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Frankenstein in the History of Happiness: From Ancient Ethics to Richard Wright

ABSTRACT In the classical and neo-classical philosophical tradition, virtue is necessary, or even sufficient, for happiness; it partially or fully constitutes happiness. Virtue comes first; happiness attends it. In Frankenstein, however, Shelley’s creature thinks of happiness as a social and material entitlement, and, turning classical philosophy on its head, a prerequisite to virtue. ‘I was benevolent and good,’ the creature says to his creator, ‘misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.’ Happiness, to the creature’s mind, is not available to the lone, superior individual as an assertion of his own rational independence; it is, rather, dependent on circumstance and our needs as fundamentally social creatures. Shelley’s moral and psychological inquiry into virtue and happiness emerges from political-philosophical responses to the French Revolution, chiefly those by her parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. The ethical question explored in Frankenstein continue to animate nineteenth-century realist and naturalist novels. Developing the case for Shelley’s direct influence on African-American literary naturalism of the first half of the twentieth century, I conclude with a consideration of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son, which examines the genesis of and responsibility for another moral monster, Bigger Thomas.