FRANKENSTEIN AND SCIENCE

Frankenstein and Science



Frankenstein and Science

Introduction

Frankenstein is one of the famous novels of Mary Shelley in which she allows herself only a single strong scientific reference in all of its stems, which in my assessment, is for the need to recourse to a specific aspect of subtlety, in order to force the act of creation in the novel, far beyond any known levels of modern knowledge. However, the artful dodge the author has given in the novel, made a number of reader generation to rebate her knowledge in terms of real science. An example of this can be seen in the appendix of U.C. Knoefelmacher's book, 'The Endurance of Frankenstein' (Levine and Knoefelmacher, 1979, pp.317-318).

In its appendix, Knoefelmacher has used bold words and has referred to the science explained in Frankenstein as pseudo-science. At the start of chapter 4, in the volume 1 of the book, the statement of Victor is his only reference as to how he brought his creature to life. To quote his words, 'With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I gathered the instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. As all films agree that the spark of being is a resilient electrical instinct. To make a reference in this context, the author used the famous experiment performed by Luigi Galvani in 1780 in which he applied electrical charge to the muscles of a dead frog.

Few other critics have given Mercy Shelley a greater credit for her subtlety, after reading Frankenstein's experiments in the light of Shelly's Great Britain contemporaries. Anne Mellor, in her book A Feminist Critique of Science, offered the fullest argument related to the scientific context used by Mercy Shelly, by saying that Shelley based the experiments performed by Frankenstein on the most contemporary approach of the 19th century, towards scientific research. (Mellor, 1988, pp. 107-110). By saying so, Mellor has referred to those experiments of Frankenstein in which he attempted to develop a new species from dead organic matter by making use of electricity and chemistry. To further support her deductions, Mellor used texts from Humphry Davy and Erasmus Darwin, which we presume to be known by Mary Shelley. Recently, a greater particularity has been added to Shelley's work by Maurice Hindle. In case the results of Frankenstein's research are productive far beyond the real achievement of that scientific environment, a modern reader would certainly have not considered them beyond the reach of possibility (Butler, 1992, pp. 238-240).

Discussion

The genetic engineering which is possible to this day with such novel and radical avenues such as cloning and the likelihood of eliminating or modifying the electrochemistry of defective genes, has been known to Mary Shelley at that time. This represents the leading part of material sciences, as a promising measure at one end, but a threatening measure on the other. Based on Stuart Curran's approach to expand the dimensions of Mary Shelley's work on ...