Imaginary Worlds - The Year Without a Summer

Episode Date: June 15, 2016

June 16, 2016 is the 200th anniversary of the night Mary Shelley began to write, "Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus." Scholars have long speculated what Frankenstein can tell us about scientific hubris or "playing God." But Professors Gillen D'Arcy Wood and Ron Broglio think the book has just as much to say about how we adapt to "acts of God." In other words, Frankenstein was imagined in a year when the Earth's climate was thrown off balance and the weather was wildly unpredictable. Sound familiar? With biographer Charlotte Gordon and readings by Lily Dorment.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. It was a dark and stormy night. I know that's the ultimate cliche, but if there was ever a story that began on a dark and stormy night, this was it. It was the middle of June, 1816, exactly 200 years ago this month, when Mary Shelley started writing a novel called Frankenstein. Mary Shelley started writing a novel called Frankenstein. Now, Arizona State University is actually using this date to kick off a bicentennial project on Frankenstein with lectures, art installations, performances, and conferences.

I mean, they even have a whole department focused on science fiction. Professor Ron Brolio says its overall mission is to encourage positive thinking and less cynicism in sci-fi. Much of science fiction, it's easy to write yet another dystopic novel. But the challenge has been, can we use science fiction to imagine a more productive or a better sustained society? But here's the funny thing. society. But here's the funny thing. Usually we celebrate the year a work came out, which in this case would be 1818, because Mary Shelley spent two years writing Frankenstein. So why are we celebrating the moment of inspiration? It's because June 16th, 1816, not just what was happening in

Mary Shelley's room that night, but what was happening around the world, might offer us a glimpse into our future. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molenski, and on today's show, the stormy birth of a masterpiece. Or you could say, that's just after the break. Mary Shelley was famous long before she wrote Frankenstein, famous and infamous. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a controversial advocate for women's rights who believed that marriage was a type of slavery. Mary Wollstonecraft died from complications giving birth to Mary Shelley, who became obsessed with a mother that she never knew.

It doesn't seem to me to be a coincidence that the author of Frankenstein would be someone who was longing for her dead mother. Charlotte Gordon wrote a dual biography of both women, mother and daughter. She made her peace on some level with the idea that her mother couldn't come back, but not really. And I think the driving motivation of her life was keeping her mother alive or keeping her mother's ideas alive. At the age of 17, Mary fell in love with a 22-year-old aristocratic poet named Percy Shelley. Percy was already married.

So the two of them fled to Paris, leaving Percy's pregnant wife behind. It was a big scandal. But they were not alone. They actually had a posse. There was Mary's half-sister Claire, who had a crush on Percy and may have slept with him before moving on. Claire had heard that the very famous rock star poet Lordron, was kind of between lovers. He was in London, and she decided, you know, if her sister Mary could have a sort of famous entanglement with Percy, a poet, she would try and do her one better and have a love affair with Byron, who was much more famous than Percy. But some of the English get mad at me when I say this,

but Byron's primary interest, we think, was probably men. And Byron had a keen interest in Percy Shelley, Mary's lover. So this group of young, sexy renegades decide to spend the summer at Lake Geneva. And at first they stayed in this posh hotel where all the English stayed on Lake Geneva, but there was so much gossip about them and it was so uncomfortable. No one would speak to them. So Byron rented a villa called the Via Diodati, which is still standing. It's privately owned just up the hill from the lake. And we have detailed notes about what happened because Byron brought his personal physician, John Polidori, who was supposed to

chronicle the great poet Byron, but he developed a hard crush on Mary Shelley and wrote about everything she did instead. I think that all of this also contributed to this incredible, I don't know, charged atmosphere. Yeah, this was going to be a hot and steamy summer by the lake full of drama, but it didn't turn out that way. It actually turned out to be very, very different. Jilin de Arcy Wood is the author of Tambora, the eruption that changed the world.

The largest volcanic eruption of the last 10,000 years on the planet Earth occurred six degrees south of the equator in what was then the Dutch East Indies and is now Indonesia, a small island dominated by a large volcano called Tambora, which exploded with extraordinary fury. The volcanic matter in the atmosphere formed a 100-megaton sulphate aerosol layer that then enveloped the entire planet and plunging the world into a three-year period of extreme weather, in particular a kind of global cooling effect.

Europe's experiencing frosts in June and July. Professor Ron Brolio. And it's having a real effect on the crops. 1816 was just absolutely devastated, so we had a lot of food shortages. In fact, in Britain, the price of bread rose almost double. Apocalyptic cults were springing up. The press called it the year without a summer. But they didn't know yet that the effects of that volcano would last for several more years. On a smaller scale, the weather was ruining the summer by the lake for Mary Shelley and her friends.

It rained and rained and rained and rained. And you know, you really can't keep people like Byron and Shelley cooped up all day long. They get impatient, restless, up to no good. And Charlotte Gordon says they plowed through every book they got. And finally, by the middle of June, when it was really stormy and they were really bored, Byron had been reading to them from some ghost stories. And he finally said, these ghost stories just aren't even scary.

How about if we all try and write a scary story ourselves? And so everyone separated that night. a scary story ourselves. And so everyone separated that night. Here's what happened. Byron tried to write a ghost story and got bored and went back to doing what he did best, which was basically writing about Byron. Shelly started trying to write a ghost story and same thing happened.

He got bored and went back to writing basically about Shelly. But Mary started writing a ghost story, and she did not stop. We witnessed a most violent and terrible thunderstorm. It advanced from behind the mountains of Jura, and the thunder burst at once with frightful loudness from various quarters of the heavens. I remained, while the storm lasted,

watching its progress with curiosity and delight. As I stood at the door, on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak which stood about twenty yards from our house. And so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump. When we visited it the next morning, we found the tree shattered in a singular manner. It was not splintered by the shock, but entirely reduced to thin ribbons of wood. I never beheld anything so utterly destroyed. That passage from Frankenstein described a real event near Lake Geneva. And Gillen says you can see the motif of lightning running all throughout Frankenstein,

which Percy described as a storm-lashed novel. A flash of lightning illuminated the object and discovered its shape plainly to me. Its gigantic stature and the deformity of its aspect more hideous than belongs to humanity instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy demon to whom I had given life. Now, obviously, there are a lot of things inspiring Mary Shelley beyond just the gloomy weather. The news at that time was full of all these experiments on electricity. And earlier that summer, she and Percy had traveled through Germany past a castle called Frankenstein. But when Gillen reads the novel, he sees a reflection of the crisis that was unfolding in Europe in 1816. After all, that volcanic ash had blacked out the skies and destroyed crops. The numbers of peasants who abandoned their farms and took

to the roads were described as armies on the march. I mean, with tens of thousands of people displaced. If we think about the Syrian refugee crisis today and the tens of thousands of people making their ways across the highways and byways of Europe. That gives us some sort of image of the level of civic disruption. And seen in that light, if you remember the novel, and the monster is, of course, shunned and abandoned and homeless and turned away from towns and cities and is essentially a kind of refugee, that captures, He symbolizes

the human crisis that was unfolding before Mary Shelley's very eyes. Again, Professor Ron Brolio. In Shelley's Frankenstein, the limits of hospitality are tested by the creature. And of course, the creature first flees into isolation. He doesn't know what's going on. And then when he tries to extend himself to community, he's shunned. The market towns and cities, which were the centers of power in various countries in Europe, they saw these armies of displaced peasantry as a threat, in particular because they brought not only demands on food supplies,

but they brought disease with them. I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and triumph. Remember that and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me. Shall I respect man when he condemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness, and instead of injury, I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance.

But that cannot be. The human senses are insurmountable barriers to our union. Frankenstein wasn't the only work of literature to emerge from that cabin. Byron wrote his famous poem Darkness, and he and his physician-slash-frenemy, Polidori, came up with the story The Vampyr, which is one of the first vampire tales in Western literature. And Charlotte Gordon says the darkness in their writing also reflected their political despair. They felt that the radicalism of the previous generation was kind of being eradicated and that a terrible right-wing backlash was occurring.

The publication of Frankenstein didn't help Mary Shelley's reputation. But the reason why she became a household name is because in those days in England, playwrights and theater people could take any novel they wanted or any story they wanted and produce it without paying the author anything. And people were enchanted. You know, this was a great story. And they put it on the stage. And that's how the story became so famous. So Mary Shelley never made any money from her novel, really.

And on the other hand, became increasingly notorious because she was linked with this shocking story that was up on stage in London. But she was able to establish herself as a writer. And eventually Frankenstein was appreciated as a great work of literature in her lifetime. Her warnings about scientific hubris felt more and more relevant in the 20th century, from atomic power to biotechnology. That year without a summer just became a footnote, a piece of trivia. Gillen to R.C. Wood wants to bring it back, front and center.

I feel like the conventional readings of Frankenstein are somewhat stale and that the environmental reading, the ecological breakdown reading, is a new one, and it's really a reading for the 21st century. I mean, of course, the year without a summer was very cold, and our climate is warming up. But Gillen says 1816 and 2016 still have a lot in common. Temperature differences being wildly unpredictable, massive storms erupting around the world, and a lot of scientists today think the solution to climate change is something called cloud seeding, which is injecting particles into the atmosphere to mimic a volcanic eruption like Tambora

that would force temperatures down. In other words, they want to Frankenstein the weather. I mean, even if there were some kind of international authority vested with the power to make such a decision, the uneven and unpredictable impacts of artificial cooling of the planet would be grotesque and impossible to rein in. And it seems like also, too, just we all know that on a small level, if you look at sort of the atmosphere of Frankenstein and think, this could be happening in your head.

You know, it makes it very personal. Absolutely. And this psychological dimension of climate change has been neglected. We haven't reckoned on, I like the phrase you used, the Frankenstein in our heads, the stress of coping and it will create a kind of, I think, collective nervousness and anxiety that it's impossible to predict exactly what they'll be. Will it spur incredible creativity and innovation and will we adapt well or will the stresses of climate change bring us undone somehow? Mary Shelley understood adaptation. She made a literary masterpiece out of ruined summer plans. After the love of her life, Percy Shelley drowned.

She spent decades cultivating his legacy and hers, restoring their reputations and evolving into an ideal Victorian woman. She would not allow forces beyond her control to turn her into a monster. Yeah, you know, it's really interesting, right? And it's part of her romantic self-fashioning. What kind of self does she want to create for herself? And Ron Brolio says that theme runs throughout all of her work. Other worlds are possible, not simply the world we live in.

And as a fiction writer, certainly that's important. But also, interestingly, I think as an ethical person, that becomes important. And if we talk about adaptation and sustainability, that's certainly the case. To be able to see or imagine or project out or to model whatever language you want to use, to imagine those features. And then I would extend that to say and to imagine them not only for ourselves, but for those who are radically other than ourself, for the monsters, for those that can't find refuge. We rest. A dream has power to poison sleep. We rise. One wandering thought pollutes the day. We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep, embrace fond woe or cast our cares away.

It is the same. For be it joy or sorrow, the path of its departure still is free. Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow. Nought may endure but mutability. Nought may endure but mutability. Orment did the readings. And thanks to Bob Beard for telling me about ASU's Bicentennial Frankenstein Project. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at Emolinski. The show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Panoply