SOURCE: "Tales of Transgression, Fables of Industry: Hoffmann, Hawthorne, Melville, and Gaskell," in In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1987, pp. 63-91.

In the essay that follows, Baldick examines "stories of doomed experimenters" found in works by Hoffmann, Hawthorne, Melville, and Gaskell, suggesting that these authors portray various forms of production as self-destructive activities.

Mary Shelley was not alone in fictionalizing the various preoccupations which we find at work in Frankenstein; stories of doomed experimenters and obsessive chemists were favourites with early nineteenth-century readers. In France Balzac himself tried his hand at this kind of tale in his La Recherche de l'Absolu (1834), in which the protagonist Balthazar Claes, who has studied chemistry under Lavoisier, encounters a Polish chemist who inspires him to search for 'the Absolute'—the single element to which all matter can be reduced. The quest is of course fatal...