When Mary Shelley penned her quid essential monster two hundred years ago, the Villa Diodati on the shore of Lake Geneva was transformed from an idyllic estate into a shine of human hubris run amok. The architect of weird science, Victor Frankenstein, sought to replace the creator and bring to life a wretch of demented design. While the creature originates as a blank slate and learns from his fabricator, the internal conflict in both rests upon an uneasy struggle dealing with the isolation of being part of a functioning social network.
Shelley was a youthful eighteen when her timeless theme was published and the culture of that era was far more in keeping with traditional western civilization. Some critics argue that her account was more science fiction than a novel but few can ignore that it was written from a woman’s perspective.
Adopting a feminist society was well over a century in the future before the felicity illusion really took hold. When those everlasting words “It’s alive! It’s alive!! It’s alive!!! ; spoken by Frankenstein the reality is that the monster was the prototype, foretelling the popular culture as an abortion cult of sirens singing from the same lyrics.
Such demon possessed women’s liberation movement ’true believers’ delude themselves into presuming that a Xanadu is achieved in a sisterhood society. The Frankenstein ‘mad scientists’ have become the vanguard of Democrat politicians with such familiar names as Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters along with relatively new comers as Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren and Mazie Hirono.
These fiends produce the eventual outcome of a culture gone unhinged. While Mary Shelley is not the cause of such downright idiocy, she is a soothsayer of what the planet would become when the population becomes preoccupied with carnal pleasure when reality of the modern age revolves around the pronounced display of an evil culture.
The secondary name for the Frankenstein tale is The Modern Prometheus. In the account, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus the following assessment is presented.
“Mary Shelley’s novel unifies all strands of the myth in a complex, multifaceted form. Its “modernity” for the second decade of the nineteenth century may apply broadly to revolutionary developments in political and scientific arenas over the previous generation that transformed the intellectual landscape of Europe. Although in the years intervening since the initial publication of Frankenstein, those terms may be thought to have changed radically, the novel’s modernity seems to have remained curiously unaffected by such shifts in its local application.”
The Role of Science in Frankenstein is an essay by Anaya M. Baker that offers this conclusion.
“Shelley wrote Frankenstein during an age where scientific advances were exploding rapidly. The discovery of such concepts as electricity had the power to effectively shake the foundations of previously established constructs and truths about the natural world. What is interesting to note, however, is that these issues, considered very “modern” in Shelley’s day, continue to resound within our present age. Our society currently wrestles with such issues as artificial intelligence, cloning, DNA, genetics, neuroscience, and stem cells, which ultimately leads to controversy regarding the roles, uses, and limitations of science. The book exists not as a static representation of a period in history, but as continued fodder for timeless questions on the role of science in human progress, technology, and evolution.”
Adopting a contrary viewpoint is Joey Eschrich in WHY ‘FRANKENSTEIN’ IS A GREAT SCIENCE POLICY GUIDE FOR THE FUTURE. His viewpoint seems to come out of the #metoo movement.
“The creature that Shelley imagined is nothing like his mute, clumsy, Hollywood and Halloween monster cousins. Her creature is articulate and sensitive, a self-taught Romantic intellectual who agonizes over his violent acts and marshals philosophical writings and John Milton’s Paradise Lost to justify and give meaning to his desperate quest for revenge and wholeness. Reading the creature’s tale, it’s difficult to see the decision to create him as purely a mistake; he is thoughtful and perceptive about his experiences, and clearly traumatized by his abandonment, rejection, and loneliness. Frankenstein fails to create a context in which the creature could thrive, so he becomes wounded, and his grief and isolation warp into rage and violence. This is a survivor of abuse, not an ungodly horror.”
It seems that Mr. Eschrich is comfortable with reading into Mary Shelley’s fable a decisive blame of Victor Frankenstein for the ills of the beast. While one such monster may rally some that the evil madman is responsible for the mistreatment of his handiwork, but such a supposition glosses over the continued deconstruction of a civilized society which bears the unmistakable fingerprints of extreme feminist sexism.
Anne K. Mellor expresses her sentiments about Mary Shelley’s feminist novel in Usurping the Female.
Disgusted by his enterprise, Frankenstein finally determines to stop his work, rationalizing his decision to deprive his creature of a female companion in terms that repay careful examination.
Here is Frankenstein’s meditation:
“I was now about to form another being, of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant; she might became ten thousand times more malignant than her mate, and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness. He had sworn to quit the neighborhood of man, and hide himself in deserts; but she had not; and she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation. They might even hate each other; the creature who already lived loathed his own deformity, and might he not conceive a greater abhorrence for it when it came before his eyes in the female form? She also might turn with disgust from him to the superior beauty of man; she might quit him, and he be again alone, exasperated by the fresh provocation of being deserted by one of his own species.”
Only the aberrant woman’s lib radicals would rationalize their vicious conduct towards gender distinctions that has done great damage to our culture and society.
SARTRE – October 16, 2018
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