of the poets. The world was to me a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own” (Shelley, 19).
This excerpt is from a longer passage in which Victor summarizes his and Elizabeth’s upbringing and education, and brags about his intellectual disposition at the expense of undermining Elizabeth’s. He draws parallels between her agreeable (and fragile) femininity and her affinity for the poetic and the imaginative, while stressing his passion for the “actual world”:
“Her person was the image of her mind…Her figure was light and airy; and although capable of enduring great fatigue, she appeared the most fragile creature in the world…I loved to tend on her, as I should on a favorite animal…” (18).
Victor is proud of his grounded (as opposed to aerial), rational approach to the world, he does not want to us to mistake him for someone who conjures a world out of their imagination, for he knows (of course) that the world is already there, and all he has to do is find its secrets. Yet, as I suggested earlier, what happens when he unlocks these secrets? Does the world not empty out? Might I suggest that he is performing a kind of conjuring of his own? Is not his passion for science based on a longing for the grand aspirations of dark magicians (Agrippa) and alchemists? Indeed, he confesses:
“…I had contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very different, when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth” (Shelley, 29)
