• cultural history
• english literature
• literature and medicine
• narrative ethics
• medical humanities

As we reflect on the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818, the work’s hold on the popular imagination shows no signs of waning. Three major motion pictures were released in the past 3 years. A mainstay of classrooms as well as theatres, Frankenstein has never been out of print. In fact, ever-more-rapid development in medicine and science continues to increase the novel’s relevance and its utility as a shorthand for ethical critique. In 2016, a piece in Engineering and Technology asked, “Frankenstein Redux: Is Modern Science Making a Monster?”1 Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts surveys the myriad genetically engineered animals that have been developed.2 Experiments with artificial intelligence and monkeys have recently been labelled ‘Frankenstein science’, as have mice head transplants and injections with fetal cells. A 2011 report of The Academy of Medical Sciences thus acknowledges the “Frankenstein fear” that "medical research which creates ‘humanised’ [transgenic] animals is going to generate ‘monsters’" (p. 72), and further that “scientists are possessed of a certain hubris, a false belief in their own powers and their own rights to exercise them in pursuit of their own projects, hence abusing their capacities without proper consideration of the consequences” (p. 73).3

‘Frankenstein’ has become a term enabling the ready expression of critique that serves, at the same time, to foreclose sustained, thoughtful ethical deliberation. Broadly speaking, media coverage sensationalises and simplifies ethical issues in science, packaging them in terms of dilemmas—two opposed, competing options.ⁱ ,4 More specifically, trends in general cultural understanding sensationalise the novel while minimising its complexity and significance. The shock value of ‘Frankenstein’ sells, but what is it selling? ‘Frankenstein’ designates an iconic Halloween monster or a horror film, having been featured in over 50 movies. If the story is considered science fiction and therefore implausible, uninformed or superstitious; if Doctor Frankenstein is viewed as evil or a ‘mad scientist’; if his creation is a shambling green hulk most akin to supernatural monsters like vampires, then it is easier to dismiss the story as fantastic and symbolic, and easier to believe that we can clearly identify what would count as ‘Frankenstein science’ today.ⁱⁱ We ‘know’ the answer. Lesson learnt. Yet ‘Frankenstein’ is not simply the name of the mad doctor, nor of his failed creation, but of a novel—and the novel’s lessons are not so simple.

A scholarly contrast between the way Frankenstein is commonly read—wrongly, by students, by naïve readers, by pop culture—and a more sophisticated, literary, theoretical reading has become almost de rigeur.ⁱⁱⁱ 5 6 I cannot claim exemption, but I will take seriously the bioethical meaning that so many readers find in the novel. The novel’s canonical position depends on its notorious complexity—“exactly to be the sort of text one argues about” (Lipking, p. 313)—whereas its cultural fame depends on the seeming clarity of its lesson. The split between academic analysis and popular readings has resulted in scant attention to bioethical implications, which get ceded to the non-scholarly or ‘applied’ realm. Likewise with Frankenstein’s status as ‘genre fiction’, namely, as the starting point of science fiction in what Fredric Jameson calls a ‘miraculous birth’ (p. 1).^iv 7 8 What if we read Frankenstein as science fiction, or fiction about science? Darko Suvin, the foremost theorizer of science fiction, defines it as “the literature of cognitive estrangement” produced through confrontation of the ‘novum’ or radically new and strange.^v 9 10 Frankenstein’s novum is the creature, and it is also the emerging practice of science itself. Although the novel strangeness of science has lessened in the intervening centuries, its radical potential, embodied in the creature, remains. Rather than a ‘miraculous birth’, Frankenstein deliberately recites its mythical progenitors to frame a ‘modern’ myth. This myth instantiates science as the dominant explanatory paradigm while insisting on the centrality of science’s ethical dimension, which becomes the cognitive work of the novel. Frankenstein’s formal structure enacts an ethical model, not as a completed ideal of the pat moral, but as a creative process oriented towards instantiation that can never be the ‘thing’ itself.

In the popular imagination, Victor Frankenstein is the ‘mad scientist’ whose creation of the monster is wrong. This reading aligns with virtue ethics, in which character guides ethical decision-making: power-hungry, Victor is deranged, evil, or misguided and makes bad choices. In the novel, however, Victor is a trained scholar whose methods and goals mirror those of contemporary scientists. When asked to describe the novel’s genesis for the third edition of 1831, Shelley recounts conversations about research by physician Erasmus Darwin.^vi She continues, “Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth” (pp. 171–2).11 The opening of the 1818 ‘Preface’ asserts that prominent doctors and ‘physiological writers’ agree that such an "event" is "not of impossible occurrence" (p. 5). Indeed, Charles Henry Wilkinson of the Royal College of Surgeons gave public lectures in London and published Elements of Galvanism in 1804: a multivolume comprehensive review of experimental, animal and human research in support of its myriad medical applications.12 The title page promised “practical directions for constructing the galvanic apparatus, and plain systematic instructions for performing all the various experiments” in order to advance “its cultivation as promising the most important results to mankind” (p. iv). The 1818 ‘Preface’ attributes the novel’s power to this scientific basis, which renders the story “exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment” (p. 5). This is a genre claim as well: the rational credibility asserted here is what for Suvin opens science fiction (as opposed to fantasy) up to cognition and to critical reflection on the world as it currently exists.^vii

Although he was early drawn to arcane, discredited natural philosophers, Victor spent years becoming a modern "man of science, and not merely a petty experimentalist" (p. 28), studying "every branch of natural philosophy" (p. 28) and especially chemistry. His university mentor, Waldman, declared,

“The ancient teachers of this science”, said he, “promised impossibilities, and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pour [sic] over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and shew how she works in her hiding places. They ascent into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers” (pp. 27–8).

Victor’s own admirable if lofty goals—“if I could but banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death” (p. 22)—sound little different from those attributed to "modern masters" of science. Nor do his methods: “the stages of the discovery were distinct and probable” (p. 30). Studying corpses and electrical experimentation have ample historical analogues, and were popularised through print culture aided by technological advances.^viii 13 Giovanni Aldini’s application of current to the body of a hanged criminal in 1803 London was supported by the Royal College of Surgeons and became a sensation. Similar experiments were conducted in 1818 in Glasgow, and William Sturgeon reported his efforts to ‘galvanise’ four Woolwich drowning victims in popular lectures, which were then published in 1843.^ix 14 15

Such context makes clear that the representation of Victor is also a representation of science, minimising the usefulness of a virtue ethics approach focused on Victor’s individual moral character. Does the novel, then, condemn science itself? Should we heed Victor’s own warning: “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow” (p. 31)? Is the ‘danger’ a lack of respect for "nature"? A man’s ‘nature’ dictates his ‘native’ position, both predetermined by birth. Victor’s next sentence—“When I found so astonishing a power placed within my hands” (p. 31)—recalls Waldman’s panegyric. "Modern mastershave “acquired new and almost unlimited powers” by “penetrat[ing] into the recesses of nature, and shew[ing] how she works in her hiding places” (p. 28). Here "nature" takes on its more standard meaning of the natural world, but with the same sense that it is predetermined. Scientific exploration beyond the bounds of nature is encouraged by its gendering as a passive feminine to be conquered^x 16—the very meaning of Victor’s name. Waldman’s diction stretches back centuries to Sir Francis Bacon, after all. Consider Aphorism XVIII of The New Organon (1620): “In order to penetrate into the inner and further recesses of nature, it is necessary that both notions and axioms be derived from things by a more sure and guarded way”. Those less enthusiastic about such "penetration" often cite nature as a given ethical boundary. In The Frankenstein Syndrome, for example, philosopher Bernard Rollin unpacks the commonplace argument that genetic engineering is intrinsically wrong because it is ‘against nature’. Chapter titles rely heavily on common knowledge of the Frankenstein story and its accepted meaning: ’There are certain things humans were not meant to do', ‘Rampaging monsters’, and ‘The plight of the creature’. Such a position can dovetail with a Christian framework relying on created nature. Indeed, Victor’s diction invokes the forbidden Tree of Knowledge and Satanic aspirations. His retrospective description of the process likewise echoes Biblical creation: “Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world” (p. 32).

When deployed as ethical critique, ‘Frankenstein’ usually means we should not ‘play God’—a phrase that has transcended religion proper to include reverence for nature and fear of transgressing boundaries without the ability to control the consequences. Victor does indeed aspire to "break through" the "bounds" of life and death (p. 32), but so do science and medicine, as evidenced by the discoveries touted by Waldman. Rather than rejecting science, Frankenstein challenges the uncritical elevation of science to a form of religion, a dogmatic authority believed intrinsically true and good. In short, it insists on the ethical dimension of science. The novel does not offer ‘lessons’ in the sense of ethical rules by which we should abide, but ‘lessons’ in its root meaning of legere, to read. ‘Frankenstein’ is a myth: a profoundly if not literally true story that teaches fundamental cultural knowledge through a process of reading or interpretation.

Frankenstein functions as a myth in popular and traditional senses of the term. ‘Mythic’ connotes untrue or unrealistic, located in an alternate world. Thus, Suvin identifies estrangement as the common mode of myth and science fiction, as opposed to mimetic fiction.^xi Myths are larger-than-life, often with superhuman characters and extraordinary events, universally recognised stories intended to teach fundamental and timeless lessons and values. Frankenstein’s mythic status within society is unmistakable, and what enables the term to function as a label: Frankenstein experiments, ‘Doctor Frankenstein’. This status reflects the story’s profound and continued cultural resonance. But it also manifests the elevated authority and purpose deliberately assumed by the work. The 1818 title page frames the novel with the Greek myth of Prometheus and with Christian myths, including Satan’s rebellion and Adam’s creation and Fall, as portrayed in John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost (1667).^xii 17–19 The novel invokes the twin foundational traditions of classical and Christian mythology, reworking them to produce a future-oriented, self-consciously ‘modern’ myth. The generalised ‘science’ in its root meaning of knowledge at issue in those sacred myths of human origin becomes the recognisable empiricism and technological method of Baconian science. In this way, the historical specificity of the novel’s science stands in for an everlasting methodological pattern typical of myth. While helping to establish science as constitutive of modernity, the novel simultaneously argues that science itself is mythic. The meaning of scientific knowledge and the authority of the scientist are neither straightforward nor transparent but narratively enacted.^xiii 20

The novel’s subtitle, ‘The Modern Prometheus’, positions Victor as the Titan who created humans from mud (or corpses), then gave them fire (or electricity) stolen from the gods. Jupiter chained Prometheus eternally in the wilds, getting his liver daily ripped out by an eagle. Victor too is punished by protracted daily near-death. His lone, final, futile pursuit of the creature across the arctic wastes externalises his utter loss of ‘paradise’ and inescapable torment. Death and desolation mark his punishment, echoing humankind’s Fall. Everyone Victor cared about has died, and he has been expelled from society, chained by his duty to kill the dangerous wild creature—a duty that finally claims his life. Yet Shelley’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, reworked the myth in Prometheus Unbound (1820). Tyrannical Jupiter was overthrown, and Prometheus freed. In the ‘Author’s Preface’, Shelley explains that he deliberately chose Prometheus as the hero of a great lyrical drama because he is “the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends”. Thus, Victor’s own Titanic and nobly motivated aspirations—broadly shared by science writ large—do not automatically condemn him. But neither do they secure the rightness of his actions. ‘Prometheus’ is not a stable or univalent referent: which story? In addition, Victor’s ‘nature’—his qualities and upbringing—and ‘motives’ and ‘ends’ occupy only a small fraction of the text. In relation to the narrative present, all of that, everything leading up to the ‘discovery’, is a long-ago fait accompli given relatively little attention and dispensed with early in the novel. If the etymology of ‘myth’ is plot, then it is notable that, structurally, Frankenstein is not a story about the creation ‘event’. The novel thus refuses a juridical approach, which “tend[s] to approach the morally troublesome situation as if it were atemporal” and therefore moves "sideways" to flesh out context instead of moving "backward and forward" to understand “how we got ‘here’” (p. 39).21

Another myth is immediately juxtaposed with that of Prometheus, countering Victor’s position with his creation’s. The 1818 title page of each of the novel’s three volumes repeats an epigraph from Paradise Lost: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay/To mould me man? Did I solicit thee/From darkness to promote me?”^xiv 22 Like Adam, the creature challenges his Maker. The repetition of subject and object pronouns referring to the creature foregrounds the primacy of his perspective, which overwhelms and replaces the "thee" with which "me" rhymes. Where Victor had used similar language to justify his action as bringing "light into our dark world" (p. 32), the creature expresses a loss of "my clay' and an imposition of another’s will made more violent by the root meanings of "clay" (cleave), "solicit" (disturb) and "promote" (move). Much like the novel’s reimagining of the meaning of a ‘modern’ Prometheus, abstracting these lines (X; lines743–5) from Paradise Lost complicates their meaning. The recognition of Shelley’s readers that fallen Adam’s complaints to God were not valid within Milton’s Puritan cosmogony stresses the contrasting justness of the creature’s questions. Adam’s equivocation immediately following the epigraph attempts and fails to explain the divine in human contractual "terms" whose Satanic overtones are conveyed through the repeated ‘s’ sounds evoking the serpent, especially in the question:

[…] as my Will

Concurr’d not to my being, it were but right

And equal to reduce me to my dust,

Desirous to resign, and render back

All I receiv’d, unable to perform

Thy terms too hard, by which I was to hold

The good I sought not. To the loss of that,

Sufficient penalty, why hast thou added

The sense of endless woes? inexplicable

Thy Justice seems; yet to say truth, too late,

I thus contest; then should have been refus’d

Those terms whatever, when they were propos’d: (X; lines 746–57).

The speciousness of Adam’s logic in a Christian context informs the meaning of the epigraph as a frame for the novel. Although ostensibly false when applied to the Fall, Adam’s claims do capture the creature’s experience; in fact, this falseness ironically delineates the magnitude of the injustices actually suffered by the creature. Adam was gifted paradise and divine guidance ("All I receiv’d"); the creature was immediately abandoned. Victor’s sustained denial of the creature can fairly be described as "inexplicable", and inexplicably unjust. Adam falsely claims that he was "unable to perform/Thy terms too hard", but the creature in truth could not care for himself: “I was a poor, helpless, miserable wretch; I knew, and could distinguish nothing; but, feeling pain invade me on all sides, I sat down and wept” (p. 68). Adam admits that he did agree to "propos’d" "terms"; the creature had no such opportunity. Adam acknowledges that "[s]ufficient penalty" follows from his own actions; the creature’s suffering does not. Frightened and bewildered, he struggles to survive. Worse, as he searches for food and shelter, he is consistently beaten and driven away solely because of his appearance^xv 23—for which he is wholly blameless. His "paradise’"(p. 71) is a pig-sty attached to a cottage, since he is “happy to have found a shelter, however miserable, from the inclemency of the season and still more from the barbarity of man” (p. 71). Indeed, the creature’s never-ending isolation—signified by his lack of a name—surpasses Adam’s so-called ‘endless woes’. Having often secretly helped his "beloved cottagers" (p. 85), he throws himself on their mercy, first appealing to the blind patriarch to intercede: “‘where they ought to see a feeling and kind friend, they behold only a detestable monster’” (p. 91). To no avail. When the sighted family members arrive, they attack him and then desert the cottage. Wandering, he saves a little girl who fell into a stream, only to be shot. He finally “vowed eternal hatred and vengeance to all mankind” (p. 96), and especially Victor. Unlike Adam’s, his subsequent "prayer" (p. 100) for a mate (with whom he promises to quit all human society) is rejected.

Just as Victor is not simply mad, evil or wrong, neither is the ‘monster’. The novel therefore problematizes a consequentialist ethics in which the outcome of Victor’s research—an unnatural monster, a hideous demon, a violent beast—determines its wrongness. The use of Paradise Lost doubly insists on the creature’s fundamental humanity. First, Milton’s epic centres on the creation of humans, establishing a direct parallel between Adam and the creature. Second, his own recognition of this parallel and his lengthy account reveal him to be fully as sensitive, thoughtful, and articulate as Victor, who is by all accounts an ideal man and "noble creature" (p. 15). By secretly observing the cottagers, the creature learns about history and society and teaches himself how to read. In reading Paradise Lost alongside Victor’s own journal record of the months prior to his creation, he recognises the similarity of his situation to Adam’s, “‘but I was wretched, helpless, alone’” (p. 87): “‘Like Adam, I was created apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect’” (p. 87). This very parallel points up how Victor is not God, not omniscient or supremely good: “‘God in pity made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of your’s [sic], more horrid from its very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and detested’  ” (p. 88). In fact, Victor is more like Adam, who lost the paradise of an ideal life where he enjoyed every advantage of birth, education, status and family through his own actions—actions which Victor himself likened to eating of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge. Thinking of Elizabeth, Victor’s heart “dared to whisper paradisaical dreams of love and joy; but the apple was already eaten” (p. 131). Like Adam’s breach, Victor later breaks their "terms" by refusing to provide the agreed-upon mate, resulting in the "penalty" or fulfilment of the creature’s threat to kill Elizabeth should Victor marry her and his murder of Victor’s dearest companion, Clerval.

If the creature becomes as Satan, a "fiend" rejoicing in the envious destruction of happy human society that he is absolutely denied, this no more excuses Victor’s decisions than it did Adam’s. Anticipating his own death, Victor beseeches his friend Walton to "satisfy my vengeance" (p. 145) and kill the creature: “‘Hear him not; call on the manes of William, Justine, Clerval, Elizabeth, my father, and of the wretched Victor, and thrust your sword into his heart’” (p. 145). Like Adam’s rationalisations after the Fall, Victor’s justification is partial and self-serving. Adam blames Eve and even God; Victor blames the creature. Is the creature responsible for his father’s death, brought by an "apoplectic fit" due to “the horrors that were accumulated around him” (p. 137)? Or the deaths of William and Justine? The creature grabbed the boy William to raise as a companion; when William cried out and revealed his family name, the creature “grasped his throat to silence him, and in a moment he lay dead” (p. 97). Justine, a family servant, is executed for his murder. These deaths can be traced to the creature, and, more precisely, to the creature’s desolation and despair: “‘I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend’” (p. 66). But who abandoned the creature? Who refused his pleas for a mate? When Victor destroys the companion whom he had promised to create, the creature curses his "tyrant and tormentor" (p. 116), “‘Man, you shall repent of the injuries you inflict’” (p. 116): “‘You can blast my other passions; but revenge remains—revenge, henceforth dearer than light or food!’ ” (p. 116).

As much as Victor sees the execution of the creature as justified, so does the creature see the murders of Clerval and Elizabeth as consequences of Victor’s actions. For that matter, so does Victor: “‘I am the assassin of those most innocent victims; they died by my machinations’” (p. 129). Despite repeatedly claiming responsibility for the deaths of William, Justine and Clerval, Victor does not explain, and his father believes his "ideas were deranged" (p. 129). Victor never discloses the creature’s existence until after all are dead, at which time, again, he is considered delusional. Doing so, or refusing to marry Elizabeth or warning her of the threat, may have prevented some or all of the deaths. It certainly would have exculpated Justine. Victor’s own death can be attributed as much to himself as to the creature. His solitary quest for vengeance to the ends of the earth and at cost of his own life mirrors that of the creature, each devoted to the destruction of the other, each like Satan carrying hell within himself.^xvi Victor notes, “misery had her dwelling within my heart, but I no longer talked in the same incoherent manner of my own crimes; sufficient for me was the consciousness of them” (p. 129). The creature similarly anticipates death: “‘I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me’” (p. 155).

Whatever the precise interpretive valence given to these shifting parallels, I want to stress the shifts themselves.^xvii 24 25 The turn to myth profoundly unsettles the shared societal values that myth would be expected to secure, and thereby the clarity of the novel’s moral lesson. In place of the archetypal poles of good and evil anchored by Christianity, the novel questions the certainty of a priori principles. The use of Paradise Lost makes it impossible to read Victor as either his name, the epic hero, or the monster’s victim. If markers as overdetermined as Satan and murder are indeterminate, how can a juridical model of ethical decision-making function? The epigraph repeated at the opening of each volume—"Did I request?’ ‘Did I solicit?"—decenters Victor’s story and stresses the vital necessity of the creature’s viewpoint as the frame for the entire novel. The creature’s voice is so crucial that it forms the structural centrepiece of Frankenstein, which has multiple narrative frames. The novel is a series of letters written by Robert Walton to his sister, Mrs. Margaret Saville, in England. Walton is captain of an icebound ship exploring the Arctic, which picks up Victor as he nears death from his lengthy pursuit of the creature. Nested within these letters is Victor’s story as told to and recorded by Walton. Within this story is the creature’s own first-person narrative as told to Victor, and then recounted to Walton where it occurred in Victor’s story. Victor’s tale ultimately catches up to his meeting of Walton and moves forward, until Walton takes up the story. Volume breaks do not correspond to content, but serve instead to foreground this multilevel structure centred on the creature. Volume I consists of Walton’s letters (letters I–IV) and Victor’s story (chapters I–VII), while volume III has the inverse organisation, consisting of Victor’s story (chapter I to beginning of VII) and Walton’s letters (the rest of chapter VII), which relate Victor’s death and the creature’s reaction. As a result, the creature’s story occupies the middle section of the middle volume. Volume II includes Victor’s first-person story continued (chapters I–II), then the creature’s first-person narrative as told to Victor, recounted by Victor to Walton, and recorded by Walton (chapters III–VIII), then Victor’s story, including his interaction with the creature, as told to and recorded by Walton (chapter IX).

Frankenstein’s structure has produced a remarkable array of scholarly interpretations. It is a mise en abyme reflecting Victor’s narcissism in “the similarities among the three protagonists” (p. 72),26 or a reverse mise en abyme in which the creature’s narrative is the “creator of the tale we read” (O’Dea, p. 8). It reflects “a fragmenting society in which communication remains incomplete” (p. 416),27 or “[s]ympathy guides textual production” (p. 7).28 The novel’s different levels compete—“activat[ing] three distinct models of social order as key components of competing sense-making frames” (pp. 325–6)29—or are indistinguishable—Frankenstein “does not offer us multiple narrators in order to provide multiple points of view, each of which expresses the unique psychology of the character who tells a given story” (p. 143).30 For the purposes of my argument, this range of interpretations indicates that the novel’s structure is both constitutive of its meaning, and notoriously open. The diversity of responses apparent in the scholarship reflects the cognitive work elicited by the novel. In Gregory O’Dea’s words,

Frame narratives, conceived as frame-works, clearly model a sequence of narrative and invite readers to continue the reshaping process. (Criticism, surely, is just such a response, an invitation accepted.) In this conception, perceivers are always potentially projectors who will assimilate, embed, and refigure the matter in their own ways, to their own ends. Frankenstein is an unusually heightened example, itself merely a fragment of what has become a much larger process in which the myth refashions and projects itself over and over, in fiction, on stage and screen, in comics, cartoons—and criticism. (p. 27)

The reader’s role is doubly figured in Walton and, outside of the narrative proper, his sister. For example, when Walton breaks in to Volume III, Chapter VII, he opens:

26 August 17.

You have read this strange and terrific story, Margaret; and do you not feel your blood congealed with horror, like that which even now curdles mine? Sometimes, seized with sudden agony, [Victor] could not continue his tale; at others, his voice broken, yet piercing, uttered with difficulty the words so replete with agony. (p. 145)

The meaning of the narrative is less about the events themselves, and more about such responses, which open up to include those of future readers, who occupy the same position as Mrs. Saville. Far from a pose of rational detachment, the story rhetorically evokes a visceral, emotional power transcending the narrative present, typical of both myth and confrontation of the ‘strange’ in Suvin’s novum. Narrative progression, continuity and chronology are multiply interrupted. The novel itself is open-ended, its meaning unfinished and uncertain. As I have argued already, Frankenstein is not (only) Victor’s story. It does not end with his death, but closes with Walton’s last glimpse of the creature after we again hear his voice, as he shares his thoughts prompted by Victor’s demise. Walton writes, “He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance” (p. 156). From Walton’s viewpoint, the creature was "lost" to "darkness", the icy wastes representing the sterile antithesis of the garden given to man. From the creature’s perspective, though, he deliberately embraces and purposefully enters the ‘darkness’ from which he was, in the words of the epigraph, ‘promoted’ against his will. The simple diction and strongly accented syllables convey his agency and determination: “‘Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly’” (p. 156). The play on ‘borne’ for ‘born’ suggests a self-birth, expressed in two gentle, lilting anapestic feet with alliteration and internal rhyme, "borne a-way/by the waves". The creature plans to "sacrifice" (p. 155) himself, but we do not know if, where, or when he dies. Nor do we know what happens to Walton. Does his ship escape the ice? Does he continue to explore?

The novel’s complicated structure has long been the object of scholarly analysis, but not in relation to its bioethical meanings. Indeed, form marks the split between academic and popular readings, which drop the narrative frames; this simplification functions to produce ‘Frankenstein’ as the familiar cautionary tale. I negotiate this split by arguing that the novel’s structure elaborates its ethical model, intervening in the dominant understanding of science. The repeated disruptions of narrative cohesion problematise elements of prose linked, since Bacon’s time, to the production of valid scientific knowledge. Recall Bacon’s Aphorism XVIII, which applies equally to scientific methodology and to systematic writing that avoids the corrupting Idols of the Market Place: “In order to penetrate into the inner and further recesses of nature, it is necessary that both notions and axioms be derived from things by a more sure and guarded way”. The narrative momentum toward the ‘inner’ secret of the mysterious figure picked up in the arctic wastes is thwarted by digression and deferral in an intimate, emotionally charged story located within a personal relationship. Victor tells Walton, “I had determined, once, that the memory of these evils should die with me; but you have won me to alter my determination”:

I do not know that the relation of my misfortunes will be useful to you, yet, if you are inclined, listen to my tale. I believe that the strange incidents connected with it will afford a view of nature, which may enlarge your faculties and understanding. You will hear of powers and occurrences, such as you have been accustomed to believe impossible: but I do not doubt that my tale conveys in its series internal evidence of the truth of the events of which it is composed. (p. 17)

Walton’s ‘inclination’—he "felt the greatest eagerness" (17)—determines the potential "useful[ness]’"of the "tale". Its "truth" is "internal" to the tale’s "series" and "compos[ition]". The "inner and further recesses" of the novel present but another tale, that of the creature.^xviii Bacon’s "sure and guarded way" of a linear progression is undermined by a recursive reading process echoed in the stalled journey of discovery and ultimate retreat of Walton’s ice-bound ship.^xix

The form of Frankenstein challenges empirical accuracy and causality. The novel maintains present, retrospective and prospective timelines simultaneously via various narrative strands and movement within strands. We also cover the same time period according to Victor and then the creature. Such temporal and structural disruptions combat the scientific ‘God’s eye’ or singular, reliable view capable of producing true, verifiable knowledge. Nor can we turn to the author or the narrator. Beyond the multiple narrative frames, additional textual issues disturb the novel’s meaning. The 1831 publication of the novel was substantively revised, and most subsequent editions use the 1831 version without providing a rationale or acknowledging the earlier text.^x The initial 1818 printing did not include an author’s name on the title page, and the ‘Preface’ was written by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Its account of the novel’s genesis does not quite match that written by Mary Shelley for the 1831 version, or journal or manuscript evidence.^xxi 31 The accepted common elements, though—the novel resulted from a contest to write ghost stories proposed during lengthy conversations between several parties (including Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon Byron)—have long introduced questions regarding degree of authorship which have, in turn, been complicated by gender prejudice. Moreover, as she wrote the novel, Mary Shelley gave her manuscript to her husband to edit. In short, these features confound the authoritativeness of any appeal to Mary Shelley’s intention or the ‘original’ text or plan in order to establish the novel’s position or lesson.

Frankenstein also lacks a narrator who could provide an authoritative voice, whether a removed third-person account or an immediate first-person story. While Walton begins the novel at a distance from the events of the primary plot, that plot catches up to Walton and he becomes a part of it with regard to Victor and the creature.^xxii The novel includes several first-person accounts that can be considered neither reliable nor unreliable. Here I must disagree with Beth Newman’s position that "we are offered a series of stories that corroborate one another" (p. 147). Setting aside the stark disagreement between the stories cast in sharp relief by a focus on ethical judgement, Newman’s argument centres on narratorial reliability: “it might seem that the purpose of a narrative technique that transfers a story from teller to teller is to direct the reader to questions of point of view, and more specifically to questions of reliability and unreliability” (p. 146). For Newman, because each narrator “accepts the story he hears without question, and repeats it unchanged”, “we are given no new perspective” (p. 147). The question posed by the novel is not one of a particular narrator’s reliability, which depends on the possibility of progress towards a more authoritative or truer understanding.^xxiii Rather, the novel poses the undecidability of competing narratives. The eschewal of judgement on the part of each successive teller models a position of witness that recognises the particular positionality of each speaker.

In using the term ‘witness’, I wish to foreground what Jean-Francois Lyotard calls the "stakes", introduced early in the novel through the flawed juridical process that puts Justine to death.32 What is at stake in the bifurcation described by Lipking, in reading the novel in academic or literary terms that largely bracket the bioethical implications found in the popular or student readings of the Frankenstein myth? My focus on ethics in this argument is multiply determined: by the dominant meaning of ‘Frankenstein’, by the pressing concern with ethical decision-making in medical science and medical humanities, and by literary theory. The ‘ethical turn’ in Anglo-American critical theory has followed two main strands: ‘deconstructive’ and humanist. The terms of my argument are generally deconstructive and Derridean: ethics entails the acknowledgement of differance, in which meaning is relational (difference) and deferred. Here the focus is on the signifying chain, rather than narrative structure, but J Hillis Miller elaborates an ‘ethics of reading’, arguing that ethics is performative and theorised through story.33 Lyotard’s concept of the differend better captures the impossibility of resolving the competing accounts posed within Frankenstein.^xxiv Lyotard coins the term because he is compelled to proclaim the harm caused by Holocaust deniers. The differend names the injustice of adjudicating incommensurable accounts. For the concentration camp survivor, “if your lived experience is not communicable, you cannot testify that it exists” (Lyotard, p. 84). Like the survivor’s testimony, the creature’s account cannot definitively prove its truth: the creature’s very survival (and eloquence) mitigates against the harm claimed by abandonment, just as the existence of the Auschwitz survivor—as Lyotard lays out—mitigates the harms of the death camp. The creature’s intellectual capacity and rhetorical ability mask the way that this language game which the creature is forced to play (ranging from teaching himself language to constructing his identity using texts like Paradise Lost and its available subject positions) wrongs him from the start because of his non-humanness, no matter his eloquent success at learning the rules. The very demand to "translate" his unique experience imposes harm, as does the demand to articulate the experience of Auschwitz called forth by Holocaust denials. Lyotard’s difference attempts to signal the "feeling" (p. 13) marking this fundamental injustice, which cannot fully be put into words. Similarly, the novel seems to demand judgement that is brought up short by the impossibility of justice indicated by a "feeling" (p. 13)—in my experience, students most commonly describe being ‘torn’. For Lyotard, the stakes are, "[t]o bear witness to the differend" (p. xiii).

Within medical humanities and more specifically narrative ethics, the word ‘witness’ is used similarly, to describe a duty to acknowledge patient viewpoints and experiences.34 Like the creature’s story, "suffering" (p. ix) is radically unique and exceeds literal, referential language, but the need to translate and communicate suffering—using a pain scale, within an ethics case—works against that uniqueness.^xxv 35 Broadly speaking, proponents of narrative ethics can be seen as making two interrelated claims. One, ethics should be narrative: literary concepts are useful (and can be taught), offering benefits in contrast to other approaches like principlism and resistance to problematic traditions like paternalism. Two, ethics is already narrative: from the form of medical genres to theorizations of ethics, reasoning through stories is ubiquitous. On my reading, Frankenstein asserts both of these claims, simultaneously critiquing Baconian science and enacting an ethical model. Frankenstein’s structure reiterates the particularity of different narratives. The plots are marked as partial in both senses of the word: subjective, reflective, perspectival memories that are retrospectively re-presented. The stories of the same events and time periods are partial, or different when told by Victor and the creature, but also partial, since their respective stories contain different material, things that the other did not and could not know. Moreover, the creature’s non-humanness marks this particularity as insurmountable. Jeanne Britton locates the ‘impossibility of sympathy’ (p. 5) in the creature’s alterity: “sympathy in Frankenstein moves away from vision and towards the speaking voice in order to conclude, through failures of comparison and insurmountable difference, with the compensatory written text, the transcribed narrative of another” (p. 7). Whereas Britton is working with a Romantic understanding of sympathy, she describes the patient history equally well. The novel points up the limitations and dangers of sympathy, or feeling with another. Just as Walton and Victor find it impossible to sympathise fully with the creature, so we should be wary of the instant sympathy between the two men, predicated on their perceived identity. Walton and Victor are as distinct from one another as from the creature, just as any patient’s experience—however moving or familiar—is particular.

The use of letters further reminds us that each of the novel’s discontinuous representations is tied to a particular time, place and circumstance; the “knowledge that narrative offers is always situated” and “embedded in the social interaction”, such that context is "constitutive" (p. 79).36 Walton records, intermittently, but also revises. Nor can his role ever be considered documentary, since his first letter after meeting Victor states, “I begin to love him as a brother” (p. 15) and his next letter asserts, “He excites at once my admiration and my pity to an astonishing degree” (p. 15). Regardless of Walton’s careful notes, or even Victor’s own review of the account, not one word of the novel can be taken as simply factual. Indeed, O’Dea points out that, formally, Walton’s account is the most "monstrous of them all’"because it consists of a "refiguration of parts" (p. 22). The novel’s complex structure produces instead an acute and continual awareness of perspective, of who is speaking and writing to whom. The juxtaposition of various perspectives denies the novel a singular, true meaning and offers different lessons than the warning not to ‘play God’ typically attributed to the Frankenstein myth.^xxvi

The novel’s structure situates the main plot—the titular story of ‘Frankenstein’, of Victor’s life as he presents it, from birth to death—within the context of other plots, first Walton’s expedition, and second the creature’s story (again presented from birth to presumed death). As we have seen, the creature’s experience counters Victor’s and vividly expresses the harm in Victor’s detachment. It has become a critical commonplace that Victor’s fault lies in his rejection of the creature.^xxvii I would extend this insight: the novel insists on the danger of a narrow empirical focus on scientific discovery. Through this perspective, the novel critiques Victor’s denial of responsibility for his work. He consistently describes his reactions in terms of being "free" (p. 36). When the newly awakened creature seeks him out after he has fled to his bedroom, Victor recalls that he “might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped” (p. 35). On fearfully returning, he rejoices to find that his lodging was “freed from its hideous guest. I could hardly believe that so great a good-fortune could have befallen me; but when I became assured that my enemy had indeed fled, I clapped my hands for joy” (p. 37). Victor ascribes the events that "have befallen" to exterior forces like fate: “the fatal night, the end of my labours, and the beginning of my misfortunes” (p. 42). And to the agency of the creature, an "enemy’"who seeks to "detain" him. The animacy of the creature does not offer a literal parallel to most research, but instead embodies the inevitable and unpredictable movement of scientific knowledge beyond the laboratory^xxviii—a trenchant insight when science supporters today organise marches to advocate the societal uses of research. The novel therefore challenges the notion of ‘pure’ science separated from society, beholden only to the pursuit of knowledge.

Walton’s mission likewise offers a new vantage on Victor’s. Walton shares Victor’s driving passion for scientific exploration, but does not divest his responsibility. Walton occupies a similar position of knowledge, care and authority in relation to his crew as Victor does to the creature. Trapped in the crushing Arctic ice, the crew makes of Walton “a demand, which, in justice, I could not refuse” (p. 149) clearly paralleled with the creature’s plea for a mate: “the justice due both to him and my fellow-creatures demanded of me that I should comply with his request” (p. 100). Where Victor ultimately breaks this promise, Walton "consented to return" (p. 150).^xxix Rather than evaluating Victor’s choice or rationale, I want to focus on how Walton’s decision-making diverges from Victor’s. Victor asserts his authority in defiance of the creature’s, exclaiming, “‘[t]he hour of my weakness is past, and the period of your power is arrived’” (p. 116). He dismisses the creature and rejects his arguments, making paternalistic decisions that substitute his own reasoning for the creature’s. Walton too disagrees with his crew: “I had rather die, than return shamefully,—my purpose unfulfilled” (p. 150). However, his crew feels differently even after being exhorted by Victor to “[r]eturn as heroes who have fought and conquered” (p. 150), “brave men who encountered death for the honour and benefit of mankind” (p. 149). Walton listens to them; he honours their discrete position, their self-determination. The choice between continuing and returning depends on their consent, not on which choice is correct or will contribute to scientific progress and the "honour and benefit of mankind". Walton explains, “‘I cannot lead them unwillingly into danger’” (p. 151). Their will—the "request" posed by the epigraph as the core issue framing the novel—is determinative. In this way, the novel advocates a decision-making model that departs from the focus of the standard ethics case study on the ‘right’ choice and stresses the responsibility to hear other voices and honour their distinct lived experiences. The application of this model to patient-centred medical practice is clear, but it also suggests broader participation in scientific decision-making more generally. Indeed, a key element of myth is its communal function. The novel’s self-positioning as myth calls for societal engagement and response.

Walton’s quest offers another radical contrast with Victor’s, namely, the very existence of the epistolary novel. Throughout his journey, Walton writes letters to his "beloved sister" (p. 148): a “scene has just passed of such uncommon interest, that although it is highly probable that these papers may never reach you, yet I cannot forbear recording it” (p. 148). This fictional device does produce the novel; however, a ship’s log or journal would serve just as well. Victor apparently kept such a journal, but it is never included in the text. A log or journal would place the writer in a more typical position of detached authority. The writing of letters, though, is personal. It foregrounds a relationship that Walton is at pains to acknowledge and maintain, while Victor is not. It is not that Walton happens to be close to his family, unlike Victor. Victor opens his story with reference to his family, which plays a major role in the novel. In response to Victor’s lack of contact, his family and friends write him, ask him to return home, and visit him repeatedly throughout the novel, which includes the text of two letters from Elizabeth and one from Victor’s father (but none from Victor). His distance instead results from his work. Victor recalls, “I knew well therefore what would be my father’s feelings; but I could not tear my thoughts from my employment” (p. 33); “[I] pursued my undertaking with unremitting ardour” (p. 32), which “caused me also to forget those friends who were so many miles absent” (p. 33). He likewise cuts off his university colleagues to cloister himself "[i]n a solitary chamber" (p. 32) engaged in "secret toil" (p. 32) based on the “secret which [he] alone possessed” (p. 32). Walton’s "ardent curiosity" (p. 7) is comparable: the Arctic expedition is the "favourite dream" (p. 8) from a childhood spent in "study, day and night" (p. 8) reading about the history of exploration, 6 years in preparation during which he “voluntarily endured cold, famine, thirst, and want of sleep” (p. 8) and "devoted [his] nights to the study" (p. 8) of relevant knowledge. Yet Walton does not therefore separate himself from his family or his companions. After Victor succeeds, he extends his isolation to his university colleagues, having “conceived a violent antipathy even to the name of natural philosophy” (p. 42). Victor’s break with his colleagues and family, his choice to keep everything secret (until persuaded by Walton), yields much suffering and contributes to numerous deaths. Moreover, it again shows the limitations of Victor’s solitary and paternalist decision-making on behalf of others. Frankenstein thus asserts personal and intellectual or professional community as part of the scientific process.

Overall, the novel presents a vision of science as more than knowledge: it is at once passionately personal and societally situated. Part of the work done by Frankenstein as a ‘modern’ myth is (re)producing science as the fundamental explanatory paradigm. The novel deliberately (re)cites and rewrites prior dominant epistemological frameworks in the form of classical and Christian mythology. The meaning of such frameworks depended on belief, on acceptance of the precepts encoded in and transmitted by the mythology based on faith in their rightness. Frankenstein shows that science cannot function in the same way, based on belief in the epistemological framework and faith in its authority or authors. Victor’s training, his careful use of the scientific method, his philanthropic goals and benevolent intentions—these fail to be determinative. He “selected [the creature’s] features as beautiful” (p. 34), but the creature ‘exclaimed in agony. “Cursed Creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?” (p. 88). This is less an indictment of science because it is not divinely infallible than a call for the need to write a new myth whose meaning is produced differently: a science that acknowledges the narrative production of knowledge.

The novel’s unique structure does not just affect its meaning; it is the novel’s meaning. Frankenstein argues for a reflective, situated and intersubjective narrative ethics. Choices must be made and evaluated not according to a priori abstract rules, but within specific, complex, emotionally charged contexts—in other words, within the attached stories. Frankenstein continually foregrounds the multiplicity and uncertainty constitutive of ethical decision-making. We cannot simply privilege Victor’s perspective over the creature’s (or vice versa). Walton’s record is not objective or accurate. Even the reader’s generic, neutral anonymity is challenged by the identification of a specific and invested addressee in the person of Walton’s sister Margaret. Any story exists within multiple larger frameworks of meaning from which it cannot be excised. Such frameworks range from the intimate scale of personal relationships, like that between Walton and Victor, to the broad societal scope of myth. Returning now to the warning we noted earlier: when Victor urges Walton—and thus the reader—to “[l]earn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example”, that learning inheres in Walton’s own process of narrative interpretation. Victor explains, “listen patiently until the end of my story, and you will easily perceive why I am reserved on that subject [of my discovery]” (p. 31). The creature’s story is constitutive of the novel, not a device or addition. Walton writes, Victor “himself corrected and augmented [my notes] in many places; but principally in giving the life and spirit to the conversations he held with his enemy. ‘Since you have preserved my narration’, said he, ‘I would not that a mutilated one should go down to posterity’” (p. 146). The mythic story is the lesson to pass on. As Victor bears witness alongside Walton, the doubled narrative, not the secret he discovered, is the creation that he labours to give life.