Frankenstein Chapter 1 Summary

Chapter 1

Introduction
Christa Knellwolf and Jane Goodall

When Evelyn Fox Keller wrote that ‘Frankenstein is a story first and foremost about the consequences of male ambitions to co-opt the procreative function’, she took for granted an interpretive consensus amongst late twentieth-century critical approaches to the novel. Whilst the themes had been revealed as ‘considerably more complex than we had earlier thought’, Fox Keller concludes ‘the major point remains quite simple’.1 The consensus might be characterised a little more broadly than this – as a view that the novel is about masculinity and scientific hubris – and has led to an enduring use of the title as a byword for the dangerous potential of the scientific over-reacher: It
Here it has to be noted that it is a response to the weakening of the power of the Church that lay investigators could encroach on its traditional prerogatives when they examined aspects of psyche, mind and consciousness and, by doing so, rejected the idea that those parts of the human being which were traditionally described by the term ‘soul’ should be excluded from empirical, physiological analysis. Importantly, though, science bridges the divide between sober empiricism and attempts to subject metaphysical issues to the scrutinising eyes of logical analysis. The hybrids between rationality and metaphysical speculation, called into existence by the crossovers between these two types of science, are a fertile backdrop to Victor Frankenstein’s introduction to the world of science. The locations of Frankenstein have been chosen with utmost care. Victor’s birthplace in Geneva positions him in the stronghold of Calvinism. At the same time, it alludes to the fact that Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) returned to this small republic on Lake Geneva as a refuge from the vices of France. Another significant setting for the formation of Victor’s mind is Ingolstadt, a Bavarian town with a recently founded university (1759) that adopted progressive principles and aimed to achieve social reform. Ingolstadt became famous throughout Europe in the early 1780s for a particular brand of Enlightenment: the order of the Illuminati who describe themselves simply by the Latin word for Enlightenment. It is true that Frankenstein does not contain any direct references to the Illuminism, or its founder Adam Weishaupt (1748–1811), but it is telling that the dates of Walton’s letters to his sister, ‘17—’, refer its action back to an anonymous time of the eighteenth century. It therefore seems to be fair to conclude