Measured Life: Making Live, the “Modern System of Science,” and the Animated Bodies of Frankenstein

This article considers Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein through what Sara Guyer calls “biopoetics,” hybridizing biopolitical and romantic reading strategies, and positing that romantic writing arises in temporal, theoretical, and political parallel with the movement of power from the reign of the sovereign to the realm of biopower. I focus on how Frankenstein imagines the flesh of Victor as animated and directed forward through biopower, by way of the novel’s juxtaposed medico-scientific and romantic discourse of life. Through close readings of the creation scene and Victor’s final breaths aboard Walton’s exploratory Arctic ship, I conclude that Frankenstein at last offers itself both as artifact and archaeology of modern power—or what Guyer calls “literature as a form of biopower.”