God's Museum: Monsters and Wonders
How Linnæus's zoological project set the preconditions for 'Frankenstein'
If you’re just joining us, on Salvage here I’m focused on the ways very old literature has influenced our technological vision; and I originally turned to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to show the form of the romance, a literary genre that’s had an outsized effect on the modern technological imagination. Also, recall that the romance, as a genre, is not so much concerned with buxom beauties swooning in the arms of Fabio-looking dudes as with adventure beyond the limits of the protagonist’s society’s knowledge. The hero/ine of the romance enters the weird, the space beyond the edge of the map, encounters monsters and wonders there, and returns, changed, to tell the tale, hopefully bearing some proof that the story is true. The romance thus functions as a new installment on a previously-less-complete map. With proof, the hero/ine’s story is taken to be true, then it’s added to what’s known back home about the outside world.
A Few Frankenstein Factoids
This is the first in a series of posts on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. I’ll focus on Shelley’s 1818 text, the first version she published, and I’m using the 2018 Penguin Classics Edition, with an introduction by Charlotte Gordon. (If you purchase the book at the link above, I recommend supporting Maile and
at Nooks in Lancaster, PA.)Frankenstein is a romance, and we see in it the major motifs and structural elements of the romance that I noted in my recent posts on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It bears mentioning that knighthood is still issued by the regents of England in our own time; so when Shelley published Frankenstein, it wasn’t at all anachronistic to associate English gentlemen or captains of the Royal Navy with the knights of the nineteenth-century’s yesteryear.
Frankenstein is also a frame narrative. The entire story is told through the letters of Robert Walton, a young Englishman who has undertaken a voyage to the North Pole out of Archangel, Russia. The British contributed significantly to global exploration; and as we’ll see, 1818 was an auspicious year for it.
At the time Shelley was writing, there were two primary reasons for a voyage to the North Pole. One reason was to find a route over “the top of the world,” which geographers had by then calculated would be the shortest journey from Northern Europe to East Asia. Also, as we’ll see in Frankenstein, what lay at the North Pole was an open question; and Shelley capitalized on this northern weird by framing her story as a tale that came from there.
It’s fair to say we live in a time that’s lost its sense of the vast world Shelley knew. Not only do we now know there’s an icy sea at the North Pole, but our satellites keep real-time watch over much of the globe and our science has spent the past two centuries discovering, classifying, and studying the life on our planet. Though still possible, it’s much more difficult to become lost in the world than it once was; and it’s far less likely that one will encounter creatures that have never been discovered. When I face the challenge of cognizing people’s view of the world in a different time, I find that reading other texts from that time helps me appreciate its fiction.
The World According to Linnæus
Carl Linnæus was a Swedish scientist famous for standardizing a taxonomy of life so that science-minded explorers could begin the work of classifying specimens using binomial nomenclature. If that all sounds arcane to you, maybe it helps to recall the piece of Linnæus you likely learned in high school Biology: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. That was Linnæus’s hierarchy of classification categories (it’s long since been modified more than once).1
Linnæus’s treatise, Reflections on the Study of Nature, does a great deal to help us return to an eighteenth-century perspective on the world and what lives in it. In the first paragraph—and here I’m going to assume you have some sense of what Frankenstein is about—we find this gem:
Those who visit museums of natural productions, generally pass over them with a careless eye, and immediately take the liberty of giving a decided opinion on them. The indefatigable collectors of these things sometimes have the fate of being reckoned monsters; many people wonder at their great but useless labours, and those who judge most tenderly, exclaim, that such things serve to amuse persons of great leisure, but are of no real use to the community. It shall therefore be the business of this [treatise], to examine the design and end of such collections.2
This is the dawn of modern zoology,3 a time when the most comprehensive collections of animals in Europe are still far from representative of what lives on our planet; and what Linnæus has just begun at this point in the treatise is his defense of the practice of collecting specimens and returning them to Europe to be placed in what would come to be known as “zoological gardens.” At the time this was written, most gardens of this sort were owned by regents and were only open to the gentry who had their regent’s favor. Later we’ll see how access to animals features in Shelley’s plot. For now, it’s interesting to note that thirty-three years before Frankenstein was published, the collectors of animals were sometimes thought to be monsters and their labor was “of no real use to the community.”
Linnæus repeats Solon’s adage that “The knowledge of one’s self is the first step towards wisdom” and then comments that “A man surely cannot be said to have attained this self-knowledge, unless he has at least made himself acquainted with his origin, and the duties that are incumbent upon him.” Linnæus concludes that humankind and other creatures “being formed with such exquisite and wonderful skill, that human wisdom is utterly insufficient to imitate the most simple fibre, vein, or nerve, much less a finger, or other contriving or executive organ; it is perfectly evident, that all these things must originally have been made by an omnipotent and omniscient Being.”4 Thus he unwittingly issues a challenge for Mary Shelley, who in thirty or so years will imagine a humanoid creature and his all-too-human maker who wants nothing to do with him when he awakes for the first time, thus plunging the creature into the mystery of his own origin.
From there Linnæus offers an observation that Shelley would later turn into a horrific twist in her story:
If we consider the generation of Animals, we find that each produces an offspring after its own kind… from each proceeds a germ of the same nature with its parent; so that all living things, plants animals and even mankind themselves, form one “chain of universal Being,” from the beginning to the end of the world: in this sense may it truly be said, that there is nothing new under the sun.5
But Shelley’s Frankenstein will subvert this chain and make something new, a creature who relies on him for life, but who is made not at all of Frankenstein’s own nature. This new creature develops one consuming desire—a longing for a mate—out of which emerges the specter of a species that could rival humankind for supremacy on the earth. The creature is a break in the Great Chain; and his and Frankenstein’s enmity may spell the end of human life.
Linnæus goes on to argue that
we find ourselves situated on a vast globe of land and water, which must necessarily owe its origin to the same Almighty Being; for it is altogether made up of wonders, and displays such a degree of contrivance and perfection, as mortals can neither describe nor comprehend. This globe may therefore be considered as a museum, furnished with the works of the Supreme Creator.6
That is, at God’s pleasure we live in a terrestrial museum full of wonders, which we may—moreover ought—to collect and enjoy, because that is our purpose here. Humankind “is made for the purpose of studying the Creator’s works,”7 and whomever “does not make himself acquainted with God from the consideration of nature, will scarcely acquire knowledge of him from any other source.”8 Moreover, “truly unhappy may that mortal be reckoned, to whom nothing affords amusement.”9 But worst of all: “Whoever therefore shall regard with contempt the œconomy of the Creator here, is as truly impious as the man who takes no thought of futurity.”10
Thus Linnæus sets up the curse that Shelley eventually lays upon Frankenstein, who pursues the wonders of a God-made humankind so monomaniacally that he ceases to appreciate the smaller wonders of the animals. Using them, he unleashes upon the world and its future—including his own family’s future—a creature of whom he has made a powerful enemy.
Animal Appendages: Weapons and Tools
Since I’m examining Frankenstein as part of a larger effort to trace the history of the vision for animalized and animal-shaped machines, one other passage is worth noting here. When Linnæus comes right down to defending the work of gathering animals (from around the globe) into large collections (in Europe), he argues for it on the basis of the pleasure it brings humankind. But look at what, specifically, he finds pleasure in:
Among the luxuries therefore of the present age, the most pure and unmixed is that afforded by collections of natural productions. In them we behold offerings as it were from all the inhabitants of the earth; and the productions of the most distant shores of the world are presented to our sight and consideration: openly and without reserve they exhibit the various arms which they carry for their defence, and the and the instruments with which they go about their various employments.11
In other words, he takes pleasure in animals, particularly in their biostructures, in which he recognizes weapons and tools. Not only does this distort Linnæus’s view of nonhuman species, it distorts his view of God whom he goes on to refer to as the “Divine Artificer,” a term that emphasizes God’s production while suggesting the artificiality of what God has made. This artificiality leads Linnæus to view nonhumans as collections of parts. Their bodies are, as it were, made of Legos; and Linnæus spends much of the second half of the treatise gushing over various species’ distinctive parts. And it also suggests that this is how God, that Divine Artificer, sees his creatures as well. But this is the anatomist’s view—it’s Frankenstein’s view—and it tends toward a harsh reductionism that cannot see nonhumans as integrated wholes.
This part-thinking brings Linnæus’s entire system round on itself, technologically speaking. At various points throughout the treatise he clearly exults in a conviction that
While we turn our minds to the contemplation of the beauties which surround us, we are also permitted to employ them for our benefit; for to what use would the sun display its beams? for what end would the spacious world be furnished by the great and bountiful Author of nature, were there no rational beings capable of admiring and turning it to their profit?12
While Shelley’s far-out vision of humans’ turning the Creator’s works to their profit entails constructing a new species made in our (fallen) likeness, Linnæus’s vision—weapons and tools—is relatively tame. But as we’ll see next post, this part-thinking turned to human profit also enhanced the ships that were being used to explore the world and opened up new parts of the globe.
Dr. Aaron M. Long is a Lecturer in English at a flagship state university, and a Lecturer in Philosophy at a historied regional art school. He has published articles in Twentieth-Century Literature, The Nautilus, and Science Fiction Film & Television, among others. Here on Substack he has collaborated on The Deadly Seven. You can find him on LinkedIn and his website is here.
While researching this post I was delighted to discover that Linnæus was born in Småland, Sweden. IKEA fans will note this is the name of their kiddie zone. And I think IKEA loves naming things just as much as Linnæus did.
Carl Linnæus, Reflections on the Study of Nature, Translated from the Latin of the Celebrated Linnæus (London, England: George Nicol, Bookseller to His Majesty, 1785), 1-2. I apologize for the typeface of the document linked here. It’s one of the great bugbears of the students who take my Thinking About Animals course at Art School—I teach it there at least yearly—because it uses the old convention where some Ss have been replaced with what look like uncrossed lower-case fs. (That old typeface really wreaks havoc with his intended meaning when he mentions the way a spider sucks blood.) After reading Linnæus together, my students and I have laughingly referred to him as “Linnæuf.”
Point of fact: it is pronounced “ZO-ahl-uh-gee,” not “ZOO-ahl-uh-gee.” There are only two Os after the Z, and one of them has to do the work of “ology,” leaving a Z and an O which, together, make the sound “ZO”—“ZO-ology.” Not “ZOO-ology.” That would be spelled “zooology,” which just looks ridiculous.
Linnæus, 2-3. Italics here are mine. Note that “wonderful skill” here is God’s, which is what makes it wonderful; and with this wonderful skill God creates animals, which Linnæus describes as wonders throughout the treatise.
Linnæus, 3.
Linnæus, 3-4.
Linnæus, 13.
Linnæus, 14.
Linnæus, 20.
Linnæus, 15.
Linnæus, 19-20.
Linnæus, 11-12. Italics here are mine.
This series has been a long time coming, and I can’t wait to dig into the material… Something tells me this is gonna be like reading Shelley for the first time.
Thanks for the shout out, Aaron!