Intro
"It's alive!" Yes, doctor, it's alive and it's ugly and it wants to kill you. Why? Well, the creature in Frankenstein is created by unnatural means. It has no mother. So the message is: mess with the way nature procreates, and it bites back.
Nature often shows up in people's lives with teeth, actually.
In fact, cataclysmic weather phenomena were gnawing at Mary Shelley just as she created this story. Which is important information to use in analyzing this text, so far as ecocritics are concerned. See, Ecocriticism loves to investigate the effects of the state-of-the-natural-world on human stories.
And that analytic lens is particularly powerful when turned on Frankenstein. You might even say that nature helped co-author this novel. The summer weather of 1816 was crap, to say the least. Snow fell in Philadelphia on July 4th. Europe experienced the entire year without a summer.
It was just cold and wet and miserable. There was very, very little sunshine. Weird, right?
These conditions were fallout from an 1815 volcano explosion in Indonesia. When this volcano, named Tambora, erupted, its ash cloud cooled the whole earth. And that made the weather miserable in a lot of places for a long time afterwards.
As you'll see if you read the novel—and trust us, you should—these harsh conditions crop up all over the environments Shelley creates in Frankenstein. So it's time to get radically interdisciplinary, dearies. Take a little historical geology, a little volcanology, and a heavy dose of gothic literature and shazzam: you've got one of the greatest monster stories of all time.
Quote
How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.
If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that blows and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us.
Analysis
If we put on our ecocritical hats here, we'll find that this passage has got something to teach us about what happens when we get too big for our britches. How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, you ask? The scary answer is: we don't know yet.
We have no idea how many monsters our biological sciences have created, or will create in the future. Today's science is making all kinds of franken-things, for better and for worse.
Our resident ecocritical boy-wonder, Lawrence Buell, recognizes Shelley's profound statement about science when he says that literary achievements "are mirrors of both cultural promise and of cultural failure." Yes, science can be a very, very good thing. Scientists cure disease, improve the quality of our now-long lives, and so on.
But science can certainly be dangerous if misused. And even if Tambora's eruption was a naturally occurring event, it was still the largest eruption in modern history. So, yes, all that wacky weather inspired authors like Shelley to write about dismemberment and murder. But it also pushed people to think about the potential consequences of new technologies.
The big, up-for-debate ethical question is: How far can we push the bounds of nature without facing deadly repercussions? How far is too far, Shmoopers?