The Beshara Lecture

According to Mary Shelley the idea for her story came to her in a waking dream. In her waking dream, Victor Frankenstein appears as a man of titanic ambitions whose over weaning pride leads him to take on the mantle of being a god who will engineer a second creation and who then abandons what he has made because his creature does not fit his ideal. Her story is the tale of a dispassionate mind unhinged from nature that disregards the feminine in the work of creation. It is a prophetic tale, which, foreshadowing a type of thinking that characterises our scientific- technological worldview, endures in the cultural imagination of our time.