At the start of the nineteenth century, ideas like those of Goethe, Lamarck, and Saint-Hilaire were viewed by most scientists with distrust and even mockery. Airy notions of constant adaptation and fluid change seemed lacking in rigor to the champions of a mechanistic universe, one where definite causes had predictable effects. But in the arts, the assault on the machine metaphor continued.

In 1813 Percy Bysshe Shelley, writing of subservience to power, pictured it as transforming the human frame into “a mechanized automaton.” Five years later his mate, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, tossed off her gothic alert on the larger dangers of treating nature as a machine.

In her classic tale, when the young protagonist Victor Frankenstein decides to use his knowledge of chemistry and anatomy to make a human being, he is at first optimistic, saying, “I prepared myself for a multitude of reverses…yet, when I considered the improvement which every day takes place in science and mechanics, I was encouraged.” But the experiment goes horribly wrong, and after years of desperate wandering the creature eventually returns to demand a bride. When Frankenstein refuses, fearing they’ll spawn a race of brutal subhumans, the enraged monster threatens to destroy all that is dear to him. “You are my creator,” it warns, “but I am your master.”

One by one, the creature kills those closest to Frankenstein, including his intended, Elizabeth, who was “the living spirit of love to soften and attract,” and his best friend, Henry, who “was a being formed in the very ‘poetry of nature.’” Toward the end Frankenstein, the daring scientist, is haggard and focused only on destroying his creation. “Learn from me,” he laments, “how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge.”

In England by the middle of the nineteenth century, the “spirit of love” and the “poetry of nature” were fading fast. Labor exploitation was rampant, and yearly coal production, no more than ten million tons at the century’s start, had grown to sixty million tons as the pace of industry quickened. Vast areas of pastoral countryside were transformed into ruined landscapes of belching chimneys, slag heaps, and streams full of wastes. Whole cities disappeared under palls of smoke.

Tags: England, Frankenstein, Goethe, industrial revolution, Lamarck, machine metaphor, Saint Hilaire

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Posted on April 12th, 2006 @ 3:00 pm