society: devious alchemists, armed with a bewilder-
ing scientific vocabulary and an arsenal of laboratory
technologies, who promise to transform base metals
into gold; and greedy clients whose materialistic
desires perpetuate the existence of charlatan science.
In so doing, this satiric tale foregrounds funda-
mental problems of “validity” and “misrecognition”
that arise any time science is invoked. Significantly,
Chaucer links these problems to cultural ideas about
technology. Prior to the 19th century, this term could
refer broadly either to material instruments or to any
systematic technique. Chaucer’s text suggests that
any technology—whether instrumental or method-
ological—should be understood as an extension of
the culture that produces and employs it. The early
laboratory implements of this tale—fire, crucibles,
chemical elements—are not value-neutral: They
establish and confer authority, and their use and
abuse reflect and shape particular human interests
and cultural values.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the term science
gradually lost cultural and professional currency and
gave way to natural science, a phrase denoting only
those enterprises that advanced our understanding
of the physical world. The circulation of this phrase
was largely an attempt to distinguish “real science”
from other forms of systematic inquiry (philosophy,
history, theology, and so on) whose methods did
not require observation, experimentation, and rep-
lication. Because this new emphasis on discovering
nature’s secrets called into question long-standing
theological explanations of the universe, many writ-
ers explored the ethical and philosophical impli-
cations of natural science’s goals. Christopher
Marlowe’s doctor Faustus, for example, takes
place in a theocentric universe, but it registers pro-
found anxiety about scientific ambitions. Inquiries
into the laws of nature, the play suggests, can give
way to scientific hubris, to an immoral aspiration to
attain godlike wisdom. For the play’s protagonist,
seeking such knowledge comes at the expense of his
moral decency. Thus, when Faustus bargains away
his soul for ultimate knowledge, he sinks deeper and
deeper into despair until his final dismemberment
by the devil’s brutal agents.
Of course, many other writers saw promise,
nor corruption, in the natural sciences. Francis
Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1627) conjures a mythical
island replete with a compassionate citizenry and
an expansive scientific institute aimed at studying
physical laws and taming an inhospitable natural
world. Still, while proponents of Bacon’s ambitious
scientific vision increased in number, many writers
in the 18th century would nevertheless continue
to examine the consequences of imperialistic sci-
ence. Jonathan Swift’s GuLLiver’s traveLs, for
instance, depicts astronomers as a dark embodiment
of humankind’s growing preoccupation with the
physical world, suggesting, as Marlowe did, that
such concerns come at the expense of moral and
spiritual growth.
Most 19th-century literary texts concerned with
science and technology are probably best understood
as responses to the so-called Age of Enlighten-
ment of the previous century. Philosophical and
scientific thinkers of the Enlightenment generally
asserted that reason and science provided the means
of overcoming superstition, controlling nature, and
achieving social and political progress. Against such
assertions stands Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,
whose scientist embodies the Enlightenment faith
that all laws of the physical universe can be known.
While this novel condemns detached intellectual-
ism, it also raises serious questions about the motives
and consequences of scientific work. Lured less by
“knowledge for its own sake” than by the promise of
power that knowledge confers, Victor Frankenstein
signifies the negative potential of science. He func-
tions as a nightmarish counterexample to the ideal-
ized image of the Enlightenment scientist dedicated
to cool, dispassionate observation and truth seeking.
Victor’s success in animating an assemblage of dead
body parts is undone by his subsequent inability to
ease the torment endured by his monstrous creation;
their entwined lives serve as a dramatic argument
for responsible science that properly accounts for
the social costs of so-called breakthroughs. Similar
critiques of Enlightenment values can be found
in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fiction. In “The
Birth-mark,” a chemist’s clinical obsession with
his wife’s birthmark threatens her well-being and
eventually leads to her death. Similarly, “Rappac-
cini’s Daughter” features an inhumane scientist
whose isolated horticultural experiments leave him96 science and technology