University of Chicago Press The Science of Life and Death in Frankenstein. By Sharon Ruston. Oxford, U.K.: Bodleian Library, 2021, 152 pp.
Reviewed by A. David Wunsch
The film Oppenheimer was a hit in 2023 and swept up seven Academy Awards (Oscars) in 2024 and earned 950 million dollars. Nearly overlooked in the celebrations was the Pulitzer Prize-winning book on which the film is based: American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin, a 721-page work that took the authors over two decades to write. Study the title—the word “Prometheus” might resonate for a moment. You might think of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, the first ever English language science fiction novel, published in 1818, or a four act play, Prometheus Unbound, by her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, which appeared in 1820.
You might think of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, the first ever English language science fiction novel.
If your interests turn to philosophy, you might know that in 1775, Immanuel Kant produced an essay “The Modern Prometheus,” cautioning the world against producing people like Benjamin Franklin, whom he names as a new Prometheus, and who says Kant, “wanted to disarm the thunder” while doubtless thinking of Franklin’s experiments of 1752 employing a kite, that showed lightning to be the same form of electricity as that produced by friction in the laboratory, Kant had perhaps learned of the sad fate of the physicist Georg Richman, who was electrocuted in Russia while trying to repeat Franklin’s kite experiment in 1753. The case was widely publicized. We might fault Kant for being oblivious to the enormous saving of life and property implemented by Franklin’s 1752 invention, the lightning rod. In fact, historians have sometimes said that Franklin was the first electrical engineer. Although that term did not exist in his lifetime, he was more well-known for his electrical experiments than his statesmanship.
Obviously, Prometheus serves as a major trope. Who was he? He was, according to legend, a Greek God but of an era that originated before Zeus and overlapped with the Olympians such as Zeus. Such gods were immortal and known as Titans. Prometheus defied the Olympians: he took fire from them and gave it to mankind. Zeus and his followers were angry and condemned him to a life of permanent torture. He was tied to a rock and each day an eagle (symbolic of Zeus) ate away at his liver. Overnight, the liver grew back but the next day the eagle was back in business.
Prometheus defied the Olympians: he took fire from them and gave it to mankind.
Let us briefly review the plot of Mary Shelley’s novel, where it is obviously no coincidence that the title is derived from Benjamin Franklin’s name. Because of 1930 sera movie posters —think of Boris Karloff — much of the public when seeing the word Frankenstein sees a huge ugly creature whom they believe carries that name. In fact, the name belongs to the creature’s creator, Victor Frankenstein. In the novel, the dreadful-looking creation is often simply called The Creature.
Victor is a Swiss science student living in Germany who is determined to build a living creature. The book is vague on the exact details of his enterprise-but Frankenstein tells us, “I collected the instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing.” Observe the word spark—it serves as a window into Sharon Ruston’s fascinating book about Frankenstein: a study of the technology, science, and medicine that had evolved in Europe and America in the generation leading up to Mary Shelley’s great opus and how that work was affected. Ruston’s book, in short, is about ideas that were “in the air” among educated people although to be sure the words scientist and technology were not in general use during the era described. She successfully convinces us that a knowledge of the science and technology known to literati in the U.K. in the early 19th century is required to fully appreciate Shelley’s novel.
Frankenstein tells us, “I collected the instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing.”
And much in the air was the work of Luigi Galvani (1737-1798), an Italian who observed in his laboratory in Bologna in 1780 that when a static electricity machine, which produced electric sparks using friction, was placed near a dead frog that had been stuck with a scalpel, the frog’s muscles caused its leg to move convulsively. Thus, the frog could be made to briefly convulse as if alive using electricity. Alessandro Volta (1745-1827), a friend of Galvani, invented a way of producing electricity in 1794 that was superior to the not-always-reliable static electricity machine: the electric battery. This became known as the Voltaic pile and consisted of two different metals—typically copper and zinc—separated by an electrolytic fluid. This opened the way to electrical experimentation throughout the West. Batteries were nearly the sole source of electricity for electrical experimentation until the advent of the electric power generator in the 1870s. We know that the British literary establishment was aware of the work of Galvani and Volta, for example, Lord Byron’s famous poem Don Juan has the line “And galvanism has set some corpses grinning” for indeed it was known that when a battery was connected to a dead person, he might move or otherwise respond. Rushton explains that Percy Shelley, Mary’s future husband, had air pumps and various electrical machines in his rooms at Oxford, as a student where he matriculated in 1810. Byron had been a great friend of Mary and Percy.
While Prometheus learns about fire and disseminates it to mankind, Shelley’s novel is more than about electricity and its consequences for Frankenstein and his creation. Frankenstein tells us that as a youth, he learned about and became fascinated with an air pump, his Creature’s method of killing is strangulation. Ruston explains that this derives from a growing body of knowledge pointing to air and finally oxygen as essential to human life. Joseph Priestly, experimenting with an air pump discovered oxygen in 1764 as did Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier in the same era and this helped start a growing body of research pointing to its necessity for human life as well as the role it plays in photosynthesis. The world of arts and letters was taken with this discovery.
Lord Byron’s famous poem Don Juan has the line “And galvanism has set some corpses grinning” for indeed it was known that when a battery was connected to a dead person, he might move or otherwise respond.
Frankenstein employs chemistry, electricity, and alchemy; he collects human and animal parts, and using the state of scientific knowledge prevalent in his day, he succeeds in creating an incredibly ugly creature 8 feet in height. He is determined not to reveal exactly what he had done for fear that others might produce other such monsters. As Ruston points out, Shelley had seen Frankenstein as a chemist. Words such as scientist and engineer were not yet in use. What is key is that scientific and popular thinking of the era had led to the belief that there was a porous boundary between the living and the dead and that this boundary could be traversed in either direction. A Royal Humane Society came into existence in the late 18th century, advocating techniques for restoring to life those who had drowned or suffocated and had experienced an “incomplete” death.
Note—this is key—Frankenstein is so horrified by the appearance of the eight-foot Creature that he abandons him but the monster, always terribly lonely, learns to speak and read and embarks on a life of murder, which includes his killing an entire family, Frankenstein’s father and brother and finally Frankenstein himself. At the end of the novel, the Creature roams free and will surely kill others. What makes Oppenheimer a modern Prometheus is that like Frankenstein, he loses control of his creation, the atomic bomb, and this knowledge came to torment him; a heavy smoker, he died of lung cancer at only 62.
What makes Oppenheimer a modern Prometheus is that like Frankenstein, he loses control of his creation, the atomic bomb.
In the background of Mary Shelley’s life was a very public debate between two prominent doctors beginning in 1815: John Abernethy and William Lawrence, both faculty at the Royal College of Surgeons. Lawrence not incidentally was Shelley’s doctor. There was a clash in their philosophies that emerged in public lectures. Abernethy’s belief about life is more harmonious with Judeo-Christian faith: there is an essence that renders organic matter different from the inorganic and that human life is fundamentally different from other life. Lawrence maintained that life is simply a matter that has grown sophisticated enough to reproduce itself and to become aware of its surroundings. Lawrence paid for this by losing his job. Ruston implies that Shelley’s Frankenstein subscribes to Abernethy’s belief although no convincing argument is presented. But this is a minor flaw in an overwhelmingly interesting book.
Reviewer Information
A. David Wunsch is a professor emeritus with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA 01854 USA. Email: David_Wunsch@uml.edu.
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