Thursday, September 12, 2013
Frankenstein's perfect neutrality
Talking about Frankenstein's father in our last class got me thinking about the origins of Frankenstein's curiosity with science and dead things. We know that he is not afraid of anything since his father didn't tell him any ghost stories growing up, but how did he get so deep into morbidity and insanity? It turns out, Frankenstein's father suggests that he "attend a course of lecture on natural philosophy" (Natural philosophy became what we now know as Modern Science) (24). He hated it. Victor focused on mathematics and other branches of science until his parents made him go to college. After his mother's death, taking the prior advice of his father, he dabbled in natural philosophy again. Ultimately, he found that he wanted to devote himself to the subject, creating his famous monster. I started thinking, wondering if Frankenstein realizes what he has gotten himself into. As in, I wonder if he is looking back and realizing the exact moment that he started to go a little crazy, devoting himself to his studies and not taking care of himself. Does Frankenstein see the scientist part of himself as a good or a bad thing? Or maybe as a neutrality? A perfect balance of good and evil? Is all of the knowledge that he has both helpful and harmful? I'm starting to think that Frankenstein started off thinking that his experiments were a necessary evil, but does he change his mind? I am planning on bringing this up in class as well but sometimes it's easier to write everything down instead. What do you guys think?
2 comments:
It is an interesting idea to sort of wonder if Victor has thought about "when it all went wrong", and it seems as if now he does see his experiments as being the cause of his problems, what ultimately destroyed him, as he keeps the secret of how he created the monster to himself in death, and even went so far as to sink the bag of his chemical equipment after destroying the monster's "companion".
In this regard I think that good and bad and good and evil are two different things. I think the novel brings up an interesting situation in which bad and evil do not go hand and hand. By the novel's end, we see both Frankenstein and the Creature as bad. They've both made mistakes that have caused bad things to happen. Yet inevitably, at least in my case, I've never truly looked at either of them as evil. They are the recipients of bad situations, brought about by themselves and others. Yet we still feel sympathy for both of them, and it is always a difficult discussion to decide who of the two is in the right. We know what is bad, but when the two main characters both do bad things, is it harder to see evil?
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