Raw Materials. Half Creatures and Complete Nature in Shelley’s Frankenstein and Homunculus in Goethe’s Faust II

Abstract

Why did Mary Shelley’s famous Creature meet its ends in the eternal ice of the Arctic Sea? What made it possible for Goethe’s Homunculus to finally break free in the Classic Walpurgis Night? Both remote places fulfill the destinies of two of the most famous laboratory-made artificial human beings in Western literature, the Creature of Frankenstein, and the “little man”, Homunculus. They are born as half-creatures: Shelley’s Monster as pure body, Homunculus as pure spirit, locked up in a phial. Their lives on earth circle around one purpose: to create themselves as complete human beings, by achieving what they miss: a soul for Shelley’s Creature, a body for Goethe’s Homunculus. This article aims to present a systematic purification and comparison of the creations, lives, and ends of the Monster and Homunculus. My thesis is that each of them literally embodies two opposite and contemporary views of nature, identified in their own time as respectively materialistic and vitalistic positions. By comparing these life spans it is possible to shed light on Shelley’s and Goethe’s literary investment in the debate.