In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Victor is an odd character in the book. Introduced to us as driven, intelligent men, that educates himself. With his quest to achieve god like abilities, Victor starts acting very selfishly. Which leads to Victor being very corrupted with his appeal to new knowledge that leads him to be corrupted, with the creation he has created. With both Victor and the monster being similar, working in secrecy and animosity are the most present traits displayed in Frankenstein.
Consequently, the ethics of humanity is challenged through these creators in both texts as they express the contextual concerns such as post-industrialism and greed. Shelley exhibits both nature and nurture in “Frankenstein”. The importance of nature is illustrated through the use of imagery. Victor states - “These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation that I was capable of receiving.” His surroundings control his emotions. This point of view is formed by Shelley’s experience of Romantic Idealism and sublimity.
(1) This is a process where people are artificially made and conditioned into certain parts of society. Natural birth is considered disgusting and freakish in this world, a world paved in concrete and artificiality. We can also see this in Frankenstein, Victor’s striving for knowledge he was not supposed to have led him to create an unnatural life from. While he does not think natural birth is disgusting, he does think he can make a better and more perfect being than GOD. With this belief Victor is throwing away the idea of natural occurrences being good, and saying that his creation from dead pieces of various bodies can develop an elite being unimagined by GOD.
The replicants are artificial, the memories are artificial. Technology has well and truly taken over. Akin to Frankenstein, Blade Runner acts as a severe warning to the depressing future we may have if we try to push advances of science and technology further and further beyond the limit. As before mentioned, it is the hubris of the protagonists in each text that causes the highest diminution of humanity. In both texts, both protagonists seek earnestly to become God-like by taking on the role of creator, Frankenstein with the monster, and Tyrell with the replicants.
Frankenstein upon creation reveals “now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” This allows us to understand that victor in no way feels empathy or a sense of obligation towards it. This is unhuman like, instead of the natural mother figure nurturing her new born we see quite the opposite. Victor is consumed by an obsessive hatred of his creation, “I was possessed by maddening rage,” he explains. This is the turning point for the mentally human like creation. He quickly grows a negative view upon humanity.
Innocence and purity are tarnished when pride is introduced into oneʼs mind. Benjamin Disraeli supports this by stating “pride ruined the angels.” When people have pride they will go to extreme measures to remove the flaws that surround them; this leads to them losing the morality and naivete that once established their being. The novel Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, exemplifies the disintegration of integrity through her protagonist: Victor Frankenstein. At first, Victor was a pure and intelligent human who once held a great passion for science and wanted to pursue his dreams of creating life; however, once that goal was achieved, Victor isolated himself from his creation due to all its imperfections and the overwhelming feelings from failing himself thus diminishing his pride.
Victor Frankenstein and Walton are “mirrors” of each other. Walton longs so badly for knowledge and recognition for his scientific experiments, but Victor knows the danger of an obsession with science and knowledge. The parallels or “mirrors” between the two characters show to the reader that Frankenstein’s story is actually a harsh warning to not only Walton, but to society also. This forces the reader to take note of the serious tone in his story. Frankenstein also realizes this and feels he has to tell his story to stop Walton making the same errors in judgment that he has; hoping that he will ‘deduce an apt moral from my tale’(31).
The desire to succeed interferes with being happy. A person can get lost in the process of solving a problem so intently that they forget those around them, to eat and even where they are. In Mary Shelley's horrific Frankenstein an example is the character of Victor, whose unnatural pursuit of knowledge, of discovering how to create the perfect being, is so extreme that he loses himself in his creation. Frankenstein follows the story of the brilliant Victor and his many achievements, which go astray after he brings to life a creature in order to sate his own curiosity about the "mysteries" of life. It becomes difficult to picture Victor as a human being because he attains in-human qualities like the ability to go countless hours without eating
Victor is fundamentally selfish and his scientific pursuits are in itself the product of a desire to boast about himself. He wants men to worship him as their god. The themes of chance and fate arise once again in this chapter. Frankenstein is on the point of returning to Geneva when an incident happens to change his mind. This plot device in which an expectation is expressed, only to be dashed a moment later by a seemingly chance occurrence is a common one in the novel.
In the novel Frankenstein we see Victor’s technological ambition turn into repulsion as the creation of the monster help him realize the magnitude of his mistakes. “The beauty of my dream vanished, breathless horror and disgust filled my heart”, this shows that Victor was blinded by his ambition and by giving up morality and using technology for his own selfish needs he was not able to foresee the inevitable horrid consequences. On the other hand in Blade Runner the ethical issues of science and technologies are not only portrayed through the creation of the replicants but also by the destruction of nature and its environments. During the beginning of the movie a camera shot from above shows a dark, industrialized city filled with fiery explosions while ominous music is played in the background, the image of the city and non-dijectic sounds portray and emphasise how society has lost sight of what really matters and no longer prioritize