On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (27 page)

The scientific pursuit of the creation of life is older than alchemy, but in Shelley’s era two relatively fresh pathways had been opened for that pursuit. First was the trend of materialism that I’ve been tracing from Galileo through La Mettrie and beyond, a theoretical position that certainly had its detractors but nonetheless enjoyed more respectability than in previous eras. Second was a wave of new empirical investigations into vitalism, begun by Luigi Galvani (1737–1798), Alessandro Volta (1745–1827), John Hunter (1728–1793), William Lawrence (1783–1867), and others. Shelley was familiar with a growing body of experimental science that demonstrated the underlying electrical and chemical sparks, the animating principles, of organic life. She was aware, for example, of Galvani’s bioelectricity experiments, in which he directed an electrical current through a dead frog’s body and produced jumping and twitching motions. In the introduction to a late edition of
Frankenstein
(1831) Shelley reveals that a conversation between her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron influenced her creation of the monster story. That influential conversation was about Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s vitalistic experiments to bring inanimate matter to life. According to Mary Shelley’s account, Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin’s grandfather) had vivified a piece of vermicelli noodle by using galvanism and other mysterious scientific catalysts. Actually, Darwin did no such thing, and the whole business appears to be a confusion, but it reveals the supposed credibility of the idea of mechanical, nonmiraculous life.
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Still, this credibility was more common in the vanguard circles in which Shelley moved than among the more conservative elements of Georgian society. The idea that science could penetrate the mystery of life itself and then manipulate it for its own end transformed from exciting to frightening almost immediately. Whatever her original attitude toward scientific materialism, her book became the principal cautionary tale warning us that science can go too far. The age-old fear of forbidden knowledge was laid over her novel, and her moral indictments of Victor Frankenstein’s irresponsible parenting became mixed with growing Romantic criticisms of scientism. Man should not play God.

It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.
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Mary Shelley apparently added the moralizing antimaterialist tone to
Frankenstein
in later editions; her friend Professor William Lawrence had been suspended from the Royal College of Surgeons because of his radical materialism and controversial book,
Lectures on Physiology, Zoology and the Natural History of Man
, and fearing that her own book might be withdrawn Shelley tempered her original 1818 edition.
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Dr. Frankenstein’s already Faustian qualities could now be enlisted in a more generic indictment of Baconian science.
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The intellectual hubris of Victor Frankenstein was a result, in part, of his poor education, which was heavy on intellectual scientific analysis but lacking in the humanities. His own natural analytic tendencies could have been cultivated in a healthier direction if only he had balanced them with more literature, poetry, music, and moral study.
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These faults make the doctor slightly robotic and soulless, like his son the monster. To that extent, parent (Victor) and child (monster) stand as literary embodiments of the Romantic warning from Johan Georg Hamann that “the tree of knowledge has robbed us of the tree of life.”
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The Frankenstein monster embodies many of the themes I have already discussed (hybridity, liminality, outcast status, etc.), but also crystallizes another recurring monster theme; in fact, the title of the book has actually become a shorthand way of describing any human creation that has unintended consequences, from atom bombs to cloned sheep.
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The monster is that unpredictable, uncontrollable force that cannot be reasoned with or persuaded. It’s an incarnation of Nature itself, upsetting our optimistic project to tame and use her.

What’s wrong with materialism and too much science? The answer, in part, is reductionism. The monsters of this literature are creatures that have been
reduced
to their parts alone. They are dehumanized humanoids, brutes that sometimes walk and talk like us but ultimately lack the mysterious heart and soul ingredients to make them human. Their creators demonstrate their own cleverness and Promethean pride, but though human knowledge might be able to compose life itself, it cannot, it seems, compose it well. Something essential is always missing.

While the Romantics were exploring the monstrous dimensions of materialism, many scientists, astounded by their own successes in medicine and physiology, were staying the course of the mechanical philosophy. At the same time the Romantics were depicting imaginary monsters and scolding science, methodical researchers such as John Hunter and Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire were exploring the real monsters of embryology.

The result of scientific reanimation. Boris Karloff, the most famous twentieth-century visual representation of Frankenstein’s creature, in James Whale’s 1931
Frankenstein
(Universal Studios). Photo courtesy of Jerry Ohlinger.

Surgeon, natural historian, and monsterologist, John Hunter cast a long shadow over British science. In some ways Shelley’s character Dr. Frankenstein could have been modeled on him.
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Hunter’s work on organic transplantation (e.g., growing human teeth on top of a rooster’s head and grafting cock testicles inside hen abdomens) laid the conceptual groundwork for stitched-together Frankenstein-type monsters.
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The fact that John and his brother, William, went to body-snatching extremes to procure corpses for dissection also seems quite inspirational for a good monster story. But my interest in Hunter is best confined to his embryo-logical monster theories.

Hunter collected many specimens of monster fetuses, which he preserved in glass bottles of distilled alcohol. He did not confine himself to human specimens but went far and wide into the animal kingdom to find similarly distorted bodies. In the same way that his physiological cabinets were designed to show the more universal animal functions of digestion, circulation, and respiration, his cabinets of monsters and malformations sought to display the underlying laws of abnormal growth. To that end, he grouped many different species of monster specimens together and looked for patterns or tendencies that would reveal the logic of monsters.
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By arresting and dissecting developing animals, in particular chicks, Hunter came to formulate some important ideas about metamorphosis. When one examines the structures of a developing chick, for example, one finds transitional stages that seem to correspond with the adult anatomical structures of other species: first the chick is worm-like, then it appears to have a tail, later it loses the tail, and so on. Hunter observed, “If we were capable of following the progressive increase in the number of the parts of the most perfect [developed] animal, as they were formed in succession, from the very first state to that of full perfection, we should probably be able to compare it with some one of the incomplete animals themselves, or every order in the Creation.” He goes on to say, “If we were to take a series of animals from the more imperfect to the perfect, we should probably find an imperfect animal corresponding with some stage of the most perfect.”
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Following Ambroise Paré, Hunter understood that monsters had their own rules of logic. They were not chaotic departures from the norm; they swerved from normality in predictable and repeated ways. Long before genetics, Hunter’s metamorphosis idea sought to acknowledge that some kind of internal code was being impressed on the developing embryo.
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Embryos were not preformed, but they certainly had some constraining code in the germ. Monsters might be caused when there is a corruption or breakdown in this code. Like a baked cake that collapses because the recipe is flawed, monsters diverge because the code is flawed. Hunter seemed to prefer this idea to the competing theory: that the code is fine, but the ingredients and the cooking go badly; that is, changes in the uterine environment derail normal growth. Trying to articulate his view, he writes, “I should imagine that Monsters were formed Monsters from their very first formation, for this reason, that all supernumerary parts are joined to their similar parts, as a head to a head; etc., etc.”
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Indeed, Hunter possessed a monster in his collection, called the Bengali Boy, that looked in every way like an ordinary boy except that he had another head growing upside down on the top of his functioning head.

Hunter was suggesting that a multilegged or -armed or -headed monster will have its monstrosity develop at the same time that the healthy legs or arms or head are forming in utero; in other words, an extra leg won’t get added at the last minute of gestation or well before the usual leg-building time. All this led him to think that the cause of a congenital malformation exists in the original germ of the animal.

For Hunter, the corruption of the germ code can be species-specific, as when a bird develops “scissors beak,” but it can also be generic and apply to many taxa. Hunter dissected many chick embryos and described the usual formation, from the internal heart outward to the lungs and then eventually to the skin of the abdomen that grows over the internal organs.
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Occasionally, however, the skin fails to form around the organs, and the result is a monstrous chicken that lacks abdominal parietes (walls). While this case clearly applies to the birds that he was directly observing, he also ventured a more general extrapolation. “There is reason to believe,” he writes, “it is the same in other animals; for in some Monsters in the Quadruped, we have no abdominal parietes. This state of deficiency in the parietes of the abdomen has all its degrees; some much more, others less.”
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In this way Hunter helped us to see that Nature composes diverse animal forms, but not as a specialist micromanager, fitting every species with unique equipment; instead, Nature utilizes a common bag of supplies (the common physiological systems) and tinkers with unique designs on top of those common structures and functions. In the end, Hunter organized his many monster specimens (which can still be seen at the Royal College of Surgeons) into four categories: monsters from preternatural situation of parts, monsters from addition of parts, monsters from deficiency of parts, and monsters that combine the addition and deficiency of parts, such as hermaphrodites.

Hunter provided incredible sophistication to the naturalistic approach to monsters, an approach that includes the teratologists Aristotle and Paré. None of Hunter’s predecessors nor his peers dissected, investigated, and preserved as many humans and animals. His work constitutes a bridge from the mere promise of monster science to the reality.

Across the Channel, the French anatomist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844) was further refining the logic of monsters; his son Isidore instituted the use of
teratology
to describe the new science. His explanation of cyclopic babies illustrates his overall approach to embryology and anatomy. Geoffroy worked in a scientific environment dominated by Georges
Cuvier and other naturalists who believed that animals were built perfectly to fit their environment, their particular “functions” or “conditions of existence.” Carnivores, for example, were perfectly adapted to find prey (they possessed keen perceptual equipment), to catch prey (powerful locomotive equipment), to eat prey (sharp teeth, claws, etc.), and to digest prey (short digestive tracts, etc.). In other words, studying the anatomy of animals led to finding the ingenious matches between features and functions. Against this reigning philosophy, Geoffroy began to argue that animals from very different conditions of existence still seemed to possess similar body plans. Humans, bats, moles, and whales had very different functions and environments, yet they still seemed to have the same blueprint for a bony pentadactyl forelimb. Geoffroy spent his career throwing these weird patterns, or archetypes, into the faces of function-minded anatomists like Cuvier, daring them to explain the similarities by appeal to good functional design. Using a materialist approach, he did not think of these archetypes
of anatomy as transcendental Platonic essences instantiated in different animal kinds. Instead, he argued that inductive observation of many body types revealed converging natural laws of growth. The regular patterns, or archetypes, occur because diverse animals (moles, humans, whales, etc.) are built according to the same sequential building processes.