This research examines Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus as a critique of the peculiarly masculine drive for knowledge of, and mastery over, nature. The research will set forth the literary and historical context in which the novel first appeared and then discuss ways in which the emergent culture of Romanticism, fed by Enlightenment discourse, informed the theme of the quest for knowledge and control of the natural environment.
The publication of Frankenstein must be understood as a phenomenon reflecting an intellectual climate in which the philosophical ideas of the Enlightenment were eliding into those of Romanticism. The body of thought associated with the Enlightenment reaches such themes as the status of and rationale for laws, the content of ethics, the nature of science, and moral philosophy. There was significant skepticism in the mode of Enlightenment inquiry, a relativistic perspective of morality, and a tendency toward seeing human experience not as unfolding in a divinely determined cosmos but rather in a more random way. Enlightenment thought was by no means uniform. Mutual dislikes between (for example) Hume and Dr. Johnson or Voltaire and assorted colleagues and European princes (Holmes 50) have been well documented. But the climate and content of Enlightenment discourse, which ran parallel to the irrevocable changes in American and European social structure in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, irrevocably opened society, culture, and religion to secular critique, as well as to the notion that humanity could be persuaded, by reason, that life could be improved, and shown how to improve it. Clark (245ff) refers to Voltaire's "smile of reason" as a cogent symbol of the period.
The fact that young Percy Bysshe Shelley could scandalize Oxford University into expelling him upon publication of a pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism (1811) must be set beside the fact that publication of suc...