Frankenstein and the Collapse of the Unus Mundus before Modernity
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can be read as a decisive cultural drama in which an older symbolic vision of unity—articulated by figures such as Gerhard Dorn and later psychologized by C. G. Jung—breaks down under the pressure of modern, implicitly Hegelian consciousness. The novel stages the moment when the reconciliation of opposites no longer occurs through soul, symbol, and suffering, but is displaced by abstract reason, technical mastery, and unilateral subjectivity. In this sense, Frankenstein does not merely warn against scientific hubris; it dramatizes the historical collapse of a world in which unity between spirit and matter could still be lived and symbolically mediated.
In Dorn’s alchemical worldview, the fundamental problem is division: mind has split from body, spirit from nature, God from world. Yet this division is not final. Alchemy aims at the coniunctio, the reunification of opposites in the unus mundus, a unified reality underlying both subject and object. Crucially, this unity is not regained through domination or abstraction but through suffering, patience, and moral transformation. The alchemist must endure the tension of opposites and allow them to unite through a process that is as ethical and spiritual as it is ontological.
Jung inherits this structure but translates it into modern psychological terms. Individuation is not regression to a preconscious unity, nor is it egoic mastery. It is the painful integration of conscious and unconscious, shadow and persona, spirit and instinct. For Jung, the split is necessary, but reconciliation remains symbolic, incomplete, and lived. The opposites are not abolished; they are held together through images, myths, and ethical struggle. Unity remains a task of the soul, not a logical result.
Frankenstein enters precisely where this symbolic economy fails. Victor Frankenstein does not seek union; he seeks production. His act of creation bypasses the alchemical work of transformation and replaces it with technical fabrication. Matter is no longer ensouled; it is inert material to be assembled and animated by will and intellect. What Dorn and Jung understand as a sacred tension between spirit and matter is, in Victor’s project, reduced to a problem of method. The coniunctio is attempted without suffering, relation, or responsibility.
This marks the entry into modernity as Hegel describes it: the rise of self-certainty, the triumph of subjectivity, and the confidence that reason can grasp and master reality. Yet Frankenstein shows this modern logic in a one-sided, pathological form. Victor embodies a consciousness that abstracts itself from its own products. He creates life, but refuses re-cognition; he produces an other, but will not acknowledge it as part of himself. In Hegelian terms, this is a failed dialectic: the moment of negation occurs, but reconciliation does not. The subject does not recognize itself in the other it has produced.
The creature, in turn, dramatizes what Jung would call the autonomous or objective psyche: rejected, unloved, and unintegrated, it becomes destructive. But Shelley’s genius lies in pushing beyond individual psychology to its historical diagnosis. The monster is not merely Victor’s shadow; it is the embodiment of a world in which symbolic mediation has collapsed. There is no alchemical vessel, no ritual container, no mythic language capable of holding the tension between creator and creation. What remains is raw confrontation, guilt, and revenge.
From a Hegelian perspective, one could say that Frankenstein depicts, at the risk of intellectualization, Spirit torn loose from its own dialectical reconciliation. The negative moment—division, alienation, death—is unleashed, but it is not aufgehoben, sublated. Reason has become instrumental rather than speculative; it produces effects without comprehension. In this sense, Shelley anticipates the modern problem Hegel sought to resolve conceptually but which culture continued to experience existentially: the split between knowledge and wisdom, power and meaning.
Against Dorn, unity is no longer ontologically assumed. Against Jung, symbolic integration no longer functions. The modern subject does not suffer with the opposites; it externalizes them. Victor does not descend into the work; he flees it. The result is not individuation but catastrophe. The novel thus marks the historical moment when the soul can no longer rely on inherited symbolic forms to mediate contradiction. What once could be transformed inwardly now returns as external violence. This is the result of scientific discoveries that no longer fit into the old forms of transcendence and metaphysics.
In this light, Frankenstein is a tragedy of modernity itself. It shows what happens when the alchemical imagination dies and consciousness attempts to complete itself through technical means alone. The unus mundus fractures into irreconcilable domains: subject versus object, creator versus creation, mind versus nature. Shelley’s novel stands as a cultural lament for the loss of Dorn’s unity and a prophetic warning about the insufficiency of a purely Hegelian faith in reason’s self-reconciliation when it is severed from soul.
Frankenstein does not resolve this crisis; it exposes it. In doing so, it becomes one of the first great literary documents of a world in which unity must be rethought—or suffered—without the naive assumptions that once sustained it.
Brenton L. Delp
Leave a Reply