Free Essays: Frankenstein and the Enlightenment :: Frankenstein essays

Many people set up that Mary Shelleys Frankenstein postdates the Enlighten manpowert that it is a looking-back on the cultural phenomenon after its completion, and a first uncertain reaction to the movement. I essential disagree. There is no after the Enlightenment. A civilization does not simply stop learning. Where is the direct at which someone stands up and says, Okay, thats enough Enlightening for now, I venture were good for another few centuries? For better or for worse, the Enlightenment is console going on today. As the Information Age advances, we continue to reconcile 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 of all time deeper into the secrets of science to find that ultimate point at which it converges with philosophy. The question is do we want to? The picture on the cover of our edition of Frankenstein is Joseph Wright of Derbys An Experiment o n a Bird in the Air Pump -- an appropriate scene, not only for how it recalls Shelleys mental state, but also for how well it illustrates precisely that enquiry about the Enlightenment the novel was written to express. All around a table, at which a scientific experiment that harms a living brute is being conducted, are seated various people of differing social positions, and also differing reactions to the event at hand. A pair of inquisitive recent men look on eagerly, a frightened woman turns her head past in abject horror, a young girl stares apprehensively, unsure 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 fire men. I find little room to doubt that Shelley is trying to imprint some sense of fear in her reader. For not only does superscript Frankenstein loathe his own creation -- and let us not be mistaken, the work of the doctor is without question a symbol for the larger dust of work of all Enlightenment scientists, seeking knowledge they do not understand in order to perform tasks previously thought out of the question -- but the creation curses himself as well, speaking of the grotesqueness of his appearance and admitting freely to having willfully done evil. Perhaps in Shelleys mind this is indeed unspeakable. For my part, kinda than view Frankensteins monster as a symptom of the potential nemesis resulting from the advances of Enlightenment science, I look on it as a symptom as one of the advances made by Enlightenment philosophy.