Lucille Turner's Blog - Posts Tagged "science"
Frankenstein, Dracula and Science
As John Edgar Browning says in his collection of essays, ‘Draculas, Vampires and Other Undead Forms’, “the story of the birthing of Frankenstein’s monster, in many ways, is about our hopes and anxieties about the brave new worlds science can potentially make possible. In contrast, the narrative of Dracula seems its converse: it is about the primordial, dark matter that resists the rationalism of science – the “old magic” that science, as the “new magic”, cannot completely counter…”
When Mary Shelley published her novel, Frankenstein, in 1818 (anonymously at first) it was a time of major social change. The Industrial Revolution had started; science had begun to show us that more things were possible than we had ever imagined. The steam locomotive had just been invented; the first photograph had just been taken; the first battery had just been made, the first plastic surgery had just been carried out in England, the stethoscope had just been invented. The inner workings of the human body began to lose their mystery. Hardly surprising then that author Mary Shelley should conceive of her monster: a new human being constructed from the body parts of the deceased. It brought old questions to the surface, this creation of Shelley’s, such as what is soul, and, what makes us human? Scientist Victor Frankenstein (Frankenstein, remember, was not the name of the monster, but the name of his creator) harnesses the power of electricity, that mysterious new force, to breathe life into his creation. Science appears as all-powerful, God-like, capable of answering every question, solving every puzzle. But does it?
Shelley’s time saw the rise of a particular kind of literature, which began to gain popularity: Gothic Fiction. The use of the word Gothic came from the architecture these works of literature often used for their settings. Ancient, medieval castles, monasteries and dungeons all feature: places that the light of science had not yet illuminated, but needed to. Frankenstein’s monster was reborn in a gothic setting in the 1994 adaptation, which starred Robert de Niro as the monster. But the ultimate failure of Scientist Victor Frankenstein to answer his monster’s persistent questions is very significant. The monster may live, breathe and walk, but his creator, Victor, offers no reply to his creation’s ultimate question, What am I? It would be another sixty years at least before an answer would finally be found. Meanwhile, enter Count Dracula.
Bram Stoker empowered the Dracula legend with his novel, Dracula, published in 1897. The book was a Gothic triumph, and still is, with its sinister settings and the ominous presence of the Count, a man on whom the words ‘I must be getting home now’ have no real impact. Where Frankenstein had exposed questions unsolvable by rationalism and science, eighty years later Dracula did something entirely different. He answered them.
John Browning, a specialist in the field of vampire studies, refers in his essay to a form of ‘old magic’, which the ‘new magic’ of science cannot counter, and which Dracula apparently personifies. To put this in perspective, we need to go back to the Industrial Revolution. The ‘new magic’ of science had big hopes. Man no longer needed God; he could become God. Shelley’s Frankenstein thought himself possessed of divine power when he gave life to his creation. But the gift of life came at a price and Frankenstein’s monster in the end destroyed itself. Dracula, by contrast, appears to live forever. Resurrection makes him stronger. He transcends time, ignores it. But let us remember that Stoker did not invent the vampire; it had inhabited popular imagination long before the start of the Industrial Revolution. The vampire was as old as death itself; the ‘old magic’ it represented had been part of the fabric of mankind ever since the dawn of time, and it was called instinct.
Scientific rationalism has always had a problem with instinct. Gradually, and in order to deal with the conundrum it presented, which was the conundrum of human nature, scientific thought evolved a new discipline to deal with it: psychology.
Around twenty years after Bram Stoker wrote ‘Dracula’, a man called Sigmund Freud gave instinct a name. He called it the Id. These instinctive impulses, Freud claimed, competed with rationality: the Ego, for control of our mind. The Id resided in the unconscious mind, while the Ego was present as a part of the conscious mind. The Id was timeless, and had inhabited us since birth; the Ego came later, as we grew. The Id harboured the impulses of sex and aggression, while the Ego struggled to regulate them. These old instinctive urges appear associated with the persona of the vampire. He is seductive; he is cruel. Perhaps more importantly, he is elusive, hard to pin down; he is timeless, eternal. The rational mind would deny him; the unconscious says he exists.
The Industrial Revolution, in full swing at the time Dracula the novel was published, had already begun to yield to the forces of evil. The brave new world that science had built was crumbling round the edges. Crime grew apace with the cities of the Industrial Revolution. The persona of the vampire lurked in dark corners on the streets of London.
Perhaps Bram Stoker was unaware that he had plumbed the darkest corners of the human psyche with his resurrection of the vampire myth, but he was certainly conscious of having based his vampire character on a real person: Vlad Dracula, a man who lived some three hundred years earlier in Romania. Psychology may not yet have made its appearance on the world stage, but the human psyche did not need to; it was as old as humankind — as old as the vampire.
The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer
When Mary Shelley published her novel, Frankenstein, in 1818 (anonymously at first) it was a time of major social change. The Industrial Revolution had started; science had begun to show us that more things were possible than we had ever imagined. The steam locomotive had just been invented; the first photograph had just been taken; the first battery had just been made, the first plastic surgery had just been carried out in England, the stethoscope had just been invented. The inner workings of the human body began to lose their mystery. Hardly surprising then that author Mary Shelley should conceive of her monster: a new human being constructed from the body parts of the deceased. It brought old questions to the surface, this creation of Shelley’s, such as what is soul, and, what makes us human? Scientist Victor Frankenstein (Frankenstein, remember, was not the name of the monster, but the name of his creator) harnesses the power of electricity, that mysterious new force, to breathe life into his creation. Science appears as all-powerful, God-like, capable of answering every question, solving every puzzle. But does it?
Shelley’s time saw the rise of a particular kind of literature, which began to gain popularity: Gothic Fiction. The use of the word Gothic came from the architecture these works of literature often used for their settings. Ancient, medieval castles, monasteries and dungeons all feature: places that the light of science had not yet illuminated, but needed to. Frankenstein’s monster was reborn in a gothic setting in the 1994 adaptation, which starred Robert de Niro as the monster. But the ultimate failure of Scientist Victor Frankenstein to answer his monster’s persistent questions is very significant. The monster may live, breathe and walk, but his creator, Victor, offers no reply to his creation’s ultimate question, What am I? It would be another sixty years at least before an answer would finally be found. Meanwhile, enter Count Dracula.
Bram Stoker empowered the Dracula legend with his novel, Dracula, published in 1897. The book was a Gothic triumph, and still is, with its sinister settings and the ominous presence of the Count, a man on whom the words ‘I must be getting home now’ have no real impact. Where Frankenstein had exposed questions unsolvable by rationalism and science, eighty years later Dracula did something entirely different. He answered them.
John Browning, a specialist in the field of vampire studies, refers in his essay to a form of ‘old magic’, which the ‘new magic’ of science cannot counter, and which Dracula apparently personifies. To put this in perspective, we need to go back to the Industrial Revolution. The ‘new magic’ of science had big hopes. Man no longer needed God; he could become God. Shelley’s Frankenstein thought himself possessed of divine power when he gave life to his creation. But the gift of life came at a price and Frankenstein’s monster in the end destroyed itself. Dracula, by contrast, appears to live forever. Resurrection makes him stronger. He transcends time, ignores it. But let us remember that Stoker did not invent the vampire; it had inhabited popular imagination long before the start of the Industrial Revolution. The vampire was as old as death itself; the ‘old magic’ it represented had been part of the fabric of mankind ever since the dawn of time, and it was called instinct.
Scientific rationalism has always had a problem with instinct. Gradually, and in order to deal with the conundrum it presented, which was the conundrum of human nature, scientific thought evolved a new discipline to deal with it: psychology.
Around twenty years after Bram Stoker wrote ‘Dracula’, a man called Sigmund Freud gave instinct a name. He called it the Id. These instinctive impulses, Freud claimed, competed with rationality: the Ego, for control of our mind. The Id resided in the unconscious mind, while the Ego was present as a part of the conscious mind. The Id was timeless, and had inhabited us since birth; the Ego came later, as we grew. The Id harboured the impulses of sex and aggression, while the Ego struggled to regulate them. These old instinctive urges appear associated with the persona of the vampire. He is seductive; he is cruel. Perhaps more importantly, he is elusive, hard to pin down; he is timeless, eternal. The rational mind would deny him; the unconscious says he exists.
The Industrial Revolution, in full swing at the time Dracula the novel was published, had already begun to yield to the forces of evil. The brave new world that science had built was crumbling round the edges. Crime grew apace with the cities of the Industrial Revolution. The persona of the vampire lurked in dark corners on the streets of London.
Perhaps Bram Stoker was unaware that he had plumbed the darkest corners of the human psyche with his resurrection of the vampire myth, but he was certainly conscious of having based his vampire character on a real person: Vlad Dracula, a man who lived some three hundred years earlier in Romania. Psychology may not yet have made its appearance on the world stage, but the human psyche did not need to; it was as old as humankind — as old as the vampire.
The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer
Greek Philosophy Boiled Down Part VII
It was an English philosopher, William of Ockham, who is credited with the principle of Occam’s razor, also used by scientists such as Einstein. The Occam's razor principle says that the simplest solution is normally the right one, and it rests on the same rational, empirical view of science that Aristotle and others were promoting in the third century BC and beyond. The Greeks were looking for simplicity, not truth – and in the discipline of astronomy this became the guiding factor. Certain aspects of Greek thinking in geometry must have inspired Isaac Newton, whose understanding of the force of gravity led on from the motion of the plants, which Greek astronomers after Aristotle had worked on – but ultimately it was the work of Greek mathematicians like Archimedes (from the third century BC) that gave science the tools it needed to move on, and allowed Einstein to arrive at his theory of General Relativity.
Still, if the Greeks did not managed to grasp the influence of natural forces on planetary movement (which Newton later understood), they were even further from accepting the kind of universe that Einstein postulated two thousand years later. Einstein’s theories might have made perfect mathematical sense to Aristotle and his successors, but the universal chaos they suggested would have had them throwing up their hands in horror in the academies of Athens.
At the time of the Ancient Greeks, Christianity as we know it had not yet been born. There was not one god but many. But there was at least order. The gods of the Greeks presided over a universe that made sense. Its planets moved in perfect circles, orbiting the sun. There were no issues about whether the earth moved around the sun or the sun moved around the earth, it was enough that there was harmony, and that the gods inspired it. It was only centuries later, when Christian doctrine took over from the Greeks, that the idea of a heliocentric universe, where the sun is at the centre, became a problem. The Christian Church must have feared that scientists were harking back to the old pagan days of sun worship when in the 16th century men like Copernicus (who based their ideas of the work of Aristarchus, a Greek astronomer of the third century) were banging this new model of the universe down on the table, to the general horror of all.
After all, Christian belief demanded that the earth, not the sun, lay at the centre of the universe, and that God had created Earth and the people on it as part of His ‘bigger plan’ (whatever that was…). To place the sun at the centre of a solar system within a much bigger universe stuck a major spanner into theological works, and when the Roman Inquisition suddenly woke up and smelled the trouble, Galileo was arrested and forced to recant his Copernican heresy. ‘And yet it moves’ he apparently famously added, with reference to the Earth. Aristotle would surely have sympathised.
Nevertheless, as history has shown, the Greeks were right to worry about the impact of science on theological thinking, and in the end they shied away from challenging the gods. Although they made huge leaps by, for instance, successfully putting forward the theory that the earth is spherical and not flat, they continued to cling to the idea of divine perfection, and viewed the cosmos as eternal, unchanging and perfect, like the gods themselves. It is hardly surprising that with such imperfection on the ground people should seek it in the heavens. We are not living in a world of earthly harmony, and never have been. The Heavens provided that harmony, for a while at least; they represented an ideal, and the concept of heavenly paradise, which settled in Christian doctrine centuries later, was nothing less than a continuation of this way of thinking – a need that people have for order. When Einstein and his successors finally got to grips with the reality of chaos – now the accepted model of our universe, it destabilised this ideal. The universe decays, changes, and does not move in perfect harmony. And there is an awful lot of it.
Modern science has now delivered the final blow to the idealistic divine view; we all know our insignificant place in the grand scheme of things (whatever that is...), and must deal with it as we can. We do not necessarily like it; an ordered heavenly paradise continues to have its appeal and nobody likes the hard truth. Einstein may have been the heir to the mathematics of Ancient Greece, but he had to cast the perfect universe aside in order to find the real one.
The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer
Still, if the Greeks did not managed to grasp the influence of natural forces on planetary movement (which Newton later understood), they were even further from accepting the kind of universe that Einstein postulated two thousand years later. Einstein’s theories might have made perfect mathematical sense to Aristotle and his successors, but the universal chaos they suggested would have had them throwing up their hands in horror in the academies of Athens.
At the time of the Ancient Greeks, Christianity as we know it had not yet been born. There was not one god but many. But there was at least order. The gods of the Greeks presided over a universe that made sense. Its planets moved in perfect circles, orbiting the sun. There were no issues about whether the earth moved around the sun or the sun moved around the earth, it was enough that there was harmony, and that the gods inspired it. It was only centuries later, when Christian doctrine took over from the Greeks, that the idea of a heliocentric universe, where the sun is at the centre, became a problem. The Christian Church must have feared that scientists were harking back to the old pagan days of sun worship when in the 16th century men like Copernicus (who based their ideas of the work of Aristarchus, a Greek astronomer of the third century) were banging this new model of the universe down on the table, to the general horror of all.
After all, Christian belief demanded that the earth, not the sun, lay at the centre of the universe, and that God had created Earth and the people on it as part of His ‘bigger plan’ (whatever that was…). To place the sun at the centre of a solar system within a much bigger universe stuck a major spanner into theological works, and when the Roman Inquisition suddenly woke up and smelled the trouble, Galileo was arrested and forced to recant his Copernican heresy. ‘And yet it moves’ he apparently famously added, with reference to the Earth. Aristotle would surely have sympathised.
Nevertheless, as history has shown, the Greeks were right to worry about the impact of science on theological thinking, and in the end they shied away from challenging the gods. Although they made huge leaps by, for instance, successfully putting forward the theory that the earth is spherical and not flat, they continued to cling to the idea of divine perfection, and viewed the cosmos as eternal, unchanging and perfect, like the gods themselves. It is hardly surprising that with such imperfection on the ground people should seek it in the heavens. We are not living in a world of earthly harmony, and never have been. The Heavens provided that harmony, for a while at least; they represented an ideal, and the concept of heavenly paradise, which settled in Christian doctrine centuries later, was nothing less than a continuation of this way of thinking – a need that people have for order. When Einstein and his successors finally got to grips with the reality of chaos – now the accepted model of our universe, it destabilised this ideal. The universe decays, changes, and does not move in perfect harmony. And there is an awful lot of it.
Modern science has now delivered the final blow to the idealistic divine view; we all know our insignificant place in the grand scheme of things (whatever that is...), and must deal with it as we can. We do not necessarily like it; an ordered heavenly paradise continues to have its appeal and nobody likes the hard truth. Einstein may have been the heir to the mathematics of Ancient Greece, but he had to cast the perfect universe aside in order to find the real one.
The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer
