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The Alchemist in Fiction: The Master Narrative: Roslynn Haynes
The Alchemist in Fiction: The Master Narrative: Roslynn Haynes
Abstract: In Western culture, as expressed in fiction and film, the master nar-
rative concerning science and the pursuit of knowledge perpetuates the arche-
type of the alchemist/scientist as sinister, dangerous, and possibly mad. Like
all myths this story may appear simplistic but its recurrence suggests that it
embodies complex ideas and suppressed desires and fears that each generation
must work through. This paper explores some of the most influential exam-
ples of such characterization, links them to contemporary correlatives of the
basic promises of alchemy and suggests reasons for the continuing power of
such images.
1. Introduction
The most widely known creation myth of modern times is not that of Gene-
sis or Darwin but Frankenstein. Why does Mary Shelley’s novel, first pub-
lished in 1818, still provide the most universally invoked imagery for science
in the twenty-first century? Western culture relies on and reveres science far
beyond any known precedent; yet, paradoxically, the master narrative of sci-
entific knowledge in both literature and film focuses on an evil and dangerous
maniac, obsessive, secretive, ruthless, and arrogant, drawing on many of the
qualities popularly associated with medieval alchemy. This paper explores the
reasons for this disjunction between the regard and monetary reward heaped
on science and technology in the ‘real world’ and the judgment these disci-
plines receive in the world of film and fiction.
Fundamentally this master narrative concerning science and scientists is
about fear – fear of specialized knowledge and the power that knowledge
confers on the few, leaving the majority of the population ignorant and there-
fore impotent. In a typical scenario the mad scientist achieves a knowledge
break-through that threatens the social order (sometimes the whole planet),
HYLE – International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry, Vol. 12 (2006), No. 1, 5-29.
Copyright 2006 by HYLE and Roslynn Haynes.
6 Roslynn Haynes
tion story of Adam in Genesis. The sub-title of Frankenstein is ‘or, the Mod-
ern Prometheus’ and in her epigraph from Milton Shelley makes specific refer-
ence to the parallel between Frankenstein’s creation of his Monster (an out-
size parody of the homunculus) and the genesis of Adam:
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me? [Shelley 1996, p. 3]
The Monster, too, compares his own creation to that of Adam. “Remember,
that I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam: but I am rather the fallen
angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.”(Shelley 1996, p. 66)
We can understand the appeal of the homunculus-peddlers better if we
realize that robots are of the same conceptual family. They, too, represent
‘beings’ we have created at will through our intellect, without recourse to
female biology, and which we hope to enslave. In contemporary biological
terms, cloned organisms, genetic engineering, in vitro fertilization, and em-
bryo transfers involve a comparable desire to take control of the genesis of
organisms, especially in relation to humans.
4.1 Faust
Probably derived originally from the real-life Georg Faust of Knittlingen,2
Faust in all his literary manifestations was depicted as displaying intellectual
10 Roslynn Haynes
4.2 Frankenstein
Mary Shelley’s character Frankenstein has become an archetype in its own
right, universally referred to and providing the dominant image of the scien-
tist in twentieth-century fiction and film. Frankenstein is the prototype of
the mad scientist who hides himself in his laboratory, secretly creating not an
elixir of immortality but a new human life, only to find he has created a Mon-
ster. Not only has his name become virtually synonymous with any experi-
ment out of control, but also his relation with his creation has become, in
popular misconception, complete identification: Frankenstein is the Monster.
The power of the Frankenstein story can be attributed to the fact that, in its
essentials, it was a product of the subconscious rather than the conscious
The Alchemist in Fiction: The Master Narrative 11
mind of its author and thus, in Jungian terms, draws upon the collective un-
conscious of the race.
The circumstances of the composition of Frankenstein, as described by
the author in her Introduction to the 1831 edition, are almost as well known
as the story itself and have themselves inspired other fictional accounts in-
cluding a film and an opera3. Yet it is worth stressing that, according to Mary
Shelley, the story was produced by the concurrence of two specific factors:
the need to produce a horror story and the account of an alleged scientific
experiment. Mary and Percy Shelley, their baby son William and Mary’s step-
sister Claire Clairmont were spending the summer of 1816 near Geneva, as
neighbors of the poet Lord Byron and his personal physician Polidori. Kept
indoors by a stretch of bad weather, Byron, Percy, Polidori, and Mary each
agreed to write a ghost story as entertainment. Mary records that she found
great difficulty in thinking of a suitable plot until the evening when the oth-
ers were discussing the latest experiments allegedly conducted by Erasmus
Darwin whereby he was said to have “preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass
case till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary mo-
tion. Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be rean-
imated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component
parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued
with vital warmth” (Shelley 1996, pp. 171f.). That night Mary allegedly
dreamed the central scene of her novel. Doctor Darwin has been transformed
into “the pale student of unhallowed arts, kneeling beside the thing he had
put together” (Shelley 1996, p. 172). This suggests that the very attempt to
create life was already associated, at least in Mary’s subconscious mind as ac-
cessed by her dream, with alchemy, the “unhallowed arts”, with the demonic
and the horrific. The problem of finding a subject for her story was instantly
solved: “What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the
specter which had haunted my midnight pillow. […] making a transcript of
the grim terrors of my waking dream.” (Shelley 1996, p. 172)4
It is not difficult to supply reasons why the account of Darwin’s alleged
experiments should have had such a profoundly unsettling effect on Mary
Shelley, aged eighteen, the youngest and least assured person present, and
clearly intellectually overawed by the discussion (she tells us that she was “a
devout but nearly silent listener”). Only the preceding year, Mary had lost
her first child born prematurely and had recently undergone a second, diffi-
cult confinement. Inevitably she would have felt emotionally disturbed, even
violated, by a discussion which not only abolished the role of the female in
the creation of life, but trivialized the process by reducing it to “a piece of
vermicelli in a glass case”. Unable to argue at a rational level with the intellec-
tual giants Byron and Shelley, she doubtless suppressed her disquiet, which
emerged violently in her subsequent dream. What is more interesting for the
12 Roslynn Haynes
It is not surprising that playwrights and film makers have returned with
such frequency to the story, modifying it to suit the prevailing tastes, values,
and scientific debates of their time, but it is interesting that no screen version
has retained Shelley’s pessimistic ending.
The first physical presentation of Frankenstein was H.M. Milner’s play of
1826, Frankenstein; or, the Man and the Monster and the story became the
subject of one of the earliest films, the Edison Company’s Frankenstein
(1910). This film concentrated on the psychological aspects of the story, em-
phasizing the fact that the creation of the Monster was possible only because
Frankenstein allowed his normal healthy mind to be overcome by evil and
unnatural thoughts. Edison’s ending was far more positive and romantic than
Shelley’s, echoing contemporary optimism about science: the Monster finally
fades away, leaving only his reflection in a mirror. And even this is subse-
quently dissolved into Frankenstein’s own image by the power of Elizabeth’s
love. Frankenstein has been restored to mental health and hence the Monster
can no longer exist.
Carlos Clerens, the historian of horror films, rates the 1931 Universal
film classic, Frankenstein, which introduced Boris Karloff as the Monster, as
“the most famous horror movie of all time” (Clerens 1967, p. 64). Yet by
comparison with the novel the film is hardly horrific at all. The heavily un-
derlined moral, stated at the beginning, that “it is the story of Frankenstein, a
man of science who sought to create a man after his own image without
reckoning upon God”, restores an element of supernatural order and justice
to Shelley’s entirely secular and unredeemed situation. In this version, Henry
Frankenstein (who, following Peggy Webling’s 1930 play on which the film is
based, has exchanged given names with Clerval) is presented as the innocent
victim of a mistake whereby his careless assistant has brought him the brain
of a murderer instead of a noble person, for inserting into his creature. The
evil character of the Monster is therefore merely an experimental error, rather
than the inevitable result of Frankenstein’s hubris, and the implication is that
the creation of the Monster per se posed no abiding procedural problem; with
due precautions a better result could be obtained next time. Such an attitude,
including the otherwise anomalous introductory moral, was consistent with
the adulation of scientists, and particularly of inventors, in the United States
during the 1930s (Haynes 1994, pp. 163-5). Although the film ended with the
Monster being burnt to death and the celebration of Frankenstein’s wedding
to the (spared) Elizabeth, the box-office success indicated a sequel. The final
scenes of the 1931 film were cut from all prints in circulation and Bride of
Frankenstein (1935) opened with a scene in which Mary Shelley relates to
Shelley and Byron the sequel to her novel. In this film Frankenstein becomes
the pawn of another scientist, the mad, evil Dr Pretorius who, having con-
structed various homunculi, now wishes to produce something larger. He
14 Roslynn Haynes
forces Frankenstein to create the mate for which the Monster of the novel
had begged. The female Monster (in an extension of the Doppelgänger effect
in the novel she is played by the same actress, Elsa Lanchester, as Mary Shel-
ley) is striking but not hideous and she immediately rejects the Monster who
in despair electrocutes her, Dr Pretorius, and himself. In this film Franken-
stein has become entirely absolved of guilt, and the role of the evil scientist
bent on creating life, has passed to the alchemist-like Pretorius.
Bride of Frankenstein was followed by a long succession of Frankenstein
derivatives whose titles are sufficiently indicative of their content and of the
way in which Frankenstein has been integrated into Western culture as an
ever-contemporary by-word, almost as a real person, engaging in dialogue
with other characters both real and imaginary.5 At different periods the em-
phasis falls variously on horror, space travel, sexuality, or comedy associated
with the figure of the scientist. One of the most interesting films in terms of
the application of the Frankenstein story to a contemporary scientific debate
is Frankenstein 1970 (1958) in which Boris Karloff returns to the screen as
the disfigured Victor Frankenstein, victim of Nazi torture. By means of an
atomic reactor he raises to life the Monster from his ancestor’s 1757 experi-
ment, but they both die a horrible death from radioactivity when the reactor
blows up. Only then is the Monster’s face revealed. It is the face of a youth-
ful Victor Frankenstein, symbolizing in startling visual imagery the identifi-
cation of creator and creature, in this case the atomic scientist and his dan-
gerous and faulty creation, atomic power.
prevalent and those who profess to satisfy them in some form continue to be
regarded with mingled fascination and fear.
However, I want to suggest ten more specific reasons for the persistence
of the alchemist-derived character and for the imaginative power it continues
to exert.
(i) One of the most common forms of the stereotype, the seeker after
forbidden knowledge, has its roots in much older mythology, suggesting that
it is deeply ingrained in human consciousness, perhaps within the subcon-
scious: the narratives of Eden, of Prometheus, of Daedalus and Icarus, and of
Pandora’s Box all feature protagonists who sought transcendent knowledge
and were punished by some higher authority or by the inevitability of events.
Coming from this implicit lineage, their modern descendants carry a trans-
ferred kudos and more powerful resonances than any ‘new’ story could gen-
erate. The scientist who discovers some power (whether it be a weapon or
nuclear power or the ability to create, clone, or modify life) that cannot be
contained or controlled is Pandora trying vainly to push the escaping Trou-
bles back into the box. Like these archetypal myths, nearly all alchemist nar-
ratives focus on a reversal of expectation and consequent nemesis: the glori-
ous promises turn to ashes and destruction – sometimes because they are not
achieved, as in Balzac’s La Recherche de l’Absolu (1834), but more often be-
cause they are achieved in the short term but bring unforeseen disaster in
their train. The preeminent literary example here is Frankenstein, whose
tragedy begins at the precise moment of his experimental success.
I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard and a convul-
sive motion agitated its limbs.
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe? […] I had desired it
with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the
beauty of the dream vanished, and a breathless horror and disgust filled my
heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of
the room. [Shelley 1996, p. 34]
(ii) Science, like alchemy, claims access to a kind of power that cannot be
gained by force of arms or other traditional forms of supremacy. The medie-
val Church was therefore justified in regarding alchemy as a rival power.
Francis Bacon’s aphorism ‘knowledge is power’ is nowhere so obvious as in
the allure of science. To those trained in a scientific discipline, knowledge is
not threatening; it is more likely to be regarded as one of the highest
achievements of the human intellect. To understand how it appears to the
uninitiated, who feel disempowered through lack of understanding or inabil-
ity to control its consequences, we might consider an analogy with other
contemporary forms of power and their concomitant sources of fear: the se-
ductive power of an idea for which its supporters willingly die, international
terrorism, the power of cataclysmic natural events, such as earthquakes, vol-
16 Roslynn Haynes
canic eruptions, cyclones, tsunamis, and, less immediate but no less real, po-
tential long-term environmental disaster for our planet.
(iii) The most publicized goals of modern science bear a striking similarity
to those of alchemy. It seems that our wish list has changed little since our
medieval ancestors visited their local alchemist under cloak of darkness, fear-
ful of being observed but greedy for results.
(a) Perpetual motion represents limitless power at close to zero cost. In
the nineteenth century electricity filled this role; in the twentieth it was nu-
clear power. Both have been regarded with similar ambivalence as both bene-
factor and destroyer. Albert Robida’s illustration “The Energy Explosion” in
La Vie électrique (1887) personifies Electricity as a provocative woman who
both liberates and enslaves the world. In the case of nuclear power, writers
have been only cautiously optimistic. The scientific utopia, pioneered by Sir
Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1626), has had few successors. H.G.
Wells’ scientific utopias were balanced by his dark studies of scientific mon-
omania. Simon Newcombe’s patriotic American novel His Wisdom the De-
fender (1900) posits a ‘thermic engine’, forerunner of a nuclear power plant,
which can precipitate a new industrial revolution. The scientist-hero Camp-
bell uses this power to enforce world peace and cooperation. Such benign use
of physical power was later characteristic of the pulp science fiction maga-
zines Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories, and Marvel of the 1920s and ‘30s.
(b) The transmutation of metals to gold was superseded by the promise
of producing artificial diamonds and then by the discovery of radioactive el-
ements and industrial processes with immense profits out of all proportion to
outlay. Our contemporary equivalent is the use of biological processes to
create complex end-products more efficiently and cheaply than from in vitro
chemical reactions, but with considerable scope for potential accidents and
unforeseen problems.
(c) In place of elixirs for eternal youth we have been offered herbal reme-
dies from tea fungus and garlic to Manchurian mushrooms and gingko, mag-
netism, positive ions and, more recently, anti-oxidants, botox, testosterone,
and hormone replacement therapy.
(d) Our strategies to cheat death include ever-new miracle drugs, organ
transplants, stem cell grafts, and injections of blood stem cells.
(e) Superseding the preoccupation with homunculi, twenty-first century
cloning techniques, artificial insemination, genetic engineering, embryo
transplants, surrogate parenting, and reproductive material produced from
the DNA of somatic tissue are highly sought after by those prepared to out-
lay the immense cost.
All have been greeted with a combination of exultation at the possibility
of overcoming human limitations and fear of unscheduled consequences and
socio-moral dilemmas.
The Alchemist in Fiction: The Master Narrative 17
(iv) The most radical and widespread literary criticism of science emerged
in the nineteenth century as part of the Romantic reaction against the Euro-
pean Enlightenment. It was characterized by an uncompromising rejection of
rationalism, mechanism, reductionism, and scientific materialism as necessary
and sufficient explanations of the world and, in particular, of human experi-
ence. In contrast to the Cartesian dream that reason, epitomized in mathe-
matics, would simplify and ultimately resolve all problems, the Romantics
argued for something much more than mechanism – for a metaphysical or
spiritual dimension beyond the parameters of measurement and for the valid-
ity of non-rational forms of knowing: imagination, intuition, dreams, the
emotions, and the subconscious. The villains of Romanticism were neo-
alchemists, reducing the world to symbols and isolating themselves from the
healing power of Nature, which might have restored them to sanity and
wholeness. These images have been powerfully presented in fiction, vindicat-
ing the Modernist premise that twentieth-century society had no humanity
touch or emotional well-being.
This vilification of science began prior to the Romantics, with the eight-
eenth-century English satirists who presented the virtuosi6 of their day as
divorced from reality, unable to relate to human concerns, and so obsessed
with their narrow focus of interest that they fell into grave errors of fact as
well as moral disrepute. Thomas Shadwell’s popular play The Virtuoso (1676)
and its many imitators, notably Samuel Butler’s The Elephant in the Moon
(1676), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), especially Book III ridi-
culing the astronomers of Laputa and the Projectors of Balnibarbi, and Alex-
ander Pope’s Essay on Man (1733) all satirized the arrogance of contempo-
rary natural philosophers.7
These criticisms were amplified in the wholesale rejection of science by
the English Romantic poets, Blake, Wordsworth, and Keats, and to a lesser
extent by the views of their German counterparts who proposed a Natur-
philosophie affirming a continuity between the spirit of Man and a spiritual
dimension in Nature.8 Of these Blake was the most condemnatory. His ‘in-
fernal trinity’ comprised Francis Bacon, the exponent of experimentalism,
Newton the arch-mechanist and John Locke, representing the philosophy of
the five senses (Blake 1966, pp. 636, 685). In Blake’s view these three men
were dangerous heretics who, blinded by materialism, failed to see the com-
plexity of truth. Wordsworth and Keats viewed the practitioners of a science
more in pity than in anger – pity for their limitations of perception and expe-
rience and their rejection of imaginative truth.
The Romantic view has remained particularly influential among prose
writers as well as poets. Thomas Carlyle lamented, “Men are grown mechani-
cal in head and in heart as well as in hand” (Carlyle 1915, p. 228), and Charles
Dickens satirized the British Association for the Advancement of Science,
18 Roslynn Haynes
which met for the first time in 1831, as “The Mudfog Association for the
Advancement of Everything” (Dickens 1837, pp. 397-413). Its members are
depicted as having lost all humanitarian sympathies and values, as socially
irresponsible and emotionally and morally deficient.
Balthazar Claës of Balzac’s novel La Recherche de l’Absolu (1834) is far
more complex. Although Balzac’s major interest is the psychological, almost
clinical, study of a genius and the effect of his obsession on his family, the
underlying moral is the Romantic belief that preoccupation with science at-
rophies the normal emotions that sustain personal relations and social re-
sponsibilities. Claës’s wife, Josephine, pleads the case for the emotions when
she tells him, “Science has eaten away your heart” (Balzac, n.d., p. 84), and
contrasts her own selfless devotion with his uncaring obsession with his
chemistry. His response, a piece of unwitting self-condemnation, is to rede-
fine feelings in the current chemical term, ‘affinities’: “Unluckily, such affini-
ties as these are too rare, and the indications are too slight to be submitted to
analysis and observation” (Balzac, n.d., p. 85).9
The notion of the homunculus was resurrected to provide a useful symbol
of such mechanistic philosophy, no longer as a tiny figure but expanded to a
full-scale person– or even bigger – dangerous in his power. In a macabre par-
ody of Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s L’Homme machine (1747), Shelley’s
Frankenstein assembles his eight-feet-tall ‘child’ from the components of
corpses and brings it to life with an electrical discharge, a method that would
have been regarded by her contemporaries as at least feasible, since it mim-
icked Benjamin Franklin’s well-known experiment with a kite in an electrical
storm and popular demonstrations of the time practiced publicly on the
corpses of executed criminals to show the effect of galvanic action.10
In E.T.A. Hoffmann’s novel Der Sandmann (1817) the title character Dr
Coppelius, overtly a lawyer, is also a closet alchemist. As a child, the protag-
onist Nathanael had watched in horror as Coppola and his father attempted
to produce an automaton in a setting that is heavily suggestive of an alche-
mist’s laboratory. Returning years later in the guise of a dealer in scientific
glasses, Coppelius persuades Nathanael to look through his telescope and see
the beautiful girl Olimpia, technically flawless but lacking emotions and spon-
taneity. In the descriptions of Olimpia, Hoffmann vividly expresses the Ro-
mantic abhorrence of mechanism. The infatuated youth Nathanael is per-
turbed to discover how stiffly she holds herself and how mechanically she
dances. She plays and sings like a clockwork model, with the emotionless
tone of a singing machine, and when Nathanael bends to kiss her, her lips are
ice-cold.11 Her mechanical nature is finally demonstrated when he hurls her
to the floor causing her dismemberment. But Nathanael, too, is destroyed by
his dalliance with mechanism and the deluding instruments of Coppelius.
Under the spell of the distorting telescope he flings himself to his death from
The Alchemist in Fiction: The Master Narrative 19
the top of a tower. Simultaneous fascination with, and fear of, mechanism is
also apparent in Ambrose Bierce’s story, ‘Moxon’s Master’ (1894). Bierce’s
story is important because it explicitly discusses, through a dialogue between
the narrator and the scientist-inventor Moxon, who has constructed a chess-
playing automaton, the question of what, if anything, distinguishes living
systems from machines. Instead of the mechanist view that all organisms are
merely complex machines, Moxon takes the contrary view, namely that “all
matter is sentient, that every atom is a living, feeling, conscious being”
(Bierce 1946). He claims to have shown that plants think and he now believes
that even the constituent atoms of minerals think, as they arrange themselves
into mathematically perfect patterns. Moxon has made a machine to entertain
himself and to demonstrate his theories; but he has not worked through the
consequences, for it is the validity of those very theories that is his undoing.
In accordance with Moxon’s own postulates, the machine is alive and there-
fore not content to accept a subservient, machine-like role. In frustration at
losing the game and anger against its opponent, it reaches forward and stran-
gles its creator with its iron hands. This ending looks back to Frankenstein
and forward to the twentieth-century stereotype of the scientist unable to
control his created beings.
Conceived eighty years after Frankenstein, Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau
(1896), although its protagonist is a biologist, draws heavily on the same tra-
dition of the alchemist and his attempts to produce life by mechanical means.
Forced to flee England because of his illegal research in vivisection, Moreau
works in isolation in his island laboratory creating his Beast People by vivi-
secting and transplanting parts from various living creatures to produce new
hybrids, the biological counterparts of interchangeable, modular construc-
tions. Like Frankenstein and Moxon, Moreau dies when his creatures revolt
against him.
In twentieth-century mainstream fiction the successors to chess-playing
automata were robots. These have been used largely to encapsulate the amor-
al mentality that the authors associated with scientists, engineers and, in
some cases, the general ethos of a technological society. For writers with a
humanities background the authorial voice is invariably critical, usually satiri-
cal, as in the prototypical work on robots, Karel Capek’s R.U.R. (1921). On
the other hand, the robot stories by writers who have come to fiction from a
career in science are usually markedly different in tone. Isaac Asimov’s ro-
bots, for example, are the heroes of the stories in which they appear, being
‘morally’ as well as intellectually superior to the flawed human characters
whom they so devotedly serve.12
Specters of mechanism continued to haunt twentieth-century horror
films. Apart from the many versions of Frankenstein, The Cabinet of Doctor
Caligari (1919), Dr Cyclops (1940) and the three film versions of Wells’ The
20 Roslynn Haynes
all, when we discuss monstrosity, we are expressing our faith and belief in the
norm and watching for the mutant. The writer of horror fiction is neither
more nor less than an agent of the status quo. [King 1983, p. 30]
While this comment applies to any example of horror from the supernatural
to the psychological, from drug-induced states to the rampage of a serial kill-
er, in the case of the evil alchemist and particularly of his fictional scientist
descendant there are additional intensifiers. First, an audience is prepared to
suspend disbelief about the ‘chamber of horrors’ that science might unleash
in the foreseeable future; from extra-terrestrial events through Silkwood
(1983) and Jurassic Park (1993) to Erin Brockovich (2000) it seems that sci-
entists can be plausibly implicated in almost any disaster. Turney (1998) has
explored this latent suspicion of science, particularly in the biological scienc-
es. Second, there is the attraction of seeing the powerful one dragged down
(and in fiction and film he almost invariably is: the threat is averted, natural
order is restored). Third, there is the lingering suggestion that such fictional
events could recur in the real world, causing similar havoc and disaster.
(viii) Scientists themselves have continued to provide writers and film-
makers with ongoing instances of the alchemist stereotype in the following
ways.
(a) Mystery and obfuscation. The symbols, formulae, and theories of
chemistry and physics are as opaque to non-initiates as those of alchemy were
in their time.
(b) Ruthless determination to achieve their goal. A 2001 BBC program
Celluloid Scientists opened with the words: “the scientists were so preoccu-
pied with whether they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should”.
Enrico Fermi is quoted as having said in relation to his work on the bomb,
“Don’t bother me with your conscientious scruples. After all, the thing is
beautiful physics.” (Buck, 1959, p. 206) and there have been copious literary
examples of this attitude derived from twentieth-century science. In C.P.
Snow’s novel The New Men (1954) it is widely believed amongst the nuclear
physicists “that the plutonium bomb was dropped [on Nagasaki] as an exper-
iment to measure its ‘effectiveness’ against the other. ‘It had to be dropped in
a hurry’, said someone, ‘because the war will be over and there won’t be an-
other chance’.” (Snow 1954, p. 201)
(c) Failure to show concern about the social and moral impact of their
research. This has been most pronounced in the case of nuclear physicists. J.
Robert Oppenheimer regarded the ‘success’ of the atomic bomb as “techno-
logically sweet”. Edward Teller was the alleged prototype of Dr Strangelove
and of Richard Tzessar in Heinrich Schirmbeck’s Ägert dich dein rechtes Auge
(translated into English as The Blinding Light [1957]). Tzesssar refuses to
acknowledge a moral dimension to his research. “We serve the God of free
research, the God who says ‘Fiat scientia pereat mundus – let there be
The Alchemist in Fiction: The Master Narrative 23
(d) Exclusion of those who might have given him the ethical advice he did
not wish to hear. Rejecting the overtures of his father, his fiancée, and his
friend Clerval, Frankenstein leaves their letters unanswered. He has also iso-
lated himself from Nature until, working day and night in his laboratory
without regard to natural rhythms, he has lost the ability to appreciate natu-
ral beauty and diversity.
(e) Rejection of responsibility for the results of his research. His inability
to retain or reclaim control over the outcomes actually disempowers Frank-
enstein. He cannot (or chooses not to) restrain his Monster. Until recently
scientists felt it an unfair imposition to be expected to deal with the conse-
quences of their research, the possible development of their experiments, and
their ethical and social implications. Now, in most cases, they have no such
option. Under pressure Frankenstein agrees to create a female as a mate for
the Monster, then reneges on this agreement. Similarly, dependent on fund-
ing from granting committees or corporations, today’s scientists are required
to work in specific ‘fashionable’ areas.
Shelley also explores the relation between Frankenstein’s pursuit of scien-
tific success, his failure as a human being, and his social guilt. The inevitable
neglect of human ties involved in the scientist’s total dedication to his re-
search results not only in his own isolation and loneliness but also in a moral
and emotional loss to society. Whereas many other Romantic treatments of
the scientist’s isolation assumed that this was a voluntary state that could, at
will, be reversed, Shelley suggests that there is an inevitable loneliness and
guilt contingent on scientific research. Frankenstein begins by frequenting
remote and lonely places. At first this isolation is dictated by the require-
ments of his research since he collects his materials from graveyards and
charnel houses; but subsequently his separation from society becomes a ne-
cessity imposed by the result of his experiment – the existence of the Mon-
ster. In relating his tale to Walton, another scientist pursuing an obsession in
contravention of the natural ties of affection, Frankenstein digresses to mor-
alize explicitly: “If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to
weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures
in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that
is to say, not befitting the human mind.” (Shelley 1996, p33)
has had more control over the material universe than ours, and yet we are still
confronted with an unpredictable world where we are stalked by terrorism,
by AIDS and other pandemics, and by a latent and recurrent nuclear threat.
Caught between terror and desire, we are a captive audience for stories that
make sense of our uncertain existence by embedding it in the archetypal leg-
end of the powerful mage, the sinister alchemist, the perplexed chemist.
Our society still desires to do a range of secret deals with its scientists,
even while professing to treat them with suspicion: nuclear power plants and
nuclear waste dumps, in vitro fertilization, cloning, genetically engineered
organisms and production processes, surrogate parenting, the trade in organs
and genes, anti-diversity treaties with seed companies marketing the total
package of genetically modified, fungus-resistant crops as their exclusive in-
tellectual property and hence a monopoly.
7. Conclusion
By bringing together in Frankenstein the apparently opposite qualities of the
scientist and the Romantic visionary, Mary Shelley not only enriched im-
measurably her depiction of the scientist over earlier representations, but
extended the basic Romantic protest against materialism and rationalism. She
showed that Frankenstein, although apparently so rational, so desirous of
secularizing the world and denouncing its mysteries, is actually, at crucial
points, highly irrational, suppressing those considerations which might con-
flict with his obsession. Levine points out that Frankenstein “as a modern
metaphor implies the conception of the divided self, the creator and his
world at odds. The civilized man or woman contains within the self a mon-
strous, destructive, and self-destructive energy” (Levine et al. 1979, p. 15).
The novel thus becomes a scientific formulation of the archetypal myth of
psychomachia or the conflict within the soul, epitomized in Stevenson’s Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In these wholly secular versions, science and technology
are a concretization of inner desires, masquerading as rational but, like the
Monster, equally capable of springing from the dark, unacknowledged depths
of their creator’s subconscious. This perception suggests an important quali-
fication of the Enlightenment belief that the pursuit of knowledge is, by def-
inition, rational and good and should not be restricted by any socio-moral
considerations.
The pervasive and enduring narratives featuring alchemist-like figures and
in particular the two prototypical protagonists Faust and Frankenstein, sug-
gest the prevalence and universality of this particular knowledge myth and
raise the question of what alternative knowledge myths there might be. There
have been other narratives – the utopian, science-based society of Sir Francis
26 Roslynn Haynes
Bacon’s New Atlantis, H.G. Wells’ scientific utopias, the happy robot lands
of Isaac Asimov – but they have failed to survive catastrophes, the innate pes-
simism or resentment of writers, and perhaps of our skeptical selves. We may
ask whether science, and specifically chemistry, can ever align itself on the
other side in the archetypal saga of good versus evil, for example by offering
solutions to the environmental disasters that we are only just beginning to
acknowledge, or by working to equalize the distribution of material wealth in
the world, the inequality of which is a major cause of racial, political, and re-
ligious terrorism.
Notes
1
In 1583 the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II moved his court from Vienna to
Prague, where it became a center for the discussion of the occult and its relation
to medicine, cosmology, and the production of gold. The search for the philoso-
pher’s stone consumed Rudolph and much of Prague’s nobility. The famed English
astrologer/wizard John Dee and his partner Edward Kelly spent five years together in
Prague (much of it financed by Rudolph) performing magic tricks alleged to foretell
the future. Kelly stayed on when Dee returned to England, claiming to have discov-
ered the coveted secret methods for turning lead into gold. Kelly gained a knighthood,
but was eventually imprisoned on charges of sorcery and heresy. Queen Elizabeth I
of England also encouraged alchemy in the hope of replenishing the royal coffers
(French 1972).
2
Georg Faust was born around 1480 and appears to have had the reputation of a
traveling conjuror, hypnotist, and quack doctor on the one hand and of an alche-
mist and serious student of natural science on the other (Smeed 1975, p. 13).
3
Ken Russell’s film Gothic (1986) and the opera Mer de Glace (1991), libretto by
David Malouf.
4
In her Introduction to a recent edition of Frankenstein, Marilyn Butler has point-
ed out that the original (1818) edition of the novel carried no such moral implica-
tions. The scientific references were to the celebrated public debate of 1814–1819
carried on between John Abernethy and William Lawrence, two professors at
London’s Royal College of Surgeons, on the origins and nature of life. Abernethy
rejected materialist explanations and opted for an added force, “some subtile, mo-
bile, invisible substance” analogous equally to the soul and to electricity. Law-
rence, who was Percy Shelley’s physician, put forward the materialist position as
being the only intellectually respectable one. His views had considerable influence
on both Mary and Percy Shelley and his aggressive materialism was strongly repre-
sented in the first edition of Frankenstein. It seems certain that the discussion be-
tween Percy Shelley and Byron later described by Mary in her Introduction of
1831 was concerned with the vitalist debate and Butler further suggests that the
Frankenstein of the first edition, the blundering scientist attempting to infuse life
by means of an electric spark, is a contemptuous portrait of Abernethy while the
unhealthy relationships of the aristocratic Frankenstein family recall Lawrence’s
research on heredity and sexual selection. When Lawrence’s Lectures on Physiolo-
The Alchemist in Fiction: The Master Narrative 27
gy, Zoology and the Natural History of Man elicited a virulent review in the influen-
tial Quarterly Review of November 1819 and Lawrence himself was suspended
from the Royal College of Surgeons until he agreed to withdraw his book, Mary
Shelley feared the same fate would befall Frankenstein. She therefore revised it ex-
tensively in 1831, removing all controversial references, adding suitably remorseful
statements by Frankenstein and, of course, the Introduction with its indication
that we should read the novel as a frightful “human endeavour to mock the stu-
pendous mechanism of the Creator of the world” (Shelley 1996, p. 172). This is
the edition most commonly reproduced and it is consequently the one that has
colored successive interpretations of the novel (Butler 1993, pp. 302-13).
5
Son of Frankenstein (1938), The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), Frankenstein Meets
the Wolf Man (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944), Abbott and Costello Meet
Frankenstein (1948), I was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957), The Curse of Franken-
stein (1957), The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), Frankenstein’s Daughter (1958),
Frankenstein 1970 (1958), El Testamento del Frankenstein (1964), The Evil of
Frankenstein (1964), Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (1965), Franken-
stein Conquers the World (1965), Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965),
Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), Frankenstein Must be Destroyed (1969),
Gothic (1986), Frankenstein, the Real Story (1993).
6
The term ‘virtuoso’ was used for wealthy patrons of natural philosophy who en-
thusiastically undertook miscellaneous projects, without rigor or training. Indis-
criminate hoarders and collectors of anything and everything, the virtuosi amassed
private museums or ‘cabinets’ (Haynes 1994, pp. 35-49).
7
Butler’s poem satirized almost the whole membership of the Royal Society of his
day, including Hooke, Boyle, and Leeuwenhoek (Haynes 1994, pp. 43f.). It was
widely (and wrongly) assumed that through his ‘Virtuoso’, Sir Nicholas Gim-
crack, Shadwell was lampooning the Royal Society since many of the experiments
described were only slightly altered from those reported in contemporary Trans-
actions of the Royal Society (Haynes 1994, pp. 45f.). Swift’s term ‘Projectors’ had
particular significance since ‘real life’ Projectors were speculators whose extrava-
gant projects threatened innocent investors with financial ruin. The most notori-
ous of such financial speculations was the ‘South Sea Bubble’. The Flying Island of
Laputa carries references to Newton’s calculations and to William Gilbert’s exper-
iments in magnetism. Through his Laputans and Projectors Swift parodied John
Locke’s theory of knowledge and specific experiments of the Royal Society
(Haynes 1994, pp. 68-72). Pope, although he produced the most famous epigraph
on Newton – “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said, ‘Let Newton
be!’ and all was light.”– was nevertheless critical of the arrogance of natural phi-
losophers who confused mere observation of phenomena with understanding
(Haynes 1994, pp. 67f.).
8
Friedrich Schelling proposed that nature was an immense living organism and
hence the goal of science was to discover the Weltseele of this organism. On the
other hand, many of the German Romantic poets had received a scientific educa-
tion. Novalis had studied mineralogy, physics, chemistry, and mathematics; Schle-
gel had studied physics; Goethe had studied botany, as well as being well read in
chemistry and optics; Ritter was a pharmacist, chemist, physicist, and physiologist
(Haynes 1994, pp. 76-8).
9
This is almost certainly a reference to Goethe’s novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften
(Elective Affinities) (1809).
28 Roslynn Haynes
10
Percy Shelley had long been interested in electricity and galvanism. He had con-
structed a large-scale battery and repeated Franklin’s experiment (Holmes 1976,
pp. 44f.).
11
Hoffmann is believed to have been inspired to write his stories of mechanical in-
ventions after seeing an exhibition of automata in Dresden in 1813 (Warrick 1980,
p. 34). He may also have been inspired by Jean-Paul Richter’s novel The Death of
an Angel. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann in turn inspired Adolphe Adam’s La Poupée
de Nuremberg and the ballet Coppelia: or the girl with the enamel eyes (1810).
12
Asimov’s robots have spawned a lucrative progeny of ‘cute’, harmless robot char-
acters, popularized in films, such as the R2-D2 and C-3PO models of Star Wars
(1977). Like E.T., these robots are essentially novel pets with just enough initia-
tive to make the games interesting but always, in the long run, deferential to their
humans. In some ways, the complacency they generate could be regarded as the
most sinister response of all.
13
The Island of Lost Souls (1933) directed by Erle Kenton and starring Charles
Laughton as Doctor Moreau; The Island of Doctor Moreau (1977) directed by Don
Taylor and starring Burt Lancaster as Doctor Moreau; The Island of Doctor Mo-
reau (1996) directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Marlon Brando.
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Roslynn Haynes:
School of English, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, NSW
Australia; [email protected]