A Thoroughly Modern Monster: Disenchantment and Reenchantment in Frankenstein

Although more than a hundred years have passed since its conception, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein stands out as a frighteningly modern novel. Immortal themes surrounding the value of life, death, and creation in the technological age are more relevant than perhaps they ever have been, but the crucial question remains unanswered: Why does the attempt to create life outside of natural boundaries end in death? Shelley gives a name and a face to an eternal paradox: the image of the creation that controls its creator, an attempt to master nature that ends up making the one who masters a victim of the same forces.

This dialectical opposition can also be found in the writings of a thinker from a very different background: nineteenth-century social scientist Max Weber. Weber’s work on disenchantment in “Science as a Vocation” reveals that something fundamental about human experience changes in a world where the natural sciences take on a supernatural power through which death itself can be overcome, bodies can be reanimated, and there are no consequences for meddling with the forces of nature so feared and respected by the ancients. Focusing on the Creature’s famous line, “You are my creator, but I am your master;—obey!” (162), the pattern of dialectical opposition found in Shelley’s work points to Weberian concepts of the spiritual realm coexisting with a strictly rational world. Frankenstein abounds with twists and reversals, but applying the concept of disenchantment clarifies the nature of the text as one of a dialectical reversal. Using this formal resemblance, I argue that the disenchantment of the world is the condition that makes Frankenstein’s experiment possible, but also the reason it fails so miserably.

In his 1917 lecture “Science as a Vocation,” Max Weber comments on both the affordances and the challenges of an increasingly rationalized world, borrowing Schiller’s term to discuss what he famously calls the disenchantment of the world. Beginning with the Enlightenment and continuing through the 19th century, Weber recounts that science and technology had advanced to such a degree that the sacred spiritual and religious beliefs of old had lost their stronghold on the mind. The pre-rational, “unenlightened” man’s fate may have been determined by the stars or the gods, but by the time Shelley was writing, this mystical relationship between human life and the mysterious, incalculable forces that govern it had all but disappeared, at least from the intellectual sphere. Weber writes directly, “Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. With such progress in medicine and the natural sciences, there is no longer a need to turn to the spiritual world” (6). Rather than tradition, religion, or superstition, it was science, developing at an unprecedented rate, that held answers. The prevailing scientific theories had also, by this time, produced a new sacred axiom: “(Rationalism) means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation” (1). This is perhaps the defining belief of modern life: all knowledge is accessible given the right tools. 

However, it can be argued that, taken to an extreme, rationalizing the spiritual world out of existence actually leads to the opposite of the intended outcome, a sort of “reenchantment.” This is because the evolution of society has outpaced the evolution of the psyche; in other words, society has changed but humans’ instinctual needs have not. Weber writes, “As Hellenic man at times sacrificed to Aphrodite and at other times to Apollo… so do we still nowadays, only the bearing of man has been disenchanted and denuded of its mystical but inwardly genuine plasticity” (6). Existing sources of spiritual guidance have been disproven, but the desire remains. Where premodern man might have found rhythm and meaning in the rituals surrounding birth, life, and death, seeking guidance from the spiritual world, modern man—by freeing himself from ritual and superstition—is left unprepared to face these circumstances of finite human existence. In fact, drawing from the ideas of Tolstoy, Weber goes so far as to speculate that death itself loses its meaning in a disenchanted world (1-2). And the new source of answers to eternal questions, the specialized fields of study to which educated people now devoted their intellectual energy, produced insights that were almost entirely incomprehensible to those of other fields. With only specialized ways of knowing things in an increasingly technical world, commonly-held human beliefs begin to erode, eventually falling away entirely as relics of the past. “Reenchantment” picks up at this moment, proposing a dialectical relationship between the natural world and supernatural belief that occurs as a result of overrationalization. Simply put, the greater the suppression of the spiritual world, the greater its effect will be on the people that have rejected it. The same process of disenchantment that was meant to master superstition actually leaves the modern mind itself mastered by even greater superstition, and we find ourselves back in a world of gods and demons. They simply have different names. 

Although Frankenstein was written nearly a hundred years before Weber delivered his remarks, evidence of disenchantment pervades the text. Shelley takes care to introduce Victor Frankenstein as a character immune to the influence of spirits, ambivalent about the powers of life and death, and completely cut off from traditional ways of understanding the world. Describing his upbringing, Frankenstein is careful to note its rational emphasis, reflecting, “In my education my father had taken the greatest precautions that my mind should be impressed by no supernatural horrors. I do not ever remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition, or to have feared the apparition of a spirit” (39-40). His modern education has assured him that traditional beliefs about the sanctity of the body are obsolete: “a church-yard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which… had become food for the worm” (40). He is drawn to natural philosophy from an early age, thrilled with the possibilities of scientific discovery, and especially the theory of electricity. However, the Medieval and Renaissance thinkers he idolizes are disparaged by his professors when he leaves his home to enroll in university. Isolated and assured of his talent in a new environment, Frankenstein trains as a scientist in highly specialized fields, especially chemistry. Obsessed with scientific discovery to the exclusion of any ideas of sanctity or natural order, he resolves to discover the means to create life outside its natural bounds. Having found the secret of life, he dedicates the next two years to his great experiment. Frankenstein resorts to robbing graveyards for bodies and acquiring human parts by legally and ethically reprehensible means in order to create the creature, confessing, “I collected bones from charnel houses; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame” (42). In Frankenstein’s disenchanted world, this behavior is permitted because, reduced to pure materiality, neither death nor life hold any inherent meaning (much less a sacred one): “Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world” (42). Nature is now to be mastered rather than feared.

However, the remainder of the novel questions Frankenstein’s supposed mastery over life and death, forces that once belonged to the realm of spirits, suggesting that his actions have actually brought him into total submission to his creation and to the world of sacred belief he once rejected. Dressed in the skin of stolen bodies, the creature eventually turns against Frankenstein and vows revenge, taking the lives of William, Justine, Henry Clerval, Elizabeth, and Frankenstein’s father before his own. Frankenstein is powerless to stop the violence, spending his remaining days pursuing the creature with no success. Although Frankenstein significantly predates “Science as a Vocation,” Shelley’s and Weber’s writings share a formal resemblance as they trace a backward-and-forward movement of opposing forces, where the process of disenchantment and reenchantment is mirrored in Frankenstein’s failed experiment. The disenchanted world proposes to free humanity from superstition through the power of reason but in its turn creates victims of ignorance. Frankenstein’s amazing progress in biology, chemistry and anatomy takes him to the peak of human achievement, but the sacred principles he violated in the process turn his own creation against him with the chilling line: “You are my creator, but I am your master;—obey!” (162). Frankenstein is ultimately back where he started: a position of obedience. 

Shelley’s apparent suspicion of a purely rational worldview and the notion of progress for progress’ sake reflects her place in the Romantic tradition, generally suspicious of the destructive effects of industrialization and the loss of human sensibilities. For thinkers like Shelley, pure materialism and a separation from the natural world came with a high spiritual cost, even the desacralization of life itself. Shelley’s work is not a simple one, but its legacy is linked with disenchantment and a chilling truth: it may well be that, for all our progress, eliminating the divine mystery from human experience through scientific mastery of nature only intensifies the incomprehensibility of the world. 

Works Cited

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: The 1818 Text. Penguin Books, 2018.

Weber, Max. Excerpts from “Science as a Vocation.” Translated by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. 1922.