Frankissstein

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-13

Chapters 14-22

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Body Parts

Body parts play a significant role in the physical science of both Frankissstein and Shelley’s original Frankenstein. In Winterson’s work, body parts have a similar symbolic value to Shelley’s, but with critical updates for the modern day. Body parts most frequently come up in discussions of Ron and Victor’s work, with Ron fashioning body parts out of varied materials for sexual use, while Victor experiments on and attempts to reanimate human body parts. In both cases, body parts are a symbol of ethics, reminding the reader of the uneasiness most people feel at the thought of dismembering, reassembling, or dissecting human bodies. Both Ry and Victor have to assure people that they are not grave robbers or murderers when the subject of body parts arises, and this need for justification fits within the scope of common ethics regarding bodies. Because bodies are usually associated with a specific person, such as I.J. Good’s head, they remind people of the connection between mind and body.

In the original Frankenstein, part of the horror of Victor’s work was that he mixed different parts of different people and animals to make a singular, coherent being. In Frankissstein, this same idea applies, but it leans into the existential question of what it means to be a coherent being at all. Victor discusses creating life without a body by uploading consciousness into technology, but this, too, discomforts Ry and Ron, who insist that the body is needed for a full identity. Further, Victor experiments with severed hands and thinks about making a body with wings, both of which further the separation, for Victor, between body parts and the mind. However, Victor is not relatable, serving instead to emphasize the dangers of unethical experimentation, and body parts are a critical symbol of this ethical question.

The Analytical Engine

The Analytical Engine was a real machine designed by Charles Babbage. Ada Lovelace used it to complete the first computer program calculating Bernoulli numbers. In Frankissstein, the Analytical Engine serves the specific purpose of displacing the modern fascination with technology and artificial intelligence into the past, allowing readers to see how Victor, Ry, and Ron’s contemporary interests in robotics and computers is not actually exclusive to the information era. In the early 19th century, Byron, Mary, and Polidori debate the degree to which steam engines, industrial looms, and other new technologies are reshaping what it means to be human. Claire jokes about a loom that writes poetry, which then effectively comes into existence in the form of the Analytical Engine. The Analytical Engine, though, was much more limited than modern computers, with Ada noting that an Analytical Engine would need to be the size of London to compute the information known by just one person, and it would need to be even larger to store all the information humanity has ever known.

Victor references Moore’s Law early in the text, which states that computing power will increase as computers reduce in size, specifically that the number of transistors in integrated circuits will double each two years without significantly impacting cost. Moore’s Law is significant to the symbolic value of the Analytical Engine because it falls into the same misunderstanding in its broader application to computing as the modern characters in the novel. Taken more broadly, Moore’s Law relates to the increase in the improvements to technology that occur over time. Applied to the Analytical Engine, it is clear that technological improvements are not limited to the format of the time. The Analytical Engine is simple compared to modern computers, but all the science fiction ideas of the text can be expressed through the Analytical Engine as a lens. This symbol, then, also reaffirms the relevance of works like Frankenstein, which, though dated, are still relevant today.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 53

In both timelines, the opening two lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 53 are repeated as motifs in the text. These lines read: “What is your substance, whereof are you made, / That millions of strange shadows on you tend?” Sonnet 53 is one of the Fair Youth sonnets, meaning it is likely addressed to a beautiful young man whom the speaker loves. There are two elements in Sonnet 53 that make it specifically relevant to Frankissstein: the opening lines’ question of what the youth is made of, and the use of both masculine and feminine comparisons in the poem. The question of what is the youth’s “substance,” referring to “millions of strange shadows” gives an ambiguous and ethereal feeling to the poem. This feeling allows the lines to read as though they questioned a spiritual or supernatural being, rather than the physical flesh of which the youth is made. In Frankissstein, the characters frequently discuss what makes someone “human,” whether there is a “soul,” and how humanity might change if these fundamental characteristics were altered. The poem implies both that the soul is the source of beauty and that it supersedes the physical, lending to the possibilities of a future in which people can be altered without losing their humanity.

The other element of the poem is the comparison to Adonis and to Helen, a man and a woman. Ry and Mary are both somewhat androgynous in the text, with Mary’s large hands and masculine “life-spark,” and Ry’s similarly large hands but androgynous outlook, referring to himself as a “hybrid.” The poem then combines the idea of a spiritual or supernatural substance with the androgyny of the characters, hinting at a substance of identity beyond the physical and beyond the gender binary.