Mary Shelley, Promethean Character, and the Authority of Science

Abstract This essay argues that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein demonstrates an incipient awareness of the disconnect between the positivist view of human knowledge, which claims to provide a god’s-eye-view of a “reality” consisting solely of observable facts, and the sense that for human beings, genuine knowledge of reality must be identified with truths learned from within a concrete, historical life and the experiences of an embedded subject. Shelley thus anticipates more recent critics of scientism, such as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Eric Voegelin, who contend that despite science’s claims to ultimate explanatory power, there is something decidedly unreal about its account of human life as it is lived concretely over time. Echoing an ancient understanding of knowledge, such critics have questioned the “external” view of reality that is central to positivist epistemology. Similarly, Shelley’s novel suggests that she conceives of the real not as a realm of objectively observable and verifiable facts, but as a way of being and acting within the world—specifically, she sees it as a particular orientation of character that is habitually prepared to place restraints on the individual will.