Trim: 228mm × 152mm Top: 11.247mm Gutter: 16.

871mm
CUUK3116-10 CUUK3116/Smith ISBN: 978 1 107 08619 7 May 11, 2016 12:6

10
TIMOTHY MORTON

Frankenstein and Ecocriticism

Biology, Arctic ice, animal flesh, Alpine landscapes, vegetarianism, life,

death, undeath: you would have thought that with juicy topics such as
these, there would be hundreds of studies specifically devoted to ecological
readings of Mary Shelley’s novel. Yet this is not the case. If you search on a
database such as ABELL (the Annual Bibliography of English Language and
English Literature), you will find countless texts on Frankenstein – there are
more than 2,500 entries for items published in the last twenty years. But
only a very few of those are explicitly about ecology.1 Indeed, only about
one per cent of the 2,500 items on ABELL explicitly pertain to ecology, and
many of those only tangentially. The first question we have to ask, then, is
what is it about Frankenstein that does not lend itself to explicitly ecological
treatment?
There seem to be two main answers. The first is about the impact of the
novel; the second is about its internal dynamics. First of all, to say that
the novel has been widely received, adapted, disseminated and otherwise
absorbed is the slimmest of understatements. It would be hard to name
another work of literature that has had the impact of Frankenstein since its
first publication in 1818. The very ‘universality’ of this impact – the way
in which the novel has become something like what Richard Dawkins calls
a meme – a virus-like string of code that can easily be reproduced and
circulated – mitigates against the specific, explicit study. Everyone wants to
talk about Frankenstein – so no one talks directly about Frankenstein. If
there ever were a candidate for a modern myth, Frankenstein would be it –
its subtitle (The Modern Prometheus) throws down that gauntlet directly.
Myths might be defined in part as stories whose original format is irrelevant:
Hesoid, or Ovid, or Virgil do not have a monopoly on the myths they are
telling. Myths are precisely stories that exceed their authors in a profound
way. You do not need to quote Ovid to talk about Arachne. You do not
need to read the Theogony to talk about Prometheus. You do not need to

143
 Trim: 228mm × 152mm Top: 11.247mm Gutter: 16.871mm
CUUK3116-10 CUUK3116/Smith ISBN: 978 1 107 08619 7 May 11, 2016 12:6

timothy morton

cite Frankenstein to refer to ‘Frankenfoods’, which is how many began to

talk about genetically modified crops in the 1990s.2
The pervasiveness of the Frankenstein myth affects art itself. Philip K.
Dick and subsequently Ridley Scott did not need to refer directly to Mary
Shelley’s novel in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and Scott’s
film adaptation, Blade Runner (1982). Yet both are profoundly allusive
meditations on the Promethean theme – the human use of ‘technology’ to
make life – and the theme of what it means to be alive, let alone the theme
of what it means to be a person. With his plangent Blake quotations, his
murderousness and aesthetic awe (‘I’ve . . . seen things you people wouldn’t
believe . . . ’), Roy the replicant is a twentieth-century upgrade of the
creature.
When it comes to readings of Frankenstein that relate it to ecological
themes, one might argue that the novel is a victim of its very success.
The ways Dick and Scott adapt Frankenstein are deeply about how the
novel explores issues related to ecology, at the beginning of the Western
intellectual disciplinary period of biology (a term coined both in Germany
and in England, roughly simultaneously, about 1800). Yet another reason
why ecocriticism has not done much with Frankenstein has to do with the
ways in which ecological issues are presented and explored. Frankenstein is
hardly comforting if one is interested in promulgating a traditional, norma-
tive concept of Nature (with a capital N). And the novel sits awkwardly in
relation to the fields of ecology and what is now called critical animal stud-
ies. Ecology has to do with populations, systems, species – things that seem
vast and abstract to many. Animal studies has to do with animal rights –
how one disposes oneself towards this particular life form, right here. For
this reason, there are clashes between literary criticism inflected by animal
studies and criticism inflected by ecology. Frankenstein does not necessarily
make one think about ecology, unless one is a rather odd ecological thinker
(such as myself).
The novel might make one consider how we treat other life forms; about
what constitutes a human as opposed to a non-human – urgently, it meditates
on the uncanniness of the nearly-or-not-quite-human; the novel explicitly
addresses topics in vegetarianism. None of these has an easy-to-identify,
traditional ‘ecological’ resonance, especially if one believes that ecology
is about studying and preserving something definitely non-human called
Nature. The same applies when we consider the phenomenological chem-
icals of Frankenstein – the emotions and states of mind and flavours of
thought in which it deals. Melancholy, horror, disgust and searing pain –
and refreshing, cold, liberating reason and its sadistic shadow side – are the
novel’s phenomenological landscape, not the awe, wonder, reverence – and
144
 Trim: 228mm × 152mm Top: 11.247mm Gutter: 16.871mm
CUUK3116-10 CUUK3116/Smith ISBN: 978 1 107 08619 7 May 11, 2016 12:6

Frankenstein and Ecocriticism

warm, familiar, unreflective or ‘pre-theoretical’ cosiness and its politically

oppressive shadow side. Yet the latter are the cognitive chemicals that eco-
criticism has often been most keen to explore and reproduce, at least in its
early days.
Frankenstein seems to have been designed to slip cheekily out of the holes
in standard ecocritical sieves. So we confront a paradox. In Frankenstein we
encounter a novel whose ecological resonance is so obvious that ironically
hardly anyone tackles it directly; and a novel, the very same one, whose
ecological resonance is so uncanny in relation to standard beliefs about
Nature that hardly anyone tackles it directly.
Yet we inhabit an era in which the cognitive chemicals of melancholy,
disgust and horror are central to how we are beginning to react to the
ecological era that began shortly before Mary Shelley was born, an era
we now call the Anthropocene, marked by decisive human intervention in
geophysical systems, a whole new geological period with a concomitant
mass extinction of life forms, only the sixth one to have occurred on this
planet. A consideration of the ways in which we might think in a critical
ecological way about Frankenstein seems especially urgent.

Frankenstein and Nature

There are many kinds of ecological literary criticism, but this was not always
the case. When it first developed in the early 1990s, ecocriticism had far more
specific and unique qualities: they could be summed up as a reaction against
the constructionism of the kinds of thought one encounters in (now tradi-
tional) theory class, and a counter-assertion of an unconstructed Nature.
(In this chapter I shall be capitalizing the term Nature to draw attention to
this specific concept – which should of course be distinguished from actually
existing mountains and foxes.) Then ecocriticism fanned out like an allu-
vial flow of water, opening up and significantly diverging from the starting
position. In a way, one might say that however surprising early ecocriticism
was – it was a surprisingly conservative (small c) rearguard action against
theory – it fit the same mould as the very theory it was opposing, insofar
as it relied on a very familiar dichotomy between humans and Nature, just
slightly reweighted. Whereas undergraduates had become used to pointing
out how ideas and institutions and all kinds of things we take for granted
were social constructs, ecocriticism wanted to show that many things in our
world are not constructed.
But both these positions are anthropocentric: they assert that there is a
sharp difference between humans and the non-human. For good or bad,
it is humans who do the constructing, and everything else that gets to be
145
 Trim: 228mm × 152mm Top: 11.247mm Gutter: 16.871mm
CUUK3116-10 CUUK3116/Smith ISBN: 978 1 107 08619 7 May 11, 2016 12:6

timothy morton

constructed. This position is not at all that different from the Cartesian
dualism in which there is a (human) intellect and soul opposed to a (non-
human) universe of matter. And it is hard to distinguish from the Kantian
version of this idea, namely that things exist, but they are not ‘real’ until
some (human) adjudicator – in Kant’s case this is the transcendental subject,
but later versions included Spirit (Hegel), human economic relations (Marx)
and will (Nietzsche) or Dasein (Heidegger’s ‘being-there’) – correlates with
things or observes them or works with them in some way.
If ecological criticism is about critiquing and transcending anthropocen-
trism, it needs to get past this mode, the mode in which there is construction,
and something that is constructed, and a sharp difference between those, usu-
ally in just one place in the universe – the difference between human beings
and everything else. And in a way, this undoing of the sharp difference is pre-
cisely what many Romantic-period writers were up to. It was the previous
period of art and culture, commonly known as the age of sensibility, which
valued Nature as opposed to (human) society: just think of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau and his rigid dividing lines between the artificial and the natu-
ral. Or consider the sentimental mourning for the destruction of indigenous
cultures that we find in the poetry of the ‘Celtic twilight’. Romantic-period
authors such as Wordsworth and Shelley strove to confuse and undermine
the difference between Nature and the human, the object and the subject,
history and natural history, not necessarily by blowing it up completely,
but by exploring its ironies and paradoxes. And William Blake found the
concept Nature downright politically oppressive.
Nature is . . . natural: it sounds like a truism but we should think about
this a little. It means that the concept Nature is normative, which is a
philosophical term for something that establishes differences between the
normal and the abnormal, often with ethical overtones. For something to
be natural, it must be not unnatural. The concept natural implies that some
things are not. If everything were natural, if everything was Nature, then the
concept would lose all its teeth. Nature cannot cover everything – although
some philosophers such as Spinoza use the term that way, they therefore
bar themselves (whether they like it or not) from using the term Nature in
the way early ecocriticism did: to draw a difference between what is natural
(for instance, non-theory-influenced readings of literary texts) and what
is not.
Nature is defined as ‘not unnatural’. So what happens when someone
writes a novel about confusing the difference between humans and non-
humans, and between the natural and the unnatural? What happens, in other
words, when someone writes about something monstrous: something that
is not only ‘natural’ in the sense that it is non-human, but also ‘unnatural’
146
 Trim: 228mm × 152mm Top: 11.247mm Gutter: 16.871mm
CUUK3116-10 CUUK3116/Smith ISBN: 978 1 107 08619 7 May 11, 2016 12:6

Frankenstein and Ecocriticism

in the sense that it defies expectations about what nature is, that it has been
manufactured by a human, and so on? What happens when Shelley writes
Frankenstein?
Frankenstein is in a way a deconstructive work of art, because it does
not get rid of categories. Instead, it tests these categories to breaking point
so that they start to speak their paradoxes and absurdities, absurdities that
themselves might be seen as monstrous. Perhaps the very idea that there is
a Nature and that this means ‘not monstrous’ is precisely the monstrous
idea, responsible for all kinds of phenomena such as racism or homophobia.
Perhaps trying to establish rigid and thin boundaries between Nature and
non-Nature is the monstrous act – or perhaps trying to blow them up com-
pletely is monstrous, as when we reduce things to piles of atoms or other
substances taken to be ‘more real’ than minds or pandas, eliminating the
weird gaps between things and between concepts, breaking them down into
something easier to manipulate in thought or in deed.
Moreover, as a Gothic horror novel, Frankenstein operates in a region
slightly to the side of mainstream high Romantic art, shadowing the latter
with something like a weird, uncanny double. This doubling is also decon-
structive, in this case of official Romanticism. Imagine, for instance, a literal
version of a Romantic poem – an ‘organic’ artwork with a life of its own –
imagine it as a physical body that gets up and walks out of its creator’s
house to find its way in the world, whether its creator likes it or not. This
would be not a bad description of Frankenstein’s creature, who drastically
threatens his creator simply by being autonomous, let alone murderous.
It follows from this argument – Frankenstein is a work that questions and
undermines all kinds of differences between categories, not by completely
eliminating them, but by multiplying differences – that it might be possible
to produce a wide variety of different sorts of ecocritical readings of Mary
Shelley’s novel. That Frankenstein might spawn all kinds of ‘hideous
progeny’ in the way of variant readings – and we know from Darwin
that variance and monstrosity are very difficult to distinguish – would also
explain why it was almost completely neglected in what is now known as
first-wave ecocriticism.
The cyborg, the spectre, the uncanny double, the abject animated pile of
flesh endowed with a razor-sharp reason and poignant emotion: none of
these beings seem to fit within a paradigm that is about Nature versus the
human, but all could encapsulate the creature in some way. If, however, we
drop the concept Nature – has it ever truly coincided with ecological and
evolutionary reality? – we find that issues concerning abjection and spectral
beings whose ontological status is uncertain and uncanny, because of the
fuzzy boundaries between the human and the non-human, between life and
147
 Trim: 228mm × 152mm Top: 11.247mm Gutter: 16.871mm
CUUK3116-10 CUUK3116/Smith ISBN: 978 1 107 08619 7 May 11, 2016 12:6

timothy morton

non-life, between organic and inorganic, and between conscious being and
android, are precisely what ecological and evolutionary science begin to
point out. Frankenstein is ideally suited to an ecological criticism without
Nature.

Environmentality
What would an ecocriticism without Nature look like? For a start, it might
begin to investigate how Frankenstein allows for – or does not allow for – a
sense of ‘being in’. We might give a name to this quality: environmentality.
What kind of surroundings does Frankenstein offer, and what happens in
them? What affordances do the worlds of the novel offer? Are the novel’s
surroundings simply a backdrop for human projects, or is there some sense
that there are other life forms, other entities whose ‘worlds’ might overlap
with that of humans, or not?3 What is included, and what is excluded?
We might begin by noting that the novel takes the form of three nested
sets of narratives. Evidently each narrative takes place ‘in’ certain specific
domains: the Arctic, Geneva, university, lab, forest, cottage. All, that is,
except for the ultimate frame. If we think that envrionmentality has to
do with specific ‘settings’, we have seriously crippled the concept of envi-
ronmentality. This just reinvents the wheel of ‘characters’ (and we have
pre-formatted concepts about what a ‘character’ is) living ‘in’ a particular
‘setting’ (about which we also have preconceptions as to what those mean).
In the end, such an analysis will be circular, as it never questions its initial
assumptions. Environmentality is a rare beast one needs to sneak up on.
Let us instead proceed more carefully. The creature’s narrative is ‘in’
Frankenstein’s, and in turn Frankenstein’s is ‘in’ Walton’s. And in turn
again, this set of sets is being held in the hands of Walton’s addressee,
Margaret Saville. This ‘top level’ of the narrative is significantly vague: are
we in a parlour, or a study, or a garden, or are the bundled letters being
read in a coach? The lack of a setting induces anxiety. Anxiety causes us
to fill in the surroundings – though they are vague, they are vivid. They are
our surroundings, because Shelley spells out no specific difference between
where we are reading and where Mrs Saville is reading. We get the uncanny
feeling of being Mrs Saville – and of not quite being her, of holding Walton’s
letters in our own hands – or not. Maybe they are just sitting on a desk.
Maybe some have not even arrived.4
This kind of uncertainty is in fact a default form of envrionmentality –
the feeling of being in an environment boils down to being uncertain as to
whether you are in one. It is a common feeling to wonder whether we have
yet entered the age of global warming. To the extent that we are unsure, we
148
 Trim: 228mm × 152mm Top: 11.247mm Gutter: 16.871mm
CUUK3116-10 CUUK3116/Smith ISBN: 978 1 107 08619 7 May 11, 2016 12:6

Frankenstein and Ecocriticism

have entered this age. We are preoccupied with it – ‘in’ in the non-trivial
sense, not as a pin on a Cartesian grid, not as a point in abstract Newtonian
space, but ‘in’ as in ‘into it’ – we care. We have anxiety because we care.
In outlining how Mrs Saville’s vague environment provides us with a
default environmentality that evokes feelings of anxiety, enabled by a car-
ing ‘into it’-ness, I am simply guiding you through the main arguments in
Division 1 of Martin Heidegger’s masterpiece, Being and Time (1927).5 It is
Heidegger who enables us to think about what it means to inhabit a world
in a sense that transcends simply being-located-at point x at time y. If you
think about it, that kind of argument, however picturesquely dressed up,
begs the question: ‘What is an environment?’ ‘It’s a space that you are in at
a certain point.’ ‘Great. And what is a certain point?’ ‘It’s a location in an
environment.’ ‘And what is an environment?’ (And so on.) It is a shame that
we do not read enough Heidegger, mostly because he unfortunately went
on to argue that Germans are the best at inhabiting worlds, an argument
that is wrong by his very own logic – so we can happily ignore that part.
Ecological awareness precisely means inhabiting a vague number of such
worlds. Where and when are you right now? In a college room in the early
twenty-first century? In the Anthropocene? In the Western world? In the
biosphere? In the time of oxygen, that disastrous (for anaerobic bacteria)
pollutant that flooded the biosphere several billion years ago, enabling life
forms like us to evolve? We cannot point to where and when we are exactly;
yet we are not living in the Renaissance and we are not on Mars.
Heidegger’s whole argument is devoted to showing how being is not pres-
ence. An environment is precisely something one is unable to point to, yet is
strangely there nonetheless. When you look for the environment, you find
things that are in it: a hammer, a smartphone, some rusty nails, a shed, a
spider, some grass, a tree. So there is a big difference between environmen-
tality and Nature. Nature is definitely something you can point to: it is ‘over
yonder’ in the mountains, in my DNA, under the pavement. Nature is what
is constantly present despite . . . (fill in the blank). But constant presence is
just what environmentality is not.
Environmentality is a manifold of things and certain ways of experiencing
or relating to those things. Environmentality is made of caring, of being-
into. Being-into involves being weirdly smeared out: Heidegger calls this
smearing ekstasis, which should not be confused with states of bliss. Eksta-
sis means standing-outside-oneself, self-transcending. We are reaching for
the smartphone in-order-to . . . We look out of the shed window with-a-
view-to . . . Another word for this smearing is time, again not in the trivial
objectified sense of LED lights flashing 8:30 on an old alarm clock, or the
vibrations of an atom, or pieces of metal going around a circular piece of
149
 Trim: 228mm × 152mm Top: 11.247mm Gutter: 16.871mm
CUUK3116-10 CUUK3116/Smith ISBN: 978 1 107 08619 7 May 11, 2016 12:6

timothy morton

metal: those are ways of measuring time, and those ways depend upon a sense
of time, a temporality that is already in place, because we are into certain
projects. We want to commemorate the English Revolutionary dead, so we
make a tomb that Victor Frankenstein visits in his journey up the Thames –
that tomb is a haunting place of half-forgotten revolutionary projects. We
need to buy and sell shares as fast as possible, so we have clocks that time
transactions in nanoseconds. Time is not an objectified box, but is precisely
this smearing, the way a thing does not coincide with what appears to be
present – there is a not-yet quality about existing; most Western philosophy
restricts to the human realm, although there is no particularly good reason
for that. Environmentality shimmers.
Mrs Saville gets to hold at least three kinds of spacetime in her hands,
three modes of being-into: Walton’s, Frankenstein’s, the creature’s. And who
knows whether she is even reading them, or whether she is reading them
in sequence? Mrs Saville stress tests the you-can-point-to-it idea of what an
environment is, to the point where it collapses: surely this is an important
feature of Frankenstein, overlooked as it often is. The many environmental
modes of the novel overlap and fail to overlap in all kinds of fascinating ways.
Sometimes we glimpse something happening from the environmentality of
Frankenstein, only to witness it differently from the environmentality of
the creature. This is not just about ‘point of view’, because that concept
depends upon environmentality, not the other way around. ‘Point of view’ is
a way of objectifying environmentality into a concept of a physically located
being with a particular attitude. But beings such as humans with attitudes
such as contempt for their bioengineered creations are produced by certain
kinds of environmentality, certain kinds of care. A different world would
have produced a different Frankenstein. Frankenstein himself wonders what
he would have been like if he had come of age in a different era, which
again does not mean a point on a timeline but a set of projects and care
formats.6
The minimalist vagueness of Mrs Saville’s environmentality is precisely
the point. How are we to care for the story? This question is analogous
to How is Walton to care for Frankenstein? and more importantly, How
is Victor Frankenstein to care for the creature? The very blankness of the
environmentality awakens our anxiety, which serves two functions. First,
the anxiety we lend to the text blows up the story into something like three-
dimensional realism, like air in a balloon. This is a common technique in
naturalist realism, which employs free indirect speech to just this end – we do
not know whether the speech belongs to the narrator or to a character, and
thus our slight anxiety blows air into the character in question, resulting in
what some call focalization, where we feel as if we are telepathically inside
150
 Trim: 228mm × 152mm Top: 11.247mm Gutter: 16.871mm
CUUK3116-10 CUUK3116/Smith ISBN: 978 1 107 08619 7 May 11, 2016 12:6

Frankenstein and Ecocriticism

a character’s head. In this case, the epistolary and first-person-narrative

driven novel admits of no substantial focalization – instead Shelley relies
on the technique of dissolving the aesthetic screen, as if we were holding
the letters in our own hands. In each case, the sense of reality depends
upon a sense of ambiguity, not of something definite we can point to. And
in turn this reminds us of what Heidegger says about being: being is not
presence.
Secondly, the vague environmentality opens up the central problem of
the novel: what are we to care for, for whom are we to care, what is care,
how do we care, why care, who cares? Perhaps the pristine blankness of the
Arctic landscape later in Frankenstein’s narrative is an objective correlative
for the blankness available at the form level in the guise of Mrs Saville and
whatever space she finds herself in. The last lines of the novel are about
being ‘lost in darkness and distance’ (p. 191), the creature blending into the
Arctic just as words are lost as we finish reading and encounter a blankness
at the end of a text, and start to forget. Perhaps the characters all care in
all the wrong ways – too aggressively, too melancholically, too violently.
Heidegger argues that even indifference is a form of care.7 Perhaps the very
indifference of Mrs Saville is pointing to a way to care for humans and non-
humans in a less violent way – simply allowing them to exist, like pieces
of paper in your hand, like a story you might appreciate – or not – for no
reason.8
Perhaps care is fragile and contingent and uncertain, and trying to delete
this fragility – just think of a thousand pieces of heavy-hitting environmental
PR, and the idea that art should (only) be PR for a cause such as environmen-
talism – is part of the violence we do to ourselves and other life forms. It is
Victor’s obsession with being interesting and exciting and praised that causes
him to invent, then abandon, his creature. He cares too much and he wants
too much for people to care about him. Perhaps this is another way to read
the ‘watery eyes’ of the creature (p. 39). They are not simply expressions of
psychopathic malice or zombie animation: those might be anthropocentric,
overcharged (Victor-centric) reactions to something that might seem more
like the eyes of a sheep. Their blankness invites Victor’s horror, whereas
it might invite a caring uncertainty. The cold hostility Werner Herzog sees
in the seemingly blank eyes of bears is an index of his anthropocentrism:
he sees Nature red in tooth and claw, but perhaps the bears are just into
something he is not into.9
Is it just humans we are talking about when we talk about environmental-
ity? Are non-humans allowed to be ‘into’ in Frankenstein? We are beginning
to glimpse that they are. Heidegger only allows humans to have and bestow
environmentality, and German humans most of all; so it would be excellent
151
 Trim: 228mm × 152mm Top: 11.247mm Gutter: 16.871mm
CUUK3116-10 CUUK3116/Smith ISBN: 978 1 107 08619 7 May 11, 2016 12:6

timothy morton

to find Mary Shelley letting non-humans in on the fun. On the whole, the
novel appears to be typically anthropocentric in this regard, typically that
is as a product of Romantic-period values and concerns. But one answer
to the question is surely yes. Think not only of watery eyes, but of the let-
ters themselves: they sit there, perhaps unopened, precisely not waiting for
a human to activate them. Rather they exceed what humans do with them
(namely open and read them): they collect dust, they shelter insects, they rest
for days on tables, like Mrs Saville’s eyes resting on the words. Because of
Mrs Saville, whenever we close the book we might notice that the pages and
the words are behaving without reference to us, even if they are just inertly
lying there. Language itself is a non-human being. One might even argue
that language makes humans – we would not know what ‘human’ meant
unless language told us and we could speak it.10 In this sense, language is
logically prior to humans, though it might not be chronologically prior –
though this is highly debatable (do no other life forms communicate?). The
creature’s narrative shows us all kinds of non-humans interacting without a
human in sight to give them meaning and graciously bestow reality on them.
It all happens in a forest, a thickly non-human environment in which trees
and mammals and birds and insects (and, we now know, bacteria and fungi)
exchange more or less explicit communications without reference to humans
at all. This lack of reference is noted by the creature himself as an opacity,
ingeniously rendered not at total nothing, but rather as a meaningfulness
not for him (pp. 79–81).
As we have just seen, an ecocritical approach can illuminate features
of a text that no other approach has yet illuminated. There are precious
few readings of the role of Mrs Saville, the silent reader – and because
of her silence, she is silenced and rendered invisible in most readings of
Frankenstein. But the fact that she is present in the text, even in this minimal
way, must have some significance, which I hope I have elucidated. In the
future, all texts will be read with regard to environmentality, just as now they
are all read with regard to race, gender and sexuality, whether or not they
have to do explicitly with race, or gender, or what have you. This is because,
as I hope I have shown, envrionmentality is not about stock descriptions of
bunny rabbits and mountains. Environmentality is a fundamental feature of
representation, because it is a fundamental feature of being.

Non-humans
When we consider a life form, we need to consider the monstrous. The
monstrous is the minimal unit of evolution. Darwin argues that sometimes
monstrosities can become variations, and sometimes those variations can
152
 Trim: 228mm × 152mm Top: 11.247mm Gutter: 16.871mm
CUUK3116-10 CUUK3116/Smith ISBN: 978 1 107 08619 7 May 11, 2016 12:6

Frankenstein and Ecocriticism

result in speciation – the development of a new species.11 But the quan-

tum of evolution is a random mutation for no reason at all: evolution is a
cheapskate, without teleology. Pre-Darwinian ideas about life forms were
dominated by Aristotle, whose concept of life was deeply teleological: ducks
are for swimming, Greeks are for enslaving barbarians and so on.
So Frankenstein’s creature weirdly typifies what we now consider to be a
life form, rather than deviating from it. Or rather, all life forms are deviance
all the way down, kluges of other life forms’ parts. Our lungs evolved
from the swim bladders of fish, yet there is nothing remotely like a lung-
in-waiting about a swim bladder.12 Swim bladders were ‘exapted’, adapted
from another function.13 The monstrosity of variation, speciation and so on
is the reason why evolution works at all. Monstrosity is functional.14
Life is monstrosity, but the reaction to life need not be horror; many
reactions to the monstrous are possible. Frankenstein is hamstrung by his
concept of life, which he derives from vitalism, a view popular in Shelley’s
day that life is enabled by some animating spark different from matter.
John Abernethy popularized this view in England with flashy experiments
whose showmanship Frankenstein perhaps imitates. Opposed to this view
was materialism, the idea that life could be explained simply in terms of the
organization of matter itself. Shelley’s doctor, William Lawrence, held the
materialist view.15
For vitalism to work, it must view life as something absolutely different
from what it sees as ‘dead’ matter. Thus arises a dilemma: in a sense, all life
forms are zombies, because they are all mere bodies, corpses animated by
an external force. When the creature is animated by the bolt of lightning,
Frankenstein’s fantasy becomes reality, another term for which is nightmare.
The idea that life is merely animated meat becomes horribly real, right in
front of him. On a materialist view, life is less sharply opposed to death
and the inorganic: it is simply a certain configuration of matter, as Shelley’s
contemporaries would have put it, or (as we might say now) an emergent
property of how some kinds of matter interact. On this view, too, it is difficult
to distinguish life from non-life. Indeed, life relies deeply on non-life (we are
made of chemicals after all), such that as biology has continued to probe into
the logos of bios, stranger and stranger forms have been discovered, such as
viruses – are they alive? A virus is a protein-encapsulated string of RNA or
DNA, code made of proteins. A computer virus is a piece of software made
of electronic charges in silicon and other materials. If one thinks a virus is
alive, one might have to concede that a computer virus is also alive. In a
way, on the materialist view, all beings are alive, or rather, all beings are
equally undead. Uncanny feelings pertaining to how loose this boundary is
afflict Frankenstein as he tries and fails to assemble a female creature: the
153
 Trim: 228mm × 152mm Top: 11.247mm Gutter: 16.871mm
CUUK3116-10 CUUK3116/Smith ISBN: 978 1 107 08619 7 May 11, 2016 12:6

timothy morton

creature-to-be is at once a pile of dismembered limbs, and the disfigured

corpse of someone who already existed: ‘I almost felt as if I had mangled
the living flesh of a human being’ (p. 142).
I say undead because being alive is very difficult to find – it is hard to
point to life as such. Perhaps life as such does not exist. Or perhaps it is
more subtle than that. Perhaps ‘life’, like ‘environment’, is a curious being
whose way of existing is different from constant presence. The more we
know about life forms, the more they slip into an uncanny valley between
our traditional categories of life and death. And that is no bad thing – a
rigid distinction between life and death, as in vitalism, results in violence
in all kinds of ways. Violence distinguishes between living and non-living
things. This distinction is maintained by banishing, yet secretly admitting,
a monstrous category between life and death, the category into which the
creature falls.
In robotics design, the Uncanny Valley is a region in which androids that
too closely resemble humans look like horrifying zombies.16 According to
the model, we ‘healthy’ humans live on one peak, and all the cuter robots
on the other. Zombies live in the Uncanny Valley because they ironically
embody Cartesian dualism: they are animated corpses. They are ‘reduced’
to object status – default, manipulable object status, that is – and mixed
with other beings: they have been in the soil. The Uncanny Valley concept
explains racism and is itself racist. Its decisive separation of the ‘healthy
human being’ and the cute R2D2 type robot (not to mention Hitler’s dog
Blondi, of whom he was very fond) opens up a forbidden zone of uncanny
beings that reside scandalously in the Excluded Middle region.
The distance between R2D2 and the healthy human seems to map quite
readily onto how we feel and live the scientistic separation of subject and
object, and this dualism always implies its repressed abject (that it attempts
to reject or suppress) as we have just seen.17 R2D2 and Blondi are cute
because they are decisively different and less powerful. It is this hard sep-
aration of things into subjects and objects that gives rise to the uncanny,
forbidden Excluded Middle zone of entities who approximate ‘me’ – the
source of anti-Semitism to be sure, the endless policing of what counts as
a human, the defence of homo sapiens from the Neanderthals whose DNA
we now know is inextricable with human DNA.
The more we know about life forms, the more the Uncanny Valley actually
widens, opens up and flattens into what we might call the Spectral Plain.
Ecological awareness takes place on the Spectral Plain whose distortion,
the Uncanny Valley, separates the human and non-human worlds in a rigid
way that spawns the disavowed region of objects that are also subjects –
because that is just what they are in an expanded non-biopolitical sense.
154
 Trim: 228mm × 152mm Top: 11.247mm Gutter: 16.871mm
CUUK3116-10 CUUK3116/Smith ISBN: 978 1 107 08619 7 May 11, 2016 12:6

Frankenstein and Ecocriticism

It is like animism but it would be better to write it with a line through it.
A rigid and thin concept of Life is what the awareness I call dark ecology
rejects. That concept can only mean one thing: business as usual for post-
Neolithic ‘civilization’. Life is the ultimate non-contradictory Easy Think
Substance that we must have more and more of, for no reason. A future
society in which being ecological became a mode of violence would be still
more horrifying than the neoliberalism that now dominates Earth. Such a
society would consist of a vigorous insistence on Life and related categories
such as health. It would make the current control society (as Foucault calls
it) look like an anarchist picnic.18 If that is what future coexistence means,
I would like to exit Earth. The wider view of dark ecology sees life forms
as spectres in a charnel ground in which Life is a narrow metaphysical
concrete pipe. Death is the fact that ecological thought must encounter to
stay soft.
In ecological awareness differences between R2D2-like beings and humans
become far less pronounced; everything gains a haunting, spectral quality.
This is equivalent to realizing that abjection is not something you can peel
off yourself. The Nazi tactic of peeling off abjection while supporting animal
rights is not inconsistent at all. Consistency is its very goal. Nazis are trying
to maintain the normative subject–object dualism in which I can recognize
myself as decisively different from a non-human or to be more blunt a non-
German, a recognition in which everything else appears as equipment for my
Lebensraum project. So there is little point in denigrating ecological politics
as fascist. But there is every point in naming some Nature-based politics as
fascist. Here is a strong sense in which ecology is without Nature.
The creature provides those around him with lessons in abjection, and
abjection is the basic feeling of ecological awareness: I find myself sur-
rounded and penetrated by other beings that seem to be glued to me, or
which are so deeply embedded in me that to get rid of them would be to kill
me. Tolerance of the creature, and anything greater than tolerance, would
require becoming accustomed to abjection rather than trying to get rid of it.
The creature himself suffers from it. Many have found it strange that when
he looks into the pool like Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674), he finds
himself terrifyingly ugly. But perhaps Shelley is making a point here, a point
we can now detect because of our increasing interest in ecology. Shelley in
part is insisting on an Enlightenment concept of the normative human being
above and beyond appearances, a concept that Frankenstein finds it hard to
rise to, and the creature too.
Or perhaps Shelley is making it clear that this pristine idea of a human
unsullied by appearances depends upon this abject extra. On this view, to
be a person is to be invisible – the creature has no idea what he looks like at
155
 Trim: 228mm × 152mm Top: 11.247mm Gutter: 16.871mm
CUUK3116-10 CUUK3116/Smith ISBN: 978 1 107 08619 7 May 11, 2016 12:6

timothy morton

this point, and in the text he is just a voice, so this provocative separation of
being and appearance is profoundly part of the texture of the novel. Theories
of race often remark that whiteness is that skin colour that pretends not to
be one, as if white people were invisible or transparent. Ecological awareness
is the drastic perception that there is no such thing, which is why staying
in a state of abjection or horror is far from ecological – in the end it is
merely a (probably male) white Westerner’s shock at having the rest of
reality included in his view. Frozen in his abjection reaction, Frankenstein
simply cannot care for his own creature.
And perhaps this is a not so subtle comment on monotheism, a persistent
product of the agricultural age that began in the Fertile Crescent and else-
where about 12,000 years ago, whose inner logic resulted in industrialization
and hence the Anthropocene with its global warming and mass extinction.
God creates Man and is horrified by what he sees of himself in the mirror of
human flesh. The logic implies that God and monotheism cannot cope with
ecology at all. Shelley’s point is that everyone is afflicted with this idea, not
just Frankenstein. Indeed, the creature was perhaps primed for it by all those
Enlightenment reading materials he finds. In so doing, Shelley is suggesting
that ideas are like computer viruses – they are not just symptoms of minds
(or brains for that matter), but independent entities, strings of code lying
around waiting for a vector.
Perhaps Shelley is suggesting that if we are going to think and write in an
ecological way, we have to confront the thought viruses that are inhibiting
us from doing so. Otherwise we will end up caring for dolphins because they
are cute: they do not push us into abjection. But this is not such a powerful
way of being ecological. We need to care about everything, and as I argued
earlier, everything, aka the environment, has an uncanny, spectral quality
just like Frankenstein’s creature. It is as if the creature were a full-frontal,
fully visible incarnation of environmentality itself. Caring for such a being
involves accepting the super-natural, that is to say, what goes beyond our
concepts of Nature, perhaps in an irreducible way. The monstrous is what
we cannot predict. But the shock of the unpredictable must give way to
compassion and solidarity. The question is, how?

NOTES

1 Helena Feder, ‘“A Blot Upon the Earth”: Nature’s “Negative” and the Produc-
tion of Monstrosity in Frankenstein’, The Journal of Ecocriticism, 2(1) (2010),
55–66, 55–6. Frankenstein is also briefly discussed in Andrew Smith and William
Hughes (eds.), EcoGothic (Manchester University Press, 2013), see ‘Introduc-
tion: Defining the ecoGothic’, pp. 1–14, pp. 2–3. Two exceptions are Jonathan
Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000),
156
 Trim: 228mm × 152mm Top: 11.247mm Gutter: 16.871mm
CUUK3116-10 CUUK3116/Smith ISBN: 978 1 107 08619 7 May 11, 2016 12:6

Frankenstein and Ecocriticism

pp. 49–55; Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and
the Natural World (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 47–51.
2 An exemplary instance is Anne-Lise François, ‘“Oh Happy Living Things”:
Frankenfoods and the Bounds of Wordsworthian Natural Piety’, diacritics, 33(2)
(2005), 42–70. François is a scholar of the Romantic period, and even she does
not need to refer to Frankenstein, even in an essay about ‘Frankenfoods’.
3 Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans; with A
Theory of Meaning, tr. Joseph D. O’Neil, introduction by Dorion Sagan, after-
word by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 2010).
4 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak notes the significance of Margaret Saville as a delib-
erately vague cipher for the reader in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards
a Theory of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1999), pp. 132–40.
5 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 37–211.
6 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus; the 1818 Text, ed. and
Intro. Marilyn Butler (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998),
p. 23. Future references will be made parenthetically.
7 Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 40–1, 113–14, 115, 116, 127.
8 Some serious ecological philosophy points in this direction. See, for instance,
Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, tr. Kevin Attell (Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2004).
9 Werner Herzog (Dir.), Grizzly Man (Discovery Docs, 2005).
10 Martin Heidegger, ‘Language’, Poetry, Language, Thought, tr. Albert Hofstadter
(New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 187–210.
11 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 63, 108–39.
12 Ibid., p. 160.
13 Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 281.
14 Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 102.
15 Marilyn Butler, ‘The Shelleys and Radical Science’, in Frankenstein (ed. Butler),
pp. xv–xxi.
16 Masahiro Mori, ‘The Uncanny Valley’ (Bukimi no tani) tr. K. F. MacDorman
and T. Minato, Energy, 7(4) (1970), 33–5.
17 The abject is formulated by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on
Abjection, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
18 Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France,
1975–1976, tr. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), pp. 243–7.

157