steve_geo1
Favorite Answer
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley gives you a hint in her subtitle to the book, "The Modern Prometheus." In Greek myth, Prometheus defied the gods by bringing fire from Mt. Olympus to humans. The gods thought humans weren't ready for that. They punished Prometheus by chaining him to a rock such that birds would eat at his liver for all eternity.
The theme of technology: Frankenstein brings a kind of "fire" to earth from "someplace" where it was thought to reside exclusively.
The story asks the basic question: What is the nature of life? Frankenstein stitched together body parts. Why didn't he just take one recently dead body and re-animate it? In asking her question, the author uses scattered body parts. Is there something about life that is separate and apart from scraps of flesh?
The theme of technology: When Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote, every one was excited about electricity and magnetism. Ben Franklin had flown his kite. Volta had built a wet cell battery. Humphrey Davy and Michael Faraday were experimenting. Berzelius declared that all chemical combination and attraction was due to electrical charges. Was it possible that life was all about electricity? And if it were, what was the place for the soul?
lampert
“All Scripture is inspired of God and advantageous for coaching, for reproving, for putting issues at present, for disciplining in righteousness, that the guy of God could be completely powerfuble, thoroughly equipped for each good artwork.” So, have been they speaking especially of the scripture that existed on the time they wrote this? the recent testomony as all of us comprehend it at present did no longer exist. It grew to become into prepare by utilising guy centuries later. besides, confident the previous testomony is extremely substantial in view that, in accordance to the Gospels interior the NT, Jesus quoted the OT numerous cases! Peace :)
PH
I wrote a short paper on this once; attached are some highlights. Now I do not advocate plagiarism, but I am not too worried about throwing this out there as it is just a collection of ideas without the rest of paper as context. Hope it helps!
In the 1831 Author’s Introduction to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Shelley confesses “I busied myself to think of a story, --a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror (vii).” With superlative florid Victorian melodrama she relates the conception of her “hideous progeny (ix)” as it appeared to her as a sort of waking night-terror. Shelley’s combination of profound revulsion for her idea, however, is leavened by a dual sense of fascination and urgency that complicates any reading of Frankenstein as merely a polemical piece against technology or purely as a campy thriller. The sense of horror/fascination is directly replicated with pinpoint accuracy in her leading character of Victor Frankenstein as he grapples with his own “progeny.” Victor’s own dark fascination with the possibility of restoring life to dead tissue, though never written about with such detail before, was certainly not a new idea. However, I will argue that in Frankenstein, the theme of necromancy is used not as a central theme but as a plot device to further the primary theme of pathological fascination with technology.
When Prometheus of Greek mythology took it upon himself to access the forbidden technology of fire, he was punished in much the same way as the debauched Ambrosio in Lewis’s notoriously licentious novel The Monk. Marlowe’s intractable Dr. Faustus strove as well after the same kind of verboten knowledge that did Saul of the Old Testament. Just as fire, lust, and knowledge became objects of desire and destruction for the characters above, Victor Frankenstein is both enamored and haunted by the fruits of his labors. In the conclusion of the novel, as the doomed Victor relates his story to an eager friend Victor lashes out against a perceived desire to continue in his work.
Are you mad, my friend? […] or whither does your senseless curiosity lead you? Would you also create for yourself and the world a demoniacal enemy? Peace, peace! Learn my miseries, and do not seek to increase your own. (156)
This passage is problematic in several ways, most obviously though in its deep hypocritical irony. The same denunciation Victor gives at the end of the novel, warning against the dangers of this branch of science, are echoes of the same stern lecture he himself received at the beginning of the book. The same lecture which of course had exactly the opposite of its desired affect and only gave rise to Victor’s resolve.
As he went on, I felt as if my soul were grappling with a palpable enemy; one by one the various keys were touched which formed the mechanism of my being: chord after chord was sounded, and soon my mind was filled with the one thought, one conception, one purpose. So much has been done […] –more, far more will I achieve. (28)
This vision of technology is almost erotically charged in its rhetoric with its frenzied avowal of obtaining what he knows is forbidden to him. For Victor, the fact that he knows what he is doing is forbidden only makes the whole project more appealing to him. Every step along the way, from the collection of the body parts right up to the moment where the monster is actually animated, the whole process is a psychological binge into the repressed.
It is interesting to note that the technology developed is never described at any point in the narrative with amiable rhetoric but is always referred to by “monstrous,” “hideous,” or other such base descriptions. The repellant nature of the technology, as it was for Shelley in her vision, only further infuses Victor to delve deeper and deeper and deeper into his project. Thus, technology, as embodied in the monster, provides a sort of pathological fascination for Victor, who at no time is in any doubt of the questionable ethics of what he is doing. A similar example of this pathological fascination into the horrors of forbidden technology is illustrated exquisitely in the final scene of Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, where young Malcolm is shown cautiously, yet curiously, entering alone into the three witches cave right as the credits begin to role, just as Macbeth had done previously.