230
This is a characteristic of the city of which Mary Shelley was well aware, commenting
on it in a letter she included in A History of a Six Weeks' Tour and dated 1 June
1816.
229
Galvanism is named after the inventor of the electric cell, Luigi Galvani, professor
of medicine at the University of Bologna. It specifically refers to the application
of an electrical charge to dead tissue, which was usually demonstrated by making the
legs of dead frogs move as if with life. Galvani's nephew, Giovanni Aldini (1762-1834),
conducted experiments in London recounted in John Aldini, An Account of the Late Improvements
in Galvanism, with a series of curious and interesting experiments . . . [and an]
Appendix, containing the author's Experiments on the body of a Malefactor executed
at Newgate (London: Cuthell & Martin and John Murray, 1803). In the first canto of
Don Juan, written later in the year in which Frankenstein was published (1818), Byron
remarks that "This is the age of oddities let loose" (line 1021), and comments on
various scientific advances:
Bread has been made (indifferent) from potatoes;
And galvanism has set some corpses grinning. . . .
(I.1033-4)
For a more serious contemporary estimate, written by a major figure engaged in research
on this phenomenon who possesses an acute sense of its implications for radical developments
in chemistry and physics, consult William Nicholson's account in The British Encyclopedia
(1809).
228
In this context Victor means a long passage-way, which was a feature of many older
European residences. Such a gallery allowed the inhabitants a place in inclement weather
to exercise themselves by walking: in major houses the gallery would often contain
the family picture collection. In this instance, its purposes are directly contrary
and antisocial, providing Victor a protective distance for his furtive experiments.
227
Frankenstein
Over the years in which Mary Shelley's novel was transformed into the stuff of legend, much speculation has centered on where she might have encountered the name of her protagonist. Unfortunately, none of the suggestions has moved beyond the level of speculation.
It is conceivable that she heard the name of a ruined castle on the Rhine during the hurried trip that she, her half-sister Claire Clairmont, and Percy Bysshe Shelley took down that river in returning to England from the 1814 trip she memorialized in A History of a Six Weeks' Tour, a trip also quickly replicated in the third volume of Frankenstein (III:1:16). But this is unlikely, since none of the party spoke German, and Mary represents them as being rather standoffish to their fellow passengers during the trip.
Similarly, there is no documentary evidence of a visit to the Frankenstein Castle near Darmstadt. Indeed, had it happened, one would have expected it to have been noted either by P. B. Shelley in the Preface he wrote to the 1818 edition or by Mary Shelley herself in the retrospective history she penned for the Introduction in 1831. What the speculation has proven, however, is that the Frankenstein name is common enough not to have needed an actual prototype. The only real oddity about the family name, and one never broached in the text, is how so Germanic an appellation became attached to a French-speaking family in Switzerland.
226
This sudden elevation of language should not be merely dismissed as a facile rhetorical
heightening for effect. What Mary Shelley seems deliberately to be doing here is evoking
a succession of elements and emotional states associated with the Sublime in eighteenth-century
aesthetic theory. As the Creature in his coming to life is associated with the Sublime,
so he is its avatar wherever he appears in the novel, either living within a sublime
landscape (e.g. Mont Blanc or northern Siberia) or terrifying the human beings whom
he encounters by his extra-human size and countenance.
225
The novel reverts once more to the importance of male bonding, already developed in
Victor's narrative in the warm relationship between Alphonse Frankenstein and his
wife's father, M. Beaufort, represented in its second paragraph (I:1:2 and note),
and before that in the intimacy struck between Walton and Victor aboard ship (I:L4:24).
224
The first embarkation on a major and, to some critics, puzzling feature of this novel,
its all but exclusive emphasis on male bonding.
If we consider novels that are contemporary with Frankenstein and have been accorded
a similar canonical reputation, we might expect a woman novelist to emphasize the
richness of female relationships (for instance, the sisters of Austen's Sense and
Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice) and a man (the classic example might be Walter
Scott in Ivanhoe) to concentrate on the representation of male competition and loyalties.
Perhaps, however, we are overly conditioned by stereotypes. On the one hand, there
is the fact that Frankenstein was published anonymously and was taken by at least
one critic, Walter Scott himself, to be the work of a male author (see his review
in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine). From this it could be argued that Mary Shelley
might have wished to escape the preoccupation with female experience in contemporary
"lady novelists." And on the other hand, from a feminist perspective it could likewise
be argued that a women might have a very different take on that male competition and
loyalty than a man. Inasmuch as masculine terms might be said to define the boundaries
of a woman's existence, Mary Shelley might have thought an exclusionary male experience
to be a province to which she had every right to demand access. This would have been
particularly the case in 1816, after nearly a quarter century of almost continuous
warfare in Europe.
223
Elizabeth's candor is exemplary of her virtue and stands in marked contrast to Victor's
resolve of silence.
222
Candor is an important character trait in the novel, and it is to Walton's credit
that he so naturally evinces it. His openness will elicit a similar frankness from
Victor Frankenstein, who for the first time in his existence will tell his entire
story. But that narration, then, raises a serious problem. Not only are there many
signs of instability in it, the major one being Victor's wish to revise it even as
it goes along (III:WC:4 and note); but his earlier lack of candor with his family
and friends is akin to dishonesty, which, if so common a practice throughout his mature
life, must raise serious doubts about the truthfulness of the narration that comprises
the bulk of this novel.
221
This feminine ideal stands in sharp contrast to the masculine pursuit of glory (I:L1:6,
I:1:18), and, as marked here, it will continue to resonate through the course of the
novel. In some sense the theme has already been signalled in Walton's attendance on
the exhausted Victor Frankenstein (I:L4:10).