The Society of Mad Scientists: Scientists and Social Networking in the Victorian Novel

Park Shawn Robert Parkison, Purdue University

Abstract

Imagine a figure in a lab coat, wide eyed and wiry haired, potentially wearing goggles, quite likely surrounded by some rather improbably complicated laboratory glassware and holding up a beaker bubbling with unknown potential. If you asked a child to draw a picture of a scientist or of a mad scientist, you will likely get very similar pictures. There seems to be a sense that interesting science has a tinge of mad science to it, a whiff of the radical and the unorthodox. And that sense does not evaporate with adolescence. The image of the scientist as a dangerous figure continues to preoccupy us as adults. We can make this observation historically as well: if the figure of the mad scientist first emerged in the nineteenth century, it continues to fascinate us, well into the twenty-first. Jekyll and Hyde still pop up in discussions of mental health, and references to other mad scientists from literature and other popular culture are common in discussions of science. GMOs are Frankenfoods. Geneticists are likened to Dr. Moreau. These references occur frequently in anti-science or anti-intellectual discourse, but they are not limited to those areas or even neutral arenas. The science positive and even scientists themselves remain enamored of the mad scientist. The preeminent scientist Freeman Dyson was well into his eighties when he compiled The Scientist as Rebel (2006), a collection of essays mostly from The New York Review of Books. In his preface and the first essay, from which the book takes its title, Dyson holds up rebelliousness as a key characteristic of science and of scientists and considers rebelliousness in relation to society as a whole and to children in particular. Dyson defines science as “an alliance of free spirits in all cultures rebelling against the local tyranny that each culture imposes on its children” (4). Rebellion is important to Dyson, but so is creating order. He notes the beauty in reductivism but prefers “constructivist” science. Dyson holds up Benjamin Franklin as a premier example of a rebel as scientist precisely because Franklin was not interested in tearing down but in building a society and even preserving when possible (x-xii). Dyson is aware of the related image problems even a constructivist scientist faces for their rebellious attitude. He relates seeing the play The Physicists by Friedrich Dürrenmatt with his fellow physicist Markus Fierz. The play features what Dyson calls “grotesque caricatures” of famous scientists like Newton and Einstein locked in an asylum. In response to his irritation, Fierz told him, “But don’t you see? The whole point of the play is to show us how we look to the rest of the human race” (15). Dyson concedes Fierz’s point and writes that it is now scientists’ duty to address this image, to show the public that “scientists are neither saints nor devils but human beings sharing the common weaknesses of our species” (15). That is an admirable goal. It is not quite mine. Rather, I am interested in the history of the grotesque caricature of the mad scientist. In the process of addressing that caricature’s history, there is interesting construction to be done and there are important things to be learned, relevant to both the Victorian period and our own.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Allen, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Theology|Clinical psychology|Divinity|European history|History|Literature|Psychology|Web Studies

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