Life is filled with ambiguity, never knowing if your opinion is the right one or if the actions you take are interpreted as good or bad, though, not everything fits into this binary of good or evil, right or wrong, her opinion or his. We live with uncertainty and Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein reveals to its readers the ambiguity within our lives. Inside the novel Shelley introduces the readers to Victor Frankenstein, a scientist that creates a new race and has to deal with the consequences of his actions when what he creates isn’t what he expects. The readers get a sense of the vagueness of the story throughout the novel as Shelley does not include specific details of morality or the creature itself, allowing for open-endedness in how readers interpret the
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Reese goes into this topic as well in her work “A Troubled Legacy: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Inheritance of Human Rights,” describing Rousseau’s idea that creatures have “ … two principles prior to reason, of which one interests us… in our well-being and self-preservation, and the other inspires in us a natural repugnance in being sentient…” in other words to be self-preserving and to have pity (Reese 51). With this, she describes that the creature, before all the murders, pitied humans [the De Lacey family] but when it’s rejected it threatens humanity and begins to act in a monstrous way (Reese 51). This evidence shows that Rousseau writes himself into a corner with his ideas, as Lipking implies (Shelley 431). Rousseau states that man corrupts the natural goodness creatures are born with, though agreeing with Lipking, if that were true what corrupts man, for we have Victor who throughout the novel is selfish (Shelley 431). Victor makes the creature in order to dive further into his studies. He then decides he wants to kill it because he doesn’t want to tarnish his reputation, he even sends a girl to be executed because he didn’t want anyone to know that he created
Reese goes into this topic as well in her work “A Troubled Legacy: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Inheritance of Human Rights,” describing Rousseau’s idea that creatures have “ … two principles prior to reason, of which one interests us… in our well-being and self-preservation, and the other inspires in us a natural repugnance in being sentient…” in other words to be self-preserving and to have pity (Reese 51). With this, she describes that the creature, before all the murders, pitied humans [the De Lacey family] but when it’s rejected it threatens humanity and begins to act in a monstrous way (Reese 51). This evidence shows that Rousseau writes himself into a corner with his ideas, as Lipking implies (Shelley 431). Rousseau states that man corrupts the natural goodness creatures are born with, though agreeing with Lipking, if that were true what corrupts man, for we have Victor who throughout the novel is selfish (Shelley 431). Victor makes the creature in order to dive further into his studies. He then decides he wants to kill it because he doesn’t want to tarnish his reputation, he even sends a girl to be executed because he didn’t want anyone to know that he created