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필사 모드: Frankenstein — On the Responsibility of the Creator

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Opening — A Modern Myth Invented by an Eighteen-Year-Old

In the summer of 1816, a small group of people found themselves shut indoors at a villa in Switzerland by bad weather.

That year would later be called the year without a summer.

A volcanic eruption far away had veiled the sky, and the European summer was cold and gloomy.

Unable to go outside, they gathered by the fireplace and decided to invent frightening tales.

Among them was a young woman of eighteen.

Her name was Mary Shelley.

Out of this game of storytelling came Frankenstein.

It is the story of a scientist who stitches together dead flesh to make a living being, and of that creature, abandoned by its maker, wandering the world.

What is remarkable is that this tale did not borrow the clothes of old legend or myth.

Shelley built her story on the science of her own time: on electricity, dissection, and chemistry, the new knowledge of the age.

This is why Frankenstein is often called the first science-fiction novel.

A teenage author, in effect, invented a new myth fit for the age of industry and science.

In this essay we will look at the novel carefully from several angles.

We will cover Mary Shelley and the summer of 1816, the novel's distinctive frame structure, the old confusion around the name Frankenstein, the ethics of creation and the subtitle the modern Prometheus, the eloquence of the abandoned creature and our sympathy for it, the aesthetics of Romanticism and the sublime, why the book is called the first science-fiction novel, and the questions it poses in the age of artificial intelligence and bioengineering.

1. Mary Shelley and the Summer of 1816

Mary Shelley was born in London in 1797, and both of her parents were renowned thinkers of the day.

Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a pioneering writer who championed the rights of women.

Her father, William Godwin, was a radical political philosopher.

But her mother died not long after giving birth to her.

Mary lost her mother almost as soon as she was born.

This early loss left a deep mark on her life.

That someone raised without a mother would later write the tale of a creature born without one gives us much to consider.

Losses That Shaped the Writing

Early death visited Mary's life again and again.

She fell in love with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and wandered through Europe with him.

Along the way she suffered the grief of losing children more than once.

Many believe that this bodily experience of the border between life and death became the soil from which her story of animating dead flesh grew.

The Ghost-Story Contest at Villa Diodati

In the summer of 1816, Mary and Percy Shelley visited the poet Byron, who was staying at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva.

Trapped indoors by foul weather, the group read a collection of German ghost stories together.

Then Byron made a proposal: that each of them should invent a frightening tale.

This is the famous ghost-story contest.

The others soon lost interest, but for several days Mary struggled, unable to think of a fitting story.

Then one night, she later recalled, in a state between waking and sleep she saw a vivid vision.

It was of a pale student kneeling beside the thing he had pieced together.

And the thing began to stir and move, quickened by some power.

From that vision, Frankenstein was born.

The novel was first published anonymously in 1818, the year she turned twenty.

2. A Frame Within a Frame — Three Layers of Story

The structure of Frankenstein is more intricate than it first appears.

The novel does not flow through a single voice.

It is built as a nested frame, with the tales of three people folded one inside another.

At the outermost layer is an explorer named Walton.

He is sailing toward the North Pole and writing letters to his sister.

These letters form the outermost border of the novel.

One day Walton rescues a man dying on the ice, and that man is Victor Frankenstein.

Victor tells Walton his astonishing story.

How he made a living being, the ruin it brought upon him, and how the pursuit of his own creation carried him all the way to these polar wastes.

This is the second layer.

And within the heart of Victor's tale, yet another voice breaks in.

It is the creature's own account.

The abandoned creature tells, in its own words, how it learned about the world and acquired language, entirely alone.

Drawn as a diagram, this three-layered structure looks like this.

[ Walton's letters — the Arctic ]
  In letters to his sister, he meets Victor
    └─[ Victor's tale ]
        The confession of a scientist who made life and was ruined by it
          └─[ The creature's account ]
              The abandoned being tells its own story in its own voice

There is a reason this structure matters.

It makes us see the same events layered through several points of view.

We look upon the same tragedy through the creator's eyes, and then through the creature's.

Neither side is wholly right or wholly wrong.

Within this overlapping, the question of whom to blame refuses to be answered easily.

3. Who Is Frankenstein — An Old Confusion

Here is a fact that must be addressed.

Many people know Frankenstein as the name of the monster.

But this is a mistake.

Frankenstein is not the monster; it is the name of the scientist who made the monster.

More precisely, it is Victor Frankenstein, the surname of the creator.

And the creature itself, remarkably, has no name at all.

In the novel it is called only the creature, the monster, the demon, the being.

The creator never gave the thing he made a name at all.

This fact is anything but trivial.

To have no name is to be unaccepted as a person.

We give names to those we love.

To speak a name is to give a being a place within the world.

Yet this creature is abandoned from the moment of its birth, without even a name.

That the name Frankenstein has, over the years, migrated from the creator to the creature may be no accident.

It may be that the popular unconscious has sensed just how blurred the line is between creator and created, between maker and made.

This confusion of names is more than a matter of trivia.

It touches the central question of the novel.

Who, after all, is the real monster?

The creature born with a hideous form, or the creator who made a life and refused to answer for it?

4. The Ethics of Creation — The Modern Prometheus

The novel's subtitle is the modern Prometheus.

Prometheus is a figure from Greek myth, the being who stole the fire of the gods and gave it to humankind.

With that fire humanity built its civilization, but Prometheus himself drew the wrath of the gods and suffered a terrible punishment.

Mary Shelley had a clear purpose in choosing this subtitle.

Victor Frankenstein, too, reached into a domain not granted to humankind: the power to create life. And like Prometheus, he meets a terrible ruin as the price.

What Can Be Done Versus What Should Be Done

Here arises the most important question of the novel.

Victor was able to make life.

But he never asked whether he ought to; he was consumed entirely by whether it could be done, and never considered whether it should be.

The ability to do something and the question of whether one should do it belong to entirely different dimensions.

It is precisely the gap between these two that this novel has kept posing for two hundred years.

A Responsibility Heavier Than Creation

Victor's true fault may not be the making of life itself.

The greater fault lies in having made it and then abandoned it.

The moment the creature opens its eyes, Victor recoils in horror at its hideous form and flees.

He neither cares for, nor teaches, nor takes responsibility for the being he made.

To bring something into the world is to take on the duty of living alongside it.

Victor chased only the glory of creation and turned away from the heavy responsibility that follows it.

It is at this point that Frankenstein rises above a mere ghost story.

This is a tale about the responsibility of the one who makes.

5. The Creature's Voice — How a Monster Is Made

A large part of why this novel has been loved so long is that it gives the monster a voice.

The monster of the films is usually portrayed as a mute and hideous thing, but the creature of the original novel speaks with astonishing skill.

It teaches itself language, reads books, and recounts its condition in clear and reasoned words.

Not Born Evil

When we listen to the creature's account, we learn that it was not an evil being from the start.

The one that came into the world was, if anything, innocent.

It longed for warmth, was moved by beauty, and wished to belong among others.

Secretly watching over a poor family, it even gathers firewood for them without their knowing.

Rejection Makes the Monster

But the world, seeing only its hideous exterior, casts it out.

Wherever it approaches, people scream, strike it, and drive it away.

Every good intention curdles into terror before its face.

Under repeated rejection, its heart slowly twists.

The being that sought love comes at last to harbor hatred.

Here the novel poses a deep question.

Are monsters born, or are they made?

This touches an old debate about human nature: the question of what is inborn and what is nurtured.

The creature was born with a hideous body, but not with an evil heart.

What made it a monster was not its nature but the coldness of the world toward it.

At this passage we find ourselves, unexpectedly, feeling pity for the monster.

And a chilling question suddenly arises: which side, in this story, is truly the more monstrous?

6. Romanticism and the Sublime — Landscapes of Alps and Ice

Frankenstein is a work of the Romantic era.

Romanticism was a movement in art and thought that swept across Europe from the late eighteenth into the early nineteenth century.

It placed feeling and imagination, nature and the individual, above reason and order.

The marks of Romanticism are steeped throughout this novel.

The Feeling of the Sublime

One of the central ideas of Romantic aesthetics is the sublime.

The sublime is the feeling, mingled of awe and dread, that a human being feels before vast and overwhelming nature.

The sheer peaks of the Alps, the endless spread of glaciers, the driving storm — before such scenes a person realizes just how small a being he is.

Frankenstein is full of such descriptions of sublime nature.

The scene where Victor climbs an Alpine mountain in despair, the field of ice where he meets the creature, and at last the frozen sea of the Arctic.

These landscapes are not mere backdrops.

They are mirrors that reflect the inner life of the characters and the emotion of the story.

The Contrast of Nature and Science

Interestingly, nature in this novel is portrayed as a sacred domain that humans must not carelessly invade.

Victor's science, by contrast, appears as an arrogance that oversteps the boundary of that sacred realm.

The Romantic sensibility that grows humble before vast nature, and the ambition of science that seeks to conquer nature's secrets.

The tension between the two runs through the whole novel.

7. Why It Is Called the First Science-Fiction Novel

Frankenstein is often named the world's first science-fiction novel.

Of course, fantastic tales existed long before it, but there is a point that sets Frankenstein apart from them.

Not Magic, but Science

In this novel, life is not made by magic or by a miracle of God.

Victor does not chant a spell or pray to a deity.

He studies chemistry, learns anatomy, and probes the structure of dead bodies.

The interest in electricity, then newly rising, also underlies the story.

Life is made through human knowledge and experiment.

It is precisely this that makes Frankenstein science fiction.

Not the supernatural, but the science of its own day, becomes the engine of the story.

Taking Up the Questions Science Raises

The true mark of science fiction lies not merely in the presence of science and technology.

It lies rather in confronting head-on the questions that science poses to human beings and society.

Frankenstein did exactly this.

Before the possibilities opened by new knowledge, how far may a human being go?

This is the very question that countless works of science fiction have taken up ever since.

And so many regard this novel as the starting point of that long lineage.

A teenage author, standing upon the science of her own time, opened the door to this new kind of story.

8. Frankenstein Today — Artificial Intelligence and Bioengineering

There is a reason Frankenstein is summoned again and again even now, more than two hundred years on.

It is because the question it raised has grown all the more urgent for us today.

Here, though, I want to be careful not to overstate the connection.

This is not an answer but an analogy worth thinking through together.

A New Creature Called Artificial Intelligence

We are now building artificial intelligences that learn and judge on their own.

We do not fully know what this being we have made will become, and here Victor's question comes alive again.

We are eager about whether it can be built, but are we asking enough about whether it should be, and how we will take responsibility for it?

Can we avoid repeating Victor's mistake of making a creature and then failing to care for it?

Technologies That Handle Life

The advance of bioengineering, too, brings this novel freshly to mind.

Human beings have now reached a stage where they can lay hands on the very blueprint of life, and the old phrase about laying hands on the domain of God no longer sounds like mere metaphor.

Frankenstein reminds us of what we must not forget before such power.

Handling the Analogy with Care

Of course, such connections call for caution.

Artificial intelligence is not a living creature, and today's bioengineering does not amount to making a monster.

To fear every new technology on the strength of Frankenstein would be to misread the novel.

The heart of this novel is not to condemn creation itself as a sin.

It is, rather, to take responsibility to the end for what one has made.

What Shelley left us is not a fear of technology but a question about the responsibility of the creator.

It is for this very reason that this old story remains valid in every age that makes something new.

9. Reading Beyond the Movie Monster

Many people meet Frankenstein first not through the book but through the films.

That famous image from the black-and-white film: the green monster with bolts in its neck, walking with arms outstretched. But this popular image differs greatly from the original.

To read the original beyond the image of the films, it helps to keep a few things in mind.

First, the monster is not a mute being.

The creature of the original speaks fluently, thinks deeply, and unfolds its sorrow with reason.

To listen to its words is the heart of reading this novel.

Second, the center of gravity of this story lies not in horror but in pity and responsibility.

This is not a tale meant to frighten but a tale meant to make us think.

Third, read it while asking who the real monster is.

Is it the creature born with a hideous body, the creator who abandoned it, or the world that cast it out for its looks alone?

Fourth, remember that this novel was born from the hand of an eighteen-year-old woman.

That a young author raised after losing her mother wrote the tale of a being born without one and then abandoned makes the work all the deeper.

Read in this way, Frankenstein comes to us not as a mere ghost story but as a serious meditation on humanity and creation.

Closing — Before the Things We Have Made

Frankenstein is a story written more than two hundred years ago.

Yet its questions have not aged in the least.

This novel gives us no comfortable answers.

Instead it quietly presses upon us the questions we have taken pains to put off.

When I make something, am I prepared to answer for it to the very end?

Am I casting out a being I do not understand on the strength of its appearance alone?

Do I distinguish between what I can do and what I ought to do?

Mary Shelley gives no answers to these questions.

She merely sets before us the tale of a creator and the creature he abandoned.

What we see within that tale is left entirely to the reader.

This modern myth, invented by a teenage author during the year without a summer, still poses the same question to every age that makes something new.

Before the thing you have made, what will you become?

Questions to Ponder

  1. Is Victor's true fault the making of life, or the abandoning of what he made? Between creation and responsibility, which weighs the more?
  2. The creature was born with a hideous body but not an evil one. Then who, and what, made it a monster?
  3. What does it tell us that the name Frankenstein has migrated from the creator to the monster?
  4. In the age of artificial intelligence and bioengineering, how should we receive this novel's question about the responsibility of the creator?

References

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