Below is a sample A-level essay showing how to hit the context objectives needed to the highest marks.
‘Mary Shelley’s sensational effects are always grounded in the everyday world.’
How far and in what ways do you agree with this view of Frankenstein?
Shelley’s everyday world was sensational. ‘ . . . in no case whatsoever shall the body of any murderer be suffered to be buried . . .’ runs a provision of the Murder Act 1751. So what happened to the bodies of murderers? They were left hanging in chains – or found their way on to the dissecting tables of medical research. It was not until the Anatomy Act of 1832 that corpses could be legally supplied to the medical schools whose insatiable thirst for material far exceeded supply. By the nineteenth century there were barely fifty hangings a year: medical research demanded ten times that number. Body-snatching was an established British custom. An article in the Lancet in 1858 (available as a Google book) traces it back to a Dr. Kinefred, a monk in the seventh century and notes how the practice had developed in England especially in the time of Henry VIII. Why are eighteenth century graves (in Edinburgh for example) high-wrought-iron-railed and caged? To protect them from body-snatchers who would dig down and haul a corpse through the hole by the neck.
So when, in that most sensational episode of the novel, the creation of the monster, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein boasts, ‘The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials’ his horrific claim is rooted in reality. It is worth our dissecting that claim a little more closely. The monster has a dual anatomical heritage: from the dissecting room, human; from the slaughter-house, beast. The slaughter-house had furnished the studio of Michelangelo before the studies of students. Our contemporary science offers the possibility of using pigs’ hearts and kidneys in human transplants. The idea still offends the squeamish and many religious groups. The integrity of the human body was perhaps a more settled idea in Shelley’s time and her Victor crosses an important line in seemingly mixing the human and the bestial – and idea that still evokes abhorrence, even whilst it is grounded in the possibilities of everyday life.
What is more shocking is Victor’s denial of his own human nature in pursuing this course: ‘often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation.’ Victor overcomes his innate feelings of revulsion; schooled by his intellect, his feelings are suppressed. There is much that might be written now about the separation of thought and feeling: Anne Mellor convincingly shows how the domestic and working spheres in the novel separate men and women, thought and feeling and how this separation makes possible the catastrophe of the monster’s creation – which in turn may symbolise a perceived crisis in human affairs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – but that is another argument. Shelley’s everyday world was sensational. Time now for an overview of the question.
In what everyday world is Shelley’s sensationalism grounded? The social practice of body-snatching and dissection were part of her world (a fellow writer at the Villa Diodati was Byron’s doctor, John Polidori); enlightenment science was another and an English literary canon that runs through Milton and Shakespeare to include her most recent romantic contemporaries, Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner for example.
Social practice and body-snatching I have dealt with as far as I will. Now for science. Mary Shelley is both precise and frustratingly ambiguous in her account of the conception of life in the monster. She has Victor collect his instruments around him ‘that I might infuse a spark of life into the lifeless being . . .’ The word ‘spark’ suggests an electrical source of the flame, which is the area I wish to contextualise next. (It also suggests a classical source for Mary Shelley’s sensationalism: the gods have thunder at which he marvel and whose power he wishes to ‘command’ is ironically reduced to a mere spark in the hands of man.) Shelley was well aware of the experiments (repeated publically) in the 1780s of Luigi and Lucia Galvani who credited the twitching leg of a dismembered from under electrical stimulus as a sign of life. Furthermore Percy Shelley’s introduction to the 1818 edition notes tahth ‘the event of which this fiction is founded has been supposed by Dr. Darwin and some of the psychological writers of Germany as not of impossible occurrence.’ Dr. Darwin is Erasmus Darwin and Shelley herself in the 1831 edition refers to his famous ‘vermicelli’ experiment – in which a fragment of a worm (not pasta) appeared to come to life when warmed in a glass case. These scientists believed that they were on the verge of creating life. And that was heresy. Marilyn Butler traces brilliantly the disputes in the Royal College of Surgeons between John Abernethy who believed that life was super-added – that is came from God – and William Lawrence (friend of the Shelleys) who believed that life was passed from biologically from parents to child (a heretical view that denies God a place in creating each human life). Shelley’s word ‘infuse’ – she repeats it (‘infusing life into an inanimate body’) is frustratingly imprecise – is it Victor’s life that is infused (which would make Victor a parent in William Lawrence’s terms)? Or a divine life (which would make Victor, blasphemously the god he wants to be an affirm Abernethy’s view)? Why should this matter so much to young Mary Shelley? It perhaps would not had she not suffered the appalling grief of failing to infuse life into her own dead child.
The sensational early life of the nut and berry eating, fire-wood collecting life of the monster is rooted in Caliban. The magical science of Victor is grounded in Prospero. The horrors of Juliet’s imagination – fearing that she might ‘madly play with my forefather’s joints’ in a charnel house – perhaps are some grounds for Mary Shelley’s creation of Victor’s ‘filthy workshop of creation’. The sensational exclusion and vengeance of the monster from the ideal society of the De Lacey’s seems to be grounded in Shelley’ reading of Satan’s exclusion from Eden and his terrible vengeance on mankind. The sensational arctic landscapes which frame the novel owe something to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner which she quotes and whose author’s Shakespeare lectures the fourteen-year old Mary Shelley attended.
The extent to which this literature is part of the ‘everday world’ is open for debate. I would argue that Mary Shelley’s sensationalism – her novel indeed is grounded in the sensationalism of the contemporary gothic tradition (I haven’t had time to mention her debt to Mary Radcliffe) and contemporary social and medical practice – is drawn from an extraordinarily comprehensive account of the world she lived in and her fears for its implications for the future.