Free Essays: Frankenstein and the Enlightenment :: Frankenstein essays

Many community say that Mary Shelleys Frankenstein postdates the skill that it is a looking-back on the cultural phenomenon later its completion, and a first uncertain reaction to the movement. I must disagree. on that point is no after the Enlightenment. A civilization does non simply stoppage learning. Where is the point at which someone stands up and says, Okay, thats enough Enlightening for now, I think were good for another few centuries? For better or for worse, the Enlightenment is still going on today. As the Information Age advances, we reach out to invent and build. Exploration now reaches to the depths of the oceans and the nearer regions of space. We peer beyond the atom, beyond the sub-atomic particle, delving ever deeper into the secrets of science to find that ultimate point at which it converges with philosophy. The interview is do we want to? The picture on the cover of our edition of Frankenstein is Joseph Wright of Derbys An investigate on a Bird in the A ir Pump -- an grant scene, not plainly for how it recalls Shelleys mental state, but also for how well it illustrates simply that doubt about the Enlightenment the novel was written to express. All almost a table, at which a scientific experiment that harms a sprightliness creature is being conducted, are seated various people of differing neighborly positions, and similarly differing reactions to the event at hand. A p parentage of inquisitive five-year-old men look on eagerly, a frightened woman turns her show away in abject horror, a young girl stares apprehensively, incertain of what to think. That young girl is us. And based on what we see in the air pump, we must decide whether we will become the frightened woman or the interested men. I find little room to doubt that Shelley is trying to instill some sense of fear in her reader. For not only does Victor Frankenstein loathe his own creation -- and let us not be mistaken, the work of the doctor is without question a s ymbol for the big body of work of all Enlightenment scientists, seeking knowledge they do not understand in order to perform tasks previously purpose impossible -- but the creation curses himself as well, speaking of the grotesqueness of his coming into court and admitting freely to having willfully done evil. Perhaps in Shelleys mind this is thence unspeakable. For my part, rather than view Frankensteins monster as a symptom of the effectiveness terror resulting from the advances of Enlightenment science, I look on it as a symptom as one of the advances made by Enlightenment philosophy.