The Pursuit Of Knowledge In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

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In Mary Shelley’s Romantic novel, Frankenstein, an over-ambitious young scientist, infatuated with the creation of life without a female and the source of generation, breaks the limits of science and nature by conjuring life into a lifeless form constructed from stolen body parts. The young experimenter confesses his monstrous tale that defies nature to a captain who shares his desire for glory and the pursuit of knowledge. Though a Romantic novel itself, the novel serves as a critique of part of the philosophy behind Romanticism, that is, “the message of radical self-involvement that celebrates the individual’s pursuit of glory and knowledge.”Both the lone captain and the young scientist seek glory from their quest for knowledge but ultimately their pursuits end disastrously. Throughout…show more content…
The creatures thirst for knowledge leads him to uncover his own loneliness and abandonment causing him to resent his creator and ultimately drives him to retaliate through the murdering of Victor’s loved ones. Similar to Victor’s insatiable thirst for knowledge, the creature searches for the answers of the secrets of life and humanity but soon learned that his “increase of knowledge only discovered to [him] more clearly what a wretched outcast [he] was” (Shelley 93). Shelley not only warns of the dangers of curiosity through Victor’s mistakes but also in the creature’s discovery of his nature through the thoughts and stories of humanity that moves him to abandon his benevolence and murder the innocent to achieve revenge against Frankenstein’s immoral creation. Shelley forgoes the Romantic notion of deciding with passion over reason through Victor’s obsessive creation of life to warn against the search for knowledge that disregards caution and morality and ultimately leads to destruction and
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