Unnatural Acts: Environmental Ethics and the Repression of Nature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Abstract

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is much more than a “monster story.” It is a deep meditation on humanity’s uneasy relationship with the natural world and the limits of ethical interventions into it. This paper explores Frankenstein in the context of environmental ethics and ecocriticism, and particularly how Victor’s unnatural behavior works as a violent suppression of nature and its original order. Shelley’s story makes an early but surprisingly prophetic attack on the anthropocentric view of nature as not a living, moral order but a resource to be subjugated, dissected, and exploited. Victor’s mimicking of life with the help of artificial means, circumventing the organic and generative ways of nature, is emblematic of a more general Enlightenment attitude, one which highly regards control, mastery, and scientific subjugation. creation of life through artificial means, bypassing the organic and reproductive processes of nature, is also representative of a general Enlightenment attitude, which prioritizes control, mastery, and scientific domination over reverence, restraint, and respect for natural balance. This is no mere individual achievement, but an entire cultural worldview that demands that the natural processes of nature be emancipated and rendered subservient to human volitions. As the novel advances, nature acts as a silent observer and agent of ethical culpability. The novel thus articulates a complex transformation in which the world becomes simultaneously a site of moral good and evil, wonder and horror, and the divine desire to humiliate and punish human arrogance. The sublime landscapes of the Alps, the forests of Ingolstadt, and the icy Arctic are desolate, unforgiving terrains. For not only do they present the reader with the external states that indicate Victor’s inner torment, they are also signals of nature’s ethical resistance to human overreach. Shelley’s nature in Frankenstein presents an implicit nature ethic: a critique of the exploitation of natural forces and a warning about the moral and existential concern of separating from the natural.