A few years ago, when I was working on revising the chapter about Frankenstein from my never-finished book project, I decided I probably should update my citations of the novel from the 1990s Norton Critical Edition I'd been using. So I looked around for a more modern critical edition, specifically one that uses the 1818 first edition as its copytext (which I find more interesting than the 1831 version, which is what the Penguin Classics edition uses). I came across this one from the MIT Press, published for the bicentennial of Frankenstein in 2018, aimed—as the subtitle says—at "scientists, engineers, and creators of all kinds."
What this means in practice is that the book contains footnotes by a whole team of annotators (almost fifty), as well as seven short essays. The annotations and essays focus not on, say, tracing literary allusions and sources or making connections to literary theory or explicating biographical references, like you might see in a Norton Critical Edition or a Penguin Classic, but highlighting issues of science and responsibility.
I updated my citations as I revised my chapter, but I also added the book to my reading list, figuring 1) I was curious about the project as a whole, and 2) you certainly can't read Frankenstein too many times. (Especially if you study nineteenth-century literature and science!) Over Christmas break, I finally got around to reading it. This was my third time reading the novel in its entirety, though over the years I've dipped in and out of it many times. Here I thus want to focus on the paratext and not the text... though I will say that rereading the novel made me very much conscious of how long it has been since I've taught it (over a decade), and I would love to do so again... I feel like at this point in my life, I could probably get a whole semester out of the one book! I am not sure where an opportunity exists for me to so that in the near future, though.
Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley |
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Annotated edition published: 2017 Novel originally published: 1818 Acquired: May 2021 Read: December 2025 |
As I mentioned earlier, the annotations here focus on highlighting issues of science and social responsibility. Sometimes they do that by contextualizing the novel in the science and debates of its own time, but more often, I felt, they raise contemporary issues and then pose a lot of broad questions. I felt like overall they were probably intended to nudge undergraduates reading the novel in a college class into asking themselves questions that could provoke discussion.
I have two issues with this, and one I think isn't very fair to the project. This is that I actually don't think Mary Shelley was very interested in what we now think of as "science," because what we now think of as "science" was only just coming into existence at the time. This is something explained really well in, for example, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's Objectivity (2007) and Patricia Fara's Science: A Four Thousand Year History (2009), both of which explicate how it was in the nineteenth century when we came to understand science as its own epistemology with its own ethical commitments. Recall, of course, that there was no such figure as the "scientist" when Frankenstein was written! The annotations in the MIT Frankenstein treat the novel as representative of issues that didn't totally exist as the time it was written. Now, should an edition aimed at undergraduates delve into these distinctions? Almost certainly not to the extent of engaging with Daston and Galison or Fara, sure. But it's a distinction the novel itself draws: when Victor goes to university, he is frustrated that modern science focuses on "realities of little worth" (29). It classifies and organizes, and nothing else. What Victor wants are "chimeras of boundless grandeur" (29)... but he got those from alchemy, not science! So how can the novel be a critique of science when Victor's ambitions come from outside science?
I think it can, Shelley was clearly engaging with the ideas of the new approach to science, but I did feel like the MIT edition elided the distinctions that the novel itself was drawing when it discussed Victor's education. Even if Shelley didn't intend the novel to discuss "science" or "the scientist" as we now understand them, that doesn't prevent the novel from having something to say about them. Victor may not have been a scientist in 1818, but he certainly was one by 1900. Indeed, he is the scientist, the representation that precedes all others! It's an interesting evolution, but one that the annotations obscure more than they reveal I think. (Alfred Nordmann's essay does flag this up, but other than that, it doesn't come up much.)
But this might all be unfair as a critique; if the MIT edition spent a bunch of time explaining the history of science and drawing a distinction between pre- and post-Enlightenment epistemology, that probably would undermine its stated project of "reflect[ing] on how science is framed and understood by the public" and "contextualiz[ing] new scientific and technological innovations" (xi).
This leads me into my second point, though, which is that I felt like in their effort to accomplish this, the annotations often have a hectoring tone... and overlook a major aspect of what makes science "dangerous." They pose a lot of questions, but footnotes are just not a good space in which to develop interesting questions, they're too constrained. So the footnotes have this vibe of "did you think of consequences, STEM majors? well? well?" To tie into my previous point, the attempt to use the footnotes to critique science as an enterprise fails a bit because twenty-first-century science is so different from what Shelley was engaging with. For example, one footnote reads, "Mary adds the troubling notion that science itself—however based in rationality and a drive for human progress—may inadvertently create disruptions... which override the ability of society's institutions to contain them" (147n14). But where in this book has science ever claimed to be "based in rationality and a drive for human progress"? That's not a claim Victor ever made, that's not what underlies his ambitions at all, or even Walton's. Where does the novel ever engage with "society's institutions" and their attempts to control science? Victor is literally just a guy, there's no kind of engagement with the broader societal context of the scientific enterprise. Which is fine for Shelley, as such a thing was only just coming into existence when she wrote, but undermines the MIT edition's attempt to claim this is going on in the book. Elizabeth Bear's essay does point out that "any scientific utility in his [Victor's] work is of very little interest to him" (231); his motivations just aren't what we think of as scientific ones.
Moreover, there is huge problem with all the annotations' and some of the essays' discussions of science going too far... namely, they just seem to treat science 'going too far' as something that just happens, thanks to the hubris of scientists. For example, in Anne K. Mellor's otherwise strong essay at the end, she mentions "the ethical problems inherent in the most recent advances in genetics: the introduction of germ-line engineering through CRISPR-Cas9 techniques of DNA alteration and the current scientific possibility of producing what Victor Frankenstein dreamed of, a superhuman 'designer baby'" (244). But what Mellor (and most of the edition's other contributors) don't actually explain is 1) why are these things bad, and 2) why would people do these things if they are obviously bad. They just 1) take it as read that these things are bad, and 2) seem to think that scientists will go around doing bad things just because. (The essays are generally better about this than the annotations, presumably because they have more space; maybe the real moral of this edition is that it's impossible to squeeze thought-provoking complexity into short footnotes, or even long ones.)
The first is a bit annoying. What makes a "designer baby" bad? A couple generations ago, there was a panic about "test tube babies" when IVF came along... and IVF is totally normalized now. Are we just freaking out about the next thing that's "against nature" for a kneejerk reason?
But the second issue really grinds my gears, because it seems that why scientific discoveries or technological developments are "misused" is a huge blind spot in a lot of discussion of science or technology. Is it because scientists are just cackling manically, or because they're oblivious?
No, it's neither. In this volume, only Cory Doctorow gets it right, in his essay at the back. People don't just "misuse" technologies because they want to; they do it for power. Specifically, in our world, that usually ends up meaning state power or financial power. The problem with splitting the atom is that it was used by nations to exert dominion over other nations; the reason someone might make a "designer baby" is that someone else will pay for it. It's not really about science or technology at all, it's about neocolonialism and global capitalism. That's what we need to afraid of. But most of the writers and annotators here focus on the science and technology itself.
Doctorow's essay, "I've Created a Monster! (and So Can You)," does an excellent, accessible job of laying this out, on both the individual and societal level. "How the railroads were built was the result of individual and often immoral choices. How the railroads were used was the result of a collective choice made by all the people in your social network" (211-2). Being Doctorow, he uses social networks as his example of a technology that gets (mis)used for profit, but I like that because it's accessible and clear: "A service like Facebook was inevitable, but how Facebook works was not" (212). The same goes for nuclear technology or germ-line genetic editing or whatever technology you want to analogize to Frankenstein. Too many people making this book focus on the choices of individual scientists, when what's really at stake are the choices of individuals with financial or political power, and the choice of society when it comes to regulation. The warning of this MIT edition is aimed at the wrong audience; if we want to prevent the misuse of science, we don't need an edition annotated for "scientists, engineers, and creators of all kinds," we need an edition annotated for the military-industrial complex and venture capitalists.
I'm guessing they'd be even less likely to read it, though.
(The other essay that I thought got it right was Jane Maienschein and Kate MacCord's "Changing Conceptions of Human Nature," which focuses on Victor's education moreso than the creature.)
Also, as far as being a critical edition goes, I was a bit frustrated that the book claims to have a "painstakingly line-edited and amended version of the original manuscript" prepared by Charles E. Robinson (xii)... with absolutely no explanation of what this means! I get this is aimed at STEM undergraduates not literary scholars, but surely a half-page "note on the text" would not have gone amiss so that (say) a literary scholar choosing to assign the text knows the provenance of the version they are assigning! A weird misstep, in my opinion; it's a minimal-effort thing that people who don't care can just skip, but people who do care very much need!
