What the Movies Get Wrong about Frankenstein (Frankenstein, Part 2)

In Part 2 of our conversation with Michael Bérubé, we discuss the enduring legacy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—how a cautionary tale about reckless experimentation and radicalization speaks just as forcefully to our present moment as it did to readers in 1818.

Michael Bérubé is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Penn State University and the editor of the Norton Library edition of Frankenstein. He is the author of ten books, including What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education and Life As We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child.
 
The Norton Library edition of Frankenstein features the complete text of the 1818 edition. To learn more or purchase a copy, go to http://seagull.wwnorton.com/frankenstein.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at http://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Listen to our Spotify playlist inspired by Frankenstein: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3t8NNem7nWM3IV7BT6j7pW?si=960699708f7a49de.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter @TNL_WWN.

Episode transcript at: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/frankenstein/part1/transcript.

Transcript

[Music]  

[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino with Michael Von Cannon producing, and today we present part two of our interview devoted to Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, Frankenstein, with its editor Michael Bérubé. In part one, we discussed who Mary Shelley was and how the novel came to be, and in this second episode we examine the contemporary relevance of the novel, the way the novel has been adapted over the years, a playlist and much more. Michael Bérubé is a professor at Penn State University and has published widely on literature, higher education, disability studies, and culture. Michael, welcome back to the show.  

[Michael:] Thanks for having me back, it's good to see you again.  

[Mark:] Oh, it's a pleasure! So, now we can continue our discussion of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. When did you first encounter this work? Do you remember? 

[Michael:] Oh I, oh I do, uh, but I encountered it the way I think a lot of people encounter it. I saw the 1931 classic movie and I thought *that* was Frankenstein. Uh, only later did I get a Signet paperback edition, uh, at the age of about 12 or 13, and was just befuddled. I didn't know what this whole story was about, this guy exploring the North Pole, and I was just thrown for a loop by the fact that the creature himself narrates a good chunk of the middle of the book and that there's this whole other story about this family he meets, the De Laceys, who are exiles from France. It was tremendously confusing, so much so that it sort of fried my science-fiction-addled brain at the time. I was looking for something, you know, quite different. And it wasn't until, uh, graduate school in 1985 or six -- I was among the teaching assistants, uh, teaching the history of English literature course and, uh, Professor Paul Cantor put it on that syllabus as one of the readings from the 19th century. And at that point, I didn't even realize that I was, you know, in the middle of a real sea change in the novel's reception history. It just wasn't taken seriously until the 70s and then, once it was on the agenda again, a number of prominent feminist critics put it on the agenda in a completely different way, and through the 80s and 90s it only grew in prominence. But the amazing thing is that it sort of lay unattended for 150 years, and the academy just thought it was "eh", a piece of Gothic... whatever. I won't say trash, but not a real work of literature.  

[Mark:] What are the particular qualities that draw you to it as a scholar or also as a professor? Why do you teach it and why do you write about it?  

[Michael:] Well the first thing is, I think I think think that draws everyone to it -- I'm no different in that respect as a scholar or as a reader -- the very idea, the very conception, again, to abuse that pun, is completely compelling. Really, the creation of sentient life in the laboratory? Um, that that resonates today -- it only picks up more and more relevance with every advance in genomics. So that's, that's one thing. But then when I started taking the polar voyage seriously, that was another thing. And I remember someone asking me as I was working on the addition, "Does it ruin the novel for you to have to nail down all the literary and historical and philosophical references?" And I said, "No, I am finding one Easter egg after another." It is *astonishing* what she put in here. There's a whole section that alludes to the English Civil War in the mid-17th century that I had really passed over because the narrative just whisks you by it. It's like, this is Victor and his friend Henry Clerval on the way off to the Orkney Islands so that Victor can create a second creature. There are any number of references to recent historical and scientific events that Mary Shelley embedded in there that are really, like I say, Easter eggs. It just gets, it just got more and more fascinating the more and more rabbit holes I discovered. I hope I've come back out of all of them, but there are plenty.  

[Mark:] Yeah.  

[Michael:] Many more than I first expected.  

[Mark:] In the first sentence of your introduction, you write, "If you are reading Frankenstein for the first time, you are in for some surprises." And as we talked about in our first episode, more than maybe most classic novels this one seems to be persistently misread, misunderstood, uh, misconceived. So, maybe, in what ways is this novel misread?  

[Michael:] Well it's funny, uh, you go to that first page of my introduction. My initial second sentence was, "This novel is one of the more curious cultural paradoxes of the past two centuries." And the more I thought about it, I said, "I'm not even qualifying that. It is one of the *most* curious." I mean, everyone know, everyone knows the name Frankenstein. And you could say that about certain other things in the genre, like say Dracula, but none of them have this -- no one's terribly wrong about Dracula, although very few people realize, again, how embedded, uh, and how many frame narratives that novel has. But in this case, the fact that really almost from the get-go, from the first staging -- literally staging, uh, of a play in 1823 -- uh, almost all the renditions of the creature make the creature basically intellectually disabled, um, again that grunting, "Fire," and sort of underscore this this association of monstrosity, you know 8 foot tall monstrosity, with a lack of intellectual capacity. And that's the first thing people have to get past. Uh, you could say, "Well, but it's implausible, right, that a creature, even a sentient one, uh, would learn two languages and learn how to read literature, you know, from Plutarch to, uh, to Milton, in two years." And I want to say, "Excuse me, *that's* the part you find implausible?" [laughter] I mean, the premise is that a bunch of dead tissue put together from animals and humans has come to life, and you're worried about how quickly it learns? Are you joking? So, that's the first way it's been consistently, and I think institutionally, misread. The other thing, and we touched on in the in the first episode, is that this is often read as a cautionary tale that is, um, not just raising ethical questions about science but that it is actively anti-science. Uh, the moral of which is that you should just stay home and stay put and put down that forceps and turn off that Bunsen burner, you're only going to hurt somebody. And I think that's a horrible misreading of the book as well, and I think it is mushroomed into a real, really destructive reading of the relation of the humanities to the sciences in general. This book is, in fact, a serious contribution to the debate of what constitutes life. Uh, and this was among the, uh, at the forefront of debates in philosophy and in science at the time. I like to say sometimes it's the last time a humanist really weighed in with this level of specificity about the question of whether life is just matter. So I think it's, it took a long time for this book to be taken seriously as something other than a teenager's Gothic fantasy and to be taken seriously as an attempt to get at the question of what life is and what the creation of life entails ethically.  

[Mark:]  I'm sure you talk about many of these topics when you teach the novel. Uh, how do you bridge the gap between 21st-century readers and this early 19th-century novel? What techniques do you like to employ to teach Frankenstein?  

[Michael:] Well, I think the language -- even though the language isn't that of Shakespeare, it's not even that before the great vowel shift, uh, like that of Chaucer -- it's still pretty alien, um, to most students these days, none of whom address each other with the formal "thou." So the language seems very ornate. So, that's that's one thing. But I try, because the novel has such strong resonances for all kinds of scientific experimentation, I try to basically translate it to -- for Walton, as we mentioned in the first episode, uh, for Walton, the analogy for me is the Apollo missions. And for Victor, one of the things I like to ask -- I am more than old enough to remember the cover of Time magazine in 1978 announcing the birth of Louise Brown the first "test tube baby." That magazine cover had a sort of metal cyborg, kind of God and Adam on the Sistine Chapel with a test tube between them. And this is, again, 1978, I was graduating from high school, and people were freaking out. Test tube babies. Um, it's like that horrible song by Zager and Evans, "In the year 2525 you'll pick your sons, pick your daughters too / from the bottom of a long glass tube." I can't believe I remember that. Here we are, 45 years later, and who cares? In vitro babies are all among us, they're as common as rain. And one of the questions you want to ask -- well, I think one of the questions you want to ask about that is: did we freak out too much 45 years ago, or did we not freak out enough since? Right, did we get used to that way too quickly? And where we thought -- some people thought -- we had crossed a really indelible moral boundary, and then we had this debate again in the early days of the George W. Bush administration over stem cell research, where, you know -- as much as Bush tried to pack a presidential commission full of intellectual conservatives led by Leon Kass -- even they couldn't come to a consensus that a 7-10 day old embryo has the same moral status as a human being and nevertheless believe that using stem cells for research may cross a boundary best left intact. Well, you know, I think a lot of the times, uh, when we think those are firm and hard boundaries, they're really not. And crossing them doesn't fundamentally change who we are as a species. That said, what does Victor say as he's coming up with life? "Life and death seem to me ideal bounds." In other words, not real. That, this is fungible, folks. You know, and we didn't get to this in episode one, but I made a mental note not to fail to mention it, uh, Sharon Ruston's recent book, this is a book about science at the time -- the science of life and death in Frankenstein -- she brought to light something I didn't know. I did know that there was a lot of debate about electricity and generation of life at the time. I did not know that there's also a great deal of debate about how drowning victims and hanged people could be resuscitated. And this just filled people with horror, right, you're preparing a hanged man for burial and all of a sudden he coughs. And, or for that matter, I mean, with drowning, most people figured -- no one knew CPR; most sailors could not swim, they didn't see the point, like, if we're going overboard let me go quickly and get it over with -- and so the idea that you could be revived really gave some, uh, substantial uh basis for Victor's belief that life and death are ideal bounds. You know, maybe death is not a final boundary. And that has fascinated us, I think rightly, for some time. That said, I do think, um, if you stitch together a bunch of corpses and animal remains and you bring it to life, you probably have crossed a pretty significant moral boundary. And so Mary was probably right intuiting that.  

[Mark:] Michael, in teaching Frankenstein, writing about it, and reading it, and rereading it, do you have a favorite line?  

[Michael:] Oh boy, do I. Um, I kind of should have it tattooed, but I haven't yet. [laughter] It'd take up a lot of space. This is Victor, about to tell Walton the story of the creature. He's already given his backstory: how he grew up, how he was fascinated by electricity, destroying a tree, how he was shocked and, um, devastated by his mother's death. So here's the whole thing: "I see by your eagerness, and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be informed of the secret with which I am acquainted; that cannot be..." He's not going to tell Walton how he did it. Everyone thinks it was, like, lightning -- he's not going to tell. "I will not lead you on, unguarded and ardent as I then was, to your destruction and infallible misery." And here's the money quote: "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." Holy Jesus. Um, so I read that in class, I say, "Does anyone here believe this? '...how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge... how happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world...' If you believe this, why are you at a university at all? Why aren't you back home, learning how to whittle or something?" But this is what happens when people take that money quote and use it as the pull quote for the whole novel, right? That's not the only thing Victor says to Walton. As he's dying, he says, again, "Remember," you know, "avoid ambition, even the seemingly harmless one of," you know, "scientific advances." And then says, "Wait a minute, why am I saying this? I failed, but someone else might succeed in my place." It is literally ambivalent. On the one hand, yeah the acquisition of knowledge is dangerous. Guess what else? The more the creature learns, the more miserable he becomes. All he learns is how abject he is; all he learns is how outcast he is. Then he finds out that most of the rest of the world is in misery as well. That only the people with landed titles and inherited money are living well. Everyone else is wasting their lives for the benefit of the privileged few. That's the creature's, I'm paraphrasing the creature. So yeah, there's a sense in which, um, as some of my students say, "Well, yeah, ignorance is bliss," and I say, "Yeah, the second half of that is 'where 'tis folly to be wise', but I can pretty much assure you that none of you want to live that way. None of you are leaving this room, going back home, and saying, 'You know what? I'd rather not learn anything. Um, acquiring knowledge is too dangerous, also makes you sad.'"  

[Mark:] Yeah.  

[Michael:] I love the quote for, like, it is the most, um, I think eloquent defense of parochialism, literally parochialism. Do not leave your parish; go ahead and believe your native town to be the world; don't learn that there are other people; don't learn that there are other cultures, other languages, other ways of eating food and worshipping God or what have you. Just stay in your lane. Never leave. It is such an extreme, uh, profession of that as to be ridiculous, and, again, something that no, uh, liberal arts college brochure will ever say. And that no one reading the novel could possibly believe. And it's really an audacious thing for Mary Shelley to open the narrative that way.  

[Mark:] That is. We also ask our Norton Library editors for a hot take -- something controversial or counterintuitive. I feel like you've had an episode and a half already of hot takes, but do you have do you have something that you find, uh, one view about this novel that you find particularly controversial?  

[Michael:] I don't know how controversial it is, but I will say I have to put on a protective suit and tongs before I bring this one out. But there is some serious incel energy going on with that creature. By which I mean an involuntary celibate. Uh, these are the young men who, uh, get radicalized by the fact that women their age are not having sex with them -- either through fault of their own or because they're misogynous or whatever -- and some of them turn murderous. And the reason one has to be cautious about saying this is that there is such a long tradition of seeing the creature as a murderous maniac, that, you know, saying, "Well, also he's an incel," seems just to heap one more log on the fire or one more, one more torch and pitchfork, uh, to the people. But, as I was saying in in the first episode, uh, I think the creature is an overwhelmingly sympathetic creature who is, uh, unjustly abused by every single human he meets simply because he is hideously ugly and really big. There's nothing else -- no one, no one is, um, put off by him because he has really short legs or something. No, it's entirely a reaction to his to his face and to his ghastly demeanor. And there's a sense that there's something profoundly unnatural about him, uh, even though, like I say, he's entirely benevolent. Well, once he gets radicalized -- the thing that I think is really unforgivable -- he kills the young, uh, William Frankenstein, Victor's brother, upon finding out that he is a Frankenstein. He's like, "Oh, okay, you're related to the guy who created me. Okay, I owe him one. I'm going to kill this kid." Okay, that's horrible, but it has a motive. It's a motive of revenge. Then he decides he's going to frame the child's caretaker, Justine, by putting a locket, the child's locket, on her person as she sleeps. And his rationale is: "Here, I thought, is one of those whose smiles are bestowed on all but me; she shall not escape." But Justine's crime here is that she smiles at other creature -- and she's never even seen the creature. This is a completely ungrounded, misogynist reaction to, "I can't find a partner; everyone else can," and Justine will pay for it with her life. It really is unforgivable. So, and it is the logic of the incel, "No one -- there is no mate for me. This one, this one she smiles at other people." And that's the one part of the, the one aspect of the creature's behavior I find absolutely chilling. It's the one place where he actually lives up to his billing as a murderous maniac.  

[Mark:] That's an interesting, uh, connection. I know that this could consume the entire episode, but we also are interested in adaptations. And, because there's been an infinite number, I wonder is there one that you are particularly fond of, or maybe one that you're not fond of?  

[Michael:] I can't do better than the 1931 classic movie. Um, I -- although I still owe it to myself to be watching Bride of Frankenstein. Uh, I don't consider it an adaptation because there is no Bride of Frankenstein in the novel. There is an attempt, on Victor's part, to start creating a second creature because he's promised. Again, creature wants a mate, kind of understandable, especially in a novel that says again and again that loneliness is intolerable and that humans crave companionship. So, legitimate desire. But Victor finally comes to his senses mid-creature and realizes, "Hey, wait a minute, I have no control over what a second sentient being will do," you know. "Haven't -- haven't I made this mistake before?" But in the, in the sequel to the movie, uh, famously Elsa Lanchester screams -- with a great hairdo -- screams bloody murder and the original creature, "She hate me." And that, I think, uh, I had -- it stands up pretty well. The Robert De Niro Kenneth Branagh version got a lot of Aloha. I kind of found it...unbearable. There's a very strange, um, 1970s TV movie, "Frankenstein: The Real Story," that bears no relation to the real story, uh, interestingly written by Christopher Isherwood, the gay modernist writer responsible for the Berlin stories that eventually gave us the musical "Cabaret." So there have been a lot of really fanciful versions. I'm trying to think also, uh, I did just see the, uh, version with Benedict Cumberbatch, and it was compelling in its, uh, depiction of a completely abject, fetus-like creature coming to life and his treatment by the De Lacey family, but again almost every adaptation leaves out the polar voyage. It's like, "Let's get cut to the chase, let's -- let's just get to the creation of sentient life and the dire consequences that follow." And, um, so in the end I'm still waiting for the version, I think, that really realizes Mary's full vision.  

[Mark:] Uh, you mentioned one already, but what would you include on a Frankenstein playlist?  

[Michael:] Of course, the internet being what it is, there is a site of the, the 10 best songs inspired by Frankenstein, and--  

[Mark:] Is there?  

[Michael:] Okay, yeah, it's a lot of death metal like, uh, Rammstein is in there, uh, White -- oh, White Zombie. Rob Zombie put together a really interesting mashup of the soundtracks of the films and it's appropriately eerie and chilling, but I was trying to think... I mean, the first thing that came to mind -- this is me just being campy -- is "Time Warp" from Rocky Horror, um, uh, just for the fun. Or just a "Sweet Transvestite" from Transexual, Transylvania. Still relevant today, then illegal in some states. But, um, then of course if I'm going to get cute, uh, Thomas Dolby "She Blinded Me With Science" but then I try to think of things, um... Oh, Edgar Winter's, um, uh, instrumental, uh, "Frankenstein." [sings guitar riff] And I only learned from researching this question that the reason it's called Frankenstein, and this speaks to a whole another genre of interpretations, is that it got spliced together from various parts and they said, "eh what the hell, just put them all together into one song, uh, and we'll call it Frankenstein." Uh, which also explains why that song has so many weird breaks in it. But thematically, if I thought of a song that I would want on a playlist, or put in a soundtrack, or something that that conveys uh some of the ominousness of Frankenstein, I'd actually go to The Matrix. Uh, the song "Clubbed to Death" by Rob D. It's really, um, it's great in The Matrix, but I think it would be even better for Frankenstein. So, just, uh, queue up, for listeners everywhere, "Clubbed to Death" by Rob D. [mouths drum line] It's, uh, it's it's techno but also it's some string arrangements and I think it, as we say in the culinary industry, pairs well with the novel. 

[Mark:] Ah, I like it. So, you talk about this in your introduction, and I wonder if Frankenstein has a moral, ultimately. 

[Michael:] Yeah, I hesitate to say that, you know, the moral is, you know, "don't do this," um, because, again, even though in the 1831 edition, uh, Victor cautions Walton against going to the pole, I'm kind of glad we did that. And its benefits by the early 20th century weren't what they were in the early, in the late 18th, um, back when control of the seas meant really control of the world, but I think it does ask, uh, what kinds of scientific exploration are either, uh, innocuous or beneficial and what kinds are legitimately dangerous. And I just want to resist the idea that the moral is, you know, stay home, think your native town to be the world, and whatever you do don't go stitching together bodies and bringing them to life, because you know know where that's going to wind up. That said, that, um, central motif in the novel is so powerful. It extends, I mean, you can't think of splitting the atom without thinking of the devastation wreaked first in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and then throughout all the test sites in the Pacific, in Central Asia, in the American southwest. Um, and everyone involved in the development of nuclear weapons knew they were heading down that road -- that this is a door that can never be closed again. And I think there are some, um, as we move into a world of sort of designer genetic modifications and CRISPR, uh, we might be heading there as well. So I think that that resonance of, "be careful about either political or scientific experiments, the results of which can completely get out of control." That -- yeah, that's a reasonable moral to take from the novel. I don't think it's an indictment of all of science, I don't think it's an indictment of all liberation struggles, either. But it's certainly a cautionary note. 

[Mark:] You're suggesting that it's not saying, it's not a negative commandment so much as bringing up the topic, illustrating it, asking the question, and asking us to ask the same question? 

[Michael:] Yeah, and I think that's one of the reasons the 1818 version is better. It doesn't pass judgment on Walton's, uh, mission, even though it gets to the point where he is, in fact, imperiling his crew and there's -- it's clear they're not going to get any further. It never stops and says, "You know what? We shouldn't go to the pole either, right, because that's just as bad as creating sentient life." So I think there you're asked to sort among different kinds of scientific endeavors and come up with something like, "Well you know, uh, discovering how electricity and magnetism work -- not a bad thing. Um, discovering how elements combine and form compounds, um, discovering how we can develop vaccines, especially with something like messenger RNA -- who thought of that? It's kind of new. All that: completely legitimate. What's not legitimate, and why?" It really is, um, as they say over in that branch of the sciences it's the ELSI -- it's the ethical, legal, and social implications of science and that's what Shelley, I think, was really trying to get at. 

[Mark:] In your edition of Frankenstein, I really enjoyed reading your endnotes, and there's one I wanted to ask you about and this one is volume 2 chapter 1 of page 76, where you note the phrase "so wonderful and sublime" and then you go into a beautiful discussion about the context and meaning of what sublime means. I wonder if you could talk about that for a minute. 

[Michael:] First of all, thanks so much for reading the endnotes. [laughter] Um, I mean, I know, right, you wouldn't not. 

[Mark:] Of course! 

[Michael:] But, um, some of those as you might imagine, took me much longer than, uh, ordinary annotations. The one that jumps out to me, quite apart from the "wonderful and the sublime," is a toss-off reference where they're coming -- Victor and his father are coming back to Switzerland -- something about the impassible Jura Mountains. Like, the impassible Jura what? So I look that up and it turns out that's actually how Napoleon invaded, so there's, again, another Easter egg where she's, you know, tongue-in-cheek saying, "Oh, by the way," and of course it's a reference to recent political missions of conquest and so forth. Sublime and wonderful is a very different thing and I had to, I thought I had to note that because "sublime" is a lot like the word "awesome." It suffered the same fate. Uh, and, in fact, they are they're kind of related. Um, awesome now just means, you know, "cool," and I say it all the time as a word of, like, "Okay, awesome." I don't usually say, "Oh yeah, sublime." We seem to have reserved sublime for like, uh, really tasty desserts, like "that chocolate torte was just sublime." No one in the late-18th century would have meant it that way. It's not pleasant. It is awesome, in the sense of awe-inspiring, but the crucial thing is that it exceeds human scale and comprehension. And Exhibit A for Percy Shelley and for much of the Romantics, uh, was the Alps -- specifically Mont Blanc -- about which Percy wrote a poem by that title. Just, you know, coming from England's rolling green hills and seeing, "Oh my God, the Alps," this, these are terrifying, you know. What geological forces, what thing's will beyond human comprehension or capacity? Uh, that's "sublime." Now, for Edmund Burke, whom they're drawing on, and his inquiry into the, um, the beautiful and the sublime, uh, the examples of the sublime are sin and and Satan in Paradise Lost. [laughter] Um, really terrifying creatures that, again, if you're reading the novel, the obvious correlation manifest as "this is the creature." Uh, and the fact that he first, uh, challenges -- encounters Victor in the Alps makes perfect sense. It's like, "Yeah, the Alps, that's my home. You know, this is, you know -- these things, they're sublime like me." So, try to restore that understanding of the word, that it does not mean a sort of intensification of the beautiful but was actually opposed to the beautiful. The beautiful is pleasant, it conforms the human scale, it involves symmetry, it involves, you know, contemplation. Sublime scares the bejesus out of you. It is unsettling, it is the German word "unheimlich." You know, it is uncanny. It is really profoundly disturbing and that meaning has just gotten lost. 

[Mark:] Right. That's great. So, finally, Michael, I wanted to ask what readers of Frankenstein in 2023, uh, would be facing as compared with 1818. What's the contemporary relevance of this novel? I know you've talked about this a lot in the last two episodes, but maybe you could just sum it up for us. 

[Michael:] Well, to sum it up, I mean, again, not only the novel is so malleable, right, that it can be read either pro- or anti-revolution, but also we humans keep coming up with, uh, developments that seem eerily, uh, explicable in terms of experiments gone wrong. Uh, the political development I see invoked all the time over the last 10 years is the, uh, Frankenstein creature created by the American Republican party, right? Where now you've got an openly white nationalist, you know, Christian nationalist, um, conspiracy mongering, you know, world just detached from any reality other than that of the Fox News Cinematic Universe. And even though, you know, the Republican Party wanted to mobilize its base, it didn't always want to mobilize it in directions that involved, you know, things like QAnon. Um, so that -- Frankenstein gets invoked there. Every time something gets put together out of, you know, disparate parts to create something monstrous or unnatural, uh, Frankenstein gets invoked there. And every time we figure out something more to do with manipulating our genetic material, Frankenstein gets invoked. It's an amazingly resonant text because Mary Shelley was really getting at a completely fundamental question, not only about what constitutes life itself in a physical sense. but also what constitutes, uh, a responsible or irresponsible approach toward, uh, experimentation either in the intellectual or in the scientific realm. 

[Mark:] Michael Bérubé, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library podcast. 

[Michael:] Thank you for having me, it's been so much fun. 

[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of Frankenstein, edited by Michael Bérubé, is available now in paperback and ebook. Check out the links in the description for the episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles. 

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