Abstract
This chapter examines the works of Mary Shelley, exploring the Romantic notions of vegetarianism she embeds into science fiction from its beginning. It examines her classic novel Frankenstein (1818) as an intersection of the foundational Western myths of Prometheus and Genesis, beginning with an examination of the myths’ vegetarian associations within the Romantic Culture of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century English literature and their influential interpretation by Shelley’s husband, the poet Percy Shelley. An extended analysis of Frankenstein then shows how it associates animal cruelty with scientific hubris and how the novel’s famous creature first offers humanity the possibility of a (post-human) vegetarian utopia before descending into murderous carnism himself. It concludes by briefly exploring Shelley’s continuation of the ethical vegetarian theme in her second science fiction novel The Last Man, showing how science fiction’s vegetarian theme is rooted in Romantic archetypes that remain entrenched within the genre.
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Notes
- 1.
As St. Clair points out, “the notion that Mary Shelley was held back in the shadow of a famous and successful male author is an anachronistic casting back of modern presumptions,” the first edition of Frankenstein having made “more money than all P. B. Shelley’s works would fetch in his lifetime” (“Impact” 41, 43).
- 2.
There is an inconsistency in the spelling of “De Lacey”/ “De Lacy” in Frankenstein’s 1818 edition. The 1831 edition uses “De Lacey” consistently.
- 3.
Although God’s carnist covenant with Noah is acknowledged and enacted in Paradise Lost, his authorisation of carnism is not made explicit. Additionally, in Milton’s later poem Paradise Regained (1671), Satan tempts a starving Jesus Christ with “Meats by the Law unclean,” reminding him of humanity’s God-given “right” to “all Creatures,” although no meat-specific temptations occur during the corresponding verses of the Bible (Milton, Paradise Lost lines 2.324–325; cf. Matthew 4:1–11, Mark 1:12–13, Luke 4:1–13).
- 4.
The Shelley/Medwin translation of Prometheus Bound (cited here) was published in 1832 and became widely influential, being only the second ever English translation of Aeschylus’s play, to which the Romantic image of Prometheus as a “hero and savior of men owes his character almost entirely” (Thorslev 113). Medwin also claims Milton drew “much of his inspiration” for Paradise Lost from Prometheus Bound in the translation’s introduction (Aeschylus v–vi footnote, see also 67–69, 73–74). Stuart, moreover, states that Medwin “converted to vegetarianism while resident in India,” although there is no evidence to support the claim (395).
- 5.
Rowe attempts to reconcile the creature’s uncharacteristic speciesism by suggesting he may have found or stolen the dead hare from the Arctic community whose “store of winter food” he takes to feed his sledge dogs (Rowe 147n18; M. Shelley, Frankenstein 175). The creature’s own sustenance is then brought into question, however. Fruits and vegetables are “almost nonexistent in traditional Inuit diets,” which usually consist of “high concentrations of meat, fat, and fish,” suggesting there would be little for him to eat during the weeks-long chase besides meat (Searles 70–71).
- 6.
For further analysis of Napoleon’s influence on Frankenstein, see Andrew M McClellan, “The Politics of Revivification in Lucan’s Bellum Civile and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Frankenstein and its Classics: The Modern Prometheus from Antiquity to Science Fiction, edited by Jesse Weiner, Benjamin Eldon Stevens, and Brett M. Rogers (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 68–73; and Fred V. Randel, “The Political Geography of Horror in Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein.’” ELH 70, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 467–69.
- 7.
Later theories of the four humours associated yellow bile with the element of fire, providing a further—though certainly incidental—Promethean coincidence (Jouanna 340n21, 346).
- 8.
Percy Shelley misidentifies Michael as “Raphael” in the cited passage.
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Bulleid, J. (2023). Feed My Frankenstein: Mary Shelley’s Romantic Vegetarian Precedent. In: Vegetarianism and Science Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38347-2_2
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