This is the quotation from Gillen D’Arcy Wood’s Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World that I didn’t have a chance to read last week in class:
Tambora’s history, then, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, ultimately tells a cautionary tale. Both warn against the technological hubris of our modernity through figures of intense and widespread suffering. ‘All men are wretched,’ laments the Creature, Shelley’s literary projection of the homeless, starving poor of Europe in Tambora’s aftermath. Two centuries on, the global ranks of the wretched are set to increase exponentially in coming decades at the hands of our own climate ‘Frankenstein,’ a monster who feeds on carbon waste and grows more violent by the year. (234)
Mount Tambora’s eruption in Indonesia in September 1815 led to turbulent weather across Europe for the following three years. As a result, many agricultural worker’s lives were disrupted as crops suffered and food was in short supply. Wood argues that the volcano’s eruption also sparked the first worldwide cholera pandemic. I know that some of you are not convinced by Frankenstein’s connection with climate change but if you’d like to read further, see the Introduction and chapter 3 of Wood’s book; and if you’d like to read a short article that is also skeptical of the climate change connection you can find it here.
One of you also made a link between the Creature and climate refugees and we discussed the link between the Creature and the working classes. Wood adds to these discussions as follows:
Mary Shelley was not wanting for real-world inspiration for her horror story, namely, the deteriorating rural populations of Europe post-Tambora. . . . Like the hordes of refugees spreading typhus across Ireland and Italy during Shelley’s writing of the novel, the Creature is a wanderer and a menace to civilized society. . . . when he ventures into the towns, is met with fear and hostility, while the privileged families of the novel, the de Laceys and the Frankensteins, look upon him with horror and abomination. If we look beyond the much-discussed scientific resonances of the monster’s creation, the lived experience of Mary Shelley’s creature most closely embodies the degradation of the homeless European poor during the Tambora period. (66)
See also this link that one of you included in your commentary for more discussion. Last but not least, part of what makes Frankenstein impressive is that it enables many diverse, and sometimes competing, interpretations.
The painting I wasn’t able to show at the end of class is below. It is John Constable’s Weymouth Bay, 1816. Wood suggests that this dark sky was typical of the darkened skies across Europe the summer after Tambora erupted. (Wood has also written on article entitled, “Constable, Clouds, Climate Change,” in which he suggests that Constable’s cloud painting give us a model for understanding climate change by showing us the weather patterns of his period.)
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