Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

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, a

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n a world of creativity and becoming" (Baumer 274). Romanticism also expressed hostility to purely mechanistic explanations of the cosmos and claimed status for the mystical element of human experience, with all its attendant uncertainties and vagueness. Thus the Romantic would take uncertainty--about nature, God, man, history, the universe--rather than certainty and order as the consequences of the application of reason. In Frankenstein the narrative concludes that one cannot trust the results of such application. In that regard, Fellman (178, 180, et passim) suggests that Frankenstein anticipated the 20th-century preoccupation with and alienation of human beings and a technology that developed a life of its own. He cites a parallel in Frankenstein with Victor's alienation and withdrawal from his family and from the world at large, to pursue his single-minded objective. The text also deals with the fact that Victor's experiment betrayed him and formed its own ideas about the structure of its life, notably when the monster demands that Victor create a mate for him: "I do refuse it," I replied; "and no torture shall ever extort a consent from me. You may render me the most miserable of men, but you shall never make me base in my

Category: Literature - M