Research Paper on Shelly’s Frankenstein
(First 3 Pages)
Mary Shelley wrote the tale of "Frankenstein" when she was only 19 years old, her fertile imagination, fueled by the age in which she lived and by her upbringing. She was the offspring of illustrious parents, writer Mary Wollstonecraft and philosopher William Godwin, both of them social rebels. Shelley was the author of Frankenstein, a novel that has proved astonishingly influential and effective, having all the qualities of a genuine myth. In this highly charge atmosphere Mary Shelley conceived and wrote Frankenstein: a macabre Gothic tale of a brilliant and talented young man who starts out with a proper desire for learning and knowledge, but gets too ambitious. He withdraws from the world and normal human contact into his laboratory and pulls off the greatest victory of all scientific imagination - he constructs a body out of bits of dead flesh, and galvanizes it. Far from this turning out to be an exciting and hopeful breakthrough for humanity, the consequences are horrendous.
And I think what one sees terribly strikingly in that incredible scene in
"Frankenstein" that she describes, of Frankenstein creating his creature in
the laboratory and the creature reaches out towards him and Frankenstein
recoils with horror from what is made incredibly clear is his child, and it
is Frankenstein's behavior which turns the monster into a demon, as he sees
it, but we don't.
And really, this was the theme of Mary's work. And we tend now to think
about the science, to think about genetics, to put every kind of mythical
interpretation into this book. And it's the great wonder of "Frankenstein"
that it will stand all those interpretations and contain them and take us
somewhere else, but it wasn't Mary's original intention. Frankenstein's
creation is horribly botched: unlike nature's creation, it is neither
beautiful nor lovable. It is destructive, vengeful, and very dangerous.
(Interestingly, the piece of the story that is least prominent in all the
retellings is Mary Shelley’s central question - is the monster evil because
it is unloved, or unlovable because it is evil?) The monster brutally
destroys everything its creator loves - friends, and family, and sanity.
Finally, Frankenstein has to sacrifice his life to destroy his own creation.
Nothing good comes of this supremely creative act.
Although it is written with an enormous emotional power, Frankenstein was
not the first Gothic horror novel, and it was not the first science fiction
novel either, but from the moment of its first publication in 1818 it struck
a chord, whose reverberations seem to increase still. It is unusual for a
novel so to escape from its origins. Almost every eight-year-old in this
country now knows the name and something of the story - however botched,
confused and reinterpreted - of the hero of a radical, literary,
intellectual novel written over 150 years ago. (Although Boris Karloff may
have something to answer for, the fame of this story is not based simply on
a film version. The name "Frankenstein" has a cultural reference way beyond
the cinematic.) It is unusual for any pervasive cultural myth to have a
known and named author. It is even more unusual for such an author to be a
teenage girl.
Why did it work so well? What nerve is it that Frankenstein touched and
still touches?
The French Revolution destabilized Europe. It raised hopes that reason could
perfect humanity and then dashed those hopes. It also led directly to the
devastating Napoleonic Wars - which ended only the year before Frankenstein
was written. And it left Europe with a profound tension between the
liberating, life-enhancing capacities of human knowledge and the dangers
(moral, practical and imaginative) of "interfering with nature". It is a
conflict which has not been resolved in the subsequent two centuries and is
seen most clearly in the life sciences, particularly medicine: will reducing
pain in childbirth undermine maternal devotion? Will organ transplant change
personality? Is cloning a new chance at eternal life, or a fundamental
corruption of our individuality? Reproductive technologies continually stir
up moral terrors and media controversies - on the one hand it is "natural"
(even a right) to have children; on the other hand we should not go to
"unnatural" lengths to get them.
Robots, cyborgs and clones (artificial people) are the "baddies" of popular
science fiction - from the film Blade runner (where it is taken as a given
that it is essential to work out who is a "real" human and who is not, even
though it is well nigh impossible to discover any difference whatsoever)
right down to the crassest children's TV cartoon, in which human heroes can
take on the characteristics of robots, while the villains are technological
constructions which take on the appearance of humanity.
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