Tra crimine e morale. L’esperimento di Victor Frankenstein e le tentazioni anarchiche di Mrs Shelley

Published 200 years ago, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein seems nowadays a symbol of the tragic consequences of ‘playing God’ and, broadly speaking, a symbol of the tentative to overstep human boundaries, despising nature. However, according to the Law & Literature approach, this paper focuses on something different, alike relevant, but far less analyzed: the ambiguous role played, in the novel, by penal justice. In particular, the interpretation here proposed stresses how in Frankenstein it is difficult to distinguish between morals and crime. But could we take such a problem as a result of the anarchic spirit, typical of the renowned Mary Shelley’s family? Or is it 'simply' about what Frankenstein’s author caught about the struggle that every human being is forced to wage against himself/herself as well as against society?