Speaker 1: Pushkin. Very few stories get put to use as often
Speaker 1: as Frankenstein. Hardly a day goes by without someone comparing
Speaker 1: AI to Frankenstein's Monster. No story better instantiates our popular
Speaker 1: understanding of the relationship between technological innovation and ethical culpability, and,
Speaker 1: as Jill Lapourr argues in her essay It's Still Alive,
Speaker 1: few stories have been as widely misunderstood today. On the show,
Speaker 1: Jill reads that essay and then afterwards we talk about
Speaker 1: the meaning of the story, the biography of its author,
Speaker 1: and how what you read shapes who you are.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's incredibly powerful to take in a book
Speaker 2: like so I think you do feel like you are,
Speaker 2: you know, like the Goodyear tire guy who's like made
Speaker 2: of tires, Like you're kind of like made of books,
Speaker 2: Like if you're a reader. That's I think as people
Speaker 2: who read kind of think of themselves, there is some
Speaker 2: total of the books they've read.
Speaker 1: Here's It's Still Alive.
Speaker 2: Part two Misjudged It's Still Alive. Mary Wolstoncraft Godwin Shelley
Speaker 2: began writing Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus when she was
Speaker 2: eighteen years old, two years after she'd become pregnant with
Speaker 2: her first child, a baby she did not name. Nurse
Speaker 2: the baby read, she had written in her diary day
Speaker 2: after day until the eleventh day. I awoke in the
Speaker 2: night to give it suck. It appeared to be sleeping
Speaker 2: so quietly that I would not wake it, And then
Speaker 2: in the morning find my baby dead. With grief at
Speaker 2: that loss came a fear of a fever from the milk.
Speaker 2: Her breasts were swollen inflamed, unsucked. Her sleep, too, grew fevered,
Speaker 2: dreaming that my little baby came to life again, that
Speaker 2: it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it
Speaker 2: before the fire, and it lived. She wrote in her diary,
Speaker 2: awake and find no baby pregnant again. Only weeks later.
Speaker 2: She was likely still nursing her second baby when she
Speaker 2: started writing Frankenstein, and pregnant with her third by the
Speaker 2: time she finished. She didn't put her name on her book.
Speaker 2: She published Frankenstein anonymously in eighteen eighteen, not least out
Speaker 2: of a concern that she might lose custody of her children,
Speaker 2: and she didn't give her monster a name either. This
Speaker 2: anonymous and andraw demon. One reviewer called it. For the
Speaker 2: first theatrical production of Frankenstein, staged in London in eighteen
Speaker 2: twenty three, by which time the author had given birth
Speaker 2: to four children, buried three, and lost another unnamed baby
Speaker 2: to a miscarriage so severe that she nearly died of
Speaker 2: bleeding that stopped only when her husband had her sit
Speaker 2: on ice. The monster was listed on the playbill as blank.
Speaker 2: This nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good,
Speaker 2: Shelley remarked about the creature's theatrical billing. She herself had
Speaker 2: no name of her own, Like the creature pieced together
Speaker 2: from the cadavers collected by Victor Frankenstein, her name was
Speaker 2: an assemblage of parts, the name of her mother, the
Speaker 2: feminist Mary Wolstoncraft, stitched to that of her father, the
Speaker 2: philosopher William Godwin, grafted on to that of her husband,
Speaker 2: the poet Percy Biss Shelley. As if Mary Wolstonecraft Godwin
Speaker 2: Shelley were the sum of her relations, bone of their bone,
Speaker 2: and flesh of their flesh, if not the milk of
Speaker 2: her mother's milk, since her mother had died eleven days
Speaker 2: after giving birth to her mainly too sick to give
Speaker 2: suck awoke and found no mother. It was on a
Speaker 2: dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of
Speaker 2: my toils. Victor Frankenstein, a university student, says, pouring out
Speaker 2: his tail, the rain patters on the window pane o bleaque.
Speaker 2: Light flickers from a dying candle. He looks at the
Speaker 2: lifeless thing at his feet come to life. I saw
Speaker 2: the dull yellow eye of the creature open. It breathed hard,
Speaker 2: and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. Having labored so
Speaker 2: long to bring the creature to life, he finds himself
Speaker 2: disgusted and horrified, unable to endure the aspect of the
Speaker 2: being I had created, and flees, abandoning his creation unnamed. I,
Speaker 2: the miserable and the abandoned am an abortion, the creature says,
Speaker 2: before in the book's final scene, he disappears on a
Speaker 2: raft of ice. Frankenstein is four stories in one, an
Speaker 2: allegory of fan an epistolary novel, and an autobiography, a
Speaker 2: chaos of literary fertility that left its very young author
Speaker 2: at pains to explain her hideous progeny. In the introduction
Speaker 2: she wrote for a revised edition in eighteen thirty one,
Speaker 2: she took up the humiliating question how I, then, a
Speaker 2: young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon
Speaker 2: so very hideous an idea, and made up a story
Speaker 2: in which she virtually erased herself as an author, insisting
Speaker 2: that the story had come to her in a dream
Speaker 2: I saw, with shut eyes but acute mental vision. I
Speaker 2: saw the pale student of unhallowed arts, kneeling beside the
Speaker 2: thing he had put together, and that writing it consisted of,
Speaker 2: making only a transcript of that dream. A century later,
Speaker 2: when a lurching, grunting Boris Karloff played the creature in
Speaker 2: Universal Pictures brilliant nineteen thirty one production of Frankenstein, directed
Speaker 2: by James Wyle, the monster, prodigiously eloquent, learned and persuasive
Speaker 2: in the novel was no longer merely nameless, but all
Speaker 2: but speechless too, as if what Mary Wolstoncraft Godwin Shelley
Speaker 2: had to say was too radical to be heard, an
Speaker 2: agony unutterable. Every book is a baby born, but Frankenstein
Speaker 2: is often supposed to have been more assembled than written,
Speaker 2: an unnatural birth, as though all that the author had
Speaker 2: done were to piece together the writings of others especially
Speaker 2: those of her father and her husband. If Godwin's daughter
Speaker 2: could not help philosophizing, one mid twentieth century critic wrote,
Speaker 2: Shelley's wife knew also the eerie charms of the morbid,
Speaker 2: the occult, the scientifically bizarre. This enduring condescension, the idea
Speaker 2: of the author as a vessel for the ideas of
Speaker 2: other people, a fiction in which the author participated so
Speaker 2: as to avoid the scandal of her own brain, goes
Speaker 2: some way to explaining why Frankenstein has created so many
Speaker 2: wildly different and irreconcilable readings and restagings in the two
Speaker 2: centuries its publication. For its twenty eighteen by centennial, the
Speaker 2: original eighteen eighteen edition was reissued as a trim little
Speaker 2: paperback with an introduction by the distinguished biographer Charlotte Gordon,
Speaker 2: and as a beautifully illustrated hardcover keepsake. The new annotated Frankenstein,
Speaker 2: edited and annotated by Leslie S. Klinger. Universal is developing
Speaker 2: a new Bride of Frankenstein as part of a series
Speaker 2: of remakes from its backlist of horror movies filmography recapitulating
Speaker 2: politico chicanery. The age of the superhero is about to
Speaker 2: yield to the age of the monster. But what about
Speaker 2: the baby Frankenstein, The story of a creature who has
Speaker 2: no name, has for two hundred years been made to
Speaker 2: mean just about anything. Lately, it has been taken as
Speaker 2: a cautionary tale for Silicon Valley technologists, an interpretation that
Speaker 2: derives less from the eighteen eighteen novel than from later
Speaker 2: stage and film versions, especially the nineteen thirty one film,
Speaker 2: and it took its modern form in the aftermath of Hiroshima.
Speaker 2: In that spirit, MIT Press has published an edition of
Speaker 2: the original text, annotated for scientists, engineers, and creators of
Speaker 2: all kinds, and prepared by the leaders of the Frankenstein
Speaker 2: bi centennial project at Arizona State University. With funding from
Speaker 2: the National Science Foundation. They offered the book as a
Speaker 2: catechism for designers of robots and inventors of artificial intelligences.
Speaker 2: Remorse extinguished every hope, Victor says in Volume two, Chapter one,
Speaker 2: by which time the creature has begun murdering everyone. Victor
Speaker 2: loves I had been the author of Unalterable Evils, and
Speaker 2: I lived in daily fear lest the monster whom I
Speaker 2: had created should perpetuate some new wickedness. The MIT edition.
Speaker 2: Here appends a footnote. The remorse Victor expresses is reminiscent
Speaker 2: of J. Robert Oppenheimer's sentiments when he witnessed the unspeakable
Speaker 2: power of the atomic bomb. Scientist's responsibility must be engaged
Speaker 2: before their creations are unleashed. This is a way to
Speaker 2: make use of the novel, but involves stripping out nearly
Speaker 2: all the sects and birth everything female material First Mind
Speaker 2: by Muriel Spark in a biography of Shelley published in
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty one on the occasion of one hundredth anniversary
Speaker 2: of her death. Spark, working closely with Shelley's diaries and
Speaker 2: paying careful attention to the author's eight years of near
Speaker 2: constant pregnancy and loss, argued that Frankenstein was no minor
Speaker 2: piece of genre fiction, but a literary work of striking originality.
Speaker 2: In the nineteen seventies, that interpretation was taken up by
Speaker 2: feminist literary critics, who wrote about Frankenstein as establishing the
Speaker 2: origins of science fiction by way of the female Gothic.
Speaker 2: What made Mary Shelley's work so original, Ellen Moore's argued
Speaker 2: at the time was that she was a writer who
Speaker 2: was a mother, Tolstoy had thirteen children born at home.
Speaker 2: Morris pointed out, but the major female eighteenth and nineteenth
Speaker 2: century writers, the Austin's and Dickinson's, tended to be spinsters
Speaker 2: and virgins. Shelley was an exception. So was Mary Wolstoncraft,
Speaker 2: a woman Shelley knew not as a mother, but as
Speaker 2: a writer who wrote about, among other things, how to
Speaker 2: raise a baby. I conceive it to be the duty
Speaker 2: of every rational creature to attend to its offspring, Wolstoncraft
Speaker 2: wrote in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters in seventeen
Speaker 2: eighty seven, ten years before giving birth to the author
Speaker 2: of Frankenstein. As Charlotte Gordon notes in her dual biography
Speaker 2: Romantic Outlaws, Wolstoncraft first met her fellow political radical William
Speaker 2: Godwin in seventeen ninety one at a London dinner party
Speaker 2: hosted by the publisher of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man.
Speaker 2: Wolstoncraft and Godwin were mutually displeased with each other. Godwin
Speaker 2: later wrote they were the smartest peopil in the room,
Speaker 2: and they couldn't help arguing all evening. Wolstoncraft's vindication of
Speaker 2: the Rights of Woman appeared in seventeen ninety two, and
Speaker 2: the next year Godwin published Political Justice. In seventeen ninety three,
Speaker 2: during an affair with the American speculator and diplomat Gilbert Imlay,
Speaker 2: Wolstoncraft became pregnant. I am nourishing a creature, she wrote
Speaker 2: to Imlay. Not long after, Wolstoncraft gave birth to a daughter,
Speaker 2: whom she named Fanny, Imlay abandoned her. She and Godwin
Speaker 2: became lovers in seventeen ninety six, and when she became pregnant,
Speaker 2: they married for the sake of the baby, even though
Speaker 2: neither of them believed in marriage. In seventeen ninety seven,
Speaker 2: Wolstoncraft died of an infection contracted from the fingers of
Speaker 2: a physician who reached into her uterus to remove the afterbirth.
Speaker 2: Godwin's daughter bore the name of his dead wife as
Speaker 2: if she could be brought back to life another after birth.
Speaker 2: Mary Wolstoncraft Godwin was fifteen years old when she met
Speaker 2: purce Bus Shelley in eighteen twelve. He was twenty and
Speaker 2: married with a pregnant wife, Having been thrown out of
Speaker 2: Oxford for his atheism and disowned by his father Shelley
Speaker 2: had sought out William Godwin, his intellectual hero, as a
Speaker 2: surrogate father. Shelley and Godwin Pee spent their illicit courtship
Speaker 2: as much romanticism as romance, passionately reading the works of
Speaker 2: her parents while reclining at Wolstonecraft's grave in the Saint
Speaker 2: Pancras churchyard. Go to the tomb and read, she wrote
Speaker 2: in her diary. Go with Shelley to the churchyard. Plainly
Speaker 2: they were doing more than reading, because she was pregnant
Speaker 2: when she ran away with him, fleeing her father's house
Speaker 2: in the half light of night, along with her stepsister
Speaker 2: Claire Claremont, who wanted to be ruined too. If any
Speaker 2: man served as an inspiration for Victor Frankenstein, it was
Speaker 2: Lord Byron, who followed his imagination, indulged his passions, and
Speaker 2: abandoned his children. He was mad, bad, and dangerous to know,
Speaker 2: as one of his lovers pronounced, mainly because of his
Speaker 2: many affairs, which likely included sleeping with his half sister
Speaker 2: Augusta Lee. Byron married in January eighteen fifteen, and a daughter,
Speaker 2: Ada was born in December, but when his wife left
Speaker 2: left him a year into their marriage, Byron was forced
Speaker 2: never to see his wife or daughter again, lest his
Speaker 2: wife reveal the scandal of his affair with Lee. Ada
Speaker 2: was about the age Mary Godwin's first baby would have
Speaker 2: been had she lived. Ada's mother, fearing that the girl
Speaker 2: might grow up to become a poet as mad and
Speaker 2: bad as her father, raised her to be a mathematician.
Speaker 2: Ada Lovelace, a scientist as imaginative as Victor Frankenstein, would
Speaker 2: in eighteen forty three, provide an influential theoretical description of
Speaker 2: a general purpose computer a century before one was built.
Speaker 2: In the spring of eighteen sixteen, Byron, fleeing scandal, left
Speaker 2: England for Geneva, and it was there that he might
Speaker 2: up with Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, and Claire Claremont. Moralizers
Speaker 2: called them the League of Incest. By summer, Claremont was
Speaker 2: pregnant by Byron. Byron was bored. One evening, he announced,
Speaker 2: we will each write a ghost story. Godwin began the
Speaker 2: story that would become Frankenstein. Byron later woe methinks it
Speaker 2: is a wonderful book for a girl of nineteen not nineteen. Indeed,
Speaker 2: at that time, during the months when Godwin was turning
Speaker 2: her ghost story into a novel and nourishing yet another
Speaker 2: creature in her belly. Shelley's wife, pregnant now with what
Speaker 2: would have been their third child, killed herself. Claremont gave
Speaker 2: birth to a girl Byron's, though most people assumed it
Speaker 2: was Shelley's, and Shelley and Godwin got married. For a
Speaker 2: time they attempted to adopt the girl, though Byron later
Speaker 2: took her, having noticed that nearly all of Godwin and
Speaker 2: Shelley's children had died, I so totally disprove of the
Speaker 2: mode of children's treatment in their family that I should
Speaker 2: look upon the child as going to a hospital. He wrote,
Speaker 2: cruelly about the Shelleys, have they reared one? Byron, by
Speaker 2: no means, interested in rearing a child himself, placed the
Speaker 2: girl in a convent, where she died at the age
Speaker 2: of five. When Frankenstein Begun in the summer of eighteen sixteen,
Speaker 2: was published eighteen months later. It bore an unsigned preface
Speaker 2: by Percy Shelley and a dedication to William Godwin. The
Speaker 2: book became an immediate sensation. It seems to be universally
Speaker 2: known and read. A friend wrote to Percy Shelley. Sir
Speaker 2: Walter Scott wrote in an early review, the author seems
Speaker 2: to us to disclose uncommon powers of poetic imagination. Scott,
Speaker 2: like many readers, assumed that the author was Percy Shelley. Reviewers,
Speaker 2: less enamored of the romantic poet, damned the books Godwinnian
Speaker 2: radicalism and its byronic impieties. John Crocker, a Conservative member
Speaker 2: of Parliament, called Frankenstein a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity, radical,
Speaker 2: unhinged and immoral. But the politics of Frankenstein are as
Speaker 2: intricate as its structure of stories, nested like Russian dolls.
Speaker 2: The outermost Doll is a set of letters from an
Speaker 2: English adventurer to his sister, recounting his Arctic expedition and
Speaker 2: his meeting with the strange, emaciated, haunted Victor Frankenstein. Within
Speaker 2: the adventure's account, Frankenstein tells the story of his fateful experiment,
Speaker 2: which has led him to pursue his creature to the
Speaker 2: ends of the earth. And within Frankenstein's story lies the
Speaker 2: tale told by the creature himself, the littlest, innermost Russian doll,
Speaker 2: the baby. The novel structure meant that those opposed to
Speaker 2: political radicalism often found themselves baffled and bewildered by Frankenstein.
Speaker 2: As literary critics such as Chris Maldick and Adriana Crasian
Speaker 2: have pointed out, the novel appears to be heretical and revolutionary.
Speaker 2: It also appears to be counter revolutionary, depends on which
Speaker 2: doll is doing the talking. If Frankenstein is a referendum
Speaker 2: on the French Revolution, as some critics have read it,
Speaker 2: Victor Frankenstein's politics aligned nicely with those of Edmund Burke,
Speaker 2: who described violent revolution as a species of political monster
Speaker 2: which has always ended by devouring those who have produced it.
Speaker 2: The Creature's own politics, though a lie not with Burkes,
Speaker 2: but with those of two of Burke's keenest adversaries, Mary
Speaker 2: Wolstoncraft and William Godwin. Victor Frankenstein has made use of
Speaker 2: other men's bodies, like a lord over the peasantry or
Speaker 2: a king over his subjects, in just the way that
Speaker 2: Godwin announced when he described feudalism as a ferocious monster.
Speaker 2: How dare you support thus with life? The creature asks
Speaker 2: his maker. The creature, born innocent, has been treated so
Speaker 2: terribly that it has become a villain, and just the
Speaker 2: way that Wolstoncraft predicted, people are rendered ferocious by misery.
Speaker 2: She wrote, and misanthropy is the ever the offspring of discontent.
Speaker 2: Make me happy. The creature begs Frankenstein to no avail
Speaker 2: Mary Wolstoncraft Godwin Shelley took pains that reader's sympathies would
Speaker 2: lie not only with Frankenstein, whose suffering is dreadful, but
Speaker 2: also with the creature, whose suffering is worse. The art
Speaker 2: of the book lies in the way Shelley nudges reader's
Speaker 2: sympathy page by page, paragraph by paragraph, even line by line,
Speaker 2: from Frankenstein to the creature. Even when it comes to
Speaker 2: the Creature's vicious murders, first of Frankenstein's little brother, then
Speaker 2: of his best friend, and finally of his bride, much
Speaker 2: evidence suggests that she succeeded. The justice is indisputably on
Speaker 2: his side. One critic wrote in eighteen twenty four, and
Speaker 2: his sufferings are to me touching to the last degree.
Speaker 2: Here my tale the creature insists when he at last
Speaker 2: confronts his creator. What follows is the autobiography of an infant.
Speaker 2: He awoke and all was confusion. It was poor, helpless, miserable, wretch.
Speaker 2: I knew and could distinguish nothing. He was cold and naked,
Speaker 2: and hungry and bereft of company, and yet, having no language,
Speaker 2: was unable even to name these sensations. But feeling pain
Speaker 2: invade me on all sides, I sat down and wept.
Speaker 2: He learned to walk and began to wander, still unable
Speaker 2: to speak. The uncouth and unarticulate sounds which broke from
Speaker 2: me frightened me into silence again. Eventually he found shelter
Speaker 2: and a lean too adjacent to a cottage alongside of wood, where,
Speaker 2: observing the cottager's talk, he learned of the existence of language.
Speaker 2: I discovered the names that were given to some of
Speaker 2: the most familiar objects of discourse. I learned and applied
Speaker 2: the words fire, milk, bread, and wood. Watching the cottagers
Speaker 2: read a book Ruins of Empires, by the eighteenth century
Speaker 2: French revolutionary, the Comte de Volney, he learned how to
Speaker 2: read and acquired a cursory knowledge of history, a litany
Speaker 2: of injustice. I heard of the division of property, of
Speaker 2: immense wealth and squalid poverty, of rank descent and noble blood.
Speaker 2: He learned that the weak are everywhere abused by the powerful,
Speaker 2: and the poor despised. Shelley kept careful records of the
Speaker 2: books she read and translated, naming title after title and
Speaker 2: compiling a list each year. Milton, Gerta, Rousseau, Ovid Spencer, Coleridge, Gibbon,
Speaker 2: and hundreds more, from history to chemistry. Babe is not well,
Speaker 2: she noted in her diary. While writing Frankenstein, write draw
Speaker 2: and walk read Locke, or write, walk, write, read the
Speaker 2: Rights of Women. The creature keeps track of his reading too,
Speaker 2: and unsurprisingly, he reads the books that Shelley read and
Speaker 2: re read most often. One day, wandering in the woods,
Speaker 2: he stumbles upon a leather trunk lying on the ground
Speaker 2: that contains three books, Milton's Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives, and
Speaker 2: Gerta's The Sorrows of Young Werter, a library that, along
Speaker 2: with Oolney's ruins, determines his political philosophy, has reviewers readily understood.
Speaker 2: His code of ethics is formed on this extraordinary stock
Speaker 2: of poetic theology, pagan biography, adulterous sentimentality, and atheistical Jacobinism,
Speaker 2: According to Frankenstein, most widely read in the United states,
Speaker 2: yet in spite of all his enormities, we think the
Speaker 2: monster a very pitiable and ill used monster. Sir Walter
Speaker 2: Scott found this the most preposterous part of Frankenstein. That
Speaker 2: he should have not only learned to speak, but to read,
Speaker 2: and for aught we know to write. That he should
Speaker 2: have become acquainted with Verter and Plutarch's lives and with
Speaker 2: Paradise Loss by listening through a hole in a wall
Speaker 2: seems as unlikely as that he should have acquired in
Speaker 2: the same way the problems of Euclid or the art
Speaker 2: of bookkeeping by single and double entry. But the Creature's
Speaker 2: account of his education very closely follows the conventions of
Speaker 2: a genre of writing far distant from Scott's own, the
Speaker 2: slave narrative. Frederick Douglas, born into slavery the year Frankenstein
Speaker 2: was published, was following those same conventions when in his
Speaker 2: autobiography he described learning to read by trading with w
Speaker 2: white boys for lessons. Douglas realized his political condition at
Speaker 2: the age of twelve while reading the Dialogue between a
Speaker 2: Master and a Slave reprinted in the Columbian Orator, a
Speaker 2: book for which he paid fifty cents and which was
Speaker 2: one of the only things he brought with him when
Speaker 2: he escaped from slavery. It was his coming of age.
Speaker 2: The more I read, the more I was led to
Speaker 2: abhor and detest my enslavers. Douglas wrote in a line
Speaker 2: that the creature himself might have written likewise, The creature
Speaker 2: comes of age when he finds Frankenstein's notebook recounting the
Speaker 2: experiment and learns how he was created and with what
Speaker 2: injustice he has been treated. It's at this moment that
Speaker 2: the Creature's tale is transformed from the autobiography of an
Speaker 2: infant to the autobiography of a slave. I would at
Speaker 2: times feel that learning to read had been a curse
Speaker 2: rather than a blessing, Douglas wrote. It had given me
Speaker 2: a view of my wretched condition without the remedy. So too,
Speaker 2: the creature increase of knowledge, only to discover to me
Speaker 2: more clearly what a wretched, outcast I was. Douglas, I
Speaker 2: often found myself regretting my own existence and wishing myself dead.
Speaker 2: The creature, cursed, cursed creator? Why did I live? Douglas
Speaker 2: seeks his escape. The creature seeks his revenge. Among the
Speaker 2: many moral and political ambiguities of Shelley's novel is the
Speaker 2: question of whether Victor Frankenstein is to be blamed for
Speaker 2: creating the monster usurping the power of God and of women,
Speaker 2: or for failing to love, care for and educate him.
Speaker 2: The Frankenstein is Oppenheimer model considers only the former, which
Speaker 2: makes for a week reading of the novel. Much of
Speaker 2: Frankenstein participates in the debate over abolition, as several critics
Speaker 2: have astutely observed, and the revolution on which the novel
Speaker 2: most plainly turns is not the one in France, but
Speaker 2: the one in Haiti. For abolitionists in England, the Haitian Revolution,
Speaker 2: along with continued slave rebellions in Jamaica and other West
Speaker 2: Indian sugar islands, raised deeper and harder questions about liberty
Speaker 2: and equality than the revolution in France had, since they
Speaker 2: involved an inquiry into the idea of racial difference. Godwin
Speaker 2: and Wollstonecraft had been abolitionists, as were Percy and Mary Shelley,
Speaker 2: who for instance, refused to eat sugar because of how
Speaker 2: it was produced. Although Britain in the United States enacted
Speaker 2: laws abolishing the importation of slaves in eighteen o seven.
Speaker 2: The debate over slavery in Britain's territories continued through the
Speaker 2: decision in favor of emancipation in eighteen thirty three. Both
Speaker 2: Shelley's closely followed this debate, and in the years before
Speaker 2: and during the composition of Frankenstein they together read several
Speaker 2: books about Africa and the West Indies. Percy Shelley was
Speaker 2: among those abolitionists who urged not immediate but gradual emancipation,
Speaker 2: fearing that the enslaved so long and so violently oppressed
Speaker 2: and denied education, would if unconditionally freed, seek a vengeance
Speaker 2: of blood. He asked, can he who the day before
Speaker 2: was a trampled slave suddenly become liberal, minded, forbearing and independent.
Speaker 2: Given Mary Shelley's reading of books that stressed the physical
Speaker 2: distinctiveness of Africans, her depiction of the creature is explicitly racial,
Speaker 2: figuring him as African as opposed to European. I was
Speaker 2: more agile than they, and could subsist upon coarser diet.
Speaker 2: The creature says, I bore the extremes of heat and
Speaker 2: cold with less injury to my frame. My stature far
Speaker 2: exceeded theirs. This characterization became on stage a caricature, beginning
Speaker 2: with the eighteen twenty three stage production of Frankenstein. The
Speaker 2: actor playing Blank wore blue face paint, a color that
Speaker 2: identified him less as dead than as colored. It was
Speaker 2: this production that George Canning, abolitionist, Foreign Secretary and Leader
Speaker 2: of the House of Commons, invoked in eighteen twenty four
Speaker 2: during a parliamentary debate about emancipation. Tellingly, Canning's remarks brought
Speaker 2: together the novel's depiction of the creature as a baby
Speaker 2: and the culture's figuring of Africans as children. In dealing
Speaker 2: with the Negro, sir, we must remember that we are
Speaker 2: dealing with a being possessing the form and strength of
Speaker 2: a man, but the intellect only of a child. Canning
Speaker 2: told Parliament to turn him loose in the manhood of
Speaker 2: his physical strength, in the maturity of his physical passions,
Speaker 2: but in the infancy of his uninstructed reason, would be
Speaker 2: to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of
Speaker 2: recent romance. In later nineteenth century stage production, the creature
Speaker 2: was explicitly dressed as African. Even the nineteen thirty one
Speaker 2: James Whale film, in which Karlov wore green face paint
Speaker 2: furthers this figuring of the creature as black. He is
Speaker 2: in the film's climactic scene, lynched because the creature reads
Speaker 2: as a slave. Frankenstein holds a unique place in American culture,
Speaker 2: as the literary scholar Elizabeth Young argued a few years
Speaker 2: ago in Black Frankenstein, The Making of an American metaphor,
Speaker 2: what is the use of living when in fact I
Speaker 2: am dead? The black abolitionist David Walker asked from Boston
Speaker 2: in eighteen twenty nine in his appeal to the colored
Speaker 2: citizens of the world, anticipating Eldridge Cleaver's soul on Ice
Speaker 2: by a century and a half. Slavery is everywhere the
Speaker 2: pet monster of the American people, Frederick Douglas declared in
Speaker 2: New York on the eve of the American Civil War.
Speaker 2: Nat Turner was called a monster, so was John Brown.
Speaker 2: By the eighteen fifties, Frankenstein's monster regularly appeared in American
Speaker 2: political cartoons as a nearly naked black man signifying slavery itself,
Speaker 2: seeking vengeance upon the nation that created him. Mary Wolston
Speaker 2: Craft Godwin Shelley was dead by then, her own chaotic
Speaker 2: origins already forgotten, nearly everyone she loved died before she did,
Speaker 2: most of them when she was still very young. Sister
Speaker 2: Fanny Emiley took her own life in eighteen sixteen. Percy
Speaker 2: Shelley drowned in eighteen twenty two. Lord Byron fell ill
Speaker 2: And died in Greece in eighteen twenty four, leaving Mary
Speaker 2: Wolstoncraft Godwin Shelley, as she put it, the last relic
Speaker 2: of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me. She
Speaker 2: shows that as the theme behind the novel she wrote
Speaker 2: eight years after Frankenstein, published in eighteen twenty six, when
Speaker 2: the author was twenty eight. The Last Man is said
Speaker 2: in the twenty first century, when only one man endoors
Speaker 2: the lone survivor of a terrible plague, having failed, for
Speaker 2: all his imagination, for all his knowledge, to save the
Speaker 2: life of a single person. Nurse the Baby read Find
Speaker 2: My Baby Dead twenty eighteen.
Speaker 1: I have a confession. Yeah, I've never read Frankenstein Man,
Speaker 1: so I didn't bring it with me. I'm like ten
Speaker 1: pages in and I love it so far. I just
Speaker 1: got past the epistolary part, so now we're really in
Speaker 1: the meat of it. But I've seen I've caught the
Speaker 1: first glimpse of Frankenstein through the snow of the monster,
Speaker 1: the sledge of Frankenstein's Monster. When was the first time
Speaker 1: you read Frankenstein.
Speaker 2: I'm I'm sure that I read it on my own
Speaker 2: in my like self serious self educated high school years.
Speaker 2: Never read it for school. But then in college I
Speaker 2: took a class on the female Gothic, one of these
Speaker 2: boutique classes that you know, you're really told never to
Speaker 2: teach because it doesn't draw enough students anymore. But I
Speaker 2: recall it being a kind of a big class, but
Speaker 2: it totally transformative class for me. We read, Yeah, we
Speaker 2: read a bunch of female Gothics. It's like one of
Speaker 2: my favorite, if not my favorite class I took in college. Why,
Speaker 2: I don't know. I remember just really loving thinking about
Speaker 2: the nature of authorship in this context, the you know
Speaker 2: a lot of that. Oh do you ever read Mad
Speaker 2: Women in the Attic?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 2: Do you know what it is? So it was really
Speaker 2: influential work of literary criticism. It's huge book. I remember
Speaker 2: going to I remember biking to Neword's bookstore at Edmond Square,
Speaker 2: which is a feminist bok store of course that no
Speaker 2: longer exists. And buying it, and I had never had
Speaker 2: money to buy book, so it was a huge indulgence.
Speaker 2: Is a long, long book, but it's sort of about
Speaker 2: the nineteenth century defiance, active defiance. It was for women
Speaker 2: to write. And the mad woman in the attic is
Speaker 2: Missus Rochester from Jane Eyre, and so how sort of
Speaker 2: all female authorship is at some level involving a kind
Speaker 2: of intellect that needs culturally to be read as madness,
Speaker 2: which is the one way you think about Mary Shelley
Speaker 2: like that it was kind of an active abomination for
Speaker 2: her to write this as such a young girl in particular,
Speaker 2: like this kind of monster coming from her own brain,
Speaker 2: and the sense that you, as a woman, your ideas
Speaker 2: themselves would have to be monstrous, because the idea of
Speaker 2: a woman's thoughts was an abomination itself. The whole class
Speaker 2: was about that, and I don't know, I don't think
Speaker 2: I had read it since then until I wrote the
Speaker 2: piece about Frankenstein, because it was twenty eighteen, so it
Speaker 2: was the two hundredth anniversary of its first publication and
Speaker 2: there are all these anniversary editions coming out, and I
Speaker 2: thought this will be kind of a drag, but yeah,
Speaker 2: it was really fun to think about.
Speaker 1: Again. One of the things I love in the essay
Speaker 1: is you have a section on Mary Shelley's reading, which
Speaker 1: then sort of dovetails with the Monster's reading, And there's
Speaker 1: this kind of idea of biography through the works that
Speaker 1: someone has read, which it sounds like it is something
Speaker 1: that you think about for yourself in terms of one
Speaker 1: you read certain things or what they meant for your thought.
Speaker 1: You have in your mind the kind of literary biography
Speaker 1: of yourself, of the things you've read and how they
Speaker 1: shaped you at different moments.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean there's a whole long convention of that,
Speaker 2: of people making lists of what they read and then
Speaker 2: kind of looking back over it. I think it certainly
Speaker 2: is a whole fetish in the eighteenth century, and a
Speaker 2: lot of commonplace book keeping is about recording the list
Speaker 2: of what you read, not just kind of taking tidbits
Speaker 2: of things that you want to remember from what you've read,
Speaker 2: but sort of constituting yourself by your reading list. It's
Speaker 2: a convention of autobiographical writing. And then in particular I
Speaker 2: think it has a kind of different power of convention
Speaker 2: of people that should have denied an education, right, So
Speaker 2: Frankenstein's The Monster's Own account of his reading, like he
Speaker 2: reads vulnear you know that he's reading himself out of
Speaker 2: a condition of slavery to a condition of freedom, or
Speaker 2: thing about Frederick Douglas's narrative Life of Frederick Douglas written
Speaker 2: by himself. So he you know, he starts with like
Speaker 2: how he his sort of story of the journey from
Speaker 2: slavery to freedom is a journey from illiteracy to literacy,
Speaker 2: and that like there's a whole Enlightenment convention of that.
Speaker 2: There's a different other cultures and other ages have versions
Speaker 2: of it. But yeah, no, I totally absorbed that as
Speaker 2: a kid, and I, you know, fetishistically kept all these
Speaker 2: lists of what I read.
Speaker 1: And do you still keep such a list?
Speaker 2: No? No, But but like Goodreads, is that right? People
Speaker 2: who do that or people who do letterbox about their movies. Uh,
Speaker 2: I don't know. I mean it's incredibly powerful to take
Speaker 2: in a book like so I think you do feel
Speaker 2: like you are you know, like the Goodyear tire guy
Speaker 2: who's like made of tires, Like like you're kind of
Speaker 2: like made of books. Stack of books is like who
Speaker 2: you are if like if you're a reader, that's I
Speaker 2: think most people who read kind of think of themselves.
Speaker 2: There's some total of the books they've read.