A lab coat, wild hair, thick glasses, and a savage glint in their eye as they watch their ill-considered experiment come to fruition—the mad scientist is a particularly recognizable trope in media and pop culture today. Mad scientists are mainly associated with science fiction and are also popular as stock villains in superhero comics, but what many don’t know is that this character trope has its roots in the Gothic. In fact, the villainization of science makes sense when you consider that the Gothic genre emerged as a reaction against the Enlightenment. While proponents of rationalism encouraged the pursuit of pure reason, many authors of the Gothic feared what such intellectualism might become when divorced from ethics and emotion. The character of the mad scientist is the embodiment of such anxieties, as we can see in several prominent works of Gothic literature.
Arguably, Victor Frankenstein from Mary Shelley’s 1818 Gothic novel Frankenstein, is the first prominent example of a mad scientist in literature. At the beginning of the novel, Victor is a teenage student studying science at the University of Ingolstadt. (Unlike later incarnations of this trope whose names are usually prefaced with the title “Dr.,” Victor never even gets a degree!) Grief over the recent loss of his mother drives Victor to plunge head-first into his studies, and he soon becomes obsessed with the idea of creating life out of death. Victor meticulously plans out the physical aspects of his creature and the practical method of bringing it to life, but it becomes apparent that he has given little thought to the emotional and ethical consequences of his experiment. When the creature awakens, Victor is overwhelmed by horror and disgust and he rejects his creation, setting off a cycle of violence and vengeance. While Victor is ostensibly the protagonist of the story, he is also quite clearly the cause of his own suffering as well as that of the creature. Throughout the novel, his wild grief and obsessive nature get in the way of making rational or compassionate decisions, and his moral failings continue to come back to haunt him. In this sense, Victor Frankenstein serves as the model for all other mad scientists to follow.
Another early example of the mad scientist trope is Dr. Giacomo Rappacini in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Rappacini’s Daughter” (1844). The story is told from the perspective of a young traveler named Giovanni who becomes infatuated with Beatrice, the daughter that Dr. Rappacini has raised to tend his garden of poisonous plants. Their romance turns tragic, however, when it is revealed that Beatrice’s breath and touch are poisonous, like those of the plants she tends, and that she has passed this trait on to Giovanni. It turns out that the whole thing has been orchestrated by Dr. Rappacini, who does not hesitate to use unwitting human subjects for his scientific research. A fellow scientist in the story says of Rappacini, “he cares infinitely more for science than for mankind,” and that his “insane zeal for science” has driven him to turn his own daughter into a dangerous experiment. Much like Victor Frankenstein, Rappacini allows his scientific ambitions to take precedence over his duties as a father, and even over his basic responsibility to act ethically. He is overtly referred to as mad, and it is specifically his prioritization of science above all else that makes him so.
Perhaps the most famous mad scientist in Gothic literature is Dr. Henry Jekyll of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Unlike the previous two examples who play god with the lives of others, at least Dr. Jekyll has the decency to conduct his questionable experiments only on himself—yet even this has devastating consequences. In the novella, Dr. Jekyll is described as having been a mostly virtuous man, who fought against his own evil urges. When he can fight these urges no longer, Jekyll creates a serum that will transform him into an alternate persona, Mr. Edward Hyde, allowing him to indulge in vice undetected. Soon, however, Jekyll is no longer able to control the transformations and Hyde begins taking over his life, all the while committing unforgivable acts of violence and murder. By the end of the story, Jekyll has run out of the serum that allows him to transform back, and he kills himself rather than risk living permanently as Hyde. In this instance, the mad scientist does just as much harm to himself as he does to others. Dr. Jekyll’s fatal flaw is not that he sometimes feels evil impulses, but that he chooses to use science to devise a solution to the practical issue of bad behavior reflecting poorly on his reputation rather than genuinely engaging with his impulses on a moral level—proving once again that science cannot be a substitute for ethics.
In this last example I want to discuss, we can see this trope jumping over from the Gothic to works more readily identified as science fiction. H. G. Wells is an author whose name is nearly synonymous with the early science fiction genre, and a mad scientist features prominently in his 1896 novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau. Moreau is a specialist in the newly emerging and controversial science of vivisection, which involves cutting open and operating on living animals. Moreau has been ousted from the scientific community and retreats to an island where he continues to conduct experiments, eventually managing to use vivisection to create macabre human-animal hybrid creatures. When a young man named Edward Prendick becomes shipwrecked on Moreau’s island, he is horrified by Moreau’s experiments—both because of the intense suffering that Moreau inflicts during the vivisections and because of the uncanny nature of the hybrids. Moreau is ultimately killed by one of his own creations, and his hybrids eventually revert back to their animal natures. Prendick returns to society, having somewhat lost his faith in humanity and in the concept that men are separated from beasts by their capacity to reason. The character of Doctor Moreau resembles Victor Frankenstein in that he is trying to create human life, but rather than using dead body parts as his raw materials he uses living animals. Like the other mad scientists discussed here, he dismisses ethical concerns—in particular, Moreau disdains the concept of pain as being irrational and feels no sympathy for the suffering of his subjects. Though The Island of Doctor Moreau is generally classified as science fiction, it is also clearly a horror novel, which uses science as the source of its horror.
The trope of the mad scientist is not only a particularly fun villain—it is also a warning: science pursued without ethics can have dangerous consequences. What do you think of the mad scientist trope? What other examples from film and literature can you name? Have you read any of the works discussed above? Let me know in the comments!