A fatal grasp for immortality
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and her immortal "Frankenstein," and modern Prometheans of Wall Street and January 6
This essay is part of a series called “Shut Out, Not Shut Up” on women through the ages who’ve written despite being dismissed because of their sex. They persisted.
News outlets recently reported on yet another lawless attorney indicted for attempting to overturn the 2020 election. This specific lawyer previously pleaded guilty to RICO charges in Georgia and gave the appearance of cooperating with state investigators across the country. Although the outcome of the latest indictment is unknown, he has told us he is guilty of crimes against the state.
Neither this person nor the legions who conspired with him to overthrow a democratic election occupies my mind beyond reading the news. It’s enough, I think, to know that the judicial process continues to work. Which is not to say that I feel secure in this knowledge, but I take the news as a hopeful sign. Like a daisy in the foreground of a nuclear bomb.1
Then I read Lucian Truscott’s essay on the latest news and it focused my attention. Truscott asked his readers to contemplate the actions of this man through his career, and in the days between the election of 2020 and its certification on January 6, 2021.
“How do you account for a Kenneth Chesebro, a graduate of Harvard Law School who clerked for Judge Gerhard Gesell, a liberal jurist in Washington D.C. who became famous for presiding over the trial of multiple defendants charged in the case that became known as Watergate, including the seven men who broke into Democratic Party Headquarters, and seven of the men working for Richard Nixon who helped to mastermind and participated in the Watergate conspiracy, including former Attorney General John Mitchell, and former White House aides John Erlichman and H.R. Haldeman. For years, Chesebro was close to Professor Lawrence Tribe of Harvard, even working with him on the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case that determined the outcome of the 2000 election.”
-Lucian K. Truscott IV
From his experience working alongside legal titans who fought on the frontlines against election malfeasance, Kenneth Chesebro seems to have learned the wrong lessons. Apparently, he took them as tutorials on perfecting election fraud, not how to prevent it. Michael Lewis observed a similar phenomenon firsthand, when he reflected in 2008 on the unintentional impact his book “Liar’s Poker” made on aspiring MBAs:
For the kind of kid that went to Harvard, Princeton and Yale, Goldman, Morgan Stanley and Salomon Brothers became the next step. And it was insane I thought. You have all these young people who often have very idealistic, passionate, smart and all kinds of possible futures ahead of them and the ability to have all kinds of positive effects on the world, just being sucked into this machine. I thought if I write this book, the 19-year-old me would read it and say, “Aha! now I see what all this is. Yeah you can make money, but it’s kind of silly and I’m going to do what I’m going to do.” In some cases that happened. But overwhelmingly, it found its way into the hands of the 19-year-old me who had no idea what they wanted to do with their lives and this seemed like, “Oh my God, I can not only get rich but be in the middle of this really funny place and it’s exciting to go to work.” It had that effect.
For Kenneth Chesebro, Watergate appears not to have been a cautionary tale for American democracy, but a study in mistakes to avoid. Don’t wimp out with a cheesy band of inept burglars. Go large. Don’t hide the connection to the White House, leverage it to apply a veneer of legitimacy. As Andrew Torrez and Liz Dye report:
“It would be nice to get some of those official-looking gold seals,” Wisconsin lawyer Ken Chesebro emailed former judge James Troupis on December 10, 2020.
Chesebro, the chief architect of the fake electors plot, had spent the prior month working alongside Troupis, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Trump campaign operative Mike Roman to convince Republican state party officials that they needed to swear in “alternate” slates of electors in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wisconsin. And the legal genius behind this operation seemed to think that success might hang on slapping on a big gold sticker to make his Monopoly money documents look like legal tender.
There’s nothing trivial about trying to overturn a democratic election. Chesebro and his friends were deadly serious.
A rainy summer in Switzerland
During the summer of 1816, while boating on an idyllic lake near Geneva and on rainy nights before a warming fireplace, four intellectuals conversed about literature, alchemy, and the latest breakthroughs in science that captured their fecund imaginations. Two of the four were renowned poets: Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Byron was with his physician John Polidori, who was also a writer. Shelley was accompanied by his mistress, a young woman only 18 years old named Mary.
Galvanism and the new Gothic literature fascinated them. They decided to each try their hand at this new genre. The doctor bowed out first, and the poets folded without finishing their works. The young woman, however, took the challenge seriously. What started as a story became, at Shelley’s urging, a novel one year later. Far from a trivial exercise, her slender novel is a work of genius that came to influence both the horror and science fiction literary genres that we know today. I’m currently watching the sci-fi series ‘Dark Matter.’ Merely swap the influence of Schrödinger for Galvani: the streaming series is an unmistakable descendent from Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein or Modern Prometheus.”
The 1931 movie “Frankenstein,” starring Boris Karloff as Die Kreatur, impressed on modern culture the horror of a science experiment gone amok. But Mary Shelley clearly stated her focus in the title: Promethean hubris. Her creature, while horrific in appearance, alone captures the reader’s sympathies. Her Frankenstein, however, deserves only our judgement.
Prometheus
The myth of Prometheus diverged over time into two different tales. The first, which is articulated in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound2, gives us the story of the Titan Prometheus who stole fire from the gods to aid humankind. For this, Zeus punishes Prometheus by chaining him to the icy rocks of the Caucasus and daily forcing him to suffer an eagle eating his liver. Nightly, his liver regenerates to begin the torture anew the next day. The second tale is of a Prometheus who models man out of clay and animates him. Both tales cast Prometheus as the source of technology in service of humans, even while they exemplify the sin of hubris, excessive pride that defies the gods.
Mary Shelley nests the story of the creature within a narrative of Frankenstein, which is itself embedded within the epistolary narrative of Robert Walton, a gentleman explorer. Walton and Frankenstein share a passion for making a world-changing discovery that will exalt them amongst all men, now and forever. In pursuit of their discoveries, neither heeds common sense, much less critical thinking, about their endeavors.
Only an idiot, you think, would be seriously surprised to learn of the mortal dangers in traveling to the north pole in the 18th century, nor to be shocked, as Frankenstein is as soon as his creature breathes, that a re-animated patchwork human would be horrifying to behold. Yet these are credentialled and serious men. Victor Frankenstein, in his early 20s at the time of his successful creation, is said to have so excelled in his studies at university that he’s outpaced his professors and could have run the university based on his knowledge alone. They are esteemed men. Even Frankenstein berates himself: how could he, one of the greatest scholars, have been not only blind to an outcome that should have been obvious, but also culpable in the horrific crimes that result from ignoring the existence of the man he made?
The creature is a study in contrast to these learned egos. With no resources or aid available, he labors to learn language, surreptitiously, after his first devastating encounter with other people. He educates himself painstakingly, reading Plutarch and Goethe. He falls in love with an impoverished family, and secretly supplies them with offerings he bestows anonymously to demonstrate his love for them. Once he reveals himself, the family rejects his timid entreaty for friendship. The creature’s response manifests his essential humanity: first, anger; then he contemplates his actions with admirable self-awareness. This is fully a man, regardless how abhorrent his outward appearance, not merely a science experiment by someone who thought himself like god.
Mary speaks
As Mary Shelley sat with Byron, Percy Shelley, and Polidori near Geneva in 1815, she occupied a lesser place amongst them: younger and therefore less experienced, a woman amongst men, and without the literary acclaim of the male poets nor the professional credentials of the physician. Consider the courage it took for her to write a book that challenged the scientific (and pseudo-scientific) concepts they found seductive. Her writing isn’t demure; she doesn’t shade her criticism to protect it from attack. M. K. Joseph, in the “Introduction” to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of “Frankenstein,” comments on this:
“With unassuming originality, her ‘modern Prometheus’ challenges the whole myth of Romantic titanism, of Shelley’s Neoplatonic apocalypse in Prometheus Unbound, and of the artist as Promethean creator. One of its themes is solitude—the solitude of one who turns his back on his kind in obsessive pursuit of the secrets of nature.”
Mary Shelley, whatever her intentions, was alone amongst her friends to finish their challenge, and in doing she turned the tables. Her novel challenged their artistic solipsism and their hegemony over Romantic literature.
Who is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (née Godwin)?
We met her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, a few weeks ago. Wollstonecraft was a leading writer and women’s rights advocate, and she died less than two weeks after giving birth to her daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. Mary Wollstonecraft’s husband (and daughter Mary’s father) was William Godwin, to whom Mary dedicated “Frankenstein.” Godwin was a well-known political philosopher and a radical thinker.
In her Introduction to the 1831 edition of “Frankenstein,” Mary directly responds to critics who have questioned how she could have written the book: “’How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?’”3
It is not singular that, as the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, I should very early in life have thought of writing. As a child I scribbled; and my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to ‘write stories.’ [….] My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings. In the latter I was a close imitator—rather doing as others have done, than putting down the suggestions of my own mind. What I wrote was for at least one other eye […]; but my dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed—my dearest pleasure when free.
-MWS, “Introduction”
This was the genesis of a truly original writer whose father enabled her the freedom, means, and confidence to explore the realm of her imagination. She read widely and was encouraged to challenge norms. At 17, she met one of her father’s acolytes, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and went with him to live in Europe.4 They conceived a child and returned to England, where they were social outcasts and struggled financially. The child, unfortunately, didn’t survive her premature birth. The couple then spent a summer in Geneva, where they met with Lord Byron and Mary wrote her first book, which was published a year later.
When she was 21, Mary moved with Percy to Italy. They conceived and lost two children before the birth of their surviving fourth child, Percy Florence Shelley. Percy Bysshe Shelley died in a boating accident off the Tuscan coast during a storm. Mary was only 25 when she was widowed.
Mary returned to England with her son. She wrote professionally, promoted her dead husband’s work, and raised their son. She never remarried. She suffered poor health for the last decade of her life. She died at 53 of a brain tumor.
Justice
By the emotionally moving finale of “Frankenstein,” the creature has left a trail of corpses. He acknowledges his crimes and leaves for the cold vastness into which he hopes to extinguish his existence in solitude. Poignantly, he imagines that his life will leave no trace:
‘But soon,’ he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, ‘I shall die, and what I now feel will no longer be felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spririt will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.’
This somber passage recalls an earlier scene, in which Victor Frankenstein reflects on the death of his friend Clerval. Frankenstein quotes Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” He then says:
And where does he now exist? Is this gentle and lovely being lost for ever? Has this mind, so replete with ideas, imaginations fanciful and magnificent, which formed a world, whose existence depended on the life of its creator;—has this mind perished? Does it now only exist in my memory? No, it is not thus; your form so divinely wrought, and beaming with beauty, has decayed, but your spirit still visits and consoles your unhappy friend.
The creature accepts that he is a finite being, while Frankenstein comforts himself with thinking that immortality is possible, if only to him.
Wtih each taking of an innocent life, the creature re-enacts the eagle remorselessly devouring Prometheus’ liver. We may be horrified by his brutality, but his actions contain the logic of retribution, making it possible to detect the hand of justice. Once he finds Frankenstein’s corpse, the creature vows to harm no one except himself. The explorer Walton, although shocked to discover the creature on board his ship, feels compassion for him. The creature is humankind in its extremes, without the solace of companionship.
It would be hard not to see that justice served Frankenstein his due. Frankenstein did the unthinkable in pursuit of self-glory. We may not applaud vengeance, but it’s as human as any attribute.
The clever, ambitious MBAs who read “Liar’s Poker” as a how-to manual didn’t think about the investors they would be shafting as they manipulated markets to serve their greed, nor the institutional damage their work would inflict. They thought of themselves. They imagined being Wolves of Wall Street or Gordon Geckos, men shorn of conscience but wearing exquisite suits and surrounded by outrageous toys, consuming the best of everything that money can buy. Before tech bros stole their mantle, these Wall Street raptors were the Titans who ruled the world. There’s never been a shortage of greed and avarice. People cut of this cloth will always walk the earth.
And the hapless lawyer I opened with? I can’t know his mind. But considering the modern Prometheus, I suspect his ethical conversion resulted less from being polluted by his boss and more from within. He manifested an unbridled, Promethean desire for timeless celebrity: the man who engineered the downfall of American democracy. His actions signal a soulless, heedless lack of conscience. His success, had he won, would have been unshackled by morality or ethics. It wouldn’t matter if his was a good or right outcome. It would lift him to Olympian heights. He would be the man responsible for bringing down a 230-year old democracy.
But he failed. He now sits in the uncomfortable position of Victor Frankenstein, forced to face the consequences of his hubris. I’m thankful he failed. I’m even more thankful he’ll be judged under the laws of the Constitution that he plotted to subvert.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley knew that the Promethean hubris that lies curled in the shadow of male ego is never conquered—it is ever ‘modern.’ Her husband imagined a Prometheus (“Unbound”) freed and redeemed by love, which comes to him in womanly form. We have Mary to thank for not saving her Modern Prometheus, but rather insist upon the roughest kind of justice.
Ellie’s Corner
Summer here (so far) is mellow and cool. Warm enough, when the sun’s high in the sky, to lounge in sunbeams. Ellie is here for it.
Thanks for reading,
Shelley (Percy) wrote a poetic drama called “Prometheus Unbound” that he published in 1820, after his wife wrote “Frankenstein.”
To get her book published (several publishers rejected it), Mary submitted the manuscript without an author’s name. Percy Shelley took the unattributed manuscript to a publisher who agreed to print it. From this, many at the time assumed Percy Shelley had written the book, even after Mary claimed ownership for later editions. Doubters have never given up. They must not have read the book or know anything of Shelley.
When Shelley’s wife died two years later by her own hand, Mary and Shelley did marry.
Thanks, now I’m going to have to read the book again!
That’s always my hope! Let me know what you think once you do.