Charlotte Gordon, a distinguished professor and acclaimed author at Endicott College, has collaborated with Rebind, a digital reading platform which is using AI to make classic texts more accessible, to create CharlotteBot: an interactive AI project that invites the public into dialogue with Frankenstein’s history, ethics, and legacy, opening up new ways to engage with Mary Shelley’s novel and its characters.
Gordon is the author of the award-winning book “Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley,” which was the first book to emphasize and prove — against what many critics had been saying for years — that Wollstonecraft’s feminist ideas influenced Shelley’s writing, even though Wollstonecraft died 10 days after Shelley’s birth.
She said her background and understanding of the subject matter led Rebind to reach out to her to be an expert source for its subscription-based, AI-influenced series. Gordon said that, while she was skeptical at first, she is very happy with how everything turned out.
She said, “I felt like the people who run Rebind are really serious about literature, and they really care about integrity and ideas, so it was totally fine with me to get made into a bot.” She added that Rebind spent more than three long days talking to her about “Frankenstein” and another entire day videoing her.
She was eager to share just how CharlotteBot differentiates between her expert opinion and AI.
“If you signed up to read ‘Frankenstein’ at the subscription library, you would ask a question of the text, and then my words would come to you in blue, and then the bot would extrapolate and say something in red, so you would know bot versus me, which I thought was smart,” she said.
She added, “I think what’s so cool about the site is they take someone so profoundly un-techy as me, and they’ve really found a way to use who I am and what I know about, what I like to think and talk about; they found a great way to make it accessible to many more people.”
Gordon joked that some of her fellow expert friends were against being turned into a bot, but she said, “bring it on. I want people to know about Mary Shelley. I want people to hear the story.”
Part of what led her to say yes to this project was her frustrations with the overwhelming amount of misconceptions about Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” She noted that, although “Frankenstein” is often taught to people as “the first science fiction novel,” that doesn’t truly address all the novel’s themes, nuances, or influences.
For one, Gordon explained that many are not taught about the mother-daughter relationship between Wollstonecraft and Shelley, which is pivotal to understanding how “Frankenstein” is a feminist commentary.
“No one thinks about the fact that Mary Shelley was the daughter of a very, very famous, feminist woman… and that woman’s ideas are all around the novel,” Gordon explained. “But if you don’t know that, you just read the book and think, ‘Huh, there’s no strong women in this, and this seems to be about invention.’ I always say, ‘No, this is a book about a world without strong women, and this is what happens when men are left unchecked with their ambition.’”
She added that it “is a huge misunderstanding to teach it as a science fiction because it really is more like ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’ It really is a dystopian novel about a world without women — and if you don’t know that Mary Shelley’s mom was Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,’ you’re going to miss so much about this book.”
Gordon also emphasized that Shelley was very clear in her writing that being an inventor is similar to being a parent. She said, “You have to stick with your invention and educate it and sort of parent it, and then you have to get the world ready for it — and if you don’t do that, the world is going to react very badly, like it does to Mary Shelley’s creature.”
She continued, “If Frankenstein hadn’t run away from his creature and had, you know, tucked the creature into bed at night and read nighttime stories and taught it how to be a good creature, we would have had an entirely different story. But instead, we have this abandoned creature who wants to make friends, and everyone’s really mean to him and hits him over the head with a log.”
Gordon stressed that CharlotteBot is a way to connect students with expert sources to allow for deeper understanding of classic literature.
“I think that we are capable of living larger, more empowered lives, if we know about the large, empowered people who came before us,” she said. “When I’m writing, I get scared, and I think, ‘OK, Wollstonecraft, everyone called her a whore, and she kept going. Shelley, everyone called her a whore, too, and she kept going, so just keep going. It doesn’t matter what your own time thinks of you. You’re trying to write things for some future that might actually get you.”
