Science and Human Animality in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
2019; Temple University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/702587
ISSN2640-7310
Autores Tópico(s)Gothic Literature and Media Analysis
ResumoPrevious article FreeScience and Human Animality in Mary Shelley’s FrankensteinNoah HeringmanNoah HeringmanUniversity of Missouri Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreFrankenstein has been a focal point for critical discussions of Romantic life science for more than a generation. James Rieger’s dismissal of Shelley’s science as “switched-on magic” and “souped-up alchemy” (xxvii) must have seemed inadequate almost as soon as he uttered it in 1974. Critics and editors of the novel in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Marilyn Butler, Maurice Hindle, and Anne Mellor, strongly emphasized Shelley’s engagement with the science of her time.1 In her introduction to Frankenstein, Butler noted that the Shelleys were close to the physician William Lawrence and sympathized with his ideas (xvi–xx), pointing out Lawrence’s lectures on the “natural history of man” as a significant source for Shelley on mechanism, though balanced by her vitalist commitments (cf. Sha 22–23). Shelley’s use of Humphry Davy also shows the importance of the most current science for this novel. But Frankenstein is also a backward-looking text in many ways, and my goal in this essay is to recover a different sense of the “natural history of man” concerned more broadly with human animality. Shelley signals this direction by citing Volney and Rousseau as well as Buffon, the only modern naturalist singled out for praise in the novel (36). The proto-anthropological discourse associated with these authors, and with the voyages of discovery that supplied some of their data, foregrounds human animality in relation to other species, as opposed to the focus on racial variety within the species emphasized by Lawrence and others in the nineteenth century. These conjectural and natural histories of humanity make it possible to understand Shelley’s sense of “life” as not only an elusive “principle” (materialist and/or vitalist) but also an area of uncertainty at the level of species—as not just ontogeny but phylogeny.Mary Shelley’s creation of a paradigm that destabilizes the boundaries between human and nonhuman animals, and even between living and nonliving matter, seems to anticipate the reconfiguration of humanity under the auspices of evolutionary theory, on the one hand, and posthumanism on the other. Her explanation of human animality at the species level raises the specter of extinction as the general fate of species, as opposed to the specific tragedy developed in The Last Man, her third novel. In Frankenstein, Shelley takes the animal nature of human beings more seriously than the many philosophers and naturalists of her time who sought to establish a firm human-animal boundary. The role of the species question in Captain Walton’s letters also provides an organic connection between the frame narrative and the main plot of Frankenstein, a connection that deserves more critical attention.Frankenstein has been widely recognized for its erudite engagement with philosophical accounts of both individual and social development by Locke, Rousseau, Volney, and others, and this engagement shows in the novel’s openness to various possibilities of both human emergence from and degeneration into animality. Famously declaring that “a new species would bless me as its creator,” just a few sentences after he has described his goal as “the creation of a human being” (49), Victor Frankenstein himself renders the species identity of the Creature undecidable from the start. And even though Victor and the Creature later seem to agree that the Creature is nonhuman, Shelley’s narrator recuperates his humanity in ways that allow the reader to dwell on uncertainties in the history of the species. The explorer John Reinhold Forster, who took the “natural history of man” to be the central pursuit of the philosophical voyager, established criteria to identify what he called “savages, removed but in the first degree from absolute animality” (9). Shelley’s scientific voyager, Captain Walton, though less focused on ethnography, is still quick to identify the Creature as the “gigantic” and “savage inhabitant of some undiscovered island” (18). Her choice of a scientific voyage to serve as the frame for this novel consolidates the various strands of natural and conjectural history that contributed to the history of the human species around 1800.As a figure of human animality, the Creature focalizes a whole set of philosophical issues now associated with posthumanism, of which the questioning of human species fixity may be the most important. The Creature mounts his own critique of human exceptionalism while recognizing extinction—also a crucial premise for posthumanism—as a condition of the possibility of his own existence as a species. Victor, in turn, sees that potential species as a possible cause of human extinction. Shelley’s registration of everything from disgust to faith in scientific progress as events in the history of the species also bears on the dialectic of humanity and posthumanity. In a dedicated chapter on the posthuman in the 2016 Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein, Andy Mousley suggests that in Victor’s time, like our own, it has become “almost second nature to think beyond nature” (162). Yet if the posthuman designates something permanent about the human condition, as suggested both here and a few years earlier by Paul Outka, there is a risk of collapsing the historical distance between Shelley and ourselves. The editors of Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism rightly draw attention to the critical and historical rigor afforded by considering these tendencies instead as “posthumanist traces of humanism,” a description that strikes me as apt for Shelley’s contributions to the history of the species as well (Landgraf, Trop, and Weatherby 3). The same authors also point out the special status of posthumanism, due to its methodological inclusiveness, as a critical “vantage point” on other debates. In the context of Frankenstein it affords a critical perspective on biopolitics, simply because the novel insists on a radical uncertainty concerning the “principle of life” (227) opposed to the consensual definition of “life exposed to death” that has emerged from the work of Giorgo Agamben and the late Michel Foucault.2 Unlike the sovereign, the creator Frankenstein cannot make his Creature “subside into dead matter” again, as Shelley imagines this desire in her Introduction of 1831 (228). He remains a “filthy mass that moved and talked,” on the verge of animality (143).As striking as it is to encounter a “gigantic” being driving a sledge over the ice so far from land, the appearance of a European in the same situation is even more surprising to Walton and his crew. After all, several Arctic voyages up to this point had encountered “savage inhabitants” and “undiscovered islands” in very high latitudes (18), and while the Creature’s unnatural history proves very different from any of those related by the voyagers, the frame of Arctic exploration provides an ethnographic context for the Creature’s whole career, his ascent from animality, and his degeneration into savagery. Shelley uses the frame story explicitly to invoke the scientific ambition associated with polar exploration at least since the early modern period. In 1831 she augments the dialogue on this point to reflect the consensus around the John and James Clark Ross and John Franklin expeditions promoted by the journalism of John Barrow beginning in 1818, when her novel was first published. In the revised text, Walton declares that one man’s life would be “a small price to pay … for the dominion I should acquire and transmit over the elemental foes of our race” (231–32)—to which Victor replies, “Unhappy man! Do you share my madness?” As Siobhan Carroll and other critics have pointed out, Walton shares Barrow’s optimistic views about climate, including the possibility of a temperate climate at the pole. George Cruikshank modeled a more skeptical response in his lampoon of the first Ross expedition (Fig. 1), which returned from Baffin Island in November 1818.Figure 1. Landing the Treasures, or Results of the Polar Expedition. Engraving by George Cruikshank from a drawing by Frederick Marryat. London: G. Humphrey, 1819. Library of Congress. Image in the public domain. www.loc.gov/item/2006688957/.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointEighteenth-century voyagers and biogeographers tended to view the region as irredeemably savage and hostile, unlike Barrow and Walton, and this skeptical tradition, which resurfaces in the Cruikshank print, also informs the novel at a deeper level. Walton’s open-ended expression “the elemental foes of our race” could be applied to everything from sea ice to hostile natives, and—as it turns out—even to the Creature himself. Throughout the novel, the Creature’s power to move easily at high latitudes and high altitudes mark him as an animal or a savage, depending on the context. Cruikshank’s Landing the Treasures deflates the supposed cultural value of “Esquimaux wood” by dismissing it as a savage artifact no better than “chump wood,” while Ross’s experience of first contact with the Inuit of Baffin Island, whom he dubbed “Arctic Highlanders,” is racialized and temporalized by the figure of Jack Frost at the end of the procession (Ross ch. 5).3 Ethnographic accounts of people living at high latitudes, both north and south, are particularly replete with strong feelings of disgust, like those provoked by the Creature, and are sometimes inclined toward a climate determinism that accounts for the state of these societies—from the Inuit in the North to the Fuegians at Cape Horn—as caused by migratory degeneration. The key point here is that these descriptions, though at times deeply pejorative, are not explicitly racialized—as Lawrence’s anatomy is—because they adhere to the theory of monogenesis that prevailed before the advent of racial theory. Human “degeneration” is therefore environmental and not endemic. Accounts of first contact and human origins were typically not racialized prior to 1800, and likewise race is not a core component of the Creature’s biological identity.4 The Creature’s “filthiness” may owe something to John Ledyard’s description of the Kamchadals as “filthy beyond imagination” (qtd. in Williams 15), but the high southern latitude of Tierra del Fuego provides the locus classicus for “savages of the lowest grade,” as Charles Darwin called them (189), who nonetheless command recognition of their humanity (cf. J. R. Forster 205; Herder 147).The Creature presumably does not have these high latitudes in mind when he offers to disappear with his prospective mate into “the wilds of South America” (142), but the novel is haunted by the prospects of inhospitable landscapes and degeneration that are inscribed in the frame narrative of Arctic exploration. The Creature mourns the “hapless fate” of the indigenous American peoples, of which he learns from Felix de Lacey’s reading of Volney’s The Ruins (115), but the extermination of these peoples was often enough ascribed to their degenerated or “unimproved” state by naturalists including Buffon and the Forsters (Reinhold and his son George), who observed them on Cook’s second voyage. The same principle of biogeography is invoked by Victor in the Orkney Islands, in the far north of Scotland, where he goes to pursue his “filthy” operations among people whose curiosity is “benumbed” by “the squalidness of the most miserable penury” (161). Closer to Victor’s home, the natives of the French Alps were described by Percy Shelley as “half-deformed or idiotic” (Shelley, History 102–03). This is the setting in which Victor describes his Creature as “a filthy mass that moved and talked,” and the surrounding glaciers bring home the connection between the “degradation of the human species” in the Alps and the narrative frame of polar exploration. The Creature’s valediction might even be seen in this context as a lament on behalf of indigenous peoples dehumanized by colonialism: “Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings, who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding” (219).The Creature’s giant stature, however, harks back to a precolonial and perhaps even prehuman past associated above all with the Patagonian giants. The seafarer’s myth of seven-foot-tall natives in Patagonia dates back to Magellan, but was still taken seriously in the late eighteenth century by naturalists and explorers including Buffon and John Byron, the poet’s grandfather (Lamb 93–96). In one of Buffon’s variations on the story of human origins, the last survivors of a giant hominin “nation” migrate across what is now the Bering Strait at roughly the same time as the last of the giant “elephants.” These elephants or mastodons ultimately perish in North America, becoming extinct because they are unable to cross the mountains of Panama (Buffon 92), but the human or prehuman giants press on all the way to Patagonia (112). Count Buffon, born Georges-Louis Leclerc, had been dead for nearly thirty years when the Shelleys were reading and discussing him in 1816, but his encyclopedic Natural History, General and Particular still defined the field for many European readers. Traditionally understood as the description and classification of rocks, plants, and animals, natural history in Buffon’s work became more chronological and included speculation on man-like species that came before Homo sapiens—early humans now known as hominins.In Frankenstein, Buffon is the subject of an encomium by Victor that marks his initial disappointment, at age 15, with modern natural philosophy and its abstruse terminology. In a significant episode unaccountably excised by Mary Shelley in 1831, Victor attends a few lectures at his father’s request, but then becomes “disgusted with the science of natural philosophy” due to an accident of timing—he began too far into the course to understand the vocabulary, he explains, adding this qualification: “I still read Pliny and Buffon with delight, authors, in my estimation, of nearly equal interest and utility” (36). This formulation captures the hybrid of modern and premodern science that uniquely characterizes Victor’s project and correlates his practice of science with a particular juncture in the history of the species, as I shall argue later. A turn to Buffon’s account of human origins is, further, warranted because Buffon incorporates ethnographic data from voyages into an open-ended conjectural history of the species, as Mary Shelley also does. Finally, Buffon and the debate he generated help to contextualize the “posthumanist traces” that appear in Shelley’s treatment of the species question.“Romantic posthumanism” may be an apt name for a milieu in which life is no longer defined solely by biological criteria—no longer or not yet. Frankenstein reveals the theory of life as an area of uncertainty (Latour 21–22), presenting an avenue of resistance to biopolitics and even to posthumanism itself as systems from which it sometimes seems that nothing is allowed to escape. Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitzes characterize posthumanism as “map for navigating the rough seas of the biopolitical” (2), and Cary Wolfe cogently defends its “openness from closure” (xxi), but Frankenstein focalizes contentions around the history of the species that provide another kind of openness, a historical perspective on the problematics named by these twenty-first-century approaches. In this context, the novel illustrates the ambivalent role of humanism in constructions of inhuman nature from the Enlightenment to the present. From the absolute magnitude of Kant’s mathematical sublime to the planetary scale of disaster in the Anthropocene, the escalation of space and time has depended on a romantic insistence on the otherness of the nonhuman that amounts to a kind of human exceptionalism. This recursive humanism poses a challenge too categorically circumscribed by Mark McGurl in “The Posthuman Comedy.” Premodern paradigms that deliberately trouble the boundary between human and nonhuman nature demonstrate that the scientific advances of the twentieth century are not, as McGurl argues, exclusive prerequisites for the production of “literary works in which scientific knowledge … of the nonhuman world becomes visible as a formal, representational, and finally existential problem” (537). In Buffon’s natural history the problem of human origins provides the catalyst for a revision of the geological timescale that greatly expands the scope of nonhuman nature.Buffon reflects explicitly on the instability produced by situating human origins in a diachronic history of species. His Epochs of Nature is one of the first geochronologies to insist on a comparatively long prehuman past, and Buffon anticipates some of his contemporaries’ objections by establishing a human epoch, a seventh and final age “when the Power of Man assisted that of Nature” (119). In this chapter, he locates the first advanced civilization diplomatically close to the boundaries of sacred history. But in discussing the earlier epochs, such as the fifth, “when the elephants and other animals of the south lived in the north” (87), Buffon raises the possibility of an earlier human presence, of beings roughly corresponding to what we now term “early hominins.” If Buffon’s seventh epoch anticipates some of the problems of the Anthropocene, then his earlier epochs decenter the human perspective, promoting the radical separation of history from geochronology. Although he raises the possibility of a human presence before the separation of the continents, this is nevertheless the time of the mammoths, and the question of human presence is peripheral to it. Buffon’s “Age of Man,” in other words, implies earlier ages in which humans are not the main actors. Forster and Johann Gottfried Herder, both strongly influenced by Buffon’s heterodox history of the species, registered particular objections to this long prehuman past. The contrast makes clear that anthropocentrism plays a more definitive role for these German thinkers; Buffon’s speculative view of human origins is more amenable to the multispecies approach of “know[ing] other living things … without recourse to humans as the subject of the inquiry, or as a controlling force” (Pilaar Birch 4).Since the earth could only have cooled very gradually (as verified by Buffon’s experiments), superheated conditions persisted for long enough to infuse the very first living creatures, followed by a whole succession of giant flora and fauna, and perhaps even—this is Buffon’s most radical suggestion—a giant race of early humans. The conundrum of the giant “elephants”—the mastodons who accompanied these giants on their migration to Patagonia, but became extinct along the way—prompts his first analysis of these conditions, and they make such apt protagonists because they lend support to a larger narrative arc extending from the gigantic fossil shells of the third epoch all the way to the proto-human “giants” of the sixth. The animals were larger during the “long tract of time” it took for the earth to cool because “Nature was then in her primitive vigor. The internal heat of the earth bestowed on its productions all the vigour and magnitude of which they were susceptible. The first ages produced giants of every kind” (Smellie 303; cf. Buffon 15). The geological and ecological sense of “primitive” is clear here, and it plays a crucial role as well in histories of humanity by the Forsters and by Herder among others. In revising the manuscript of Epochs of Nature for publication, Buffon worked hard to make his account of human origins more orthodox, but traces of the original proximity of human and animal species remain in his account of the Patagonian giants (Roger 161n) as well his introduction to the “Age of Man.” “The first men,” he writes, were “naked in spirit and in body, exposed to the curses of all the elements, … [and] penetrated by a common feeling of baleful terror” (Buffon 119). The Creature hears a very similar account from Volney, and readers of the novel are often referred to Rousseau as well; but Buffon’s version of this bleak scenario carries with it the memory of giant prehistoric species, the deep uncertain past of human animality that haunts the triumphant account of domestication—both of wild nature and of so-called “savages”—with which Buffon concludes his work.Human animality plays a different role for the Forsters and for Herder, all avid readers of Buffon who published their histories of humanity a few years later. Reinhold and George Forster’s accounts of their Pacific voyage make much of their experience in the field, which allows them to introduce more and better empirical evidence than was typically found in conjectural histories of humanity, reduced to quoting voyagers at second and third hand. In the domain of geology, their empirical base led them to favor a younger earth, since the South Pacific is filled with young volcanic islands. In the domain of ethnography, they attempted to document a wider range of more finely nuanced human varieties based on their numerous experiences of first contact, especially with Melanesian peoples. Their accounts allow for interplay between geological and demographic developments without expanding the timescale as much as Buffon. Reinhold Forster’s strong belief in monogenesis led him to attribute cultural change to migration away from the tropics; at high latitudes, he viewed not only the people but even the landscapes themselves as degenerated (117). Both Forsters’ accounts of the natives of Tierra del Fuego, therefore, stand in stark contrast to their more cosmopolitan accounts of other islanders. Both register their disgust for these people, who present “the most loathsome picture of misery and wretchedness,” in George Forster’s view (2: 628), and confirm, in his father’s account, the hypothesis that environmental conditions are “the true cause” of “debasement and degeneration among savages” (J. R. Forster 207). Herder, deeply influenced by these accounts, adopted the term Pesserai—which the Forsters mistakenly took to be the Alaclufe people’s name for themselves—to signify “the lowest variety of humans” [die niedrigste Gattung der Menschen] (Herder 247) and solidify the human-animal boundary that Buffon had disrupted with his open-ended human prehistory. For him the salient point is that all varieties of humans have lips and can kiss while mating (155), unlike other species—a capability rendered uncertain in the Creature’s case by his “straight black lips” (Shelley 52).The beginning of the Creature’s narrative in Frankenstein chronicles his emergence from “absolute animality”; the term from Reinhold Forster seems especially apt, since the Creature is composed of human and nonhuman parts. Finding himself alone and helpless in the forest, the Creature copes with hunger, makes his first “uncouth and inarticulate sounds” (99), and discovers the use of fire. In so doing, he “follows the course of the human species,” as Wolfson and Levao note in their gloss on this justly famous episode (179n7). This development proceeds rapidly and in its early stages resembles the Lockean account of an individual mind accumulating sense impressions. But strictly speaking the Creature’s ontogeny begins atypically in mid-career, and his development deviates crucially from human phylogeny in the absence of any social contact. Jean-Marc Itard pointed out in his account of the Wild Boy of Aveyron, also commonly cited as a source for this episode, that individuals found in a “true state of nature” had been classified by Linnaeus as a subspecies of humanity; in his words, even “a savage horde the most vagabond” gives its members their fundamentally social being, but “a man truly savage … owes nothing to his equals” (4–5). The Creature’s own account may be directly influenced by Volney’s chapter on “The Original State of Man” in The Ruins, from which he learns that man, “like other animals, without experience of the past … wandered in forests,” seeking out food, clothing, and society in that order (Volney 37). Like Volney’s original man, the Creature progresses rapidly to a pastoral stage and then to the discovery of science, which in Volney precedes agriculture (41–42).This passage shows an affinity to conjectural history. Ian Balfour draws strong parallels to this genre in his reading of the novel, itemizing eleven stages in the Creature’s development that mark him as “an allegorical figure for humanity as such” (788). Although Balfour notes that his role as a “quasi-man” with no childhood and no society is inherited from conjectural history, he concludes that the Creature’s unsettled status as a “human/unhuman being” is due above all to the misrecognition of his humanity by others, and not to any intrinsic qualities of his own (789–90). The Creature’s first textbook, The Ruins, explains the rise and fall of empires throughout history as a result of “self-love, aversion to pain, and desire of happiness” (Volney 35), thereby teaching him to trace society and inequality from the instincts of a being somewhat like himself. Ironically, the Creature’s disposition to language, cemented by this reading, blocks his path toward posthumanity, as defined by Felice Cimatti in his reading of Frankenstein: “he cannot help but look back to humanity, instead of looking forward to a new form of life no longer marked by humanity and animality” (24). For Chris Washington, however, the Creature’s otherness is forward-looking, informing “a posthuman conception of face-to-face relationships that situates the face of the nonhuman other … as foundational and necessary for life and love in the Anthropocene” (123). Complementing the conjectural “state of nature” that precedes the original social contract, this posthumanist conjecture posits a return to animality as the condition for a future social contract.The Creature’s path diverges sharply from both ethnographic and philosophical prototypes in his moment of self-recognition: “I was not even of the same nature as man” (115–16). Although he understands the “patriarchal lives of [his] protectors” (125) as conforming to the pastoral stage delineated by Volney, he posits an alternative phylogeny and ontogeny for himself: “Oh that I had forever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst, and heat!” (116). This spectacular reversal culminates in the Creature’s transformation into a “wild beast” when he is rejected by the de Laceys. It is more rapid and more absolute than even the migratory degeneration advanced by some conjectural historians. This alienation and reversal is effectively prompted by his exposure to “the science of letters” (114), to which conjectural history assigns a very different role. Victor’s meditation on the scale of time on his return to Geneva sheds light on the celerity of the Creature’s progress, which is rapid enough for an individual but madly telescoped if we consider it as the history of a new species: “One sudden and desolating change had taken place; but a thousand little circumstances might have by degrees worked other alterations, which, although they were done more tranquilly, might not be the less decisive” (69).The escalation of change over time also comes to bear on extinction, the other species question that Shelley takes up in the novel. This question becomes more central in The Last Man (1826), which more explicitly links human and nonhuman animals through their “shared susceptibility to extinction,” in Melissa Bailes’s reading (161). By 1818, Georges Cuvier had added many more entries to Buffon’s “Ohio animal” to form a list of extinct species, making it clear at the same time that a species had to be numerous to leave an adequate record of its existence. The prospect of a numerous “race of devils” leads to the first explicit recognition of the Creature’s species identity in the novel, as Victor begins to fear that “future ages” will curse him for “buy[ing] [his] own peace at the price … of the existence of the whole human race” (163). Human extinction comes into view as a foil for the extinction of a Creature who may be both the first and the last of his race. As Bailes points out, Shelley applies the term frequently to the death of individuals in both novels, but Victor and the Creature both understand the biological stakes of extinction. Extinction helps to define the Creature as a species, and yet his lack of opportunity to reproduce collapses geological time to produce a catastrophe much more rapid than any imagined by Cuvier. Alan Bewell’s intriguing suggestion that we classify the Creature as a nondescript, rather than as sui generis, helps to illuminate the “posthumanist traces” of Frankenstein. In Bewell’s reading the Creature is asking to be recognized “as a species” when he requests “a female partner,” provoking Victor’s vicious reaction (337). Bewell concludes that the novel thus gestures “toward a posthuman ecology for it allows its readers, along with Victor, to entertain the possibility of conceiving a different relationship to the natures around them, one that adopts a humanism that is [not] based … on human beings separating themselves from their animal nature” (338).Although from Victor’s point of view the threat of extinction marks the Creature’s species difference, it also secures human animality. This shared animality is particularly visible at the moment when Victor destroys the partially finished female Creature: “I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being” (167). It is precisely in it
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