No, Taylor Swift is not Mary Shelley - by Henry Oliver

Literature professor Matthew Green has said that “ Taylor Swift’s gothic work is as important as the novels of Mary Shelley”. This is an absurd contention. We should be able to praise Swift’s extensive achievements and strongly imaginative work without making these glib assertions. Yes Taylor Swift is impressive; no, she is not Mary Shelley. To maintain that they are equals (remember, Swift is on the syllabus at Harvard, and is the subject of further serious academic discourse) is to mislead the young and perpetuate an illusion upon the public.

Mary Shelley confronted the radically new ideas of science and philosophy which were the basis of a social and cultural revolution throughout the early nineteenth century. The question of how science should be used and to what ends it could be put was vital and urgent. In the preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley referred to experiments conducted by Erasmus Darwin, Charles’ influential grandfather. Her knowledge of the work of Humphrey Davy, who theorised that chemistry was the underlying principle of all life, was central to Frankenstein’s concern that scientists would endanger society by seeing themselves as the masters of creation.

These are not, as with Swift, mere tropes: Mary Shelley was working with cutting-edge scientific knowledge. Frankenstein is a profound thought experiment about the fundamental changes that were taking place in the world. Today it retains its relevance as we explore the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence. It has the power of a modern myth, a new Ovid for a new aeon. Critics have had much to say on this topic, from the idea that Frankenstein was a call to democratise and domesticate science, to the fact that Shelley worried about the masculinity inherent in experimentation, to the way that the victims of the monster, like Justine, are often women.

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