Identity Confusion And Ethical Choice Of Scientific Man In Frankenstein

Mary Shelley(1797-1851), a famous British novelist, is hailed as mother of science fiction because of her science fiction novel Frankenstein written in 1818 through which has built her position in British literature. The creature which was created by Frankenstein, a scientist who had found the secret of life, was the result of scientific choice and we could call it scientific man for short. He was dropped into identity confusion since the first day he was created because of his unnatural way of birth and different appearance, thus leading a series of ethical conflicts. The scientific man went on the way of identity searching after he was forced into human society and went to his tragic ending as he realized that all his endeavors were turned into complete failures. By using the method of ethical literary criticism, starting from the frequent ethical conflicts, this paper mainly focuses on the reasons resulting in ethical confusion and makes a thorough inquire of morality implied meaning and ethical values from the view of identity at the back of ethical selection and the analysis of tragic causes.Divided into three parts, the first chapter mainly displays ethical confusions caused by coexistence of scientific man and human, bringing about the questions of the form and nature of man, and make further exploration of ethical confusions from the perspective of identity through the analyses of ethical questions faced by the scientific man after his entrance of human society, thus leading to the thinking of the combination of science and human. The second chapter mainly pays attention to make specific analysis of his ethical choices to explore his experience of identity searching and make right understanding and fair judgements of his identity from of his revenge behaviors from hesitations and choices of revenge actions. The third chapter is aimed at revealing the moral and ethical implications through the researches of the causes of the tragedy.Based on the discussion of the above three chapters, we can safely draw the following conclusions:various ethical dilemmas faced by the creature were caused by his uncertain identity coming from the conflicts of high-speed development of science and technology and relative lag of traditional ethics. His attempts of his identity searching are also the positive attempt to get rid of the ethical dilemmas. However, his eventually tragic ending coming from his commit suicide illustrates that he can not obtain the identity relying on its own strength. In order to make his identity accepted, the transformation of human ethics may be the key except the reasons of scientific man himself and science and technology.