Abstract
Over the last two decades, the field of biomedical ethics has claimed Frankenstein as its classic narrative, a cautionary tale warning that science divorced from ethics will produce monsters. But Frankenstein is a critique, not so much of an amoral science, as of a conflation of scientific and moral theory — in the theory of physiologic sympathy. In Frankenstein’s strange world, both scientifically modern and gothically melodramatic, everybody is searching for sympathy, which functions as both a natural, material principle and the highest ideal of social interaction. The theory of physiologic sympathy, however, posits fragile bodies, susceptible to contagion and collapse. Under this model, social sympathy is safe only for people of nearly identical psychological and somatic constitutions. Shelley critiques the Romantic attempt to resolve science and ethics into a theory of physiologic sympathy, which she depicts as a narcissistic reduction, impatiently and prematurely synthetic, and therefore brittle in its demand for universal similitude, harmony, and unity.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text, ed. James Rieger (University of Chicago Press, 1982) 13, 22. Subsequent references to this edition will be given in parentheses in the main text.
David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749; Gainesville, FL: Scholar’s Facsimiles and Reprints, 1966) 13.
George Cheyne, The Natural Method of Cureing the Diseases of the Body, and the Disorders of the Mind Depending on the Body (London, 1742) 82–3.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951) 576.
Quoted in John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) 26.
Robert Whytt, Observations on the Nature, Causes, and Cure of Those Disorders Which Have Been Called Nervous, Hypochondriac, or Hysteric (Edinburgh, 1765) 213–14.
William Hazlitt, Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805), reprinted in English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins (San Diego: Harcourt, 1967) 41.
Ibid., 39.
Beth Newman, ‘Narratives of Seduction and the Seductions of Narrative: The Frame Structure of Frankenstein’, English Literary History, 53 (1986) 141–63.
Anne K. Mellor, ‘Frankenstein: A Feminist Critique of Science’, in One Culture, ed. George Levine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).
D.M. Knight, ‘The Physical Sciences and the Romantic Movement’, History of Science 9 (1970) 54–75; 59.
Thomas Frosch, ‘The New Body of English Romanticism’, Soundings, 54, 4 (1971) 372–87; 380.
G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility (University of Chicago Press, 1992) 21–3.
Peter Brooks, Body Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) 201.
John Keats, Letters, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford University Press, 1970) 43.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Caldwell, J.M. (1999). Sympathy and Science in Frankenstein. In: Hadfield, A., Rainsford, D., Woods, T. (eds) The Ethics in Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27361-4_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27361-4_16
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-27363-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-27361-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)