Every self-respecting pedant knows that Frankenstein was not the monster in Shelley’s 1818 classic (or was he?). Most know also that Frankenstein’s creation was not the zombie-like Boris Karloff depiction and was rather more terrifyingly articulate and intelligent. Fewer of those who have read the novel can shake the impression that there is something electric in the creation of Frankenstein’s monster. There is an impression in the public consciousness of a definitive lightning strike of re-animation, an electrical charge that galvanises body parts, that is decidedly absent from the novels text:
It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.
Why then, given the sparse evidence of the text, do those that have read it labour under the misapprehension that it details an electric re-amination of a corpse? One answer is the 1931 James Wheelan film; to paraphrasets most famous line: ‘It’s A-Lie’. Much like victor Frankenstein, when James Wheelan directed the film he created an entirely new and archetypal character from select pieces of the novel and the impact of the film on the ongoing cultural psyche surrounding the Frankensteinian cannot be overstated. However, we would miss a shocking and vibrant period of scientific experimentation if we ignored the electrical pioneers and showmen of the 18th century which shaped the understanding of physiology, electricity and electrophysiology in Shelley’s lifetime.
The phrase vital electricity has not entered public consciousness as much as the work inspired by the scientists who practised it. But before the well-known 19th Century electrical experimenters Edison, Faraday and Tesla, there were the equally eponymous Galvani, Volta and Duchenne.
The ancient Greeks claim the discovery of electricity in the way they often have: by etymology. Electricity comes from ‘Elektron’, the Greek for amber. Greeks demonstrated that amber, when rubbed, could allow small particles and objects to be lifted by the energy generated.
While not entirely novel, the idea that electricity could be a (or the) vital life force for electricity took of with the widening understanding and demonstrations of electricity in 18th century Europe.
In the 18th century, scientific discovery had an element of showmanship. Experiments were performed to whole lecture theatres and often these lectures would become public. Shelley herself talks of ‘Dr Darwin’s’ experiments’ (referring to Erasmus Darwin, Charles’ grandfather) in the 1831 introduction to Frankenstein. There can be no doubt she was not only aware of the cultural shifts inspired by the science of the day, but she was writing aware of the science itself.
The experiments concerning vital electricity, or animal electricity as Galvani would call it, can be divided into 3 broad categories:
- The body as a passive object with which electricity will interact.
- The body as a conductor.
- The body as a collection of electrical control signals.
These experiments were popularised in 1729 by Stephen Gray. He used the Leyden jar to demonstrate the second of those categories: that the body was a conductor. An 8-year-old boy was suspended on silk threads and held conductors in his hand, and his body attracted small particles towards it.
He later inventively swapped the young boy for a young girl of the same age. Sadly, when this predictably failed to generate hugely increased interest, he went on to super-charge these public experiments by killing small animals such as sparrows and beetles with an electric charge. These grim precursors of the electric chair preceded the invention of the lightbulb by some 100 years.
The epicentre for the school of the vital electricians of the 18th century was in Bologna. In the 1750s Marc’antonio Caldani and Felicine Fontana experimented by inserting electrified rods into the muscles of cats and isolating individual nerves in dissected frog legs.
In the 1780s, Luigi Galvani proposed his theory of an ‘animal electricity’. His most famous experiment used frog legs with an electric current to reproduce physiological muscle contraction. Not satisfied with frog legs, these experiments continued freshly amputated human limbs from hospitals. He took his show on the road to Paris, where the French revolution enabled easy access to limbs with no formal claimants.
Galvani’s compatriot Alessandro Volta repeated Galvani’s experiments but came to a different conclusion. Rather than there being an innate charge within muscle, he felt it was the presence of two different metals and the difference in their charge that enabled an electric current to be created; the electrical potential. The concept of electrical potential, and its relevance to nervous signalling, will be familiar to medical students everywhere.
It was Volta who first used the term ‘Galvanised’ in reference to the electrical stimulation of these muscles. However, Volta himself secured his future mention in the song ‘Danger! High voltage’ by inventing the voltaic pile or the early battery.:
The man who truly united the scientific study of animal electricity and combined it with therapeutic intervention is the omnipresent Duchenne du Boulogne., While spiritually descended from the school of thought of the great Bolognans, Duchenne was in fact from Boulogne, France.
Rather than electropuncture (what it says on the tin), he pioneered the use of electrodes to stimulate muscle contraction and used knowledge of anatomy to label where they would be best placed to stimulate contraction of difference muscles. He used these experiments in the medical treatments of paralysis and used the new art of photography to document some of his results. One involved placing an electrode to force a man’s face to smile. This was named a ‘Duchenne smile’ – counterintuitively referencing a truly genuine smile that reaches one’s eyes.
Duchenne famously gives his name to the muscular dystrophy, but he also was the forefather of much of electrophysiology, including electroconvulsive therapy.
These experiments instigated debates across the continent. The most impactful question raised by them was this: could life be created, or the dead re-animated? This was the question of the scientific community in the time Mary Shelley was living and writing.
The lack of explicit mention of electricity in the text has a few prevailing interpretations. One is that in fact the life force referenced is not in fact electricity but heat. This argument references the subtitle of the novel: The Modern Prometheus.
Other interpretations favour the use of both electricity and purposeful limited information in the creature’s birth scene. When Frankenstein recounts his experiment to his faithful listener and our narrator, is he so horrified as to not want to repeat the details of his ‘unhallowed arts’ as to allow them to be repeated? And does this itself foreshadow the grisly end of both creator and creation ?
My favoured interpretation is that it is left purposely vague to highlight the non-importance of the method itself. Shelley may be saying that this is not a novel about the science of reanimation, but the moral quandaries raised by manipulating the building blocks of life. This is what makes the novel’s message so enduring. What has helped in its enduring relevance is the adjacence of electricity in modern medical practice.
