Unknown Natures
“There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand” - Captain Walton in “Frankenstein”
The book “Frankenstein” is commonly perceived as a work of science fiction, culturally adapted to be little more than a thrilling tale. But Mary Shelley’s monumental work, when seen in its entirety, can offer something more: a picture of both man’s tenuous relationship with the mysteries of nature, as well as the concealed and gendered underpinnings of Western science that influence its connection to wilderness and outdoor exploration.
“Frankenstein” begins and ends on an Arctic ice field. At the time that the book was published in 1818, the British Royal Navy had already embarked on its first Arctic expedition in search of the Northwest Passage, marking the beginning of a period of “polar mania” in Europe and beyond. Little was known about the vast wilderness of the Arctic at the time, and the voyage was described as one primarily motivated by geographical discovery and the “advancement of scientific and natural knowledge”— seemingly altruistic goals that conveniently masked any pursuit of British territorial expansion. In “Frankenstein,” the protagonist Victor finds himself on the Arctic’s vast expanse for similar reasons, although his pursuits of nature have nothing to do with geographic control. While he does not seek to gain territory, or leave his national flag on an illusive channel of ice and water, he shares a similar ambition with 19th-century sailors: the discovery of that which is unknown.
In their pursuit of the hidden corners of nature, from the Arctic to what is now North America and beyond, European explorers’ early interaction with wilderness molded a perception of the environment which still frames the tension around nature conservation today. In this dynamic, the natural world is inherently “pristine” and should be returned to some imagined “original” state—yet, at the same time, it should also benignly serve as a canvas for continued scientific discovery and recreational use. This mastery of nature has ideological roots in the gendered history of early modern science. Thinkers such as Francis Bacon used symbolic language to both designate nature as female and suggest the need to “reveal its secrets.” Such images, argues environmental historian Carolyn Merchant, made “the subjugation of nature as female [...] integral to the scientific method as power over nature,” and “legitimated the exploitation of natural resources” after the Scientific Revolution.
Through this lens, both wilderness exploration and its modern day successor, nature conservation, can be seen in a new light. Behind the altruism and inherent goodness of scientific discovery lies the shadow of the need to control nature—to both know and seek pleasure from it. Despite good intentions for its constructed preservation, “wilderness,” as it has been defined, is at the mercy of scientific action. Like Frankenstein’s Creature, it has been designed, assembled, and manipulated, without any agency in the purpose of its own creation.
“In this dynamic, the natural world is inherently “pristine” and should be returned to some imagined “original” state—yet, at the same time, it should also benignly serve as a canvas for continued scientific discovery and recreational use.”
At the outset, “Frankenstein” follows the story of a curious scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who meets his demise at the hands of the Creature he makes from the body parts of cadavers brought to life by the power of electricity. The book was written by 19-year-old Mary Shelley, who was vacationing in Geneva with her husband Percy and Lord Byron when she conceived the idea for the gothic tale in a dream. According to the author’s introduction to the book, conversations between the holidayers repeatedly drifted towards discussions of the “principle of life” and the role that science could—or should—play in revealing its mystery. Shelley’s husband stood firmly in the camp of science idealists and believed it to be a channel through which man could exercise his newfound “divine” creative powers. Modeled after her husband, the character of Victor Frankenstein echoes these thoughts when he declares his motivation for the life-giving experiment: “I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.”
For the European explorers who were first encountering the North American wilderness around the same time that the book was written, Victor Frankenstein’s words could have served as a sort of mantra. They reveled in the idea of unveiling uncharted oceans, valleys, and plains to society back home. Lord Dufferin, a prominent member of Victorian society and eventual governor of Canada, was recorded saying upon his visit to the northwest part of the country in 1877: “when the Dominion of Canada came to these vast regions, she was no longer a mere settler along the banks of a single river, but the owner of half a continent—in the magnitude of her possessions, in the wealth of her resources, in the sinews of her national might—the peer of any power on earth.”
The words of both Victor Frankenstein and Lord Dufferin give an aura of the possibility of limitless discovery and promised power, vested to those who could unlock the enigma and wealth of the natural world. When the artist and traveler Paul Kane passed through the Athabasca River Valley in the 1840s, his sketches and paintings were included in brochures for European tourists promoting the region to those who could afford to make the long journey to an aesthetic playground, an alleged new world where the superabundance of life had no bounds.
The exploration of North American territory showcased to British society the fruits of science at its best: a mission of moral duty to unveil and document the inner workings of nature for the greater good, while securing valuable resources and cultivating enjoyable entertainment. But are these Western science’s only motivations? How have its outcomes been expressed otherwise in relation to nature, when framed by the reality of ongoing environmental degradation, extinction and a rapidly changing climate?
In an introduction to a 2006 edition of “Frankenstein,” Maurice Hindle describes the book as an omen of the potentially dangerous impacts of science that Mary Shelley observed the men around her compulsively promoting. In creating his Creature, Hindle writes, it is Frankenstein’s wish “‘to penetrate the secrets of nature’ through the appliance of the new masculinist-made god, Science,” without any concern for the consequences.
When the book was first released, it was met with shock by British society. As Hindle writes, the story shook readers by showing “the all embracing ‘Nature’ that eighteenth-century Europe had so much revered [getting] disturbed and plundered,” despite the fact that arguably similar “plundering” was already underfoot across the Arctic and North America. This disconnect would chart the course for how Western society would frame its relationship with nature to this day.
In the wake of Dufferin and Kane’s explorations, Banff National Park—Canada’s first and currently most developed national park—was created in 1885. After European settlers had surveyed the region to their satisfaction, oftentimes guided by indigenous groups along traditional travelling routes, they saw potential for tourism and hunting and thus consecrated the area as “protected.” Settlers forcibly relocated indigenous communities who had lived sustainably in the mountainous ecosystem for millennia to reservations in the Canadian foothills. Science-based policies guided the park’s early management, which sought to minimize human intervention, all while simultaneously encouraging the “ecosystem husbandry of select species for direct human benefit.” Within this advertised “wilderness,” park administrators eliminated forest fires, launched carnivore reduction programs to support the proliferation of herbivores that could be hunted, and fragmented habitat and migration corridors through the eventual creation of highways, ski hills, and logging areas.
Despite these obvious human interventions, Western perceptions of wilderness have remained as something intrinsically pure or unfragmented. In the oft-quoted US Wilderness Act of 1964, a culmination of conservation and resource management ethos that had been practiced and tested over the last century, wilderness is described as an “area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
In the end, Victor Frankenstein’s singular ambition leads to tragedy. Alone in the knowledge of what he has created, and afraid to grant the Creature a final wish, he meets an icy fate, not unlike the majority of Britain’s Arctic explorers. Modern day conservation and wilderness management has in many ways been met with a similar dissatisfied conclusion. “The wild things [the conservationist] hunts for have eluded his grasp,” writes Aldo Leopold in “Sand County Almanac,” “and he hopes by some necromancy of laws, appropriations, regional plans, reorganization of departments, or other form of mass-wishing to make them stay put.”
Wild places should continue to exist, as should the life-saving advancements that science has provided for modern society. But perhaps it’s time that they are practiced through a different lens. In her book “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Robin Wall Kimmerer discusses new ways that science and environmental conservation can be made interdependent through knowledge found in indigenous ways of being, traditions that stem from matriarchal communities. It’s in part our purposeful separation, or isolation, from nature through the mechanisms of Western science that have made our efforts of conservation fatal—and our desire to control it inadvertently harmful. Instead of “finding secrets” in nature, Kimmerer suggests to look inwards.
“The land knows you,” she writes. “Even when you are lost.”