Introduction

The parallels between inner and outer space bears special salience for the setting of Frankenstein: The immense distances traversed, particularly in its narrative frame, position the novel's eponymous hero in both an emotional and a geographic desert. Frankenstein was published in 1818, in a cultural and political climate fraught with contrary ideals. Frankenstein's creature is frequently referred to as a monster. The agonies of conscience experienced by Victor Frankenstein also reflect the intensity of debates surrounding researches into electricity which, from an orthodox religious point of view, were dangerously impious, because to reveal those things in creation that were hidden from the human senses was to transgress divine intention. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is often read as a work that stands at the beginning of such dark visions about the barbarities resulting from a science that is used in the service of megalomaniacs wishing to control the world rather than as a tool for the spread of Enlightenment ideas and values.