Visions of Frankenstein

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, is no doubt one of my favorite novels.  It marks the dawn of a new era: a modern mythology in media, known as science fiction.  Published in 1818, familiarity with the plot endures thanks to Hollywood.  When a mad scientist, Victor Frankenstein, discovers how to reanimate dead matter, he conducts a laboratory experiment that gives birth to “the Creature.”

Contrary to the Hollywood image, the Creature is smart and agile in the original story.  He learns languages quickly and can scale mountains faster than any human.  He is, nevertheless, an unbearably hideous vision to behold.

In fact, the moment the Creature awakens, he is such an appalling sight that Frankenstein flees from his creation.  Realizing the monstrosity he just unleashed into the world, Frankenstein laments:

my imagination was busy in scenes of evil and despair.  I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind, and endowed with the will and power to effect purposes of horror (from Chapter VII).

The Creature, you might imagine, isn’t thrilled by Frankenstein’s reaction, and he encounters even worse fear and prejudice from the outside world.  Overwhelmed by feelings of alienation and resentment, the Creature wreaks vengeance upon his creator by murdering Frankenstein’s neighbors, friends, and family.  Devastated, Frankenstein spends the rest of his life pursuing his creation gone awry in an attempt to destroy the monster once and for all.

The whole story is a myth, of course, but myths—as Joseph Campbell taught—are metaphors.  So what is the Frankenstein monster a metaphor for?

Myths of mechanical monsters

Mythological metaphors are rich in meaning, and the Frankenstein monster is no exception.  Perhaps what’s most striking is (1) he’s a big, powerful, machine-like creature, and (2) his creator can’t control him.  Through these two features, Shelley raised a disturbing question about the modern world.  Have our machines gotten so big and powerful that they’ve become runaway technologies?

From beasts to machines

To illustrate what makes the Frankenstein monster unique, compare him to previous monsters in history.  When you read myths from ancient and medieval times, the monsters frequently show up as giants or dragons.  They appear out of the blue, usually from a supernatural realm, and terrorize the world … until a hero shows up to slay the beast.

When we move from ancient and medieval tales to modern narratives, however, we go from a mythology of beasts to a mythology of machines.  Frankenstein was the first story to usher in this modern take on monsters—that is, as machine-like creatures.  Recall the cinematic renditions of Shelley’s myth, which portray the Frankenstein monster like a piece of machinery, sparked to life by electricity (as in the famous 1931 film).

Naturally, he was the first in a long line of mechanical monsters to follow.  Hence, in today’s mythic stories—most notably science fiction—we see monsters in the same mechanical vein.  The HAL 9000 computer (2001: A Space Odyssey), cyborgs (The Terminator), replicants (Bladerunner), the Borg (Star Trek), AI (The Matrix), and Darth Vader (Star Wars) … to name a few.

The reason these machine-like creatures are monsters almost goes without saying.  Either they lack humanity, or they’ve apparently lost it.  As Obi-Wan Kenobi says of Darth Vader: “He’s more machine now than man.”

Nonetheless, what’s peculiar about mechanical monsters is that, unlike ancient and medieval beasts, they’re our own creations.  So what inspired artists since Shelley to depict modern monsters as such?  In a word, innovation.  Writing during the Industrial Revolution, Shelley observed unprecedented technological progress, a historical trend that, more or less, has continued to this day.  In depicting monsters as machine-like creatures, she basically was issuing a warning about how technological innovation could go wrong.

Runaway technologies

At what point does technological innovation go wrong?  According to Frankenstein, it’s when we lose control of our creations.  As soon as we can’t control our machines, they turn into monsters.  Mechanical monsters, in other words, are metaphors for runaway technologies.  They symbolize what happens once technological innovation triggers a chain of unintended consequences.

Take social media, for example.  At first, platforms like Facebook seemed like a great way to stay in touch with friends and family.  Who would have guessed that, within a short time, social media would devolve into an online outrage machine.  As author Siva Vaidhyanathan says in his book Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy,

If you wanted to build a machine that would distribute propaganda to millions of people, distract them from important issues, energize hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive surveillance all at once, you would make something a lot like Facebook (Vaidhyanathan, 2018, p 19).

Needless to say, none of that was intended.  Clearly, we’ve lost control of this Frankenstein monster.

What, then, are we to do about mechanical monsters?  How might we reclaim control of our technological creations before they become runaway technologies?  Fortunately, Shelley’s myth gives a preliminary answer, which we’ll explore in Part II of this article: Risk society.

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References

Shelley, Mary. (1994). Frankenstein. New York: Dover Publications, Inc.

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. (2018). Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press.