Inscribing the Enlightenment: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Community of Readers
With Frankenstein (1818), Mary Shelley intended to titillate and terrify a readership for whom nothing could be more terrifying than science run amok (Villasenor 4). For most of her audience; God, the Church, the Devil, and the Bible held sway over neither their consciences nor their nightmares any longer. Yet the newly secularized societies of Europe had not lost their fear of the dark; they had simply relocated those fears to the margins of their world, at the limits of the known, that twilight realm of science where divine inspiration mingled with human genius to create both marvels and monstrosities. A simple take on Frankenstein would assert it offers a cautionary tale, a parable on the problem of curiosity unbounded and science unchecked. But the triune narrative …show more content…
From the beginning, he set out to create a race of beings that would “bless him as their creator” (Shelley, 33). When recapitulating his tale to Walton, Frankenstein insists that his Creature’s request for a mate had never before entered his mind. So that, instead of owning his failure and engaging in ethical and scientific debate over how to handle the consequences, and what rights might belong to a member of a created race, Frankenstein can only seek to destroy the literal corpus of his knowledge (Rauch, 228). The Creature itself recognizes that upon the death of his creator and in the absence of any community for itself, it must “collect [its] funeral pile, and consume to ashes [its] miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch, who would create such another as I have been” (Shelly, 160). The terrible irony of discord between Creature and creator is that acceptance, rather than rejection, would have given each the companionship they
With Frankenstein (1818), Mary Shelley intended to titillate and terrify a readership for whom nothing could be more terrifying than science run amok (Villasenor 4). For most of her audience; God, the Church, the Devil, and the Bible held sway over neither their consciences nor their nightmares any longer. Yet the newly secularized societies of Europe had not lost their fear of the dark; they had simply relocated those fears to the margins of their world, at the limits of the known, that twilight realm of science where divine inspiration mingled with human genius to create both marvels and monstrosities. A simple take on Frankenstein would assert it offers a cautionary tale, a parable on the problem of curiosity unbounded and science unchecked. But the triune narrative …show more content…
From the beginning, he set out to create a race of beings that would “bless him as their creator” (Shelley, 33). When recapitulating his tale to Walton, Frankenstein insists that his Creature’s request for a mate had never before entered his mind. So that, instead of owning his failure and engaging in ethical and scientific debate over how to handle the consequences, and what rights might belong to a member of a created race, Frankenstein can only seek to destroy the literal corpus of his knowledge (Rauch, 228). The Creature itself recognizes that upon the death of his creator and in the absence of any community for itself, it must “collect [its] funeral pile, and consume to ashes [its] miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch, who would create such another as I have been” (Shelly, 160). The terrible irony of discord between Creature and creator is that acceptance, rather than rejection, would have given each the companionship they