In the wake of John Locke’s philosophical reintroduction of ‘tabula rasa’ into English society, a popular discourse arose on the subject of proper education for children—those whose minds were completely formidable and dependent on the careful instruction of both morals and knowledge-based intellect for their successful development and progression through life.1 Among the critics who joined in this conversation was Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of Mary Shelley, and author of several works regarding ideal principles on childhood development and upbringing.2 One of these texts was a nursery book, directly purposed to influence the malleable minds of children with morality, knowledge and sense. Wollstonecraft believed that people, regardless of sex, should possess a “dignity of mind,” that is, an awareness of the presence and effects of evil, suffering, and misfortune in the world, and an ability to endure them with willingness, mental fortitude, and perseverance. She claimed that this “cultivated mind is a real advantage” to the possessor, ultimately enabling them to “rise above misfortunes.”3 Her stories, thus, aimed at elevating the untainted minds of childhood, those which abide in an inexperienced reality, into the full knowledge and awareness of evil and suffering. Throughout the course of the nursery book, she exposes children to difficult situations, such as death, grief, illness, physical pain, economic ruin, and many other transformational experiences, which, William Blake, interestingly the illustrator of her children’s book, in his own poetry The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, would deem the necessary elements for the transition between childhood and adulthood.4 This collection of Blake’s poetry centers on the idea that all mankind must, at some point in their youth, traverse through a door of experience and awaken to the harsh reality of an evil world. “Experience,” in Blake’s philosophy, is directly correlated to the awareness of corruption, suffering, and misfortune on earth. As the illustrator of Wollstonecraft’s story book, it is clear that Blake was aware of her belief in the impartation of “premature knowledge,” an idea which, although perhaps not entirely shared by him, was influential in the creation of his poetry on this subject matter (Wollstonecraft vii).5
The intentional education of children regarding the difficult realities of the world is an undertaking which can be compared to the edenic act of eating the forbidden fruit; the act which opened the eyes and minds of the innocent eaters to all the knowledge of both good and especially of evil. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus, these edenic, knowledge-vs-innocence themes are also present, indicating a deep familiarity with the discourse of childhood education in which her mother ardently participated. While Shelley did not personally know her mother, she was vastly familiar with the works that she wrote throughout her life, and thus would likely have read her stories either as a child or in her young adulthood, and gained this understanding of her mother’s perspective.6 Yet by comparing the major themes of childhood development in Wollstonecraft’s stories to those in Shelley’s Frankenstein, it appears that Shelley presents a rather different message on the ideal image of a cultivated mind. Where Wollstonecraft claims virtue derives from harsh experiences, Shelley presents through her child-like creature the opposite: “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend,” implying his initially innocent and blank mind which, from the atrocities of his experiences both in the natural world and in society, as well as from his increase in intellectual knowledge, turned dark within him rather than light (Shelley 126). Thus, it appears that Shelley offers an underlying message of leaving off the forbidden fruit and returning to the bliss and simplicity of an ignorant life, suggesting the detriment of an excessive and unnecessary acquirement of knowledge.
I. The Paradise of Childhood Innocence and Its Loss through Empirical Knowledge
As previously mentioned, the innocent mind of childhood is ostensibly a reflection of the edenic minds of Adam and Eve from Milton’s Paradise Lost, before they possessed the knowledge of good and evil. In Blake’s aforementioned series of poetry, he depicts the fantastical separation between the untainted mind of a child and the antonymous mind of an adult. In his own words, it is the image of “two contrary states of the human soul,” separated by a portal of experience (Greenblatt 123). It is thus empirical knowledge that ushers humans from a state of innocence to one in which they are aware of the evils within the world. This perception of darkness permeates Blake’s Songs of Experience and, while attempting to portray pure beauty and gleeful scenes in the Songs of Innocence, corruption is not absent there either. It is simply observed through a mind that does not comprehend its significance, and thus sees nothing extraordinary but beauty in nature, religion, and fellowship—a mind composed of innocence, a child’s mind.7 Similarly, in Paradise Lost, the presence of evil abides in Eden with the untainted inhabitants, in the form of the forbidden fruit and eventually as Satan himself in disguise, but the man and woman remain innocent because they are unaware of it; they do not have the knowledge of its existence, but only when they choose such knowledge over their innocence does evil become a foreboding presence.
In a similar manner, Shelley structures Victor Frankenstein’s story, as encapsulating his entire life, detailing the pursuit of knowledge, or the forbidden fruit, as the first step which ultimately led to his fall, and the fall of his entire family. Thus, his story begins with a scene of perfect domestic bliss, the paradisiacal life into which he was born, and an incredibly vivid parallel to the edenic position of Adam: “such was our domestic circle, from which care and pain seemed forever banished…the voice of command was never heard amongst us; but mutual affection engaged us all to comply with and obey the slightest desire of each other” (71). Even his relationship with Elizabeth, when in this state of innocent youth, reflected most closely the bond of the idealistic marriage in Eden, as Victor expresses “although there was a great dissimilitude in our characters, there was an harmony in that very dissimilitude” (66). The depiction of absolute perfection in his upbringing, which he crowns with the statement, “No youth could have passed more happily than mine,” portrays an emphatic idealism of his state of innocence, reflecting both the perfection of humanity before its exposure to the knowledge of good and evil, as well as his own preferred state of ignorance before he fell by the power of the same force.
Yet this forbidden fruit was present in his home as well, in the form of books on natural philosophy, alluring him as it did Eve. Unlike Eden, however, it was Victor alone who fell into the temptation which this knowledge presented to him, and which led to the downfall of his family. He recounts, “The world was to me a secret, which I desired to discover,” yet for Elizabeth, “it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own” (66). This is an interesting reversal of the blame of Eden, showing Elizabeth’s contentedness with the innocence of imagination against Victor’s hunger for knowledge, which only enlarged after being dismissed by his father: “My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash” (68). The sense of it being prohibited, and Victor’s doubt in his father’s wisdom to recommend its expulsion, served to expedite his pursuit, for which he recounts “I continued to read with the greatest avidity” (68). The first effect of the fall that Adam and Eve demonstrate after having indulged themselves in the fruit of knowledge is the projection blame upon one another. At the end of Book IX of Paradise Lost, Milton expresses, “Thus they in mutual accusation spent / The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning / And of their vain contest appeared no end” (Milton). Similarly, one of Victor’s most apparent flaws is his inability to accept responsibility for his actions, and his continual imputation of blame upon others. This is the first instance of his account in which we observe this accusatory response, indicating the beginning of his downfall: “If…my father had taken the pains to explain to me…the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin” (68).
Victor’s pursuit of forbidden knowledge culminates, however, in the birth of his creature. The monster, the imagery of the living dead, is a reflection of mankind after having eating the fruit in Eden. As Milton explains, “of the fruit of this fair tree amidst / The garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat / Thereof, nor shall ye touch it, lest ye die” (Milton, Book IX). After eating the fruit, humanity became a form of living dead; their expulsion from the innocent paradise of Eden rendered them spiritually dead, although they physically lived. Full of knowledge of both good and evil, they traversed through the empirical door, losing all sense of the innocence which they had carried purely before. They themselves became monsters of evil through the knowledge of its existence. Thus, Frankenstein’s monster is an image of the state of mankind after indulging in forbidden knowledge, a beastly soul torn between two worlds of good and evil, of innocence and of experience. Blake presents the birth of a child in Songs of Experience in grotesque terms, mirroring the horror of leaving paradise for the world of knowledge: “…my father wept: / Into the dangerous world I leapt, / Helpless, naked, piping loud, / Like a fiend hid in a cloud.” (Blake, “Infant Sorrow” 1-4). This imagery, and particularly the word “fiend,” is reflective of the creature’s birth in Frankenstein: “I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs…His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath…his watery eyes…his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips” (84-85). In this moment, Victor is stripped of his childhood innocence, and all his attempts to reclaim his untainted past are tarnished, and ultimately destroyed, by the presence of his knowledge-born monster.
Thus, it is interesting that the first tangible evidence of his fall, that is, the first event of misfortune that follows the creation of his monster, is the death of his young, innocent brother William. Victor describes William in his infancy as “the most beautiful little fellow in the world; his lively blue eyes, dimpled cheeks, and endearing manners, inspired the tenderest affection” (71). Similarly, Blake in Songs of Innocence, the counterpart to the aforementioned poem, presents a newborn baby as “Pretty joy! / Sweet joy, but two days old. / Sweet joy I call thee: / Thou dost smile” (Blake, “Infant Joy” 7-10). The birth of the monster ushers in a new era for the Frankenstein family, and the hideous fiend, born of prohibited knowledge, replaces the sweet, innocent William. Ultimately, the death of William is representative of the loss of Victor’s childhood innocence; the first experience which conducts him through Blake’s door of empirical knowledge, and into the second state of the human soul, the one tarnished by the harsh realities of the world. William’s murder is a direct result of Victor’s decision to indulge in the forbidden fruit, as are the subsequent deaths of the rest of his loved ones. In the same way, the spiritual death of the edenic inhabitants came by their own hand, by their choice to eat the fruit; and just as the human race fell as a result of this decision, so did the Frankenstein family as a result of Victor’s. Across all of these parallels, childhood innocence is dashed by the hands of knowledge-based experience.
II. Acquiring Virtue: Wollstonecraft’s Prerequisite for Friendship and Happiness
In Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories, the author explicitly states for the young readers that “Fortitude of mind” is “the basis of every virtue” and will “habituate [children] to bear the conflicts of the soul when they become reasonable creatures” (Wollstonecraft 36). The development of this reason, mental fortitude, and virtue derives from exposure to difficult and trying experiences. Thus, Wollstonecraft, through her nursery book, attempts to shape morality into the malleable minds of children through this sort of exposure. She explains that “Those who, when young, weep if the least trifle annoys them, will never, I fear, have sufficient strength of mind to encounter all the miseries that can afflict the body” (37). Throughout the chapters of the book, her protagonist children experience the effects of many tragic and heart-breaking situations, the sources which ultimately render them “no longer [children],” but “reasonable” humans of “virtue” (19).
The stories begin with exposure to the realities of suffering animals, slowly expanding into the sphere of human misery as well. After spotting a wounded bird, which was “in such exquisite pain. The children turned away their eyes,” which their tutor, Mrs. Mason, corrects by saying, “Look at it,” and ultimately puts it out of its misery by stepping “on the bird’s head” (2). Mrs. Mason tells the story of “A bitch [who] had once all her litter stolen from her, and drowned…she sought them out…laid them at the feet of her cruel master…and expired” (4). She moves to the account of a “poor father…bereft of all his children, hung over their bed in speechless anguish” (5). His only comfort was a stray and loyal dog, who too was taken from him as a merciless horseback-rider “leveled his gun at his head—shot him—and instantly rode off” (6). Scholar, Dennis M. Welsh notes that the moral of this tragic story is ostensibly absent and that “One wonders why the governess tells Mary and Caroline about this man and his family, except to make her charges conscious of life’s cruelty and misfortune” (Welsh 9). Bloody, wounded birds, drowned puppies, families broken and killed by poverty and illness, and the smallest form of comfort murdered with a gruesome shot to the head. All of these examples appear to be hardly appropriate subject matter for children, and aimed only at the end of instilling “premature knowledge,” as Wollstonecraft states in her preface to Original Stories, within their impressionable minds (Wollstonecraft vii).
She further speaks of a child who “broke her mother’s heart, or hastened her death, by her want of duty…and many other faults;” of a rich Lady Sly who “cannot pray to God” as she “never attended to truth…obtain[ed]…fortune by falsehood,” and is cut off from divine connection as God “hates a liar!” (8, 10). She introduces the foreboding reality of death, explaining that “A mind is never truly great, till the love of virtue overcomes the fear of death” (16); and she recounts a woman’s tragedy so brutal that the “grief that did not break her heart disturbed her reason; and her husband confined her to a madhouse” (21). While the purpose of instilling virtue into a child’s mind is noble, the manner of its execution here appears to be aimed at the instillation of fear and dread, as well as a premature departure from the paradise of childhood innocence. Mrs. Mason notes the physical response of distress that the children demonstrate after having been awakened to the knowledge of these horrors. She says, “Give me your hand Mary, you tremble…Be calm, my child, and remember that you must attend to trifles” (22). The children physically tremble at the impartation of the knowledge of evil but, according to Wollstonecraft, it is necessary in the development of a strong mind, the enabler of success, connection, and fulfillment in life.
It is with this consciousness that Wollstonecraft emphasizes throughout the book the benefit of friendship, which she explains, is a direct result of mental and moral development. She states, “Friendship is founded on knowledge and virtue, and these are human acquirements” (4). When the child, Mary, exhibits virtuous behavior, Mrs. Mason proudly says, “I called her my friend, and she deserved the name, for she was no longer a child; a reasonable affection had conquered an appetite; her understanding took the lead, and she had practised a virtue” (19). At the end of the book, in Mrs. Mason’s farewell to the children, she states, “You are now candidates for my friendship, and on your advancement in virtue my regard will in future depend” (41). Thus, it is evident in this instruction that one earns the right to companionship after having proven themself a rational being, demonstrative of the virtues which a cultivated mind produces. To Wollstonecraft, empirical knowledge produces virtue, and virtue alone enables companionship.
With this understanding, it is interesting that the motif of wanting friendship, of lacking human connection and companionship, is so prevalent throughout Shelley’s Frankenstein. In the second letter to his sister, Walton expresses, “I bitterly feel the want of a friend” (Shelley 53). Victor laments the loss of his closest companion as well as others in his family, “Have my murderous machinations deprived you also, my dearest Henry, of life? Two I have already destroyed…but you, Clerval, my friend, my benefactor—” (200). Similarly, the creature declares, “Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded…am I not alone, miserably alone?” (126). There is an extreme presence of loneliness and isolation throughout the novel, yet the source of this depravity appears to be very different from that presented in Wollstonecraft’s nursery book. What is ostensibly hindering all these individuals from companionship is not a lack of virtue, but rather a surplus of the empirical knowledge defined by Blake and the edenic tree of good and evil; the knowledge with which Wollstonecraft attempts (though with benevolent intentions) to mold the minds of innocent children.
Walton, like Victor, seeks fulfillment in exploration, the potential for scientific discovery and fame through the most unattainable region of the world, that which, given the constitution of the human body, would be considered off limits, forbidden, unreachable by anyone but God. Victor meddles with scientific concepts that have theretofore been reserved for God alone. Yet the desire for such unattainable knowledge allures both into the isolated and depraved state which they inhabit by the end of the novel, as it did for the fallen edenic couple as well. The creature demonstrates the benevolence of childhood innocence upon his birth, but becomes immediately enraptured with the harsh experiences of the world; and it is the excess of this empirical knowledge for all three characters that renders them wanting not only in companionship, but also in virtue. Walton claims that friendship would reduce his faults: “How would such a friend repair the faults of your poor brother!,” demonstrating the restorative and healing power of friendship and mutual care (53). The creature tells his master, “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous,” indicating that it was his miserable experiences which produced vice within him, and that it is companionship alone that offers him hope for restoration and happiness (126).
In this manner, Shelley presents an antithetical opinion to that of her mother, demonstrating through her characters that the simplicity of friendship inspires virtue, rather than the reverse; and ultimately, that an excess of the knowledge of evil produces vice, rather than virtue—vice which leads to isolation and loneliness. Victor possessed virtue, happiness, and and tranquility prior to his indulgence in forbidden knowledge, and admits to a preference for the former as he says, “I feel pleasure in dwelling on the reflections of my childhood before misfortune tainted my mind” (67). It was his experiences of misfortune, brought about by the involvement in forbidden knowledge, that tainted his pure mind and expelled him from the Eden of his youth. Victor’s childhood innocence is a paradise in which virtue naturally flourishes, as are the initial moments of the creature’s life, although he quickly discovers the painful realities of the world which mar his pure, blank mind as well. As scholar, Rebecca Baumann, explains:
“It is through reading, then, that the monster learns of the social organization of the world, that heredity and wealth dictate one’s position in society. It is through reading, essentially, that he learns to hate himself…His literacy and his misery increase when he finds a portmanteau in the woods containing copies of Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, and The Sorrows of Young Werther” (Baumann 77, emphasis added).
Like Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, the characters become victims of their empirical knowledge. The creature expresses the progression of his fall, his traversal through Blake’s empirical door, “Evil thenceforth became my good. I had no choice but to adapt my nature to an element I had willingly chosen” (241). In the same manner, Victor receives a life of retribution for his decision to pursue forbidden knowledge, and is killed by the culmination of that pursuit—the monster, who at Victor’s death, says “I irretrievably destroyed thee by destroying all thou lovedst” (240). The fruit of his knowledge destroyed him, as it did for the inhabitants of Eden.
Ultimately, Victor Frankenstein advises Walton, the only one of the three who had not entirely taken the irrevocable step toward empirical knowledge, the equivalent knowledge of good and evil, to “Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries” (239). These words, the last before his death, reflect his deepest regret—his pursuit of the forbidden fruit, and his lack of attention to the “paramount…duties towards my fellow-creatures” (238). While he inserts the caveat, “Yet why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed,” he maintains, through the story of his life, such a terrifying testimony of the detriment of excess knowledge and ambition that even these words appear more of a warning than a provocation toward the same path (239). The aforementioned critic, Dennis Welsh, presents that “to try continually to confront experience creates risks…especially the risk of becoming what one beholds” (Welsh 12). Such appears also to be a message within Shelley’s novel and, through the lives of her misery-worn characters, she guides her readers back toward the beauty and virtue in the simplicity and edenic bliss of childhood innocence.
December 3, 2019
Endnotes:
- Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Batoche Books Limeted, Ontario, 2001 (In Ch. III: “moral principles require reasoning and discourse, and some exercise of the mind, to discover the certainty of their truth. They lie not open as natural characters engraven on the mind”).
- Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Norton Critical Ed. 3rd Ed. Edited by Deidre Shauna Lynch. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2009 (See pp. 221-247, section titled “Education”); She also wrote Thoughts on the Education of Daughters.
- Wollstonecraft, Mary. “Analytical Review” A Simple Story by Elizabeth Inchbald, edited by Anna Lott, Appendix B, “Mary Wollstonecraft, Analytical Review 10 (May 1791): 101-02.”
- Wollstonecraft, Mary. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories (1788). Edited by E.V. Lucas, Project Gutenberg, Middleton, 2011 (See Introduction by E.V. Lucas, pp. v); See also Greenblatt, Stephen. The Norton Anthology of English Literature:The Romantic Period, 10th Ed. Vol. D, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2018 (See pp. 125-127 for William Blake).
- Welsh, Dennis M. “Blake’s Response to Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories.” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly (Summer 1979), Vol 13, Iss. 1 (See pp. 4-5, 12).
- Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. Routledge, New York, 1989 (See pp. 3, 20, 23 for Mary, “idolizing her dead mother,” and “read[ing] her mother’s works and sought solace from nature and her mother’s spirit”).
- Greenblatt, Stephen. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period, 10th Ed. Vol. D, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2018 (See pp. 127, footnote 1 on Songs of Innocence and of Experience).
Works Cited:
Baumann, Rebecca. “Case 8: The Monster’s Books” Frankenstein 200: The Birth, Life, and Resurrection of Mary Shelley’s Monster. Indiana University Press, 2018.
Blake, William. “Songs of Innocence and of Experience.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature:The Romantic Period, 10th Ed. Vol. D, Edited by Stephen Greenblatt, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2018.
Greenblatt, Stephen. The Norton Anthology of English Literature:The Romantic Period, 10th Ed. Vol. D, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2018.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Project Gutenberg, Ebook No. 26, 1992.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus. Edited by D.L. MacDonald and Kathleen Scherf, 2nd Ed., Broadview Press, Ldt., Toronto, 1999.
Welsh, Dennis M. “Blake’s Response to Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories.” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly (Summer 1979), Vol 13, Iss. 1.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. “Mary Wollstonecraft, Analytical Review 10 (May 1791): 101-02.” A Simple Story, by Elizabeth Inchbald, Edited by Anna Lott, Broadview Press, 2007, pp. 381.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories (1788). Edited by E. V. Lucas, Project Gutenberg, Middleton, 2011.
Bibliography:
Blake, William. “Songs of Innocence and of Experience.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature:The Romantic Period, 10th Ed. Vol. D, Edited by Stephen Greenblatt, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2018.
Greenblatt, Stephen. The Norton Anthology of English Literature:The Romantic Period, 10th Ed. Vol. D, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2018.
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Batoche Books Limeted, Ontario, 2001.
Locke, John. “The Works of John Locke, vol. 8 (Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Posthumous Works, Familiar Letters) [1690]” Online Library of Liberty.
Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. Routledge, New York, 1989.