Started loosing my voice this Monday and now I sound like Louis Armstrong. Doctor doesn’t think it’s serious, but I’m just exhausted. I haven’t been able to write at all today. (I do this really annoying thing where I am always mumbling whatever I’m writing. I need to hear how it sounds when I write. My throat hurts so bad that even that is painful.) This was from the former Story Club.
Well, the story itself isn’t conclusive. The monster argues that he could have been good, and I think that ambiguity really makes the story. If it was just, “Poor monster, nobody gave him a chance,” or “AH! What a hideous abomination!” then, however good it was, I doubt it would have been as deep. The fact is, Mary Shelley brings both ideas into conflict.
Part of the genius of this story is that, if something like this were to happen, both ideas would conflict. I’ve talked to a fundamentalist type who’d say that if man ever cloned man, the clone would be a soulless body for a demon. (He said this with conviction, and would hear no argument.) That position seems obviously wrong, at least as far as it’s theoretical, but just as wrong would be all the Victor Frankensteins of the world blithely ignoring any of these natural intuitions and sallying forth to create life in the blind hubris of scientism.
As far as my own theology goes, man is created in the image of God. There’s debate within Christianity on how to understand this concept, but the declaration exists within the context of God as Creator, and the task he then assigns man is maintenance of creation, but also participation within creation, that is to tend the garden and name things. It is this naming of things which I take to be participation within creation, for God created by similar means, calling forth things that are not as though they were. “Let there be . . . “
Man is supposed to create, and he even participates in the creation of new men (ask your parents how). However, most of us have a concept of a right way and a wrong way to go about this creative act; the creation of life from out of this act, whether it is done rightly or wrongly, is not somehow less of a person because of his parents.
So, not being able to know by anything other than a philosophizing, I would argue that the situation would be generally bad (I personally think we should not clone people or sew dead body parts together) the product of said creation would be its own person capable of loving and being loved by God. If science creates a new bad way of creating man, the men created, if they are men, are men.
Tale Told 