『Frankenstein』 still speaks to very modern fears

‘Frankenstein’ still speaks to very modern fears（593 words）

By Anjana Ahuja

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From the fevered imagination of a young woman rose a creature so diabolical and vengeful that it has haunted us for two centuries. The beast was nameless but its creator, Frankenstein, was not.

Mary Shelley’s chilling Gothic novel, about a scientist who stitches fragments of corpses together and then brings his tapestry of flesh to life, celebrates its 200th anniversary this month. Age has not diminished Frankenstein’s power. It remains the go-to parable on the perils of unexamined scientific progress — and can even be reinterpreted for the age of artificial intelligence.

The tale was forged in circumstances that themselves read like a work of fiction. Shelley was the product of two extraordinary parents. Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote one of the earliest feminist tracts and died shortly after the birth. Her father was William Godwin, a minister-turned-atheist who became a radical philosopher of the left.

Little Mary Godwin, already blessed with fine genes, was marinated in a bracingly intellectual environment. Visitors to her father’s London home included the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the then married Percy Bysshe Shelley, a high-born rebel. Mary and Percy ended up eloping to the continent; Percy’s first wife killed herself.

Across Europe, Mary and Percy consorted regularly with Lord Byron. While staying at Byron’s villa near Lake Geneva during the stormy summer of 1816, the host challenged his guests to spin a ghost story. She found hers in a terrifying nightmare: “I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.”

It was this wild imagining that she expanded into her most famous work.

Frankenstein was published anonymously in 1818 to mixed reviews. One magazine opined that it was “in doubt whether the head or the heart of the author be the most diseased”. But Walter Scott claimed that the unknown writer exhibited “original genius”.

Mary had seemingly internalised the science of the time, which was focused on the essential distinction between life and death. She was fascinated by reports of “galvanism”, which held that electricity could possibly reanimate dead matter. In the late 18th century, the Italian experimenter Luigi Galvani had shown that the muscles of dead frogs could be made to twitch through electrical stimulation. In 1803, electro-stimulation was tried on a hanged murderer, to similarly ghoulish effect. Today, galvanism finds expression in the form of defibrillators, used to treat those with cardiac arrhythmia.

Frankenstein’s monster took on a life of its own because Shelley so vividly crafted it. The creature, jolted irreversibly into sentient existence, longs for acceptance and companionship, and wreaks its terrible revenge when its creator cannot deliver either. The novel is a story of unforeseen consequences. The use of the “franken-” prefix — as in “frankenfoods”, for example — deliberately channels the same fears about meddling with nature in a way that cannot be undone. The rise of gene-editing, which enables precision tinkering, revives such concerns.

With a little imagination, though, we can also see parallels with the field of AI. Shelley’s protagonist Victor Frankenstein toiled in secrecy, without oversight, for reasons of ego; when he lost control of his creation, others suffered terribly.

The monster also learns how to speak and behave by watching people but falls into an unhappy metaphorical crevice: humanlike enough to arouse fear but not sufficiently human to fit in. Designers of robots call this the “uncanny valley” effect. Even on its bicentenary, Shelley’s masterpiece can assume fresh meaning for a new generation.