Irvine Valley College - Online Literature Study of the School of Humanities and Languages

Literature 110 - Popular Literature

Spring 2013 - Ticket #62740  // Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink, MFA, Instructor

 

Unit 2b:  Horrors! continued

Science becomes Science Fiction 

Science in 1800:

The words "science" and "technology" have slippery meanings for us.  On the one hand, there have been "scientists" since the first shaman observed the movements of the moon, planets, and stars in the Stone Age.  And technology has been around from the moment that these sky-watchers discovered that it was best to hunt certain animals and gather certain foods under different "moons" - i.e. months.  In modern parlance, though, we tend to think of the rise of science and technology as something that happened in the Renaissance.  In any case, the popular mind began to focus with great excitement (most relevant to our theme of the Monster) on the preliminary experiments with blood, bodily fluids, electricity and their relationship to life.  

Blundell's Gravitator 
Pennsylvania State University Libraries 



James Blundell, a London physician troubled by the many women who died after childbirth from massive bleeding, introduced blood transfusion between humans, using the simple apparatus shown here. Reproduction of an illustration from The Lancet, 1828-1829. 


Galvanism:

During the 1790s, Italian physician Luigi Galvani demonstrated what we now understand to be the electrical basis of nerve impulses when he made frog muscles twitch by jolting them with a spark from an electrostatic machine. When Frankenstein was published, therefore, the word galvanism implied the release, through electricity, of mysterious life forces. 

"Perhaps," Mary Shelley recalled of her talks with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, "a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things." 



Illustration of Italian physician Luigi Galvani's experiments, in which he applied electricity to frogs legs; from his book De Viribus Electricitatis in Motu Musculari (1792). 

Luigi Galvani, 1737-1798, Italian physician and physicist.

Louis Galvani


Galvani's great interest was "animal electricity," which he studied in his post as a teacher of medicine in Bologna.  In 1780, he constructed a crude electric cell with two different metals and the natural fluids from a dissected frog. In another experiment he applied current to the nerves of a frog and observed the contractions of the muscles in their legs. This led to widespread speculation on the relationship of biology, chemistry, and electricity, and perhaps encouraged speculation on medical electricity, such as George Adams and Benjamin Franklin were exploring. His theoretical foundation was later corrected by Alessandro Volta. For a contemporary account, consult William Nicholson's entry in The British Encyclopedia (1809). 

Body Parts and Grave robbing

To make his creature, Victor Frankenstein "dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave" and frequented dissecting rooms and slaughterhouses. In Mary Shelley's day, as in our own, the healthy human form delighted and intrigued artists, physicians, and anatomists. But corpses, decaying tissue, and body parts stirred almost universal disgust.  Alive or dead, whole or in pieces, human bodies arouse strong emotion - and account for part of Frankenstein's enduring hold on us. 

 

Childbirth in the Middle Ages - note the Astronomer charting the stars for the Astrological sign of the child

Childbirth:

Pregnancy and childbirth, as well as death, were an integral part of Mary Shelley's young adult life. She had four children and a miscarriage that almost killed her. This was all before the age of twenty-five. Only one of her children, Percy Florence, survived to adulthood and outlived her. In June of 1816, when she had the waking nightmare which became the catalyst of the tale, she was only nineteen and had already had her first two children. Her first child, Clara, was born prematurely February 22, 1815 and died March 6. Mary, as any woman would be, was devastated by this and took a long time to recover. 

If you are not familiar with Childbirth practices in the Middle Ages and in recent history, please see this SideBar information page on Women and Childbirth.

So we can see that a cluster of important scientific and medical ideas were at work around 1800 - the discovery of bodily fluids, the capture of electricity, the medical fascination with cadavers from the graveyard, and, sadly, the ongoing terrors of childbirth.  All of these came together for the first time, really, in literature, in the creation of a Science Fiction genre that pre-supposed that science might be able to do what had never been done before - create life.

Since that time, Science Fiction, as a popular genre, has grown to include many other kinds of themes and possible worlds- we will explore these in Unit 8.  Still and all, the humble beginnings were here, with Mary Shelley and the birth of her Monster.

 

continue on to "Readable" Characters

Patterned Structure

Reassuring Plot

Clear-cut Value System

Mythological and Folk Referents

Intimacy of Style and Tone

Continue to Section (2c)  

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Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink, your Instructor, is a Professor of English in the School of Humanities and Languages

Irvine Valley College, Irvine, California