“The Seat of Frost and Desolation”: The Arctic, Climate Change, and Extinction in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Abstract

This article examines the significance of the frame narrative’s location, the Arctic, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). It extends recent ecocritical analyses of Frankenstein to consider how Shelley projects her fears about future climate change upon the Arctic by envisaging it as a dystopia, in which humanity cannot exist, thereby anticipating her later post-apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826). I argue that Shelley specifically depicts the Arctic as a place of utter “desolation,” onto which she displaces the bleak future that is to befall the world if humans continue to exploit nature for their utilitarian needs. In so doing, she stresses that errors in judgment and actions can lead to disastrous environmental consequences such as changes in the global climate and the near extinction of mankind, a message she also imparts in The Last Man. In addition to examining the way in which Shelley similarly portrays the world as a scene of “so vast a desolation,” where Lionel Verney, like the Creature, must also endlessly wander alone as punishment for the male characters’ excessive ambitions to subjugate nature, this article considers the urgent warning she issues against future ecological disasters by projecting the global pandemic into the future instead of displacing it onto the limited remote geographical location of the Arctic.