The monster opens his yellow eyes and looks through the slime. An incandescent throb jerks him into action: it pulses through his mind, forcing corridors to appear from the swirling clouds, making reality spiral in and out of itself like a million simultaneous monsters, joined through creation, and then the next moment, the next moment, the next moment...

This is not to say that Mary Shelley gave birth to a monster, or that she invented a character whom made a monster; but that within the function of writing, something wholly unnatural may appear. On the one hand we have science fiction, i.e. the design and the application of apparatus, and on the other we have horror, i.e. the perception that monsters exist and that they haunt us.

It could be said that the lacerating torment that the monster feels, becomes recognisable to it, and it is transformed into the hunting of the creator. It is also an abstract map of the scientific methods that went into the production of the monster. Frankenstein had to reject Elizabeth, his family, the Enlightenment basis for scientific research, i.e. that there is a God, and therefore creation is impossible. This gathering of forces and its translation onto the field of chemical reactions, the hotchpotch of body parts and the introduction of electricity pulses as the ‘spark’ of life; could be interpreted as a universal law, in that the splitting of the scientific endeavour from the word of God, gives rise to the realm of demons, in and through which, the solo investigator may experience and be subjected to variant levels of fear.

Mary Shelley received these demons in her ‘dream consciousness’ in the villa in Switzerland. Demon Number One. Lord Byron and the proclamation of the transition between life and death, the imminent journey through the skull to find multiple sexual identities and the use of words to take us from the humble to the acclaimed, from the common to the mysterious, indistinct and embroiled. Demon Number Two. Percy Bysshe Shelley and the unleashing of anarchy in terms of encountering a daemon, who had ‘lips like thine’, who could spread her words with a gentle and cast look from a distracted perspective. A woman’s perspective? A storyteller’s perspective that may distance itself from the act of having babies, and place the act of creation in terms of feminist messages and making a difference in a world where the repetition of the phallic same was dominant. Demon Number Three. Dr. John Williams Poldori who developed his story called ‘The Vampyre’ as Mary wrote. His villain and subsequent demonic influence is a reflection of Byron, who we find in absolute terror in the lonely and "shunned Grecian wood".

Of course it wasn’t easy for Mary. Especially as Miss Shelley was so young, and the novel is, at times, a nervous exposition of her worries and dreams. The cool and detached demonic approach appears in visionary glimpses, perhaps because of the competition with the other demons, perhaps because Mary developed the rational process of writing after and as a consequence of the intensity of dream consciousness, and concurrent with the challenge to transcribe a good scary story. The demonic interference that occurs throughout the novel, takes away the pressure of horror, and diverts us from the path into hell that the story is a passage towards. Mary is a guide down this route, away from the connection between scientific exploration and the word of God, or a moral and metaphysical foundation for research. The ‘foundationless’ and disconnected scientific enterprise, benefits doubly from the interjection of fictional creativity and the separation from morality.

Mary transposes this endeavour into a solo male consciousness. His is the proper name that has found its way into everyday use to signify the monstrous creativity of science. For example, the process of cloning and the frontiers of genetic engineering, represent the contemporary equivalent of the Frankenstein project and Mary Shelley’s imagination. Scientists have been working in laboratories around the world to perfect the technology that would be able to manufacture a human being from genetic ‘spare parts’. The conception of a wholly artificial, ‘grown’ human being inspired the conformist and banal mass society of Brave New World, and it is a pertinent question that divides critics in that it is impossible to predict how the clones may come back to haunt their creators. (Note: the ‘replicants’ in Blade Runner). Expressed with a parallel and fictional edge by HP Lovecraft in the Mountains of Madness. "With the march of time, as the sculptures sadly confessed, the art of creating new life from inorganic matter had been lost, so that the Old Ones had to depend on the moulding of forms already in existence."

It is a terrifying consideration to completely address unique and singular creation. This movement of fear resulted in the decadent art of the ‘Old Ones’ as Lovecraft describes them, and the consequent ‘reproducibility’ of their art form. It could be said that Shelley’s writing is almost impossible to reproduce, even by her. That which comes in the wake of the novel is a set of possibly false and ‘interpretative’ devices, which may lead the reader in many directions. For example, we may consider the coincidence of the novel with her life? We may look at the fusion of fact and fiction through dream consciousness? We could take the monster as metaphor, as the psychological reflection of her attitude to babies, as a father figure; or we could consider it to be a composite of the three demons and their ‘haunting’, and we could read the novel as an allegory for the folly of science. However, these ‘guides to understanding’ mesh over the singularity of the expression; they act in unison to project the reader into familial and safe waters. This said, the enumeration of dispossessed women throughout the novel, or the clear injustice that befalls a sympathetic and ‘innocent’ monster, leaves us in no doubt as to the field of dependency that Mary Shelley was looking to effect. These attractions and repulsions combine simultaneously, or as individual instances, e.g., the case of Justine, or the murder of Elizabeth, or the encounter in the ice cave above Geneva; to undermine the proper name of science that is FRANKENSTEIN. This name is, in fact, relentlessly put under pressure throughout the novel until it becomes an evacuated and ‘holed’ space. He becomes a shell of a personality; the correct and upstanding ‘man of science’ reduced to a wreck.

This wreck sets to sea, and seeks refuge in oceans of ice and lifelessness. The overwhelming solace of death reappears in terms of Walton’s suicidal push to the North Pole, Frankenstein’s maniacal desire to create artificial life, and the monster’s ravenous thirst for revenge. These are the fixtures and the components of Mary Shelley’s ‘Death Machine’. The death machine is sonorous, and makes sounds throughout the novel; such as the romantic dance of death in which Elizabeth is caught, or the tale of the cottagers that is the story of betrayal and the inevitable confrontation with fear and displacement, as their unknown pupil reveals his presence. Death circles and resonates through every cavity of the book, it is joyfully and hopefully presented as the only escape from the obsessive quality of explanation, and the brutal nature of love. It works to join and disassemble, to make wholes out of fragmentary elements, and to jar and to divide the natural, continuous or present. The death machine is a prelude to the imagination, it is a method for dislocating the sensible contents of consciousness, and ‘pressing’ them into action as the expressive elements within an extreme gothic and romantic landscape.

Such a landscape is programmed to conflagration. The lightning that is the ‘spark of life’, runs through the Swiss mountains as loose stitching, hanging from the skin of the monster. This ‘splitting apart’ defines a method of construction that filled the adolescent mind of Mary Shelley, and is a trajectory in her dream consciousness, as the proper name is tracked down and caught; so the story propels us towards oblivion. Perhaps a full stop could be placed concerning the death of Mary’s mother, and a marker positioned beside the experience of childhood through the rejection of the surrogate, and the escape route through a married and promiscuous poet at the age of seventeen. Yet these enactors are parallel and unconnected with respect to the death machine of the novel. The events of Mary’s life go to make up a bolt of energy that welled up in her dream consciousness during that stay in the villa in Switzerland. However, this ‘bolt’ is wholly unnatural. It is incorrect to state that it is a sublimated or synthesised agglutinin of Mary’s calamitous life and experience, or that her literary heritage and second hand knowledge of science somehow combines in a negative sense in the figure and story of Frankenstein. More directly and succinctly, she built a death machine that shows the possibility of unnatural creation.

Foucault dealt with death, in his chapter, ‘Open up a Few Corpses’; in which he described the way the medical profession in France during the later half of the eighteen century came to accept the art of nosology. Victor Frankenstein conforms to the nineteenth century picture of grave robbers and the clandestine experimentation with corpses. In fact, during the eighteenth century, a taboo on examining the flesh of the dead had not been extended. Professors had been encouraged to dissect and to give anatomical demonstrations. Therefore Victor, far from being alone, was amongst friends in Ingolstadt. The nineteenth century myth of the necrophile medical experimenter, arose from the need to gloss over the facts of history, and to enable the ‘new science’ of pathology to appear fresh, clean and precise. Hereafter, the science of pathology was tied to, as Foucault termed it, the institution of ‘the clinic’, where it needed to hold substantial social esteem. The story of Frankenstein fits into the nineteenth century, romanticised image of graveyards and ‘fiddling with the processes of death’. The science of pathological anatomy, and the reasoning that would enable the results of cadaver examination to be ‘carried over’ into the identification of the diseases and the consequent death of the living; had to distance itself from midnight prowls and medieval witch doctors. Robert Louis Stevenson, amongst others, exploited this division, and allowed the archaic image of unsavoury meddling with the processes of death to be carried forth in The Body Snatcher or Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.

The story of Dr. Jekyll is in some ways parallel and ironically countered by the case of Frankenstein. Mary has given us an early nineteenth century reading of multiple personality, a hundred years before psychoanalysis was invented. Victor runs in horror back to the oedipal fold and away from the reality of his unnatural creation. The monster strides into the world by reading Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, the Sorrows of Werter and Volny’s Ruins of Empire, and by spying on the cotttagers. Yet life is tough for the monster. He yearns for a monstrous mommy/daddy. Learning through the keyhole and mimicking the displaced cottagers, gives the demon a sense of dislocation, a tendency to overly familiarise, and the inevitable cathartic lust for revenge. The demon turns the mommy/daddy syndrome inside out through his unnatural state, and he begins to enact his ‘destiny of the real’, or, "the inception of an effective chain outside of humanity – a frightening possibility of a new and uncontrollable signifying chain, one with no rules and no grammar."

However, Frankenstein’s creation is an extremely thoughtful monster. He is prone to philosophy, and his adept use of language makes his creator seem crude and inarticulate. Victor admits that he is a "creature of fine sensation." Yet this creature is also unnatural. He is a ‘mishmash’ of body parts, badly stitched together. He is not human, and he is not a part of nature, yet he lives. He resides in his own biological genus, being an anathema to Linneas; he is caught between categories and belongs nowhere. He is a demon or a ghoul in the proxy mind of Victor Frankenstein and practising scientists, and he is alive in the fictional landscape of Mary Shelley. The monster is in a sense an example of Occam’s razor. The rendition of this ‘unnecessary principle’ has life because unnatural creations are able to travel across time and space (because they are unnatural) and they may become embroiled in the memory due to their singular qualities. The creature is therefore ripe for interpretation in virtual reality, or on TV and films, or comic strips, all due to its undying lack of realism and the creature’s significant transitional qualities. The monster has, to an extent, been latterly replaced by aliens; however, the succubus dining on the good hearts of well-intentioned scientists has been kept alive, and is a pungent pit of calamity that the aspirations of science may fall into.

This border crossing of biological determinism also extends to sexuality and gender. The monster steps across the sexual divide by being an artificially created male, not emanating from sexual relations. It is transgressive as it is organic (alive), yet not a product of organic relations. The sexual drive of the ‘monster’ is therefore deviant, yet pleasurable in a similar manner to the cyborg of Donna Haraway; i.e. there is satisfaction to be found in the relation between the machine and the organism. Frankenstein does not feel this pleasure in the presence of ‘his machine’, perhaps because it is too real, or perhaps because he quickly realises what he has unleashed, (the disturbance of the natural order). He is also distressed by what critics have termed as "the erosion of the border between the masculine and the feminine." In other words, Frankenstein has artificially reproduced the action of the phallus, he has made a phallic machine. This machine threatens the patriarchy that he was a part; in effect, by making a ‘working’ penis, the scientist Frankenstein has thrown into question the position of the male. This question concerns the sacred nature of the penis in contrast to and not limited by the position of the natural womb.

The creature is not a natural phallus, and Frankenstein will not create a natural womb (perhaps this is more transgressive?) In the recent film, Artificial Intelligence, there were included displaced A.I.s running away from capture in the middle of the night. They were trying to find ‘spare parts’ to replace their malfunctioning artificial bodies, and they had to scour rubbish tips to locate such parts. This film demonstrates a graphic representation of an order of ‘Frankenstein beings’ that are outside of a human and therefore normative value system. The ‘monsters’ are predictably hunted down and destroyed at the cruel spectacle of the fair. The point of this anecdote is the reality that the artificial monsters give rise to. They are not in fact a ‘race apart’, but they are already part of the human species. It could be said that through a variety of techniques such as prosthesis, artificial insemination, cloning, even the production of GM crops, we are developing new variations of the human form. The political message is that we are all, to an extent effected, effecting, or in the process of being effected by Frankenstein. We are developing relationships as a species with monsters. The ‘depth of penetration’ of this tendency is disputable; the indisputable aspect is that a pure, unsullied, human form devoid of Frankenstein is impossible.

Perhaps this is the ultimate message of Mary Shelley and her ‘adolescent daydreams’. Her flighty treatment of the ‘monstrous other’ was a beginning of its absorption into everyday life. She could not have imagined the replication technology that is now at our disposal to spread the 'meme' of the monstrous, she could not have predicted the direction of genetic science and the ‘cracking of the code of the human’. Yet maybe she did hit upon a formula for the ‘de-structuralisation’ of the human, and specifically the male person. It was, after all, presented to her in such an oblique and uncompromising form.

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