Susan E. Lederer

Scholar traces the many faces of Frankenstein

A traveling exhibit by Yale scholar Susan Lederer shows how Hollywood turned Shelley's sympathetic creature into a despised monster.

Just in time for Halloween comes the publication of Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature by Susan E. Lederer, associate professor of the history of medicine and assistant professor of history.

The slim, richly illustrated volume complements a traveling Frankenstein exhibition that Lederer curated. The show will be visiting libraries across the country through March 2006.

Titled "Frankensteinalia," the exhibit traces the various guises of the man-made monster, from his beginning as the beleaguered protagonist of Mary Shelley's novel to a modern symbol of the ethical limitations of science. Lederer's catalogue was recently published by Rutgers University Press.

As Lederer explains in the catalogue, the popular American perception of Frankenstein as the personification of science run amok was virtually created by Hollywood.

"Today many people know the Frankenstein monster from film and television rather than the novel, yet there are striking differences between Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the 20th-century myth of scientific ambition and destruction," Lederer writes.

Shelley's novel, "Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus," was published in 1818, a time of intense interest in science—as captured in the catalogue with images ranging from book illustrations to scientific inventions, like the "Voltaic Pile" and the crown of cups battery.

The motivations of Shelley's scientist, Victor Frankenstein, are more easily understood in the context of his age of burgeoning medical discoveries and intense scientific experimentation, says the Yale scholar, noting that his creation of a new man was commensurate with experiments in raising the dead with galvanic batteries and other primitive sources of electric current. As the images of human deformities and severed limbs included in the catalogue attest, she adds, the early 19th century imagination was also captured by the macabre.

"Mary Shelley's terrifying vision of a pale student assembling a man out of body parts collected from the graveyard and dissecting rooms vividly parallels the public demonstrations by physicians in which decapitated human bodies, frog legs and ox heads moved in response to electrical stimuli," says Lederer.

The second part of the catalog, titled "The Celluloid Monster," examines the evolution of the creature that Frankenstein created from Shelley's sympathetic victim into Hollywood's monster, an admonishment not to transgress "natural and divine laws." This section also offers a treasury of images of the creature that is now known simply as Frankenstein, including movie stills, Hollywood posters, gum cards, masks and plastic toys.

In the third part of the catalogue, Lederer—author of "Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War" and an expert on medical ethics and bioethics—examines how the myth and metaphor of "Frankenstein" articulate the human dilemma of modern science. She offers a historical overview of scientific research from Shelley's day, when the smallpox vaccination revolutionized immunology, to cutting-edge scientific developments such as cloning and genetically altering animal organs to serve as human transplants.

The Yale scholar asks: "How do we resolve the conflict between the desire to advance scientific knowledge and the fears that such progress will create undesired consequences (a monster, Mary Shelley might say)?"

She cautions that in a democratic society, citizens must make an attempt to stay informed and to engage in political discourse about the ethics and human consequences of scientific advances.

"Unlike Mary Shelley's day, where access to medical and scientific knowledge was limited to the wealthy and educated elite, today we have unparalleled access to such information ...," notes Lederer.

Arming ourselves with information and the tools of evaluation, she suggests, is the best hope of keeping Frankenstein's monster at bay.

- By Dorie Baker : Yale Bulletin & Calendar - October 25, 2002