Frankenstein

CONTENTS

Introduction

The myth of Prometheus in literature

I.1 Prometheus – the symbol –

I.2 Prometheus in literature

I.3 Mary Shelley and her Prometheus

II. Creation as a Process

II.1 The relation between Frankenstein and Prometheus

II.2 The scientific ground of the novel

II.3 The Monster – a primitive man

II.4 Frankenstein and his knowledge

II.5 Frankenstein – a male mother

II.6 Sinning against Divinity

II.7 Frankenstein and the Genesis

III. What makes them humans

III.1 The Monster – a social creature

III.2 Frankenstein’s victim

III.3 The pride

III.4 The Creature’s desires and expectations

IV. The violation of Nature

IV.1 Nature’s usurpation

IV.2 The family – Nature’s request

IV.3 Frankenstein’s fear – an independent female

IV.4 Nature’s revenge

Conclusions

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

Without doubt, Frankenstein is Mary Shelley’s most famous work. Frankenstein has remained a popular novel because it speaks about real anxieties. There have been suggested numerous interpretations: it is a warning about the uncontrollable nature of scientific discovery and the dangers inherent in `progress`, it is a revision of Paradise Lost, only to name a few.

This paper is an examination of the items that gave Frankenstein an unparalleled popularity and his semi-mythical status and endless trail of creative remouldings.

The novel gained the status of a nineteenth-century classic whose meanings continue to proliferate beyond the symbolic fixity of any one definitive interpretation.

Frankenstein, who is driven by Faustian curiosity, creates the monster and then refuses to take responsibility for his creation. In the absence of God, the moral battle is between the monster and Frankenstein, between the former’s complaint that his maker is unjust and the latter’s horror at the forces he has unleashed.

The novel’s language echoes Paradise Lost at several points. Frankenstein likens himself to the archangel who aspired to omnipotence and now is chained in eternal hell. The monster also recognizes the Miltonic parallels, but cannot decide whether he has been cast as Adam or Satan.

Frankenstein evokes a degree of sympathy with the monster’s complaint in readers and he is not the only creature who suffers. The framing structure is a series of letters written by an Arctic explorer, Robert Walton, to his sister relating the monster’s story as told to Frankenstein, and Frankenstein’s story as told to Walton. But the reader comes to the narrative from the opposite direction, through the viewpoint of Walton (Frankenstein’s sympathetic listener), then through the viewpoint of Frankenstein (who hates the monster) and only last through the viewpoint of the monster himself, who lives at the heart of the story. In each instance, the reader’s sympathy is focused on the immediate narrator. Omnipotent authorial comment is missing. Multiple stories are offered. Each narrator explains himself in terms of his childhood education, each time the novel describes the process by which the individuals’ characters are formed.

A deep sense of injustice runs through the novel, much of it perpetrated by the monster himself, who, like Frankenstein, is both abuser and victim. Some critics regard the monster as reflecting the liberal reaction to the emergence of the industrial working class as a political and social force, and to the unrest in the early years of the nineteenth-century.

Frankenstein’s main theme is that of creation. The theme of human creation was not new to Mary Shelley. When she wrote Frankenstein, she had already had knowledge about the myth of Prometheus or of Pygmalion or the older Hebrew legends of the Golem. She also knew the works of the early scientists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, like Luigi Galvani, Count Volta, and Benjamin Franklin, who experimented with the power of electricity, trying to infuse the spark of life to inanimate matter through electric shocks.

The subtitle of Frankenstein – the Modern Prometheus – implies that Mary Shelley was familiar with the legend of Prometheus, that ancient God who revolted against Zeus, stealing the fire from heaven, and creating or re-creating mankind. Mary uses in her novel the two versions of the myth: the Greek legend says that Prometheus is the bringer of fire from the gods to help mankind, while the Roman legend says that he is the creator of mankind, by animating a figure of clay. By the third century A.D. these two elements had become combined: the stolen fire was also the fire of life. This combined version is later used and enriched by many writers: the Neoplatonic interpretation gave Prometheus the status of demiurge or deputy creator, in the Middle Ages Prometheus was considered a representation of the creative power of God, and in the Renaissance, the image was the same as we can see from Othello's words:`…I know not where is that Promethean heat that can thy light relume.`

In the eighteenth century Prometheus became an accepted image of the creative artist, and in the early nineteenth century writers diverge again in the symbolic use they make of the Prometheus myth: Byron and P.B. Shelley show Prometheus as the suffering champion of mankind while Mary Shelley's Frankenstein shows Prometheus/Frankenstein as creator. Mary Shelley hints that the divine spark of life that creates the monster may be electrical. So she takes the idea of electricity as an animating force, the scientific equivalent of the life force which the mythical Prometheus stole from the sun. .

This paper is the study of the parallel between Frankenstein and the myth of Prometheus, and analyses the process of creation, its human and social consequences. The first chapter presents the variants of Prometheus’ myth, the writers who were inspired by this legend, but also the common points between the Titan Prometheus and the creator Frankenstein.

The second chapter encapsulates the process of creation, the scientific ground of the novel, the circumstances that transform a human into a god and the fact that the `animation` process is perceived as a sin against Divinity.

The third chapter presents the moral characteristics of the two protagonists, but especially the monster’s desires and expectations from his `father` and society.

The last chapter presents the process of creation from the point of view of Nature, the negative things that influenced Frankenstein and determined him to animate a being, stealing her the secret of imparting life.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a synthetic myth that consciously employs the Promethean and Faustian legends and Paradise Lost to reflect the cultural movements of the nineteenth century. The critics view the novel as representing the continuing popular reaction to scientific development that threatens the existence of mankind and questioning whether scientists will learn to reconcile their ambitions with society’s needs.

Nowadays, in the third millenium, Frankenstein is a modern story that confirms the relationships between man, machine, and society that arose with the technological revolution as well as the threat that far fetched intrusion into the secrets of creation may bring.

CHAPTER I

The Greek Orphic tradition maintained that the Titans, whom Zeus and the Olympian gods overthrew were our ancestors. Hesiod said that the name, Titans, meant `punished overreachers`. Of these overreachers, Prometheus is the most celebrated.

Prometheus is in Greek religion, the supreme trickster, and a god of fire. His intellectual side is emphasized by the apparent meaning of his name, Forethinker. In common belief he developed into a master craftsman, and in this connection he was associated with fire and the creation of mortals. Prometheus was a Titan born from the union of the Titan Iapetus and the Nymph Asia. He was one of four children born to the pair. The siblings of Prometheus included his twin brother Epimetheus , Menoetius, and Atlas, all of them Titans. The name Prometheus means `foresight`, and his twin brother's name Epimetheus means `hindsight`.

When the goddess of wisdom Athena was born out of the head of Zeus, Prometheus assisted in the `delivery`. Wise Athena then taught Prometheus mathematics, navigation, astronomy, architecture, medicine and many other arts. That is how Prometheus got to be so smart. Along with his ability to foresee the future, that made him a formidable Titan. Prometheus had created humans in the likeness of gods, using the clay and water of Panopeus, and Athena had breathed a living soul into them. The wise Titan made Man stand upright like the gods, to be noble and conscious, and to hold his head high, looking up at the heavens.

The Greek poet Hesiod related two principal legends concerning Prometheus. The first is that Zeus, who has been tricked by Prometheus into accepting the bones and fat of sacrifice instead of the meat, hid fire from mortals. Prometheus, however, stole it and returned it to Earth once again. As the price of fire, and as a general punishment for mortals, Zeus commissioned the creation of the woman Pandora and sent her down to Epimetheus, who though warned by his brother Prometheus, married her. Pandora took the great lied off the jar she carried, and evils, hard work, and disease flew out to plague mortals. Hope alone remained within. Hesiod relates in his other tale, as vengeance on Prometheus, Zeus had him chained and sent an eagle to eat his immortal liver, which constantly replenished itself.

Zeus offered to free Prometheus (who still had the gift of foresight) if he would tell the secret of the prophecy that told of the dethroning of Zeus one day. Prometheus refused. The mother of Prometheus, the Nymph Asia, also had the gift of foresight. Her son’s continuing torture plagued her, so she finally went to Zeus and told him the secret of the prophecy. The prophecy explained that the offspring of Zeus and the Nymph Titans, whom Zeus and the Olympian gods overthrew were our ancestors. Hesiod said that the name, Titans, meant `punished overreachers`. Of these overreachers, Prometheus is the most celebrated.

Prometheus is in Greek religion, the supreme trickster, and a god of fire. His intellectual side is emphasized by the apparent meaning of his name, Forethinker. In common belief he developed into a master craftsman, and in this connection he was associated with fire and the creation of mortals. Prometheus was a Titan born from the union of the Titan Iapetus and the Nymph Asia. He was one of four children born to the pair. The siblings of Prometheus included his twin brother Epimetheus , Menoetius, and Atlas, all of them Titans. The name Prometheus means `foresight`, and his twin brother's name Epimetheus means `hindsight`.

When the goddess of wisdom Athena was born out of the head of Zeus, Prometheus assisted in the `delivery`. Wise Athena then taught Prometheus mathematics, navigation, astronomy, architecture, medicine and many other arts. That is how Prometheus got to be so smart. Along with his ability to foresee the future, that made him a formidable Titan. Prometheus had created humans in the likeness of gods, using the clay and water of Panopeus, and Athena had breathed a living soul into them. The wise Titan made Man stand upright like the gods, to be noble and conscious, and to hold his head high, looking up at the heavens.

The Greek poet Hesiod related two principal legends concerning Prometheus. The first is that Zeus, who has been tricked by Prometheus into accepting the bones and fat of sacrifice instead of the meat, hid fire from mortals. Prometheus, however, stole it and returned it to Earth once again. As the price of fire, and as a general punishment for mortals, Zeus commissioned the creation of the woman Pandora and sent her down to Epimetheus, who though warned by his brother Prometheus, married her. Pandora took the great lied off the jar she carried, and evils, hard work, and disease flew out to plague mortals. Hope alone remained within. Hesiod relates in his other tale, as vengeance on Prometheus, Zeus had him chained and sent an eagle to eat his immortal liver, which constantly replenished itself.

Zeus offered to free Prometheus (who still had the gift of foresight) if he would tell the secret of the prophecy that told of the dethroning of Zeus one day. Prometheus refused. The mother of Prometheus, the Nymph Asia, also had the gift of foresight. Her son’s continuing torture plagued her, so she finally went to Zeus and told him the secret of the prophecy. The prophecy explained that the offspring of Zeus and the Nymph Clymene would one day rise up and destroy Zeus and Gods. Zeus sent Heracles to free Prometheus from the rock once he learned the revelation of the prophecy. He still required that Prometheus be bound to a rock for the rest of eternity. A link of the chain he had been bound with was set with a chip of the rock. Prometheus was required to carry it with him always. Men on Earth also created rings with stones and gems set into them to commiserate with him and to honor Prometheus for the actions he had taken on their behalf. As a symbol of his repentance, Prometheus was ordered to wear a crown of willow, a tree of mourning. Herakles, in order to alleviate the shame of Prometheus, took up a wreath of laurel to wear for himself as they processed down the mountains. To this day, a crown of willow is sacred to Prometheus, and the crown of laurel is acknowledged as a symbol of victory and triumph, the accolades of the hero.

The literary treatment of the Prometheus legend continued with Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, who made him not only the bringer of fire and civilization but also their preserver, giving humans all the arts and sciences as well as the means of survival. Prometheus proved to be for later ages an archetypal figure of defiance against tyrannical power. Prometheus in his many aspects has been the inspiration for a large number of other writers including Lucian, Giovanni Boccaccio, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, J. W. von Goethe, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Ramón Pérez de Ayala.

The myth of Prometheus contained two main elements. The first, best known through the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, was the story of Prometheus pyrphoros, who had brought down fire from the sun in order to succour mankind, and whom Zeus had punished bu chaining him to the Caucasus with an eagle feeding on his liver. The second was the story of Prometheus plasticator who, in some versions, was said to have created or recreated mankind by animating a figure of clay. This aspect of the myth, little used by the Greeks and unknown to Aeschylus or Hesiod, seems to have been more popular with the Romans.

But about the second or the third century A.D., the two elements were fused together, so that the fire stolen by Prometheus was also the fire of life with which he animated his man of clay. This gave a radically new significance to the myth, which lent itself easily to Neoplatonic interpretation with Prometheus as a demiurge or deputy creator, but which could be readily allegorized by Christians and was frequently used in the Middle Ages as a representation of the creative power of God. Later still, Prometheus became an accepted image of the creative artist. Early in the eighteenth century a convenient and influential account of Prometheus the creator is to be found in Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks, which exactly suggests the central ideas and situation in Frankenstein, whether or not Mary had first-hand knowledge of the Characteristicks at the time she wrote the novel.

The Atenian tragic dramatist wrote a trilogy on Prometheus, the dating of which is uncertain, on only which the first play, Prometheus Bound survives. The play concerns the god Prometheus, who in defiance of Zeus has saved humanity with his gift of fire. For this act Zeus has ordered that he be chained to a remote crag. Despite his seeming isolation, Prometheus is visited by the ancient god Oceanus, by a chorus of Oceanus’ daughters, by the ”cow-headed” Io, and finally by the god Hermes, who vainly demands from Prometheus his knowledge of the secret that could threaten Zeus’ power. After refusing to reveal his secret, Prometheus is cast in the underworld for further torture.

The drama of the play lies in the clash between the irresistible power of Zeus and the immovable will of Prometheus. The most striking and controversial aspect of the play is its depiction of Zeus asa a tyrant. In Homeric literature it had been taken for granted that the consequence of defying the gods was severe and inevitable punishment. In questioning the justice of Prometheus’ fate and in demonstrating the wretching choices Prometheus had to face, Aeschylus produced one of the first great tragedies of Western literature.

The surviving fragments of Aeschylus’ second play, Prometheus Unbound, indicate that Zeus is reforming himself, as he has partly restored the Titan, and has given up his threats to destroy mankind. He still seeks to induce Prometheus to reveal his fatal secret, known only to Titan, which will destroy Olympian rule, the secret being that any child Zeus begets upon Thetis, a mortal woman, will rise eventually to destroy his father.

Prometheus Unbound is a lyrical drama in four acts by Percy Bysshe Shelley, published in 1820. It is not a drama properly, being rather a series of splendis chants in praise of democracy than a picture of action and passion. Prometheus represents Humanity freed at least by the Revolution from the rule of tyrants.

The work, considered Shelley’s masterpiece, was a reply to Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, in which the Titan Prometheus stole fire from heaven to give to mortals and was punished by Zeus (Jupiter). Shelley’s heroic Prometheus strikes against oppression as represented by the power-mad Jupiter. This brilliant but uneven work represented the culmination of the poet’s lyrical gifts and political thought.

Shelley rejects the outcome of Aeschylus’ lost second play, which reconciles Zeus and Prometheus, and which permits Zeus to be warned in time. Shelley’s Romantic Prometheus never yields to Jupiter, but he ceases to hate Jupiter, and in doing so begins a process that destroys the High God, whom Shelley regards as being beyond redemption. This process is imaginatively difficult, but is undoubtedly the supreme poetic invention in Shelley’s work. To understand it, a reader needs to clarify for himself the curious shape of Shelley’s myth in the poem.

The postulate is that a unitary Man fell, and separated out into torturing and tortured components, and into male and female forms as well Jupiter is not an ultimate evil, evin though he would like to be; he is too limited, because he has been invented by his victim, Prometheus, and cannot survive long once Prometheus abandons hatred of his own invention. As for Prometheus himself, he is too limited also, for though he contains the human imagination and sexual energy, he can only begin the process of freeing imagination and sexuality. To complete it he requires Asia, who is again a limited being. Despite much scholarly interpretation to the contrary, she does not contain a universal Love or what Shelley termed the Intellectual Beauty, though in her apotheosis (at the end of Act II) she momentarly becomes one with these high powers. Mostly she remains subject to nature and can best be thought of as that provisional strength in humanity that holds the natural world, even in its dreadfully fallen condition, open to the love and beauty that hover perpetually (according to Shelley) just beyond the range of our senses.

Though it is very much a poem of Shelley’s own revolutionary age, Prometheus Unbound transcends the limiting context of any particular time, or rather becomes sharply relevant in any new time-of-troubles. Shelley always a revolutionary temperament, is not teaching quietism or acceptance. But he shows, in agonizing, deeply inward ways, how difficult the path of regeneration is, and how much both the head and the heart need to purge in themselves if and when regeneration is ever to begin.

Mary Shelley was first in the field with her modern ”Prometheus”, and she alone seized on the vital significance of making Prometheus the creator rather than, as in Byron and Shelley, the suffering champion of mankind. Prometheus' relation to the novel can be interpreted in a number of ways. The Titan in the Greek mythology of Prometheus parallels Victor Frankenstein. Victor's work by creating man by new means reflects the same innovative work of the Titan in creating humans. Victor, in a way, stole the secret of creation from God just as the Titan stole fire from heaven to give to man. Both the Titan and Victor get punished for their actions. Victor is reprimanded by suffering the loss of those close to him and having the dread of himself getting killed by his creation.

For Mary Shelley, Prometheus was not a hero but rather something of a devil, whom she blamed for bringing fire to man and thereby seducing the human race to the vice of eating meat (fire brought cooking which brought hunting and killing). Support for this claim may be reflected in Chapter 17 of the novel, where the "monster" speaks to Victor Frankenstein: "My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment."

While the juxtaposition of Frankenstein and Prometheus establishes a connection between the mythic past and Shelley’s own creative initiative in the present, the term `modern` encapsulates and projects the work’s ominous implication for the future. Frankenstein can be read as as allegory of the modern age in which, due to its scientific progress and increasing knowledge in all areas of life, humanity has outgrown the medieval order of a God-given universe and begun to think itself the maker of its own world.

The fundamental promethean ambivalence of Victor’s heroic status is a direct result of Shelley’s precarious conflation of the classical pagan myth with the biblical narrative of Genesis. Shelley’s chief protagonist displays an affinity with both guilt-ridden Adam expelled from Eden and defiant Prometheus widely admired for his intransigence and superhuman audacity.

Milton’s narrative Paradise Lost also parallels to no small degree the Hellenic Myth of Prometheus who, having usurped the powers of the higher gods, is alienated forever from both men and gods, and chained to the frozen top of Caucasus. This is an allusion on which Mary Shelley was certainly conscious, since she refers to Frankenstein as a `Modern Prometheus` in her sub-title. Also, Shelley himself was obviously aware of the structural similarity between Milton’s narrative and the Greek myth, for in his preface to Prometheus Unbound he remarks that `the only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan …`

Frankenstein’s guilt is never completely the crime of hubris (an excess of ambition, pride, etc., ultimately causing the transgressor’s ruin) manifested in Aeschylus or the failure to recognize derivation which we discern in Milton. Frankenstein’s crime is social. He sins against society. In syncretizing the Miltonic and Promethean motif Mrs. Shelley has clearly translated her materials into early nineteenth-century terms, just as Shelley transformed the story of Prometheus within his own contemporary framework.

After the title page it remains for the reader to deduce in what respects Victor Frankenstein can be said to be a modern Prometheus. The frequent references in the novel to electricity and lightning remind us that Prometheus incurred the wrath of the gods by stealing fire for mankind. A further analogy can be detected in the legend according to which Prometheus created the human race by fashioning men of clay. But that is as far as the analogy can be pursued. For his theft of fire Prometheus was punished by being chained to a mountain in the Caucasus, where each day an eagle appeared to eat away his liver, which renewed itself for the eagle’s delection every day for thirty thousand years. Unlike Frankenstein, however, Prometheus never succumbs to his punishment. He was beloved by the Romantics precisely because of his titanic spirit of rebelliousness. Far from being beset by doubts, the romantic Prometheus is, in P. B. Shelley’s words, `the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends.` What distinguishes him from such rebels as Satan and makes him more poetical, Shelley continues in the preface to Prometheus Unbound, is the fact that `in addition to courage, majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge,and a desire for personal aggrandisement.` These words could hardly be applied to Victor Frankenstein, who appart with his obsession with fire is a Prometheus manqué (unfulfilled or would-be): he creates a man, to be sure, but it is a flawed man. Instead of serving society, Frankenstein becomes its nemesis (agency of retribution and vengeance), having created a monster that threatens its destruction. Indeed his name itself has become anathema (a curse), the very definition of the evil scientist. The ambivalence od Mary Shelley’s modern Prometheus is produced through its contamination by a parallel legend from a totally different source: the biblical Adam.

The cluster of images alerts us to another dimension of the novel. Adam, like Prometheus, is both functionally and by etymological designation a scientist. He performs the typically scientific functions of naming and classifying nature. And, as the serpent tells Eve, if she and Adam will eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, they will become as gods, knowing good and evil. There is an essential difference, however. Whereas Prometheus was venerated for his scientific achievements, Adam was lamented.

From the sixth century B.C. the quest for scientific knowledge provided one of the most powerful motivations for Greek culture. The Hebrews had an entirely different conception. `In much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow` (Ecclesiastes 1:18). The ambivalence regarding science that we encounter in Frankenstein results from a conflation of these two opposing views. In both cultures we encounter the paradigm of the scientist who seeks to increase knowledge by probing hitherto forbidden secrets; in both cases new consciousness is brought to the human race as a result of the scientific discovery; and both scientists receive typically political punishment for their transgressions: Prometheus is imprisoned and Adam is sent into exile. But the difference between their respective reactions to their fates produces the ambivalence toward science in our modern society, which arises from the dual traditions of Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman culture: Adam skulks aut of Eden, ashamed of his knowledge and deplored for all eternity for his fall, while Prometheus remains defiant in his attitude, cheered by the gratitude of the human race, until he is ultimately liberated by a tyrannical Zeus.

The analogy between the two myths has been recognized by theologians and poets since the Renaissance. In the nineteenth century the interest began to focus specifically on the analogy between Adam and Prometheus, who were seen to exemplify the differences between Christian and Greek that had been made popular by Heinrich Heine and Matthew Arnold, among others. This tradition culminates in Friederich Nietzsche who argues in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) that the myth of Prometheus has the same characteristic significance for `Aryan` man as does the myth of the Fall for Semitic man. In both cases, Nietzsche suggests, mankind chieves its highest goal, cognition, through an act of sacrilege. In the Greek myth the sacrilege is perpetrated consciously in the interest of human achievement and dignity; in the Hebrew myth, in contrast, it is prompted by idle curiosity and the reaction is shame.

It can be seen that Mary Shelley’s novel represents a surprsingly early conflation of the two representatve myths. It is well known that during the composition of the novel Mary Shelley and her husband studied Paradise Lost and Prometheus Bound – that the Bible and Aeschylus’ drama were therefore very much in her mind as she worked. But it has not been sufficiently stressed that her inability to reconcile the conflict inherent in her two sources – between pride and shame in cognition – produced for the very first time that ambivalence toward scientific knowledge that we have come to regard as characteristically modern.

CHAPTER II

Mary Shelley made Prometheus the creator rather than the suffering champion of mankind. In doing so, she linked the myth with certain current scientific theories which suggested that the `divine spark` of life might be electrical or quasi-electrical in nature.

Mary Shelley was not oblivious to her novel’s ambition , for she subtitled it `The Modern Prometheus`. She could also have cited Pygmalion, Pandora, and other mythic figures who tampered with the natural order, but Prometheus suited her needs perfectly. He was simultaneously the creator of mankind – whom he shaped aut of clay, and into whom he breathed life – and the bringer of fire (an act of technological hubris for which he suffered the liver-destroying fate that, by comparison, makes Frankenstein’s ravaged life seem ordinary).

Like Prometheus, Frankenstein is both a creator and a scientist; and this double role is manifested in his name. Unlike his first name (the ironic implications of which are obvious), Victor’s surname has no literal meaning. Its two Germanic elements are the verb `frank` – which, as in English, means to mark as currency, to stamp or prepay – and the noun `stein`, or stone. What Victor Frankenstein does is to give life to a stone-cold object, to take something that has no mortal value and to give it currency. He does so through the application of an electric current, a scientific novelty that, when Mary Shelley was growing up, had recently been exploited by Benjamin Franklin. D.H. Lawrence commented on the connection between Frankenstein and Franklin that was later, in revised form, to become the Benjamin Franklin chapter of Studies in Classic American Literature. What Lawrence said was that `if on the one hand Benjamin Franklin is the perfect human being, on the other hand he is a monster, not exactly as the monster in Frankenstein, but for the same reason, that he is the production of fabrication of the will, which projects itself upon a living being and automizes that being according to a given precept.’ Lawrence explicitly meant the Franklin of Poor Richard’s Almanac, Franklin the irritating moralizer, but the words `production`, `fabrication`, and `automatizes` point also to Franklin the technologist.

Frankenstein is our culture’s most penetrating literary analysis of the psychology of modern `scientific` man, of the dangers inherent in scientific research, and of the horrifying but predictable consequences of an uncontrolled technological exploitation of nature and the female.

Mary Shelley’s novel fuses together three basic fantasies that we have long used to allay our fear of death: a belief that we can find eternal life, the production of new life that replicates ourselves, and the resurrection of the dead. Each of these endeavors incorporates elements of faith, mysticism, and science.

Mary Shelley based her myth of the scientist who creates a monster he cannot control upon an extensive understanding of the cutting-edge science of her day. Said to initiate the genre of science fiction, Frankenstein is a thought experiment based directly on the work of three scientists: Humphry Davy, the first President of the Royal Society of Science, Erasmus Darwin, author of The Botanic Garden, or, Loves of the Plants, and Luigi Galvani.

If Franklin contributed the discovery of electricity, Dr. Erasmus Darwin seems to have contributed the idea that electricity might be used to bring inanimate matter to life. That, at least was the contemporary notion Mary Shelley alluded to when she invoked `the experiments of Dr. Darwin` in both the 1817 and 1831 prefaces. Both Mary and Shelley had every reason to read the works of this extraordinary physician. But in addition the Shelleys had a far more personal connection with Darwin. Being an atheist, he shared Mary’s and Shelley’s skepticism about the Genesis interpretation of the origins of man; like Mary and Shelley, Darwin was a romantic, a free thinker, and a rebel against eighteenth century morality; he was an artful mechanic and engineer. Darwin was undoubtedly one of the most artful medical practitioners of the eighteenth century. Like Galvani, Volta, Franklin, and Davy, Darwin had also seen the future importance of electricity in curing disease , in stimulating paralysed muscles by electric shock at a time when the medical practice considered this new power a mere toy.

Theories of the spontaneous regeneration of matter were also popular during Mary’s time, and it is possible that her reference in the 1818 Preface to the animation of man as `not of impossible occurence` referred to the work of a German doctor, George Frank von Frankenau (the name is uncannily close to Frankenstein), who might be called the father of the science of Palingenetics – or the science of successive rebirths.

In the novel itself, Victor Frankenstein is understandably reluctant to reveal how he gave life to his creature, but there are clues to what Mary Shelley had in mind. In her Introduction, she recalls the talk about Erasmus Darwin, who had `preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion`, but this sound an ordinary case of alleged spontaneous generation `Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth`. She then goes on to describe the half-waking reverie which gave her the beginning of her story, in which `I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched aut, and then, on the walking of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.` Not is the story itself without hints: in Chapter II a discourse on electricity and magnetism turns Frankenstein’s mind away from alchemy, and in Chapter V `the instruments of life` which Frankenstein assembles before infusing the `spark of life` also suggest an electrical rather than a biological process.

It seems likely that the idea of making electricity the animating force, the scientific equivalent of that divine spark which, in the myth, Prometheus had stolen from the sun represents the Copernican revolution, the thing that animates the dead matter, and makes the story veracious.

Mary Shelley might have been influenced when creating the monster’s character also by the Golem legends. A version of a clay – like brutish monster that precedeed her monster by some 300 years relates back to the sixteenth century. According to this tradition, a monster is animated from clay by divine intervention – this time by the Jewish God. Endowed with life, in accordance with the magic rite, the Golem becomes the faithful servant of his master.

Unlike Mary Shelley’s monster, the Golem was a mute creation, blindly following the instructions of its creator. According to the Talmud, the destruction of the monster is comparatively easy…all the creator has to do was to erase the letter `E` from its forehead. Without the letter `E` the Hebraic inscription read `Meth`, which means `death`; the erasure results in the immediate desintegration of the monster.

In some respects the Jewish Golem resembled Mary’s conception of Frankenstein’s monster. It was an alter ego or a projection of its creator, and was of gigantic size. And in many of the Golem versions, like Frankenstein’s monster, the Golem was forced to avenge itself on its master, the difference being that, unlike the monster, the Golem could be easily destroyed.

The monster is, in a literal sense, a projection of Frankenstein’s mind, and an embodiment of his guilt in withdrawing from his kind and pursuing knowledge which, though not forbidden, is still dangerous. He is also a reflection of Frankenstein’s own situation, and the quotation from Paradise Lost which appeared on the original title-page – the accusing words of fallen Adam to his creator – might apply both:

`Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

To mould me Man? did I solicit thee

From darkness to promote me?`

Frankenstein is a scholar who is obsessed with the desire to find the `principle of life`. We recognize the moden world in the replacement of Faustus’s study by a laboratory. Frankenstein gives life to a creature, gigantic and hideous, and, as it turns out, with needs that he has not anticipated and cannot satisfy.

Victor Frankenstein himself has to be both father and mother (not that he is particularly good at being either) to the unfortunate monster he has created. The novel is at times explicit about the extent to which it adresses the subject of parenthood. Contemplating his creation before he finishes it, Victor blithely reflects: `A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs`.

This boast comes back to mock him later, as the renounced, exiled monster (who has already mourned his orphan state, complaining that `No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses`) confronts Frankenstein with the words:

`I learned from your papers that you were my father, my creator; and whom could I apply with more fitness than to him who had given me my life?`

Prometheus was also an accepted metaphor of the artist, but when Mary Shelley transfers this to the scientist, the implications are radical. If Frankenstein, as scientist, is `the modern Prometheus`, then science too is creative; but whereas the world of art is ideal and speculative, that of science is real and inescapable. It must then take the consequences: the scientist, himself a creature, has taken on the role and burden of a creator. If Frankenstein corrupts the monster by his rejection, we are left asking a question which demands another kind of answer: what has rejected and corrupted Frankenstein? And if Prometheus, in the romantic tradition, is identified with human revolt, is the monster what that revolt looks like from the other side – a pitiful botched-up creature, a `filthy mass that moved and talked`, which brings nothing but grief and destruction upon the power that made him?

Frankenstein seems in many ways inspired by Rousseau’s primitivist anthropology centring on his concept of original, authentic man as a `noble savage`, the novel is probably best understood as a corrective rewrite of Rousseau’s intrinsically warped manifesto.

The two traits that Rousseau attributes to the human animal in a precivilized state are self-preservation and compassion. As he says in the Second Discourse, he finds `two principles prior to reason, one of them interesting in our welfare and preservation, and the other exciting a natural repugnance at seeing any other sensible being, and particularly any of our own species, suffer pain or death.` These traits can easily be discovered in Mary Shelley’s monster. The monster does not come into existence tabula rasa but begins to show a Rousseauean inner being in his first reaction to light and darkness: `a stronger light pressed upon my nerves, so that I was obliged to shut my eyes. Darkness then came over me, and troubled me; but hardly I felt this, when, by opening my eyes, and I now suppose, the light poured in upon me again.` (F 1818, p.80)

The first response, to light, is entirely physiological, but this is not so in the reaction to darkness. There is no physical pain associated with darkness; the monster is simply `troubled`; in this he evinces the Rousseauean instinct for self-preservation that is as automatic as a physiological response.

Victor is willing enough to take the blame for having animated the monster in the first place; he crticizes ad nauseam his own behaviour as a scientist.

Unlike her creator-hero, the maternal author willingly assumes parental responsibility: `And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart…. But this is for myself; my readers have nothing to do with these associations` (F 1831, p.10). The potential vanity of authorship is cancelled by declaring what is `my own` to be `hideous` and by proposing a theory of invention which denies absolute origination, thereby draining the adjective my of most of its possesive force.

A reading of the drama the novel re-enacts can begin with a notice of the first overt catastrophe recorded in Frankenstein’s narrative: his witnessing, during a thunderstorm, at fifteen, the terrible power of a lightning bolt. When the adult Frankenstein describes the event, which occurred at a time when his enthusiasm for alchemy had redoubled the urgency of his endeavors to penetrate nature’s secrets, his excited rhetoric betrays the insistent presence of a forgotten childhood scene. `I remained, while the storm lasted, watching its progress with curiosity and delight. As I stood at the door, on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak…and so soon as the dazzling light vanished the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump` (F 1831, p.40).

The next critical event in Frankenstein’s history is his mother’s death, and a period of mourning delays his departure for the University. Once there, he resumes his former studies, reconverted by Professor Waldman on modern chemists: `these philosophers…penetrate into the recesses of nature…They ascend into the heavens…they can command the thunders of heaven` (F 1831, pp. 46-47). The difficult work of mourning is undone. The idea of the mother, set free by death for fantasy elaboration, becomes the focus of the regressive descent into phantasmagoria that constitutes Frankenstein’s reanimation project.

Frankenstein’s descent is a grothesque act of lovemaking, the son stealing into the womb that bore him in order to implant his seed. Having fully re-membered the form of his desire, the mother restored by a far more radical rescue than the one by which the father claimed her, he is ready to draw rebellious Promethean fire down from the heavens and realize the grandiose conception, the creation proper.

Or so Frankenstein dreams: the time never can be right for this obsession: `With an anxiety that almost amounted my agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet….my candle was nearly burnt out, when…I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe…?` (F 1831. p.56)

What is most strange is that the Creature is a sleeping beauty until its orgasmic stirring rouses Frankenstein to recognize the monstruosity before him. We confront the antithetical aspects not only of the fantasy mother but of the son’s desire. The Creature is thus a befouled version of the son who would usurp the father’s prerogatives, the would-be transcendent father of himself who now beholds the squalor of his actual origins and wishes. The scene scatters the self into every possible familial position; the Creature, on the contrary, is a massively overdetermined representation of the entire scene. We can infer that the Creature also embodies the fantasy father because it is as much a ubiquitous gaze under which Frankenstein cowers as a nightmare image that bewilders his sight.

We may note that Mary Shelley writes in the Introduction of `the working of some powerful engine` (F 1831, p.9), but Frankenstein has a spark, not a bolt, and as he begins to infuse life, his candle has dwindled. Already defeated by his own scene of origins, Frankenstein is barred from the compensatory replay he intends. Instead the creation precipitously repeats the occasion of his mental trouble, the traumatic fixation he is fated to suffer again and again.

In the novel, Mary Shelly gives no specific reference to the latest discoveres of Erasmus Darwin or Sir Humphrey Davy concerning the use of electricity in animating muscles. Even describing the actual construction of the lifeless monster, Mary displays little knowledge of the human anatomy of the human skeleton, the tibia, or the skull. We are let with he explanation that Frankenstein pursued his filthy work in charnel houses. What explains Mary’s extraordinary reticence in revealing any detail that might led the reader to infer a genuine knowledge of science and medicine? It is perhaps the ill-digested nature of the knowledge which she had gathered from others and which she was too timid to reveal.

If Mary’s novel has any claim to genuine science fiction, it must rest on the scientific envinronment of the eighteenth and nighteenth century and the discoveries in physics, biology, chemistry, medicine and surgery.

Victor’s monster can be read as an objectification of his own unregulated and contradictory desires. Victor Frankenstein draws our attention to this question when he attempts to recount the events that led up to the creation of the monster. He links the onset of this passion with the onset of puberty, when, at the age of thirteen, while `confined` to an inn, he discovered a volume of the works of Cornelius Agrippa: `when I would account to myself for the birth of that passion, which afterwards ruled my destiny, I find it arise like a mountain river, from ignoble and almost forgotten sources but, swelling as it as it proceeded, it became the torrent which, in its course, has swept away all my hopes and joys. Natural philosophy is the genius that has regulated my fate.` (F 1818, p.22)

Agrippa was an astrologer, and delved into black magic; anothe name cited by Victor Frankenstein, as one of the `lords of imagination`, and a teacher initially respected by him was Paracelsus, one of the first who claimed that it was possible to create `a little man or homunculus`. Paracelsus felt that a homunculus could be created without a natural mother, and that it would grow to full age, like a monstrous dwarf and other creatures, would be victorious over its enemies, and know secret things that man otherwise could not know. The alchemists dream of creating a homunculus by distilating blood, bones, precious metals, urine, various minerals, acids, mandrake roots, and male sperm, continued to exercise the imagination of the alchemists up to the eighteenth century.

Another important source of inspiration for Mary is the automaton or the mechanical man. In contrast with the creation of man by divine intervention or by alchemy, the manufacture of an automaton is a scientific endeavour, even if the science is somewhat limited and certainly does not presume to infringe upon the work of the Deity.

If we let ourselves read Paradise Lost through her eyes, we cannot help but wonder whether the male mother who gives birth to Adam is any more competent than the male mother of hers nameless Monster. Furthermore, Mary Shelley suggests a specific reason why male motherhood is `monstruous`: it issues exclusively from the will rather than the heart. Victor Frankenstein creates the Monster not out of love for the developing creature but purely out of a need to demonstrate his mastery over the process of nature. The Monster, we might say, leaps full-grown from the mind of his creator like Athena, from the head of Zeus, like the Son from the mind of God, like Eve from the side of Adam. The last from these acts of birth is perhaps less monstruous than the others, because Eve at least emerges from a place in reasonable proximity to Adam’s sexual organ, and because she is created out of Adam’s need for a companion. But God has no `need` of the Son or of Adam. No possibility of reciprocity exists in these cases, and thus the act of creation itself seems motivated solely by the creator’s desire to possess an inferior being over whom he can exercise power. Mary Shelley forces us to recognize, by these means, that all these male births, insofar as they issue from motives other than love, are in varying degrees unnatural – that the true `monster` here is not the creature but his creator.

The creature is by his very nature an `other`, eternally standing over against a creator whose nature is fundamentally different and superior to the nature of the creature. Between Frankenstein and his creature there is a similar gulf. Victor `dreams` his creature. But when this dream stands over against him in inescapably physical form, he is appalled by the incommensurability between his spirit and this gross body: `I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For these I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. (F 1831, p.56)

All the deaths in the novel suggest that the exigencies of Mary Shelley’s fable demand the exclusion from the novel of the genitally and generatively potent female. No less important in this respect is a female who, rather than dying, is never born: the female Monster that Victor Frankenstein first agrees to create and then refuses to create. No rupture occurs in Frankenstein, simply because the creator refuses to allow the female to exist. As a consequence, the sterile struggle between the patriarchal creator and his creature must proceed to its terrible end.

Frankenstein strains to bring into being the generative nonpatriarchal creator – free of all dependence upon an exterior creator, freely creating in her own right, and claiming no residual rights of possession over the beings she creates. In pointing beyond itself to this possibility of freedom and creativity, Frankenstein opens up to us a new awareness of our birthright – a birthright we have as yet scarcely begun to make our own.

A resolution to the destructive effects of patriarchy must involve a liberation of a power which is, under patriarchy, suppressed: the power of free, unpossessive creation. For Mary Shelley, this power is found primarly in women – although this power is not restricted to women. The mother whose absence from Frankenstein speaks to us so eloquently is the principal exemplar of the creative power. Her concern with the organic growth of the child can counterbalance the patriarch’s demand for obedience. Scattered through Frankenstein are several images of nutritive parent/child relationship. Invariably these nutritive families include both a father and a mother. An important example is Frankenstein’s own family during his early years: ` My mother's tender caresses, and my father's smile of benevolent pleasure while regarding me, are my first recollections. I was their plaything and their idol, and something better – their child, the innocent and helpless creature bestowed on them by Heaven, whom to bring up to good, and whose future lot it was in their hands to direct to happiness fulfilled their duties towards me. With this deep consciousness of what they owed towards the being to which they had given life, added to the active spirit of tenderness that animated both, it may be imagined that while during every hour of my infant life I received a lesson of patience, of charity, and of self-control, I was so guided by a silken cord that all seemed but one train of enjoyment to me.` (F 1831, p.33)

What the mother brings to the family, it would appear, is a concern for the child not as possession, as object, but rather as an emergent, autonomous self. In the `normal` family, the mother’s nutritive concern for the child can in practice counterbalance the theoretically absolute rights of the father. But if the mother is removed from the family, the patriarchal social structure that reduces the child to the status of object reasserts itself – and the struggle between Frankenstein and his Monster graphically demonstrates the consequences. The alternative to patriarchy, it should now therefore be clear, is not matriarchy: the substitution of the powerful, controlling female for the powerful, controlling male. For if woman also creates only in order to possess her creation, she loses the very quality that establishes her as an alternative to the patriarch: her willingness to nurture her creatures as long as they need nurture, and to let them go when they are ready to assume responsibility for their own lives. Nor are the qualities that define the mother as an alternative to the patriarch generically female.

Shelley not only draws on obstetric recommendations regarding diet, sleep, exercise, and pure air, but also focuses explicitly on regulating the imagination in creation. Since monsters and monstrous makings constituted a document of the embryonical conflicts caused by a mother’s wanton or abnormal passion.

However, Mary’s monster is more the child of the alchemists and occultists than of the scientists. We assume this to be the reason for Mary’s silence on the precise circumstances attending Victor Frankenstein’s creation of the monster. She knew something of Sir Humphrey Davy’s chemistry, Erasmus Darwin’s botany, but little of this got into her book. Frankenstein’s alchemy is switched-on magic, souped-up alchemy, the electrification of Agrippa and Paracelsus. Things simply unknown or undone do not engage his attention; he wants the forbidden, unknown and undone.

The novel’s interest is cultural, moral, philosophical and psychological: it is a nightmare of alienation; a sentimental critique of the victorious intellect to which Shelley trusted; and a negative critique of a Faustian overconfidence in natural science.

Frankenstein’s sin, his exclusive power of creation, should be interpreted only in Christian context. Prometheus was not a god, but a Titan, and the gods did not raise objections against the creation of man, but against the divine gifts he showered on him. And here we can see an important difference; Prometheus felt responsibility for his creature, while Frankenstein was interested only in the very act of creation, and as soon as he cast a glance upon the being he had created, he stepped back in horror. As the plot evolves, the various myths of Prometheus might help the interpretation in many places. For example, gifts originally planned to benefit humanity will actually cause plenty of troubles, because Frankenstein is unable to clearly see the consequences of his actions. His creation of the monster’s female partner, a project that Frankenstein starts and then abandons, has an enigmatic relation to Pandora, whom the gods created collectively to prevent humans from living free of troubles. The female partner – as a counter-Pandora – might relieve humankind of the disaster the monster represents, or she can – as a new Pandora – cause a terrible deterioration in the human condition through the possibility of the monster’s proliferation. Frankenstein denies the monster the creation of a partner and then a shift appears in their relationship, which had been previously modelled on the example of Prometheus and the humans created by him; after the denial a new model arises, that of the relationship of Prometheus to Zeus.

In her first and most enduring novel, Mary Shelley lends depth and resonance to her tale of science gone horribly awry by offering telling allusions to failed father and son relationships. A parellel is drawn between the story of Frankenstein’s miserable creature and that of Adam. This artificial man, like the ruined, questioning Adam, turns to accuse his creator with a deep intelligence (he has already grasped the theological and educational implications of Paradise Lost). Like Adam, he insists on both his loneliness and his wretchedness. He also comes to recognize how much he has in common with Milton’s Satan (`When I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me `). Envy, defeat, and unhapiness express themselves in a course of jealous destruction which he sees as vindicating his separate existence.

Shelley provides numerous references to the opening chapters of Genesis and the creation of Adam, whose relationship with his creator-father turns out badly when, in concert with Eve, Adam disobeys God and is banished from Paradise, forced thereafter to live a finite life filled with emotional hardship and physical suffering. Shelley also includes veiled references to Cain, Adam's oldest son, a rebellious misfit who becomes the first murderer and is subsequently sentenced by God to wander the earth-friendless, fatherless, and outcast-until the end of days.

In this novel, parents are not just parents; they are `creators`, which can mean `gods`. The monster expicitely compares his and Frankenstein’s relation to that of Adam and God: ` Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.` Later, with an eye toward asking Frankenstein to make him a female counterpart, he mentions that `no Eve soothed my sorrows, nor shared my thoughts; I was alone.` This in not just any Adam, but specifically Milton’s, for Paradise Lost is one of the formative works of the monster’s education, one of the three books through which he learns to read (the other two are Plutarch’s Lives and Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther). Like Paradise Lost, Frankenstein asks to be admitted instantly to the realm of our mythic literature – mythic not just in its use of fantasy, but in its stature among our cultural memories and explanations.

Frankenstein displays a religious scepticism and obsessive preoccupation with the material world that are typical of almost all major achievements in nineteenth-century creative, philosophical and scientific thought. Victor Frankenstein’s activity is the attempt to discover in matter what we had previously attributed to spirit, the bestowing on matter (or history, or society, or nature) the values once given to God.

Instead of providing unequivocal moral reassurance by confirming and thus reconsolidating orthodox beliefs and attitudes, in Frankenstein the good and the evil are often presented provocatively as virtually indistinguishable from each other – be it in the dualism of Victor and the monster or, by implication, in the relationship between Satan and God.

Frankenstein’ guilt is never completely the crime of hubris manifested in Aeschylus or the failure to recognize derivation which we discern in Milton. Frankenstein’s crime is social, he sins against society. In syncretizing the Miltonic and Promethean motif, Mary Shelley has clearly translated her materials into early nineteenth-century terms, just as P.B. Shelley transformed the story of Prometheus within his own contemporary framework.

Frankenstein sins against moral and social order. Though he begins his pursuit with benevolent intentions, he discovers his error in assuming that knowledge is a higher good than love or sympathy, and that it can be independent of the fellow-feeling afforded by a compassionate society. As a result, what had appeared initially as a benevolent intention becomes in the final analysis misguided pride, a selfish pursuit aimed at self-glory, because it

evades the fulfillment of higher duties toward the social community, the brotherhood of man which forms the highest good.

The rise of modernity represents simultaneously both a triumph and a fall, signalling humankind’s enfranchisement and liberation from intellectual servitude as well as its irretrievable loss of innocence and existential security. Consequently, Shelley’s novel leaves us wondering if, as a typical representative of modern man, Victor commits an unforgivable sin by attempting to emulate God’s creative power or if, alternatively, he could possibly be seen as a heroic rebel against divine tyranny, whose science constitutes an awesome tool of human emancipation.

It is the monster himself, fresh from his study of Paradise Lost, who sees himself as a new Adam, enjoying the fields of Paradise but soon abandoned by his creator. In this analogy, of course, Frankenstein is equivalent to God the Creator.

Mary Shelley asks herself why did God, knowing that sooner or later human beings would sin, create in them the capacity to sin. The events in Paradise Lost force her to ask this question but she, less sanguine than Milton, demands an answer. If we read Paradise Lost through her eyes, we cannot help but wonder whether the male mother who gives to Adam is any more competent than the male mother of Mary Shelley’s nameless Monster. Furthermore, Mary Shelley suggests a specific reason why male motherhood is `monstruous`: it issues exclusively from the will rather than the heart.

The abandoned or liberated Creature has embarked on its career of murderous inroads into Frankenstein’s family romance, and the creator, increasingly abandoned to morbid anxiety, gravitates to the Alps, whose `savage and enduring scenes` (F 1831, p.91) become the stage for an attempted reworking of his defining scene. As in the lightning scene of his youth, he stands apart, gazing ecstatically. From the recess of a rock, he looks across the troubled surface of La Mer de Glace, the glacier poured down from the summits in an eternally solemn procession, and in the distance the stupendous bright dome of Mont Blanc rises `in awful majesty` (F 1831, p.95) before him. Power, throughout this section of the novel, is envisioned as the power to wound: ` the solemn silence of this glorious presence-chamber of imperial Nature was broken only by…the cracking reverberated along the mountains of the accumulated ice, which, by the silent working of immutable laws, was ever and anon rent and tom, if it had been but a plaything` (F 1831, p.93). To be where Power is would mean to be above the turmoil of desire, the desire of and for the mother, whom the father controls and possesses by right. Restraining his primal-scene fantasy under the gaze of the terrific god of the Alps, Frankenstein has a dual aim. While he would seem to be propitiating the father, submitting to the law that freezes or castrates desire, he may also be seeking a way out of his oedipal impasse by identifying with a transcendent paternal principle that enables the son, in his turn, to put on the power of the father.

The novel ends where it began in a wild and frozen polar landscape, a wasteland which both purges and purifies the human aberrations represented by Frankenstein and his flawed experiment. The shifting ice is not only effectively placeless, it also allows for the opening of new perspectives and uncertainties.

The creator, if he is male and if he gives birth without the intercession of woman, `owns` the creature. It is an extension of him, and, theoretically at least, it finds its fulfillment in obeying him. The patriarchal cosmos is a perfectly hierarchical world, descending by stages from God, the `author` of all creation. And each creature in this hierarchy, recognizing that it owes its existence to a creator who occupies a higher level in the hierarchy, responds (or should respond) with gratitude and obedience.

The creature becomes the emblem of a new postrevolutionary subjectivity engendered by a tragic split of the individual between his desire for heroic self-authentication and the mundane responsibilities of a given social role, that is, between the alluring freedom and adventure of progress on the one hand and the intellectual and emotional compromise necessitated by tradition on the other.

Humanity will reborn socially and physically. Mary Shelley parodies these heroic hopes in the quest of Victor Frankenstein. Victor foresees a utopia that reflects his own subjective desires. What was previously a form of social millenarianism (in Christianity) has been reduced or narrowed to the status of a psychic obsession.

CHAPTER III

At the centre of the novel is the story of the education of a natural man and of his dealings with his creator, which might be described as a sort of Godwinian Genesis. The theme is stated plainly at the beginning of the monster’s conversation with his maker: `Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good – misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.` (F 1831, p.100)

The monster is essentially benevolent, but rejection by his creator and by mankind at large has made him first a fallen Adam and then a fallen Lucifer.

The story of the monster’s beginnings is the story of a child, and at the same time he recapitulates the development of aboriginal man. He awakes to the world of the senses, discovers fire and searches for food. When men reject him, he discovers society by watching the De Laceys in their cottage. Having thus acquired language, from Felix’s readings of Volney he learns the human history; having learned to read, he discovers private sentiment in Werther and public virtue in Plutarch.

Most of all, it is through Paradise Lost that he comes to understand himself and his situation under the double analogy of Adam and of Satan. At the same time, though the copy of Frankenstein’s journal which he has conveniently carried off in his first flight from the laboratory, he learns that his situation is yet more desperate than theirs, since he has been rejected without guilt and is utterly companionless. `I am malicious because I am miserable` (F 1831, p.145); it is that turns him against his maker and against mankind. What he demands, not unreasonably, is to be supplied with an Eve of his own hideous kind and to return to the natural life, with `the vast wilds of South America` for his Eden.

Frankenstein is moved to pity; it is only when he revolts and destroys his second, half-formed creature that the monster finally becomes a fallen angel, a Satan bent on mischief, as he acknowledges at the end, over the dead body of Frankenstein. His final suicide by burning at the North Pole will reconcile the novel’s central images of fire and ice, of life and desolation, of Promethean heat and the frosty Caucasus.

Yet Frankenstein himself is also both a fallen Adam and a fallen Lucifer: `the apple was already eaten, and the angel's arm bared to drive me from all hope` (F 1831, p.189); ` … like the archangel who aspired to omnipotence, I am chained in an eternal hell` (F 1831, p.211). There is a strict parallel between the role of each in his own story, and we are drawn to complete the equation for ourselves: as the monster is to Frankenstein, so perhaps is Frankenstein to whatever power created man. The clue to the monster’s predicament – benevolence corrupted – may also be the clue to Frankenstein’s.

Frankenstein disowns but cannot free himself from his monster, which thus takes on the character of a doppelgänger or a Mr. Hyde. Their interdependence is evoked with considerable power in the last part of Frankenstein’s narrative in which Frankenstein, from being the pursued, becomes the pursuer; yet, by a sort of complicity, he is also lured on willingly by the monster across the snowbound landscape of Russia, in an atmosphere of dream and delirium, towards the Frozen Sea.

This is exactly the scene of perfect sympathetic communication imagined at the beginning of the Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, when Walton finds the `the brother of my heart` in the suffering Victor Frankenstein; identifying with the inventor’s `elevated` emotions Walton is almost overwhelmed. But the body of Frankenstein’s tale is a fable of the failure of sympathy between the creator and his creature. When the monster seeks to awaken Frankenstein’s sympathy, the latter cannot accept his bonds of connection with him. The monster, like another Rousseauvian figure, the `solitary walker` of the later Reveries, is a man `made for sympathy`, but cast into solitude.

In the novel multiple stories are offered. Each narrator explains himself in terms of his childhood education, and again the novel describes the process by which individuals’ characters are formed. The most detailed explanation of the growth of human consciousness and conscience is the monster’s account of his development from the moments of his waking awareness. Abandoned by Frankenstein, he is entirely self-educated and thus provides a case study for Rousseau’ theory of self-directed education. He learns by experience the benefits and dangers of fire. Learning from sensory experience, however, gives the monster only the knowledge necessary for physical survival. Observing the De Lacey family stirs his desire to be a social creature. He becomes aware that he is lonely, and he supports the family with kindly acts. As he learns language, first spoken and then written, he acquires sensibility and a sense of morality. The books Shelley picks for him illustrate the ideas about the process of education. From reading Goethe’s Sorrows of Werter, the monster gains the Romantic high regard for affective feelings; from Plutarch’s Lives he learns republican values; and from Paradise Lost he acquires concepts of good and evil. He learns that the nineteenth century obsession with class and money condemns anyone who lacks them to be a vagabond and a slave. He is brought to the ultimate Romantic question, What was I? The monster’s education appeared to be forming a physically capable, morally sensitive, social being until he was rejected. Injustice, rejection, brutality and isolation turn him into an antisocial murderer.

The monster whom Frankenstein creates is a variant of the noble savage. He does evil only in response to the social injustice he suffers. After rescuing a girl from drowning, he is shot by a terrified countryman. The benevolence of the individual so long as he is unharmed by contact with social injustice is one of the axioms of the book. The monster wants love, but finds himself unjustly repelled because he is hideous. The repulsed love turns to hate and destructiveness; and the longing for communion with his creator, denied because of the monster’s wicked deeds, becomes a determination to harry him perpetually until both are annihilated.

Social injustice is the other side of the picture. The monster watches an idealized version of the simple life in rural surroundings, lived by a cultivated family who had once been affluent but were ruined by their defiance of the government in rescuing from prison a Turkish merchant, condamned only because of the greed and religious prejudice of the authorities. Once ruined, they were desprised and abandoned by the merchant, himself equally prejudiced and materialistic.

In her novel Mary Shelly brings us closer to the monster, hinting at tender feelings and impulses within him through gestures that only scare away the obtuse Frankenstein: `He held up the curtain of the bed and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped, and rushed downstairs.` Ever we, who have no more acquaintance with the new species of man-made creature than Frankenstein himself has, may suspect that the monster’s gestures signify friendliness rather than agression; and the creature eventually confirms these suspicions when he gets to tell his own story. But Frankenstein is too frightened and too guilt-ridden to see his child’s first sounds, tentative smile and outstretched hand as anything other than menacing.

Frankenstein’s creature has no name. His creator refers to him as monster, fiend, wretch, devil. The lack of name might be important in itself, but the emphasis laid on the omission of the act of giving a name can suggest ideas the pure namelessness could not. How could the creature be given a name? Through baptism, obviously. Baptism washes off the original sin, at least according to the Catholic understanding. This creature, however, is not a descendant of human beings, and therefore he does not share in the original sin. He need not or even cannot be baptised. As a not human being he is not redeemed, and he cannot join the Christian community. On the other hand, people usually give names to pets. When Frankenstein does not give a name to his creature, he excludes him not only from human society, but also from the entire human world.

He never takes the blame as a parent: he never admits that the monster, if loved and educated, might have turned out well rather than badly.

Frankenstein’s monster comes to represent a fitting image of the unpredictable multiplicities of life in general, which it remains impossible to unravel into a neat sequence of clear-cut oppositions. The Monster thus stands as a remarkable feat of both conceptual and textual assimilation: albeit assembled from components of the old order, it is new; seemingly male, its gender assignment must ultimately remain as dubious as that of its father, who is a `male mother`; and finally, while originally innocent and good, it soon evolves into a merciless killer of women and children.

Of course that Shelley disagrees with Rousseau’s dismissal of familial obligations as an integral part of what he condemns as man’s burden of social incarceration. According to Shelley, parental and filial affections are sacred because they are what makes up human. To denounce them as particularly sinister constituents of society’s (de)formative machine of oppression and self-alienation would be, so Shelley insists, deeply barbaric.

In the Second Discourse Rousseau argues that the attainment of a more reflective sense of mortality is a crucial stage in human evolution, for no animal can know what it is to die; the knowledge of death and its terrors being one of the first acquisitions made by man in departing from an animal state. The monster signals his transition from a state of nature to a more fully human condition in one of his most Rousseauean outbursts that incorporetes this growing awareness of mortality: `Oh, that I had forever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst, and heat! Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind, when it has once seized on it, like a lichen on the rock. I wished sometimes to shake off all thought and feeling; but I learned that there was but one means to overcome the sensation of pain, and that was death – a state which I feared yet did not understand.` (F 1818, pp.96-97)

The monster shows his capacity for compassion for the first time when he refuses to take food from the De Laceys’ supplies once he realizes that by doing so he causes them hardship. This is the best argument for the original goodness of the monster, for in this case the two primal Rousseauean instincts collide, and the monster chooses to exercise compassion ever as it conflicts with his own self-preservation. Later, the monster describes to Frankenstein how he became aware of himself and of the world, passing from confused to distinct sensations, then to sensibility. He has a finely tuned sensibility even before he reads Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werter.

The central enigma of Frankenstein is the evolution of this benign creature into a child-murderer, and in sketching this development Mary Shelley uses Rousseauean principles, but she shows an even more fluid transition between the attributes of the natural man and the social being that Rousseau did in his Discourses. It seems clear in Frankenstein that the natural instinct to compassion leads directly to the desire for social relations in the monster’s dealings with the de Laceys. The awakening of sensibility occurred when, through a chink in the wall of the De Laceys' cottage, he saw Agatha De Lacey at work and her grandfather playing music: `He raised her, and smiled with such kindness and affection, that I felt sensations of a peculiar and overpowering nature: they were a mixture of pain and pleasure, such as I had never before experienced, either from hunger or cold, warmth or food; and I withdrew from the window, unable to bear these emotions` (F 1831, p.85). He has clearly progressed from sensations to emotions, and his `mixture of pain and pleasure` unmistakably indicates sensibility. The creature's sensibility also manifests itself in his love of nature and in the sympathy he naturally feels with the De Laceys.

The psychological ground of Frankenstein becomes even more complicated when Mary Shelley effaces the distinction made by Rousseau between amour de soi-meme and amour-propre.

In a footnote to the Second Discourse, Rousseau identifies amour de soi-meme as a natural instinct and amour-propre as an artificial sense of honor born of socialization. Amour de soi-meme he calls `a natural feeling which leads every animal to look to its own preservation`, whereas amour-propre is `a purely relative and factitious feeling, which arises in the state of society, leads each individual to make more of himself than of any other, and causes all the mutual damage men inflict one on another.` It follows, in Rousseau’s reasoning, that `in the true state of nature,` there could be `no feeling arising from comparisons` and the natural being `could know neither hatred nor the desire of revenge,` since such a being would have no sense of honor to be injured. The congruence between Milton’s and Rousseau’s accounts of the fall from innocence were clear to Mary Shelley. What Milton called pride, Rousseau called amour-propre. In Frankenstein’s initial dreams of glory, he images himself surpassing all of his predecessors, he refers to himself in the third person and: `So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein, – more, far more, will I achieve` (F 1831, p.47). The monster is quite proud of his linguistic prowess, telling Frankenstein, `I may boast that I improved more rapidly than the Arabian, who understood very little, and conversed in broken accents, whilst I comprehended and could imitate almost every word that was spoken` (F 1818, p.95). It should be remarked that the monster is not an otherwise normal being with an unfortunately deformed appearance, and his compasions of himself to Satan are not entirely laments. When he says that `Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage him` (F 1818, p.105), it is noteworthy that he identifies himself with the chief, and `admired,` rebel and not with any of his `fellow devils.`

When the De Laceys reject the monster, the intensity of the its response is rooted precisely in the injury done to his sense of amour-propre. He believes that `to see their sweet looks turned towards me with affection, was the utmost limit of my ambition` (F 1818, p.107), but his ensuing account of why he believes he will be successful in his quest shows that he has developed the sense of amour-propre that marks the transition, in Rousseauean terms, from the natural to the social state: `The poor that stopped at their door were never driven away. I asked, it is true, for greater treasures than a little food or rest: I required kindness and sympathy; but I did not believe myself utterly unworthy of it’ (F 1818, p.107). Upon the monster’s first rejections by human beings, he simply moves away to fiind new sources of food and shelter. This is the way of Rousseau’s `savage man`; he compares the difficulty of conquering his antagonist with the trouble of finding subsistence elsewhere: and as pride does not come in, it all ends in a few blows; the victor eats, and the vanquished seeks provision elsewhere, and all is at peace. That the monster’s response to his rejection by the De Laceys should be a desire for revenge, rather than simply disappointment, is due to his having developed a sense of his own self-worth. This being that cannot trace his existence to a protecting God finds his prospects for happiness controlled by such arbitrary and intractable determinants as his outward appearance, and his sense of justice is outraged. At the moment when the monster addresses Frankenstein as `Cursed, cursed creator` and tells him that `I declared everlasting war against the species, and, more than all, against him who had formed me` (F 1818, pp.110-11), he views his entire existence through the prism of his socially acquired sense of justice; he finds his existential condition intolerable, and he focuses his desire for revenge on his creator.

Mary created characters whose psychologies were inextricable mixtures of altruism and narcissism, deriving from Rousseau the belief that the most characteristic part of human nature is `his affections`, and showed the operation of those affections in Frankenstein. The monster’s first reaction when he hears himself described by the de Lacey as a `good spirit` is to seek to discover why Felix and Agatha were so unhappy and that `it might be in my power to restore hapiness to these deserving people` (F 1818, p.91), but when they injure his own sense of deserving, his own being comes to be devoted to revenge.

Victor Frankenstein is the most complex figure in this matter. His account of his motivation in the creation of the monster is: `A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs. Pursuing these reflections, I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.` (F 1818, p.36)

When Frankenstein encounters the Creature, during a nocturnal storm in the Alps, its figure is suddenly illuminated by a bolt of lightning. A series of flashes enbles Frankenstein to make out the Creature’s course as it leaps from crag to crag, and he reflects in intervals of darkness, while his eye is recovering from each blinding glance. He is sure that this `devil` has strangled his little brother and framed Justine for the murderer. `No sooner did that idea cross my imagination, than I became convinced of its truth` (F 1831, p.73). Unlike those who convict the innocent Justine, Frankenstein has the facts right, but his imputation of diabolical designs to the Creature is a gross distortion, as is his summary judgement, which marks him as the prototypical psychoanalytic reader of his own text: `I conceived the being…in the light of my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me.` (F 1831, p.74)

What does the Creature wants from Frankenstein? He attempts to engage Frankenstein in dialogue because he seeks reparation for his sorrows, because Victor alone can provide a suitable mate with whom to share his enforced solitude. After Frankenstein breaks his word, destroying the half-finished monsteress in full view of the Creature, the Creature keeps his. By killing Elisabeth, the monster shows that he wants to establish a relationship with the only human being to whom he can claim kinship and he also wants to teach his creator what he suffers.

The Creature’s utmost desire is that another reciprocate his need for sympathetic relationship, and even after he becomes conscious of his exclusion from the human community and begins to objectify the negativity he arouses in others, we recognize that his agression is a product of disintegration. We can hear the bereavement of the Creature’s whole self, we recognize that he looks back with `speculative eyes` (F 1831, p.9). By the end, freed from his creator’s self-consuming rage, he makes his destiny his choice, being a giant form of Solitude, an existence made absolute by its confinement to the hell of being itself.

The Creature’s fate is to be misread however much it restitutes. In a moment of remarkable self-awareness he reflects that if he had been introduced to humanity `by a young soldier, burning for glory and slaughter`, not by the old de Laceys, he would `have been imbued with different sensations` (F 1831, p.126). We can say that the Creature’s principal virtue is virtuality. A kind of wandering signifier, the Creature proceeds through the text triggering various signifying effects.

We can ask ourself, considering the Creature as a shifting relational event, what he means, at a certain point in the novel, to himself, Frankenstein, Elisabeth, or such and such a reader. Frankenstein never speaks more truly than when he calls the Creature his `daemon.` A marginal or boundary being, the daemon is a powerful representation of our uncertain lot, suspended as we are between knowledge and power, nature and supernature. Conceiving the Creature as a genius of liminality, a type of art’s duplicitous interplay of revelation and concealment, restores his virtuality, which is betrayed as soon as he comes to signify something determinate.

Victor Frankenstein refuses to take responsibility for his `child`, he takes one look at what he has created and fless. He abandons in disgust his helpless and flawed creature but nevertheless he insists upon holding the Monster morally accountable for all the crimes he commits in his desperate attempts to claim from his parent the self that has been denied him. The monster, created as a free being with the power to shape his own destiny, is nevertheless expected to do nothing contrary to the will of his creator. The creature is in fact an autonomous self and an extension of his creator, and this two dimensions of his existence are absolutely incompatible.

When Frankenstein meets and speaks with the Monster, we notice that Victor speaks in his typically subjective and self-reflexive manner while the Monster talks analytically about the social influences that have shaped his life. The Monster speaks like a philosophe, while Victor rages in Romantic agony. The first time Victor ever speaks with his creature, he breaks out in a fit of wild imprecations, and the Monster replies: `I expected this reception…. All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things` (F 1831, p.77). The novel assigns to Victor the conventional role of the experimenting philosophe-scientist, but he raves like a mad demon, while the novel assigns to the creature the role of the mad, of a demon, but he talks like a philosophe, indicting the social system for the suffering it causes individuals. The Monster has been converted to his demonic identity which assumes that he is the principle of evil incarnate. Victor’s rejection is ironic because the utopia projected by the monster is highly paternalistic: he wants to be cared for by Victor.

The Monster proves a very philosophical rebel. He claims he has been driven to rebellion by the failures of the ruling orders. He says of the De Laceys: `My protectors had departed, and had broken the only link that held me to the world. For the first time the feelings of revenge and hatred filled my bosom, and I did not strive to control them` (F 1818, p.113). This rebellion against irresponsible superiors soon turns against Victor, who has rejected the creature from the moment of its awakening. The Monster’s rebellion is parricidal; he rises against his own creator. He tells Victor: `I will revenge my injuries: if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear; and chiefly towards you my archenemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred` (F 1818, p.119).

Frankenstein’s creature likewise lacks the two vital components of spirit: consciousness, the dimension of self-awareness that adds moral judgment to our behavior, and intelligence, the process of mental functioning that conceptualizes and rationalizes. Frankenstein is only one of many myths and stories that depict the terrible consequence of a creation that mimics man, but without the essential soul that makes us human.

CHAPTER IV

The novel allows time for the monster and Frankenstein to meditate on the nature of morality, the responsibilities of God and parents, and the very principle of life itself.

In the 1831 text, Mary Shelley replaces her earlier conception of nature as organic, benevolent, and maternal with a mechanistic view of nature as a mighty juggernaut, impelled by unconscious, amoral force. Since fate or an `imperial Nature` (F 1831, p.142) now controls human lives, Victor Frankenstein is decidedly less responsible for his actions; in the best light, he seems almost a tragic hero suffering for an understandable hubris.

Frankenstein’s research aims towards the discovery of truths by which to confirm his authority. Not content to appreciate the appearances of things and dissatisfied with superficialities, Victor’s `delighted in investigating their causes`, seeking profound insights of universal scope: the `hidden laws of nature` (F 1831, p.36). Frankenstein’s attempt to unfold these secrets is phrased in sexual terms: like a lover courting his beloved he `pursued nature to her hiding places` (F 1831, p.53). But he is `insensible to the charms of nature` (F 1831, p.53), he wants only one thing, `to penetrate the secrets of nature` (F 1831, p.39). It seems that female nature is to be ravished by the masculine desires for the sexual conquest.

Frankenstein, motivated by womb envy and driven by a masculine desire for heroic acts, is a male scientist who experiments on and violates the sacred body of Mother Nature. The male makes his chief objective to usurp nature’s position of absolute power in order to assert and inscribe his own status of a God-given cultural superiority. Traditionally feminine values, such as familial affection and domestic peacefulness, are superseded by the seemingly self-perpetuating dynamics of an inveterate male egotism fuelled and compounded by misogynous paranoia.

The destruction of the female’s role of the natural mode of human reproduction erupts in Frankenstein’s nightmare following the animation of his creature, in which his bride is transformed in his arms into the corpse of his dead mother `a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel` (F 1818, p.39). By stealing the female’s control over reproduction, Frankenstein has eliminated the female’s primary biological function and source of cultural power. For the simple purpose of human survival, he has eliminated the necessity to have females at all. Perhaps Frankenstein’s goal is to create a society for men only: he refuses to create a male, his creature is male; there is no reason that the race of mortal beings he hoped to propagate should not be exclusively male. Frankenstein’s scientific project, on the cultural level, to become the sole creator of a human being, supports a patriarchal denial of the value of women and of female sexuality.

The separation of masculine work from the domestic affections leads directly to Frankenstein downfall. His obsession with his experiment made him `to forget those friends who were so many miles absent, and whom I had not seen for so long a time` (F 1818, p.37). Frankenstein cannot work and love at the same time, because of this he fails to feel empathy for the creature he is constructing and makes him eight feet tall because `the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed` (F 1818, p.35). He then fails to feel any parental responsibility for the monster he has created. And he remains so fixated on himself that he cannot imagine his creature might threaten someone else when he swears to be with Victor on his wedding-night.

Frankenstein cannot save Elisabeth on their wedding night. Her death is attributable to Victor self-devoted concern for his own suffering and his own reputation, he thinks that the creature will attack only him and that people would think him mad if he told them about the monster.

Mary Shelley attacks the social injustice of established political systems and she underlines the deprivation in a family and social structure: the De Lacey family. The political situation of the De Lacey family, exiled from their native France by the manipulations of an ungrateful Turkish merchant and a corrupt system, points up the injustice that prevails in a nation when masculine values of competition reign. Mary Shelley’s political critique of a society founded on the unequal distribution of power and possessions is conveyed not only through the manifest injustice of Justine’s execution and of France’s treatment first of the Turkish merchant and then of the De Lacey family, but also through the readings in political history that she assigns to the creature. From Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of the Greek and Romans and from Volney’s Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires, the creature learns both the masculine virtue and of masculine cruelty and injustice. `I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty; … I learned that the possessions most esteemed … were high and unsullied descent united with riches` (F 1818, p.96). `Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and base?` the creature asks incredulously.

Nature requires the submission of the individual to the welfare of the family and the larger community. The family is the basic social unit, it has historically represented the system of morality practiced by the culture at large. Frankenstein’s family has a masculine ethic of justice in which the rights of the individual are priviledged: Frankenstein pursues his own interests in alchemy and chemistry, ignoring his family obligations as he engages `heart and soul` in his research, and is encouraged to leave his family and fiancée for two years. In contrast, the De Lacey family has an egalitarian and interdependent structure that encodes a female ethic of care in which the bonding of the family unit is primary. Felix blames himself for the exile they are suffering because of the Turkish merchant, Agatha and Felix perform their father `every little office of affection and duty with gentleness; and he rewarded them by his benevolent smiles`; they willingly starve themselves that their father may eat (F 1818, p.87).

In portraying the De Lacey as an archetype of the egalitarian, benevolent, and mutually loving nuclear family, Mary Shelley clearly displayed her own moral purpose, which Percy Shelley rightly if somewhat vaguely described in his Preface as `the exhibition of the amiableness of domestic affection, and the excellence of universal virtue` (F 1818, pp.3-4). Mary Shelley’s grounding of moral virtue in the preservation of familiar bonds (against which Frankenstein, in his failure to parent his own child, entirely transgresses) entails an aesthetic credo as well.

The doctrine of the separate spheres that Victor Frankenstein endorses encodes a particular attitude to female sexuality that Mary Shelley subtly exposes in her novel. This attitude is manifested most vividly in Victor’s response to the creature’s request for a female companion, an Eve to comfort and embrace him. After hearing his creature’s account of his sufferings and aspirations, Frankenstein is moved by an awakened conscience to do justice toward his Adam and promises to create a female creature, on condition that both leave forever the neighborhood of mankind. Frankenstein gathers the necessary instruments and materials, after numerous delays, into an isolated cottage on one of the Orkney Islands of Scotland and proceeds to create a human being. Once again he becomes ill: `my heart often sickened at the work of my hands… my spirits became unequal; I grew restless and nervous` (F 1818, p.137). Desgusted by this new project, Frankenstein finally determines to stop his work, rationalizing his decision to deprive his creature of a female companion in terms that repay careful examination `I was now about to form another being, of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate, and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness … She also might turn with disgust from him to the superior beauty of man; she might quit him, and he be again alone, exasperated by the fresh provocation of being deserted by one of his own species … I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace, at the price, perhaps, of the existence of the whole human race` (F 1818, p.138).

What does Victor Frankenstein truly fear, which causes him to end his creation of a female? First, he is afraid of an independent female will, afraid that his female creature will have desires and opinions that cannot be controlled by his male creature. Like Rousseau’s natural man, she might refuse to comply with a social contract made before her birth by another person; she might assert her own integrity and the revolutionary right to determine her own existence. Second, those uninhibited female desires might be sadistic: Frankenstein images a female `ten thousand times` more evil than her mate, who would like to murder for his own sake. Third, he fears that his female might be uglier than his male creature, so much so than even the male will reject her in disgust. Fourth, he fears that she will prefer to mate with ordinary males; given the gigantic size and strength of this female, she would have the power to size and even rape the male she might choose. And finally, he is afraid of her reproductive powers, her capacity to generate an entire race of similar creatures.

What Victor Frankenstein truly fears is female sexuality as such. His sexist aesthetic insists that women be small, delicate, passive, modest, and sexually pleasing – but available only to their lawful husbands, while a woman who is sexually liberated, free to choose her own life, her own sexual partner (by force, if necessary), and to propagate at will can appear only monstrously ugly to Victor Frankenstein.

Scared by this image of uninhibited female sexuality, Frankenstein violently reasserts a male control over the female body, penetrating and mutilating the female creature in a scene that suggests a violent rape: `trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged` (F 1818, p.139). The morning after, when he returns to the scene, `The remains of the half-finished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being` (F 1818, p.142). However he has rationalized his decision to murder the female creature, Frankenstein’s `passion` is here revealed as a fusion of fear, lust, and hostility, a desire to control and even destroy female sexuality. Victor Frankenstein’s desire is not only horrible and unattainable but also self-destructive.

Frankenstein share with early modern science the assumption that nature is only matter, particles that can be rearranged at the will of the scientist. They thus defy an earlier Renaissance world-view that perceived nature as a living organism, Dame Nature or Mother Earth, with whom humans were to live in a cooperative, mutually beneficial communion. Frankenstein thus opposes ecology with egotism, with his own yearning to command the worship only a God receives.

He imagines Nature passive, inert or `dead`, matter that isn’t so. Frankenstein assumes that he can violate Nature and pursue her to her hiding places with impunity. But Nature resists and revenges herself upon his attempts. During his research, Nature denies to Victor Frankenstein both mental and physical health: `my enthusiasm was checked by my anxiety, and I appeared rather like one doomed by slavery to toil in the mines, or any other unwholesome trade, than an artist occupied by his favourite employment. Every night I was oppressed by a slow fever, and I became nervous to a most painful degree` (F 1818, p.38). When is experiment is finished, Victor has a fit that renders him `lifeless` for `a long, long time` and that marks the oneset of a `nervous fever` that confines him for many months (F 1818, p.43). Victor is tormented by anxiety attacks, bouts of delirium, periods of distraction and madness. When he wants to blespheme against Nature a second time, by creating a female human being, Nature punishes him: `the eternal twinkling of the stars weighed upon me, and … I listened to every blast of wind as if it were a dull ugly siroc on its way to consume me` (F 1818, p.123). His mental illness returns: `Every thought that was devoted to it was an extreme anguish, and every word that I spoke in allusion to it caused my lips to quiver, and my heart to palpitate` (F 1818, p.132); `my spirits became unequal; I grew restless and nervous` (F 1818, p.137). Finally, Frankenstein obsession with destroying his creature exposes him to such mental and physical fatigue that he dies at age of twenty-five.

Nature prevents Frankenstein not to construct a normal human being: an unnatural method of reproduction produces an unnatural being, in this case a creature of gigantic stature, watery eyes, a shriveled complexion, and straight black lips. His physiognomy causes Frankenstein instinctive withdrawal from his child and sets in motion a series of events that produces the monster who destroys Frankenstein’s family, friends, and self.

Nature pursues Frankenstein with the electricity he has stolen: thunder, lightning, and rain aroud him. The November night on which he animates the creature, stealing the `spark of being` from Nature is dreary, dismal, and wet: `the rain … poured from a black and comfortless sky` (F 1818, p.40). He sees the creature during a flash of lightning as a violent storm plays over his head in Alps. Before Frankenstein’s first encounter with his creature among the Alps, `the rain was pouring in torrents, and thick mists hid the summits of the mountains` (F 1818, p.74). Sailing from the Orkney Island where he has destroyed his female creature, planning to throw her mangled remains into the sea, Frankenstein finds his boat threatened by a fierce wind and high waves that portend his own death: `I might be driven into the wide Atlantic, and feel all the tortures of starvation, or be swallowed up in the immeasurable waters that roared and buffeted around me. I … felt the torment of a burning thirst; … I looked upon the sea, it was to be my grave` (F 1818, p.144).

Frankenstein ends his life and his pursuit of the monster he has made in the Arctic regions, surrounded by the aurora borealis, the electromagnetic field of the North Pole. The atmospheric effects of the novel … manifest the power of Nature to punish those who transgress her boundaries. The elemental forces that Victor has released pursue him to his hiding places, raging round him like avenging Furies.

Nature punishes Victor Frankenstein for his theft of the spark of life most justly by denying him the capacity for natural procreation. His bride is killed on their wedding night, cutting off his chance to engender his own children. The Creature – that `great object, which swallowed up every habit of my nature` (F 1818, p.37) – turns against him, destroying not only his brother William, his friend Clerval, his loyal servant Justine, his father, and his wife, but finally pursuing Victor himself to his death, leaving Frankenstein without progeny. Nature’s revenge is absolute: he who violates her sacred hiding places is destroyed.

Mary Shelley portrays the consequences of raping Nature. But she also celebrates an all-creating Nature loved and revered by human beings. Mary Shelley envisions her as a sacred life-force in which human beings ought to participate in conscious harmony. Those characters capable of deeply feeling the beauties of Nature are rewarded with physical and mental health. Even Frankenstein in his moments of tranquillity or innocence can respond powerfully to the glory of Nature: `The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions, seem still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth` (F 1818, p.16). In the company of his friend Clerval, Victor becomes again `the same happy creature who, a few years ago, loved and beloved by all, had no sorrow or care. When happy, inanimate nature had the power of bestowing on me the most delightful sensations. A serene sky and verdant fields filled me with ecstasy` (F 1818, p.51).

Mary Shelley’s novel identifies moral virtue, based on self-sacrifice, moderation, and domestic affection with aesthetic beauty. Her ethical norm is both in life and in art, her ideal is a balance or golden mean between conflicting demands, specifically between large and small objects. That means that Frankenstein should have better balanced the obligations of great and small, of parent and child, of creator and creature. Frankenstein’s failure to preserve `a calm and peaceful mind` (F 1818, p.50), is in Mary Shelley’s vision both a moral and aesthetic failure, resulting directly in the creation of a hideous monster.

Mary Shelley believes that the key to a nutritive relationship between two human beings (whether these individuals are male or female is irrelevant) is a mutual respect for independence. So a parent must see his child from the beginning as a person, not as a possession. Patriarchy denies the possibility of mutual relationships between equals, demanding instead that in every human relationship one person must be the master while the other must be a slave, that one must give orders while the others obeys, that one must be a subject while the other is an object.

By building other bodies even where they seem to be in question, Frankenstein highlights his body. The novel’s most sensational moments – the animation of the monster, the destruction of the monster female, the discovery of Elisabeth death – point to spectacular objects other than Frankenstein but, in fact, the narratives evidentiates these dramatic passages on Frankenstein’s body and replays them in broken utterances. In the account of the monster’s composition, Frankenstein decomposes himself; anticipating his inventory of the creature’s parts, he deanimates and divides his own body, now seen as an object made up of component parts: `my eye-balls were starting from their sockets` (F 1818, pp.36-37). Frankenstein’s creation scene doubly performs its male anatomy, on the body of the creature and on the body of creator.

After the creation of the monster, Frankenstein becomes nervous, even when the monster is not physically present, the memory of its animation disturbs his equilibrium. Because of an excess of sensitiveness, Frankenstein’s body becomes a notable site of hysterical self-play. He finds that he cannot be stilled: `I was unable to remain for a single instant in the same place; I jumped over the chairs, clapped my hands, and laughed aloud` (F 1818, p.42). This scene demonstrates that he could have suffer by hysteria. In fact, hysteria was frequently read, in the eighteenth-century, as a sigh of privilege and superiority. Thus Frankenstein’s engagement in … the production of a grotesque male body participates in a culturally specific reconfiguration of the problems of masculine idealization. In the chain of idealized male figures that inhabit the novel, the monster represents only the most evident distortion.

Mary Shelley makes Victor Frankenstein `pregnant` with an idea, she is able to apply this complex discourse on the biological creation of monsters, one that had focused on female creation. She was able to counter the widespread idea of the poet as an isolated genius whose fixation on the ideal necessarily leads him into conflict with nature and society. By revoking the laws of nature and reproduction, Victor destroys nature and himself.

Frankenstein's efficiency, his productiveness, is destructive, while sensibility in him takes the form of a fusion with nature equated with a sort of Utopian serenity, a sensibility completely disconnected from the efficiency expected of a man. The fusion with nature is a regressive pleasure that can only be indulged occasionally. Sensibility appears as a dead end, but so does man's transformative power over nature. Sensibility, whose ideal working out is confined to a subplot of the novel, can only offer interludes of emotional expansion. It is strongly associated with an impossible ideal: man – whether it be an artificially created being or a perfect scientist. Ultimately, both modernity and a feminized, benevolent, and regressive sensibility appear as dead ends in Frankenstein; the protagonist, a prisoner of conflicting models, can only disappear.

Shelley's successful attempt to humanize the monster and demonize its creator is soundly assisted by paralleling their emotional experiences. The novel ends with the monster's physical demise only assumed, but clearly both he and his creator share the psychological ruin toward which each have steadily progressed throughout the plot.

The Monster is one part of its creator – not his `double` but an aspect of his character that he refuses to acknowledge. Tied to the `damned circle of science,` Frankenstein creates a presence that is an attempt to release an identity he has supressed … The novel is an allegory

of the disastrous consequences of love denied to children by parents concerned only with the fulfillment of their own desires.

CONCLUSIONS

Frankenstein is a novel where man usurps nature, the divinity’s role that attributes to man the power of a creator. Victor Frankenstein’s activity is the attempt to discover in matter what we had previously attributed to spirit, the bestowing on matter what was once given to God only.

By naming the novel – the modern Prometheus – Mary Shelley drew numerous parallels between the ancient myth and her modern story. Victor Frankenstein's work of creating man reflects the same innovative work of the Titan Prometheus in creating humans. My opinion is that Victor, in a way, stole the secret of creation from God just as the Titan stole fire from heaven in order to help mankind. Both the Titan and Victor get punished for their actions. This annomality being realized, nature fights back, destroys the usurpator and tries to restore the ancient order. Frankenstein and the monster die so that normality be restored.

I realized that Frankenstein is the product of a long and complex literary tradition that incorporates the writings of Shelley’s family and encompasses the literary and philosophical heritage of the Enlightenment, the imagery of classical mythology and the Bible. Mary was influenced when creating the monster by the numerous attempts to animate dead matter, she knew the circumstances in which the great scientists of the century used electricity in curing diseases. Also the novelist was influenced not only by the Greek myth, but also by the Jewish Golem who avenged on its creator.

The story of the monster’s beginnings is the story of a child, he awakes to the world of the senses, discovers fire and searches for food. Frankenstein is a male mother, who creates the monster but cannot supply him with affection. Because of the rejection, the monster, essentially benevolent, becomes evil and decides to kill Frankenstein’s family in order to have his creator’s attention. He does evil only in response to the social injustice he suffers.

Nature requires the submission of the individual to the welfare of the family and the larger community. In the novel, the family is the basic social unit, it represents the system of morality practised by culture at large. Frankenstein violates nature because he does not realize the importance of the family, he pursues only his own interests in alchemy and chemistry, ignoring his family obligations.

Frankenstein’s scientific project does not succed. This work demonstrates that it is not merely because the creature turns on him, but also because nature fights back. She destroys Victor’s health (he is frequently sick with both physical and mental diseases and dies at the age of twenty-five), she prevents him from creating a `normal` creature by denying him the maternal instinct or the emotional capacity for empathy, and stops him from engendering his own natural child by distracting his desire for his bride on their wedding night into a desire for revenge. Nature pursues Frankenstein with the electricity – that `spark of being` with which he animated his creature – that this `modern Prometheus` has stolen from her.

Mary Shelley demonstrated that the pursuit of knowledge, fame, and power may not only destroy the emotional state of the scientist but also result in disastrous social consequences. Frankenstein employs consciously the Promethean and Faustian legends to reflect the cultural and political movements of her century. Frankenstein can be read as an allegory of the modern age in which, due to the scientific progress, humanity has begun to think itself the maker of its own world.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Recent editions of Shelley’s work

Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, London: Everyman’s Library, 1992

Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, Oxford University Press, 1988

Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein sau Noul Prometeu, Bucuresti: Corint Junior, 2004

Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein sau Prometeul Modern, Bucuresti: Albatros, 1973

Biographical criticism

Schor, Esther, The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, Cambridge Collections Online:

Cambridge University Press, 2003

Criticism on Frankenstein

Coleman, Jim, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, New York: Bantam, 1991

Hajdu, Péter, The Modern Prometheus and the Interpretive Communities, Budapest:

Akadémiai Kiadó, 2007

Olaru, Victor, The Alchemists in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Annals of the University of

Craiova, Series: Philology – English; year IV, no. 1, Craiova: Editura Universitaria, 2003

Olaru, Victor, The Artificial Man, Annals of the University of Craiova, Series: Philology –

English; year III, no. 1, Craiova: Editura MJM, 2001

Olaru, Victor, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Spectacle of Masculinity, Annals of the

University of Craiova, Series: Philology – English; year III, no. 1, Craiova: Sitech, 2002

Schoene-Harwood, Berthold, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Duxford: Icon Books Limited,

2000

Thompson, Terry W, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Washington: The Explicator, Vol. 64, Winter

2006

Related Criticism

A History and Anthology of Literatures in English, vol. 2, English Literature: The Romantics

and the Victorians, Milan: La Spiga languages, 2003

Alexander, Michael, A History of English Literature, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Bour, Isabelle, Sensibility as Epistemology in Caleb Williams, Waverley, and Frankenstein.

Studies in English Literature, 1500 – 1900. Vol. 45, Baltimore: Autumn 2005

Burgess, Anthony, English Literature, Longman, 1994

Grigorescu, Dan, Shelley, Bucuresti: Editura Tineretului, 1962

Gurr, Elisabeth, English Literature in Context, Oxford University Press, 2001

Keymer, Thomas and Mee, John, The Cambridge Companion to English Literature

1740-1830, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004

Merriam – Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature, Massachusetts: Merriam – Webster

Incorporated Publishers Springfield, 1995

Ousby, Ian, The Wordsworth Companion to Literature in English, Cambridge University

Press, 1992

Rogers, Pat, The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature, Oxford University Press,

1990

Sampson, George, The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1976

Sanders, Andrew, The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Hampshire: Oxford

University Press, 2004

Spector, Robert Donald, The English Gothic, A Bibliographic Guide to writers from Horace

Walpole to Mary Shelley, London: Greenwood Press, 1984

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Literature, Oxford Clarendon Press, 1963

The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. 5, From Blake to Byron, Penguin Books,

1990

The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, volume II, Oxford University Press, 1973

Thornley, G.C. and Roberts, Gwyneth, An Outline of English Literature, Longman, 2005

Volceanov, George, A Survey of English Literature from Beowulf to Jane Austen, Bucuresti:

Editura Fundatiei Romania de Maine, 2000

www.messagenet.com/myths/bios/prometheus

www.wikipedia.org

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Recent editions of Shelley’s work

Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, London: Everyman’s Library, 1992

Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, Oxford University Press, 1988

Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein sau Noul Prometeu, Bucuresti: Corint Junior, 2004

Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein sau Prometeul Modern, Bucuresti: Albatros, 1973

Biographical criticism

Schor, Esther, The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, Cambridge Collections Online:

Cambridge University Press, 2003

Criticism on Frankenstein

Coleman, Jim, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, New York: Bantam, 1991

Hajdu, Péter, The Modern Prometheus and the Interpretive Communities, Budapest:

Akadémiai Kiadó, 2007

Olaru, Victor, The Alchemists in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Annals of the University of

Craiova, Series: Philology – English; year IV, no. 1, Craiova: Editura Universitaria, 2003

Olaru, Victor, The Artificial Man, Annals of the University of Craiova, Series: Philology –

English; year III, no. 1, Craiova: Editura MJM, 2001

Olaru, Victor, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Spectacle of Masculinity, Annals of the

University of Craiova, Series: Philology – English; year III, no. 1, Craiova: Sitech, 2002

Schoene-Harwood, Berthold, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Duxford: Icon Books Limited,

2000

Thompson, Terry W, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Washington: The Explicator, Vol. 64, Winter

2006

Related Criticism

A History and Anthology of Literatures in English, vol. 2, English Literature: The Romantics

and the Victorians, Milan: La Spiga languages, 2003

Alexander, Michael, A History of English Literature, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Bour, Isabelle, Sensibility as Epistemology in Caleb Williams, Waverley, and Frankenstein.

Studies in English Literature, 1500 – 1900. Vol. 45, Baltimore: Autumn 2005

Burgess, Anthony, English Literature, Longman, 1994

Grigorescu, Dan, Shelley, Bucuresti: Editura Tineretului, 1962

Gurr, Elisabeth, English Literature in Context, Oxford University Press, 2001

Keymer, Thomas and Mee, John, The Cambridge Companion to English Literature

1740-1830, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004

Merriam – Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature, Massachusetts: Merriam – Webster

Incorporated Publishers Springfield, 1995

Ousby, Ian, The Wordsworth Companion to Literature in English, Cambridge University

Press, 1992

Rogers, Pat, The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature, Oxford University Press,

1990

Sampson, George, The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1976

Sanders, Andrew, The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Hampshire: Oxford

University Press, 2004

Spector, Robert Donald, The English Gothic, A Bibliographic Guide to writers from Horace

Walpole to Mary Shelley, London: Greenwood Press, 1984

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Literature, Oxford Clarendon Press, 1963

The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. 5, From Blake to Byron, Penguin Books,

1990

The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, volume II, Oxford University Press, 1973

Thornley, G.C. and Roberts, Gwyneth, An Outline of English Literature, Longman, 2005

Volceanov, George, A Survey of English Literature from Beowulf to Jane Austen, Bucuresti:

Editura Fundatiei Romania de Maine, 2000

www.messagenet.com/myths/bios/prometheus

www.wikipedia.org