"Look within" might be the motto of the great Romantic poets of bygone England, Keats and Shelley. Oh, and Byron, who was admittedly distracted by foreign wars. Metaphysics starts at home. If you can't find miracles in your own backyard, you needn't travel. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, human subjectivity and the Mother Nature that was its mirror were felt by sensitive types to be threatened by certain objective and unnatural forces. In this historical moment, a teenage girl wrote Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus , not as a love letter but as a series of screams issuing from a premonitory dream. Two hundred years later, Rutgers gives us Monstrous Progeny: A History of the Frankenstein Narratives.
Monstrous Progeny is a great title and led me to expect some delicious and methodical tracing of lines of descent from the great foundational origin story of the modern world. I naively hoped it would be as thrilling as the text it owed its existence to. I was mistaken, or deceived, and dismayed to discover that Monstrous Progeny is one of those idiot children who never quite get it together enough to even merit the honorific Monster , being merely 236 pages of random babbling about a myth that has held the world in thrall since it was published in 1818. Here's a sample of the execrable prose style, flabby reasoning and ludicrous conclusion:
"The novel's draw is its plot, but the substance has to be the questions it asks but doesn't answer, the ones we keep asking �" even as we dissect, deep-freeze, and microwave marshmallow bunnies. Does desiring and pursuing knowledge endanger our humanity? That question precedes the early 19th century by a few thousand years. The Renaissance was obsessed with the potential for knowledge to bring people closer to God and salvation while simultaneously fearing the traps set by demons to lure scholars into the pursuit of knowledge for personal gain and thus endanger their souls. Shelley incorporates this theme and develops a strong case for why scientific knowledge should be grounded in the academy, governed by peer oversight, and responsive to social rather than theological expectations."
Co-authors Lester D. Friedman and Allison B. Kavey are both firmly wedged into a bureaucratic structure called Academia, governed by peer oversight, and therefore can be forgiven for thinking Mary Shelley was writing an encomium to social expectations. Anyone else reading Frankenstein for the first time will be amazed by what a wild ride it is through three separate subjectivities: the Doctor's, the Monster's, and the Captain's. This has never been remotely captured by the Hollywood movies that have warped contemporary appreciation for the novel. Hollywood loves gangsters, so they made the Creature a dumb brute, whereas Mary understandably crafted him a Romantic sensibility. This glaring discrepancy isn't dealt with, but all the plots of all the Universal and Hammer films are gone over ad nauseam before lumping in further derivative mass garbage.
Seventy-year-old Friedman has been cranking out books on popular films for decades, but 30ish Kavey recently wrote an article called "Mercury Falling: Gender Malleability and Eroticism in Popular Alchemy." My hunch is, she was supposed to provide some scholarly grounding to Friedman's plot rehashes. There are some enticing glimpses of Renaissance metaphysics that might be said to ground Mary Shelley's resolutely unscholarly and madly imaginative story, but these threads are dropped once the droning on about Hollywood product commences. I hypothesize it was Kavey who wrote the chapter which concludes, "The Creature is immensely human, and he calls upon us to exercise those oft-sleeping angels of our better natures to recognize the human in those we deem alien and to meet them with kindness."