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The Role Of Enlightenment In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

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The Role Of Enlightenment In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Science has always played an outstandingly important role in every aspect of human life. Literature is not an exception. This regularity especially concerns the periods of “revolution” in the scientific world. This “blasts” truly had the strongest influence on literature trends of corresponding time frames. One of the brightest examples is the period of Enlightenment or the Scientific Revolution. Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is a product of this revolution. It is a result of the revolution that changed the standard perception of the world and the possibilities of a human being.

The seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries brought a lot of changes into the “baggage of knowledge” of European people. It was the time when the world started to …show more content…
Everything that science cares for is “…the metaphysical, or, in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world”. The secrets of the human soul disappear behind the sounds of the machines. It becomes the time of the “kingdom of empirical investigation”. Shelly criticizes the thought that science makes the God out of a man. Viktor Frankenstein brings a life to the world just to satisfy his ambitions, just to prove that he can do it. His words reveal the nonentity that Mary Shelley sees in him:” …new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me”.The question that Mary Shelley worries the most about is how far a scientist should pursue his thirst for knowledge, how far should he lead his experiments and whether they are worth of the possible outcome and damage they can bring. The Scientific Revolution did not care about this issues, it just went on and on like an avalanche that no one can stop and prevent. The collision of science and human values in the book emphasizes the meaning of ethics and morality in the life of each scientist. The novel highly criticizes the possible outcomes of the uncontrolled scientific progress and is a “call of duty” of each scientist to think carefully before creating something and to analyze if the world and he himself truly need this
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