ence, its applications can develop a life of their own, with often negative results. Victor's ambitions for his creature alienate him from his family and the wider world, but he sees unambiguously that he has created a monster when the creature, which has already killed several people demands that he supply him with a mate: "Shall I create another like yourself, whose joint wickedness might desolate the world! Begone! I hahve answered you; you may torture me, but I will never consent" (Shelley 123).
But who is the monster? Victor was the one who created it in the first place, and his motive power was that he wanted to possess the very secret of life by way of science. His insight into the consequences of his ambition can be considered a species of social commentary because he is interrogating the presumed certainties of science that had flooded popular as well as academic imagination over the course of the "enlightened" 18th century. Newton, Kepler, Harvey, and other scientists might not have been understood by more than a handful of academics, but their names were nevertheless household words. Barzun cites the "eager reading public and a publishing industry in proportion" to the scientific and mathematical innovations of the 18th century (367).
Victor Frankenstein carries his work one speculation too far, in the process creating not one but two monsters: the creature and Victor himself as the prototype of the mad scientist. Shelley takes the position that mastery of nature is dangerous without an accompanying moral sense. The narrative demonstrates t
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