Frankenstein

This is an excerpt from essay on Mary Shelley's motivation to write
_Frankenstein_.

     ... By separating procreation from love, by accomplishing
     procreation in the laboratory and not where God intended it,
     which is to say in marriage, Frankenstein created a monster,
     whose major work was death and horror. Which leads us to
     answer our question about why a young lady connected with
     the cream of English society at the time, people of
     undeniable talent and seemingly unlimited promise, would
     write a horror story as the best evocation of their lives
     together. It is because sex disconnected from the moral
     order leads to horror. This is not a new story, although it
     seems to be a story that each generation has to learn in its
     own way. Euripedes said something similiar in the Bacchae
     thousands of years ago. As soon as the Asiatic god Dionysos
     became an object of worship in any State, someone is going
     to die. Sex disconnected from the moral order leads to death.
     As soon as the women leave their looms and go off to dance
     naked on the mountain side, horror is soon to follow. The
     mother of young Pentheus, the king of Thebes, listened to
     the music of undoubtedly thinking that she was engaging in
     some form of liberation. When the intoxication finally wore
     off, she found herself sitting with her son's head in her
     lap, and in answer to her father's question about what she
     saw, replied, "I see horror; I see suffering; I see grief."
     ...

     ... If you carelessly bring life into the world without
     regard to the moral law (which is another definition of
     sexual liberation) you invariably create monsters which
     will return and destroy not only you, but your friends
     and family, indeed, your entire culture as well.

     Mary Shelley felt this particulary acutely at the time.
     She was an 18-year-old girl, pregnant by a man who was
     at the time married to someone else, reading the Marquis
     de Sade's vision of the future. A vision which had already
     led to the horrors of the French Revolution. In gazing at
     the pornographic illustrations in Justine, she was smart
     enough to understand what role 18-year-old girls were
     going to play in the brave new world by revolutionaries
     like her father and soon to be husband. "Woman," said the
     divine Marquis in Justine, is a machine for voluptuousness."
     Sexual license is in its way ultimately just a way of
     treating people like machines, and as Mary must have
     understood by reading Justine, the fate of female machines
     was not a happy one. The trajectory of his novels is the
     trajectory of pornography itself. When sex is separated
     from the moral order, someone ends up getting tortured
     and killed.

     Frankenstein is a protest against the vision of the
     world proposed by the Enlightenment, whose vision was
     proposed in explicit terms by the Marquis de Sade. It
     keeps getting retold because we still live in that world.
     The protest is still necessary because the Enlightenment
     is still with us in the form of in-vitro fertilization,
     and test tube babies, and an $8 billion a year pornography
     industry. In his latest encyclical the pope denominates
     this world of the Enlightenment, the "culture of death."

     <https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/frankenstein-10806>

Danke,

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