The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (4 page)

3: The New Prometheus

T
HE FIRST WRITER AFTER WALPOLE
concerned to find a point of balance between mystery and plausibility was Mary Shelley. She was able to solve the problem that Walpole had not solved, nor any other writer of the Eighteenth Century. In her story
Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus
(1818), begun when she was not yet nineteen years old, Mary Shelley presented an argument that rendered transcendent power plausible in contemporary Western terms.

The argument that Mary Shelley discovered was an argument for the potential transcendence of creative science. Walpole could not have thought of it—but more than fifty years had passed since
The Castle of Otranto.
The times had changed. The quality of life had changed. In this altered atmosphere, new arguments were possible.

It takes time for new beliefs to be accepted, and even more time for changes in belief to be translated into changes in life. The roots of modern Western scientific thought can be traced at least as far back as the Thirteenth Century, when the English Franciscan friar-philosopher Roger Bacon taught the tools of mathematics and deductive scientific reasoning, and for this and other reasons, such as denying the truth of unexamined authority, was perceived as dangerous by the superiors of his order and placed in confinement. It took no less than four hundred years after this, as we have seen, until the late Seventeenth Century, for the philosophy of scientific rationalism to wrest the leadership of society from the traditional spiritual philosophy.

Even then, the argument between materialism and spiritualism was not settled. Through the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, the representatives of spirit were a great conservative force in society. Spirit had vast inherited material wealth and position. It had prominent spokesmen. It had great capacity for resistance to the pace and direction of scientific progress. Even as late as 1860, it was possible for a bishop and a biologist to debate in public the propriety of the scientific theory of evolution. It was only in the 1920s—the era of Gernsback and the founding of
Amazing Stories
—that scientific materialism finally broke the last grip of traditional thought on the reins of Western society.

For the first hundred years of the modern period, well into the Eighteenth Century, it was possible for most people in the West to live as though nothing had changed, as though the old traditional beliefs were still the rule of society. The scientific doubt of Descartes and the scientific theory of Newton might convince a reasonable man, but for all that, life was still much the same. There was a great deal of radical thought, but very little radical action. Kings and nobles were still kings and nobles, priests were still priests, merchants still merchants, peasants still peasants. Whatever ideas for new parts and for independent action might be in their heads, the actors in the social drama still fit their traditional roles.

The perfect example is Horace Walpole. Just as
The Castle of Otranto
combined the ancient and the modern with no apparent sense of the fundamental contradiction in terms that defeated all imitators, so was Walpole’s personal life also a contradiction in terms. In politics, as a member of Parliament, Walpole was a liberal—a modern man. In private lifestyle, Walpole was a conservative. He was a member of the British ruling class, in the last years of his life inheriting the noble title Earl of Orford. He had traditional tastes. He lived a traditional life of high privilege. Life and thought were two different matters to him.

At the end of the Eighteenth Century, when Walpole was an old man, the social stasis was shattered. The American Revolution of 1776 and, even more, the French Revolution of 1789 were profound social events. The American Revolution was an assertion of political independence of thought. The French Revolution was a radical overturning of traditional society in the very heartland of the Western world. People at last had begun to act in accordance with their private thoughts. During the 1790s, the structure of traditional society began to break down.

At this very same time, the new Western material science finally overcame its inertia and moved beyond the stages of criticism and theory, beginning to demonstrate its practical power to transform the world. In the latter part of the Eighteenth Century, the Industrial Revolution began. The steam engine was perfected. The power loom was invented, and the modern factory system emerged. Canals were dug to facilitate commerce. Balloons were flown, demonstrating scientific mastery of the skies. With the Nineteenth Century, the pace of change began to accelerate. In the fifteen years that followed Horace Walpole’s death in 1797, the gaslight, the steamboat and the locomotive were all invented.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born in the year that Horace Walpole died. The world that she grew up in was very different from his. It was a world with reason to believe in change, a world that was beginning to associate change with the creative powers of science.

At the turn of the Nineteenth Century, the balance between the old views and the new was still precarious. There was profound ambivalence about the new modern world that was being ushered into being. Great enthusiasm alternated with great fear and reluctance, sometimes within the same person. Often within the same person. The new moderns of the Nineteenth Century dared to do what had not been done before, and were frightened at their own audacity.

Mary Shelley was an archetypical young modern of the early Nineteenth Century—a second-generation modern. Her parents had been among the first during the 1790s to advocate new ways contrary to tradition and attempt to live them. Mary’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of
A Vindication of the Rights of Women,
had lived with a married man and borne a child out of wedlock. Mary’s father, William Godwin, to whom
Frankenstein
is dedicated, was a minister turned freethinker, the author of
Political Justice,
a radical critique of society, and the pioneer social novel,
Caleb Williams.

When the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was dismissed from Oxford in 1811 for authoring a pamphlet entitled “The Necessity of Atheism,” it was only natural that he would seek out the acquaintance of the foremost freethinker of the day, William Godwin. In 1814, he met young Mary Godwin in her father’s home, and with the aid and company of Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, eloped with her. Mary was sixteen, Shelley five years older. Shelley was already married and a father, with another child on the way, but no matter. In terms of traditional society, Percy Shelley’s and Mary Godwin’s conduct might be scandalous, but they were only acting out of principle. The willful new ideas of the times were in their heads and they could not bear not to live as they believed.

In the summer of 1816, when she began
Frankenstein,
Mary and Shelley were living with Claire near Geneva, Switzerland. Much had happened to Mary in two years. She had borne Shelley two children, one of whom had died when only two months old. She and Shelley would not be married until the end of December, three weeks after the discovery of the suicide of Shelley’s wife, Harriet, who drowned herself in the Serpentine.

Their party in Geneva was joined by George Gordon Byron, with whom Claire had begun an affair, and by whom she would have a daughter in 1817. In an age when poets were pop stars, Byron was a poet and rebellious spirit even more notorious than Shelley, singing sympathy to the devil. He was rumored to have an incestuous relationship with his half-sister. Crippled and handsome, the bearer of a noble title, a rakehell and a revolutionary, Byron was the living embodiment of the contradictions of the time. He and Shelley hit it off well together, each influencing the other.

It was a rainy May and they were forced to spend time indoors. For amusement, they turned to reading supernatural horror stories, stories that from Mary Shelley’s description sound closely related to
The Castle of Otranto:

Some volumes of ghost stories, translated from the German into French, fell into our hands. There was the History of the Inconstant Lover who, when he thought to clasp the bride to whom he had pledged his vows, found himself in the arms of the pale ghost of her whom he had deserted. There was the tale of the sinful founder of his race, whose miserable doom it was to bestow the kiss of death on all the younger sons of his fated house, just when they reached the age of promise. . . . I have not seen these stories since then; but their incidents are as fresh in my mind as if I had read them yesterday.
¹⁶

It was Lord Byron who proposed to the party that each of them should write a ghost story. Byron and Shelley both set to the job confidently, though neither of them did more than turn out fragments. Byron’s physician, Dr. John Polidori, also set out to write a story, and in fact did complete one. It was entitled
The Vampyre
and was published in 1819 with a preface and afterword by Byron.

Mary included herself in the competition. Shelley had been pressuring Mary to follow the example of her parents and write, and she had spent her childhood in composing fanciful stories for her own amusement. She volunteered that she, too, would write a story. At first, however, she could not think of one. As she remembered in 1831:

I busied myself
to think of a story
—a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name. I thought and pondered—vainly. . . .
Have you thought of a story
? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.
¹⁷

What was the problem? If the problem was merely
to think of a story
and no more, then Mary Shelley might have whipped together some trifle about ghosts and kisses of death, and then either finished it like Dr. Polidori or set it aside like the others. The problem was to write a story that could be believed in. That was what baffled Byron and Shelley and what stymied Mary. How could these people, with their histories and their beliefs, write of inconstant lovers wrapped in the arms of the ghosts of the women they had deserted? That might be well enough for Polidori—“poor Polidori”
¹⁸
as Mary calls him, shaking her head over his story—but it would not do for a young modern.

Mary only found the key to her story at last as a result of listening to a conversation between Byron and Shelley:

Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of these, various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated. They talked of the experiments of Dr. Darwin, (I speak not of what the Doctor really did, or said that he did, but, as more to my purpose, of what was then spoken of as having been done by him,) who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.
¹⁹

What a typically blasphemous conversation! Here these young mods of the early Nineteenth Century were, titillating each other by separating the power of life from God and speculating about spaghetti coming to life like a pair of giggling eight-year-olds. The Darwin they mentioned was Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles, who in the years around 1790 wrote poems about science and evolution. The scientific experiments they discussed were the experiments of Luigi Galvani, who had made the muscles in the legs of dead frogs move through the application of electricity, the newest discovery of science.

After this conversation, Mary went to bed, but lay awake in a twilight state, her mind racing with visions:

When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine; show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade; that this thing, which had received such imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter; and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench for ever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.
²⁰

Once again, at a crucial point in the development of SF, we have vital conception taking place within a nonordinary mental state. Mary’s creative imagination had accomplished what all her vain “thought and pondering” could not:

Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. “I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.” On the morrow I announced that I had
thought of a story.
I began that day with the words,
It was on a dreary night of November,
making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream.
²¹