Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, Cyberpunk, and the Dark Future of Modernity [by David Walter]

This blog post has been converted from a speech given by David Walter at the Festival of Dissent at NGMH on 13 May 2023.

Ten days after giving birth to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft passed away. Her grieving husband, William Godwin, who was now a single parent, held within his arms, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, under her own name, would become the Pythoness who would author a fable of Modernity in all its dark sensuality, shock, and beauty.

On 16th June 1816, at the Villa Diodati mansion in Switzerland, Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord George Gordon Byron, John William Polidori, and a somewhat obscure Claire Claremont, held an Opium-fueled Symposia, where they created characters of sensual, existential, and elemental horror, The Vampire, the senseless Dr. Frankenstein and his vengeful Creature.

Frankenstein and his Creature remained the most iconic characters in English Literature. Mary Shelley nurtured and raised these characters into some of the most famous and earliest forms of anti-heroes in modern Science Fiction and Horror, which became Neo-Gothic or Cyberpunk in today’s popular culture.

At the emotional heart of Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, there were themes of loneliness, anxiety, the pleasure and the tragedy of Motherhood, and the angry rejection from her father.

She had concern for Women’s place in society threatened by a world ruled by a chauvinistic and industrialized society based on science and technology, and imperial conquest.

As one of the few popular, but provocative female writers in early to mid-19th century England, Mary Bysshe Shelley had followed in the radical footsteps of her deceased Mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary Shelley felt threatened by the extinguishing of a metaphysical awareness for a divine force of Nature in the Universe but was enamored at the same time by the power of technology, science, and industry.

Mary Wollstonecraft established the tenets of Feminism in pursuit of Women’s Rights, and her other radical ideas, which put her at odds with one of the doyens of the 18th century French Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the 18th century Whig Conservative, and arch traditionalist, Edmund Burke.

Her Daughter, Mary Shelley (nee Wollstonecraft Godwin), however embraced the Italian Medieval philosopher Monk, Albertus Magnus, and the German Renaissance Philosophers, Paracelsus, and Cornelius Agrippa, who were also steeped in the Ancient Greek Metaphysics of Aristotle, Plato, and the African/Roman Philosopher, Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism.

Mary Shelley’s novel challenged the notion of Victor Frankenstein as a traditional masculine hero in Western literature, whom, with all his scientific prowess, and his ‘instruments of life’ could bring about life from lifelessness, through his will.

Mary Shelley created an anti-hero for the modern industrial age, augmenting himself with technological power and given himself over to a God-like conceit, to possess and violate the essential divinity of nature herself.

She has been quoted in Romantic Outlaws: Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, written by Charlotte Gordon to say that:

“There is no such thing as progress, a man setting sail is not a glorious symbol of expansion, rather, exploration is yet another meaningless action, a futile gesture in a world where all empires decay and die.”

Mary Shelley was not the first writer to invent the Gothic Genre. Traditional Gothic Literature, dealt with themes of the supernatural, decrepitude and the deepest memories of the past filled with decadence during the fall of great Houses or Empires, specifically the destruction of an assumed Roman Civilization in Western Europe by the Goths.

Horace Walpole was and is still credited for being the literary pioneer who invented the Gothic genre, who like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, based his novel ‘The Castle of Otranto’ (pub. 1764) on a dream.

Unlike, Walpole however, Wollstonecraft Shelley’s dream was based on the future, on things to come, where the horrors of the Supernatural, gave way to the horrors of scientific and technological progress driven by a masculine need to expand, conquer and dominate people and overcome fundamental laws of nature herself.

By the time Mary had published Frankenstein in 1818, the Napoleonic wars had been over for three years, the USA had been an independent nation-state since 1776, and the industrialization of Metropolitan Britain increased its economy through the power of its steam-based technology.

British Metropolitan society also saw the emergence of scientific discoveries and the technologies that had the potential to exploit other fundamental forces, and reactions in nature, such as electricity.

By the time Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley had published her second edition of Frankenstein under her own name in 1823, Michael Faraday had pioneered experiments in Electro-magnetism, 2 years before, and successfully built a rudimentary electric motor by wrapping metal wire around a magnet and passing an electric current around it making the magnet spin.

Charles Babbage and the Countess Ada Lovelace were yet to meet in 1833, who changed the way information was processed in a British society that was becoming more complex in its imperial expansion and administration, especially in relation to other Imperial Industrial/Military Nation States such as Russia, France, or Germany.

By the time of Mary Shelley’s death in 1851, the Mid-Victorian Era had experienced ascendancy of the first Information Age known as the Telegraph, a network of electrical wires operated by electro-mechanical mechanisms, which were used to send and receive personal messages, military orders, Intelligence, and news, across nations and across the globe.

The infamous image of a giant figure of an armed Cecil Rhodes striding across the African continent, his arms outstretched triumphantly laying out telegraph wires, subjugating the land and its people, are reminiscent of Wollstonecraft Shelley’s fear for an Imperial world obsessed by technology and conquest.

For some, the history of 19th Century was a dark age before the Digital Age emerged in the mid-20th century, but Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley had lived in a time where technology was shaped by the complexities of Imperial wars, social change and new waves in artistic expression such as Photography and the emergence of the typewriter, and advancements in medicine.

Never could Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley have imagined the wonders of the Voyager space probe, smartphones, cochlear implants, organ transplants, the discovery of DNA, the creation of A.I., and the World Wide Web. What would she have made of the Apollo Moon Landings, Robots on Mars, or machines on Venus?

The rise and success of the Globalized Cyber Society, built on solid state digital networks, exchanging information through fibre optic cables, at near the speed of light, or by radio waves in the air, was itself shaped by the fear of the horrific power of nuclear weapons, and the proxy wars of the 44 year long era of the Cold war (1947 - 1991), which nearly brought an end to human life on Earth.

The emergence of Drone warfare, and the meteoric rise of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Tim Cook, would not have trusted her hope, that humanity had not yet awoken from the futility of warfare and neo-industrial conquest.

The ‘Dark Satanic Mills’ as William Blake mentioned in his famous poem ‘Jerusalem’ referred to the steam-powered factories that belched out the black, grey smoke, that would gradually steep the British industrial towns and cities of the 19th Century into a miasma of disease and poverty.

The emancipated, but poor Caribbean workers indentured Asian workers, and enslaved African American plantation workers had fed raw cotton and the sugar loaves into the coal-fed, steam-powered factories worked by impoverished families of workers, and Artisans in the Industrial North of England.

At about that time, Mary Shelley had learned about Galvanism, which was based on an 18th-century scientific theory of Bioelectricity, at the time, which was that ‘life is made up of “animal electricity” or electric current that resulted in life’.

Luigi Galvani, an 18th-century Professor of Anatomy, at Bologna, discovered bioelectricity, from an accidental stimulation of a femoral nerve in a pair of frog’s legs, by one of his students, at his laboratory.

Mary’s gruesome image of Galvani’s back garden Laboratory, festooned with the twitching of these frogs hanging from metal hooks by their spinal cords, was the inspiration for the darkest tones of Victor’s obsession with the secrets of life, his lab stocked with dead or reanimated flesh.

These descriptions of small unfortunate creatures tortured with metal hooks and electricity, in the name of scientific curiosity and experimentation fed into these dark images and plots, which would become part of the tone of Cyberpunk, the Neo-Gothic, or as we popularly say, Science fiction movies, comics, and novels.

Authors, Animators, and filmmakers such as Philip K Dick, Octavia E. Butler, Masamune Shirow (Ghost in the Shell), Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira) and James Cameron created images inspired directly and indirectly, by Mary Shelley’s dark themes of scientific, and technological progress and the realm of body horror.

Such fables would take us to dystopias populated by cyborgs, genetically modified humans and animals, Virtual Reality, Robots, Replicants, Extraterrestrials, and A.I.s veiled as gods or demons, shaped by atomic warfare, social decline, advanced medicine, and Space travel.

Literary Cyberpunk as termed, was characterized by counter-cultural anti-heroes trapped in a dehumanized, high-tech future. This popularity turned films and animations such as Terminator, Bladerunner, Ghost in the Shell, Matrix and Akira into the status of modern science fiction icons.

Cyberpunk has its deep origins inspired by the legacy of Newington Green Meeting House. Richard Price, Joseph Priestly, and Mary Wollstonecraft in their Human failings became the Anti-Heroes, Dissenters, who rebelled against the grand narrative and the degeneration of

imperialism, through their radical ideas, against the dehumanizing dominance of a British Empire that threatened the moral core of what they saw as innate Universal human suffrage.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, she named herself, after the tragic death of Percy Shelley in 1822, became the first modern Writer to make us beware of a future corrupted by an over-reliance on technology, Authoritarianism, and scientific curiosity that is endemic without ethics or democratic oversight.

Without Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and her novel Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus there would be no Terminator, Blade Runner, or The Matrix. There would be no Modern Science Fiction, as we know it, without us understanding how it could mould not just our societies, but how it would form us as physical, sensual, and emotional Human beings struggling against an unforgiving Universe.

This blog is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. It was made by New Unity and David Walter. Find out more: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.