A meeting on the mer de glace: frankenstein and the history of alpine mountaineering

Abstract

Until the eighteenth century, the Alps were widely believed to be infested with devils, monsters, and dragons. At that time, however, fear gave way to curiosity and many Alpine journeys were undertaken in pursuit of aesthetic pleasure or scientific observation. Scientific travelers, who hoped to discover the secrets that the unexplored peaks might yield, predominated in exploration above the snowline. Alpine mountaineering was largely a product of the Enlightenment search for knowledge, as Mary Shelley must have learned when she visited Chamonix in 1816 while writingFrankenstein. By locating the important initial meeting between Victor and the monster on the Mer de Glace, Shelley links Victor's activities with those of mountaineering scientists like Horace Benedict de Sausure. Both the 1818 and 1831 editions ofFrankensteingive significance to this meeting by enmeshing it within a pattern concerning romantic/aesthetic and Enlightenment/scientific responses to mountain scenery. But they offer different versions of this pattern.