Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" in relation to the debate between vitalism and materialism

Essay from the year 2016 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2, 3, , course: Literature and Science, language: English, abstract: This essay deals with Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", written in 1818. In this time a highly controversial discussion started about living entities containing a kind of vital spirit or not and how it is related to electricity and chemistry. The two main positions are on the one hand the vitalists and on the other the materialists. Vitalism consists of the supposition that every living source owns a vital force which brings life into them. It is supposed that a soul was infused into the body by a power like God via electricity and the fact that they contain this sort of energy makes them different from non- living entities.