Frankenstein Application Essay

English Composition II

Frankenstein Application Essay, Writing Assignment 5

January 13, 2013

What are the unintended ramifications of some discoveries when man takes science too far? Some of the underlying ethical dilemmas presented in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein mirror the ones we struggle with today, such as the invention of the ultrasound machine. This machine, originally designed to discover birth defects, destroys many lives due to its association with selective abortion. Shelley’s doomed creature portrays the devastating result of man’s playing God through science by creating a life, declaring it unwanted, and discarding it. The act of choosing who does and who does not deserve life ultimately results in profound negative moral consequences for the story and for modern society.

Just as Victor Frankenstein abandons his creature after he beholds his faults, our current culture discards lives because we do not deem them acceptable. He laments, “How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe . . . I had endeavored to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips”. (Shelley)

The creature proved repulsive, but would Frankenstein have reacted differently if it were a superior specimen? This unfortunately resembles the practice of rewarding life to a particular sex but exterminating the “undesirables”. This barbaric phenomenon, called selective abortion, is commonplace in China and India. If a girl is not the desired sex, they destroy her life in favor of one deemed more worthy: a male. According to the British Medical Journal, “in China, 2005 males under the age of 20 exceeded females by more than 32 million, and more than 1.1 million excess births of boys occurred. China will see very high and steadily worsening sex ratios in the reproductive age group over the next two decades. Enforcing the existing ban on sex selective abortion could lead to normalization of the ratios”. (Zhu 1211) China, in playing God, has created a male nation leaving large numbers of young men competing for dominance elevating local rates of violence, homicide and lawlessness.

India’s statistics are similar. According to the BBC “In 1961, for every 1,000 boys under the age of seven, there were 976 girls. Today, the figure has dropped to a dismal 914 girls. India's ratio of young girls to boys is one of the worst in the world after China . . . campaigners say the