Amid the chaos of the Industrial Revolution, Mary Shelley published a story that our culture has not been able to forget. The tale of an idealistic scientist who created something that neither he nor his world could contain, Frankenstein crystallized the anxieties of an era in which scientific knowledge seemed to be outgrowing available ethical systems. By 1818, what had looked like the natural limits of human knowledge had been erased and redrawn several times. Today, when human cloning is a distinct possibility, and “Franken-foods” and biocybernetics challenge longstanding assumptions about the boundaries of the human, Frankenstein speaks to us with new force. This seminar will bring together scholars of literature, ethics, film, history, and science to discuss Frankenstein and its implications today.

In Shelley’s telling Frankenstein is less a monster story than a parable about scientific progress, a cautionary tale for humans who would be gods. At the moment his creature is animated, Victor Frankenstein is horrified by the success of his project and flees, leaving his creation to find its own way in the world. Far from the mute Neanderthal that has taken over his image, Frankenstein’s creature displays an intelligence and sensitivity that suggest great human potential. But his creator’s neglect, and the cruelty he finds when he ventures out into human society, channel the creature’s strength and intellect into vengeance. It is the scientist rather than his creature that the novel holds up for judgment.

When the story was adapted for the stage and screen, some of its nuances disappeared. Shelley’s frame narrative—the letters of an arctic explorer who finds Frankenstein pursuing his creature across the ice—disappeared, erasing the context of exploration that ties Frankenstein’s experiments to a broader world of discovery. The complexities of scientific responsibility were elided when Victor Frankenstein morphed from a troubled student, tragically carried away by his quest for knowledge, into a devil-may-care mad scientist with nary a thought for humanity or ethics. And the creature would never look the same after the first talkie version of Frankenstein, James Whale’s 1931 release, seared the image of a square-headed and stitched-up Boris Karloff onto the story’s legacy. This monster is mute; he has lost the eloquence that countered his ugliness in Shelley’s text—the eloquence that had enabled him to critique both the man and the world that formed him.

Returning to Frankestein now allows us to revisit this critique in the context of our own struggles with the progress of knowledge. In the lights of Shelley’s novel, its film adaptations, and its scientific context, we will consider questions such as: what constitutes ethical scholarship? Who is accountable for anticipating and controlling the products of research? What is a human, what a creature, and what a monster? What responsibility do humans bear toward the nonhumans we encounter or create?

Participants will include: James Chandler and Mark Hansen (English); Sandra Macpherson (English, Ohio State); Robert Richards and Alison Winter (History of Science); James Lastra (Film).

Note: we will be using the 1831 version of Frankenstein.