Science in Shelley's Frankenstein

Science in Shelley's Frankenstein

In Shelley's Frankenstein, it's interesting to use the text to ask the question, whose interest's lie at the heart of science? Why is Victor Frankenstein motivated to plunge the questions that bringing life to inanimate matter can bring? Victor Frankenstein's life was destroyed because of an obsession with the power to create life where none had been before. The monster he created could be seen as a representation of all those who are wronged in the selfish name of science. We can use Shelley's book to draw parallels in our modern society, and show that there is a danger in the impersonal relationship that science creates between the scientist and his work. It seems to me that Shelley was saying that when science is done merely on the basis of discovery without thought to the affect that the experimentation can have, we risk endangering everything we hold dear.

When describing the monster he had created, Frankenstein says:

No mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch. I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then; but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived. (Shelley, 235)

This was Victor's response to the reaching out of the monster towards Victor on the night of his creation. Victor, who for months had worked on this creation, was suddenly confronted with the results of his scientific pursuit. He had labored night and day in an effort to do something that had never been done by man before. He had figured out the scientific way to bring life to that which was dead, so he blindly went forth and did it. He never really stopped to think what the consequences of his action might be. He knows that the creature he is making is ugly, but he never wonders what will happen to the creature after he is brought to life as a result of that ugliness. The monster is made oversized so it's easier for Victor to work on him, yet no thought is taken about how the creature might feel about such a form.