Role of the scientist in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - Essay Example

volved in these debates being waged, particularly as newspapers and other periodicals became more available thanks to the introduction of the printing press. These new media proved essential in introducing and maintaining widespread discourse in the political and social issues of the day, not just in the form of non-fiction news articles, but also in the form of fiction novels. “The Victorian novel, with its emphasis on the realistic portrayal of social life, represented many Victorian issues in the stories of its characters” (“The Victorian Age”, 2007).

One of these debates was the question of the proper role of the scientist in the contemporary age, addressed in the novel Frankenstein written by Mary Shelley. In this novel, Victor Frankenstein, the main protagonist, stretches the bounds of technology to its limit takes the concept of new technology to its ultimate limit trying to overcome death by re-animating dead tissue, trying to create life on his own terms. The science of the past is criticized for its inability to produce on its premises just as the science of the present is criticized for its lack of imagination.

“The ancient teachers of this science,’ said he [Frankenstein’s first professor], ‘promised impossibilities, and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera” (Shelley, 1993: 40). However, there is also an upper end to how far science should strive. “Victor Frankenstein, the modern Prometheus seeks to attain the knowledge of the Gods, to enter the sphere of the creator rather than the created” (Bushi, 2002).

Frankenstein envisioned himself creating a better human than the one created by God, presuming he could somehow circumvent the powers of nature established by God to impose the better, stronger and more economic powers of man. “The comment that seems evident in Frankenstein is that God has abandoned Man; the