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• Title: Composing What May Not Be "Sad Trash": A Reconsideration of Mary Shelley's Use of Paracelsus in Frankenstein (Critical Essay)
• Author : Studies in Romanticism
• Release Date : January 22, 2004
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 240 KB

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THOSE WHO HAVE ADDRESSED THE SIGNIFICANCE OF VICTOR FRANKENstein's reading in Albertus Magnus (c. 1200-1280); Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535); and Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better and more conveniently known as Paracelsus (1493-1541), have typically downplayed the importance of that reading. Of Victor, Samuel Holmes Vasbinder observes, "He clearly rejects the works of Albertus Magnus, Paracelsus, and Agrippa in favor of men who wrote and experimented with the new science" (1) Anne K. Mellor takes note of Victor's "misguided and self-taught education in the theories of the medieval and renaissance alchemists, Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus," an education that brings Victor to the point of "being suddenly forced to acknowledge the ignorance of these pseudo-scientists.... " (2) James Rieger, writing in the introduction to his 1974 edition of the 1818 text of Shelley's novel, goes so far as to characterize the scientific knowledge that Frankenstein supposedly imbibes at Ingolstadt as "switched on magic, souped-up alchemy, the electrification of Agrippa and Paracelsus." (3) And U. C. Knoepflmacher, although not naming any actual or would-be scientists in particular, apparently concurs, stating that, "Science in Frankenstein is, of course, pseudo-science." (4) Generally speaking, the critical commentary concerning the significance of Victor Frankenstein's three objects of youthful quasi-scientific study has followed the apparent lead of the novel's interior voices. Alphonse Frankenstein, Victor's father, observes Victor avidly reading Agrippa and responds by cautioning, "'do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash.'" (15) At the University of Ingolstadt, M. Krempe, Victor's initial choice for a mentor, upon learning that Victor has been reading the three, asks incredulously, "'Have you ... really spent your time studying such nonsense?'" (Frankenstein 26). M. Waldman, Victor's ultimate choice for a mentor, is more charitable than the other two respondents: he characterizes the work of Albertus, Agrippa, and Paracelsus as "'the labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed,'" and credits those labors as "'ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind,'" which has been able "'to give new names, and arrange in connected classifications, the facts which they in a great degree had been the instruments of bringing to light'" (Frankenstein 28). But Waldman questions the projects of the three even as he credits their labors, associating them by implication with those "'ancient teachers of this science [i.e., chemistry, who] ... promised impossibilities and performed nothing'" in attempting to transmute metals and to create the elixir of life (Frankenstein 27).

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