Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner both draw upon their rapidly changing periods to contextually explore mankind’s ability to inherit hubristic ideas for forbidden knowledge which destroy one’s morality. Frankenstein examines irrational behaviours and immoralities of Romantic Prometheanism within the realms of science, ideology and politics. Meanwhile Blade Runner extrapolates a similar cautionary tale of a dystopian future and its contemporary excess from the 1980s era of economic hedonism. Hence both Scott and Shelley explore the loss of human morality and sensation due to a rise in technology and science in their texts.
Shelley’s Frankenstein is a text that warns the audience of how mans desire for forbidden knowledge can lead to the loss of our morality and emotional empathy, through the dehumanisation of Frankenstein’s creature. Shelley’s creature is a metaphoric representation of the consequences of the unrestrained intrusive science that was so despised by the Romantics; an embodiment of Locke and Rousseau’s Tabula Rasa, pure and virtuous. This is observed through its expression of emotion during its readings of Plutarch’s Live, “I felt the greatest ardour for virtue rise within me.” However it is when the creature discovers the hatred and fear expressed in the journal of its creator Victor, that begins to turn it into the “horrendous fiend” that kills William, “I too can create desolation” expressing the loss in emotional empathy and morality. This transition from feeling human to the degraded “animal” the creature has become is further emphasised in its reflection, “Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue and fame… now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest of animal.” Thus we perceive Shelley’s expression of the Romantics humanist tradition and from the creature’s loss in morality, passion and emotional empathy that transforms it into a beast more ‘human than human’.
The loss of human emotions and empathy is also evident in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is connoted through the dehumanisation of the replicants. The values of Scott’s period the 1980’s, were based upon an obsession for profit where globalization and consumerism has reduced the individual human
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“Why is it that Frankenstein and Blade Runner present similar perspectives to humanities use of technology despite being composed more than 150 years apart?” in your response make detailed response to both texts. The desire for social progression has always shrouded society. Both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) were produced during eras of technological exploration. Through depicting technology breeching moral boundaries through context, characterisation…
The two texts Frankenstein and Blade Runner may be divided by nearly 200 years, be Conveyed in different forms and develop their ideas in very different settings but there are Distinct similarities between them. Mary Shelley frames her book with a series of letters making it an epistolary novel. She deals with a horrifying topic which produces fear and loathing in those who read it making it a gothic text, but she also creates a new genre in that she does not follow the conventions of the gothic…
Miah Cooper February 6, 2015 English 301 In “Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein”, Anne K. Mellor observes the gender roles in Geneva in the nineteenth century and their impacting influence on the happenings in the novel. Mellor asserts that the events in Mary Shelley’s life play significant roles in determining the events, attitudes, and character limitations in Frankenstein. Mellor’s 3 most noteworthy claims are as follows: The restricting roles of the male and female are responsible…
Frankenstein Frankenstein Human qualities are things that cannot always be taught. When our parents and teachers brief us about it in our childhood days and try to instill these qualities in us, it is up to the individual to imbibe them at the same time. In today's fast-paced world, many of these human qualities are left far behind. One of the most important of all human qualities is sympathy. Right from our school days, we are taught to be sympathetic towards others. Being sympathetic…
morning students. My name is Ignacio Gonzalez and I’m a high school teacher specialising in Module A: Comparative Study of Texts and Contexts in the HSC English Course. Today in this lecture, I will be examining how Mary Shelley’s allegorical novel, Frankenstein, written in 1818, compares with and contrasts against the 1991 sci-fi film, Bladerunner directed by Ridley Scott. These two texts, though composed in two different centuries, share a variety of common key issues including the idea of ambition and…
Teaching the Monster: Frankenstein and Critical Thinking Melissa Bloom Bissonette Melissa Bloom Bissonette is an assistant professor at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York. She writes on the culture, politics, and personalities of early eighteenth-century London theater. T he student’s presentation posed the question “Who has the right to create life, God or Science?” Her Power Point displayed images of Boris Karloff, a Petri dish, and an unattributed painting of Adam…
