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.