Frankenstein rebound

[calimac]

I never actually finished reading Frankenstein, a book that struck me as a rather tedious philosophical treatise in novelistic disguise. (I've never gotten far into Ayn Rand, either.)

However, I've been reading some articles on its 200th anniversary in Slate, and was struck by this quote, the Monster speaking to Dr. F:

Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even YOU turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance.

Read that last phrase again.

Mary Shelley not only invented science fiction.

She discovered the Uncanny Valley.

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Ooh yes - good catch!

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I'll grant the second, tentatively, but not the first. Shelley was an important early science fiction writer, but I think that Swift clearly precedes her. Of course what he was doing was science fiction as a vehicle for social satire, but that's a known tradition: Stanislaw Lem wrote a lot of it, as did many Russians, and for that matter Amis and Conquest made it central to English language science fiction (though I think it was less so than they believed). But when Swift talks about how his giant people are twelve times as tall as humans, and therefore eat 1728 times as much, or when he gives orbital date for the imaginary moons of Mars, he's literalizing his imaginary constructs in precisely the way that science fiction does.

However, Frankenstein, for all that it's slow going, is very science fictional in actually being about a scientific idea: Criminological theory. The creature explains to Frankenstein that he was turned to crime by the cruelty with which people treated him in response to his hideousness. This is the "society creates criminals by oppression" theory. And one of the first advocates of that theory was William Godwin—Mary Shelley's father. (Conversely, the early movies, with the monster having a defective brain, reflect the "crime is inborn" atavism theories of 19th century criminology, almost the polar opposite of the novel's theme.)

One of Ayn Rand's books has a passage where she praises Frankenstein at some length.

(Personally, I find Dracula more exciting reading. Have you been able to get through it?)

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Oh! Yes, indeed.