Percy and Mary Shelley
- Eloped when she was very young. He was already married. He wanted
his
current
wife to act as a sister.
- His first wife committed suicide eventually. Mary and Percy ran
away to
Switzerland to avoid criticism.
- They became friends with Byron. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein
at age
19. They decided to have a contest to see who could come up with the
best
ghost story.
Frankenstein or The
Modern
Prometheus.
- Dream of man: to create life without sexual reproduction because
women
call into question the progeny of descendants. You can’t be sure of who
your father really is.
- Frankenstein creates ugliness from filth; assembles different
body
parts
from stuff he collected.
- Why did he make him so big? It was hard to work with small parts.
- 2 Intros: Husband’s Preface – he doesn’t want people to think
she’s
against
science since it shows limitations/destructiveness of creation.
- Alchemists tried to make gold from other elements that were
associated
with hell. Man with secret knowledge. God limits.
- Frankenstein – original mad scientist. Studied alchemy during his
youth.
- Promise of Science: new knowledge/discoveries to make life easier.
- Science has made life better but worse at same time. People want
the benefits without the costs.
- The mad scientist is blinded by his quest. Looses site of
morality.
- One of the bequests of the enlightenment is that it produced a
science that can tell us what we CAN do, but can't tell us what we
SHOULD do.
- Frankenstein has become
a metaphor for anything that can go wrong with science--genetically
modified food (frankenfood), cloning, stem cell research. In
earlier times, people debated whether it was ok to fly or to go into
outer space.