Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein': A creation for the ages

Two hundred years ago this month, on a thundery June night in 1816, at a villa high in the Swiss Alps, a wayward teenage girl had a nightmare for the ages.

Summer looms before us — and rather a scary summer at that. Don't be afraid to give your reading list a bicentennial jolt by revisiting Mary Shelley's freakish masterpiece, "Frankenstein."

Inspiration for a thousand imitations, interpretations, spin-offs and spoofs, "Frankenstein" is, above all, a strange book — one of those works of art weirdly diminished by its own uncanny power and success. From the beginning, its mythic story line and iconic characters took such hold over so many imaginations that the tale has come to be seen not merely as a cliché but as a seemingly timeless feature of the cultural landscape, a comfortable old piece of humanity's psychological furniture.

A Frankenstein monster is a self-made monster, a fatal mistake born of overweening ambition. Everybody knows this; surely, everybody always has. It somehow comes as a surprise to contemplate that one day, long ago, somebody simply made the whole thing up.

Truth is, the story of who made it up and how has a dark enchantment of its own. Mary Shelley was the precocious daughter of celebrated English radicals and freethinkers. Her mother died giving Mary birth (a common catastrophe at the time), and Mary was raised by her brilliant and egotistical philosopher father, William Godwin — which was likely something of an uncommon catastrophe.

At 16, she began an illicit extramarital romance with Percy Bysshe Shelley, a self-indulgent genius well on his way to becoming one of the leading English Romantic poets. It was with him and Lord Byron, another of that era's famed artist/agitators, that she traded ghost stories one night while summering in Switzerland.

The yarn-spinning set off a creative storm in Mary, by then still only 19, and out of a dream she had that evening she brought to life "Frankenstein." Other events during its composition may have contributed to the novel's macabre, guilt-ridden themes — notably the suicide of her poet paramour's wife. What's certain is that Mary's "ghost story" is still alive in Western culture two full centuries later in a way the work of her companions — whose names may be better remembered — is not.

One reason is that the moral hazard of hubris — of grandiosity and overconfidence leading to ruin — has never been more vividly embodied. It is specifically a scientific ambition that seduces and destroys Victor Frankenstein — "I pursued nature to its hiding places," he confesses, and "tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay." But he warns, after his disaster, against allowing any pursuit, any goal, to become an obsession "that has a tendency to … destroy your taste for … simple pleasures." Any such all-consuming passion, he has learned, is "not befitting the human mind."

Fear of the obscure and incalculable powers of science was rife in Mary Shelley's day. In her novel we don't see the scene Hollywood so loved — Frankenstein harnessing lightning bolts to shock his creature into life. There are some vague references to the mysterious new force of electricity, but the novel's remorseful inventor refuses to explain how he bestowed life on his monster, lest he tempt another to repeat the folly.

The story's indelible portrait of the scientist as sorcerer no longer quite captures what makes us uneasy about the frontiers of knowledge today. Yet anxieties over climate change, genetic engineering, fetal-tissue research and more still emerge from the fear that human powers have outrun human wisdom.

The world stood at an epochal turning point in 1816, with industrial and scientific revolutions — above all, "the birth of the machines" — about to transform daily life more profoundly, as C.S. Lewis put it, than it had been altered since the prehistoric domestication of animals. English historian Paul Johnson's massive study "The Birth of the Modern: World Society, 1815-1830" identified the same great historical divide. Some felt sense of uncertainty about the impending changes may explain the essential disquiet that runs through "Frankenstein."

From our vantage point two centuries later, there's no denying that the powers modernity placed in human hands have produced horrors along with abundant blessings. Another milestone anniversary this summer makes the point. On July 1, 1916, midway between us and the conception of "Frankenstein," the Battle of the Somme commenced — one of humanity's worst real-life nightmares.

Of all the atrocious carnage of the last century's world wars, no single event revealed the cruelty of industrial warfare more pitilessly. The indecisive five-month struggle among the British, French and German armies produced more than 1 million casualties, and more than 300,000 dead.

The British are said to have lost 20,000 lives on the first day of the fighting.

Maybe that puts this summer's worries in perspective — or maybe it reminds us of how monstrous can be the mistakes foolish leadership can make.

Yet in "Frankenstein," horror and heartache ultimately arise from more personal failings. The novel's monster is not old-time Hollywood's mute, stiff-limbed robot, but an articulate "wretch" — an eloquent, thinking, feeling, catlike giant with "yellow skin (that) scarcely covered the work of … arteries … a filthy mass that moved and talked.''

He is also an innocent victim, utterly and instantly rejected and despised for the hideous ugliness and unnaturalness he can do nothing do change. Neither his creator nor anyone else finds the strength to extend him the slightest mercy.

"No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses,'' says the monster, defending his turn to vengeance and violence. "Tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me.''

Maybe not so much has really changed in 200 years. The truly scary thing isn't too much knowledge, but too little compassion.

D.J. Tice is at Doug.Tice@startribune.com.