Romantic Literature: Frankenstein

The Importance of Revision

Univ. of Idaho

Dr. McKeever

Spring 1990

I will concentrate on several different perspectives: textual, biographical, psychological, historical, scientific, and philosophical.

Textual: there are three editions first, the manuscript, second (1818), third 1831 (this edition, most reprinted, was substantively revised by Shelley in an attempt to interpolate a later and in some ways contradictory concept of nature and the human will, a concept produced by the traumatic deaths of her husband and children.

Percy Shelley's editorial revisions can be roughly grouped under two headings: those that improve the novel and those that do not. He improved the text by correcting three minor factual errors, eliminating a few grammatical mistakes, and frequently substituting more precise technical terms for Mary Shelley's cruder ones. Percy Shelley's changes, which pushed Mary Shelley's novel in the direction of a more Latinate structure, actually might be held responsible for the Ciceronian prose style about which many readers have complained. George Levine, for instance, has condemned Frankenstein to the ranks of the "minor" novels primarily because of "the inflexibly public and oratorical nature of even its most intimate passages," passages almost invariably overwritten by Percy. Mary's voice tended to utter a sentimental, rather abstract, and generalized rhetoric, but typically energized this with a brisk stylistic rhythm. Here is Mary on Frankenstein's fascination with supernatural phenomena:

Nor were these my only visions. The raising of ghosts or devils was also a favorite pursuit and if I never saw any I attributed it rather to my own inexperience and mistakes than want of skill in my instructors.

And here is Percy's revision:

Nor were these my only visions. The raising of ghosts or devils was a promise liberally accorded by my favorite authors, the fulfillment of which I most eagerly sought; and if my incantations were always unsuccessful, I attributed the failure rather to my own inexperience and mistake, than to a want of skill or fidelity in my instructors.

Percy's preference for more learned, polysyllabic terms was obsessive. In addition, he rigorously eliminated Mary's colloquial phrases, as the following lists indicate.

Mary Shelley's manuscript Percy's revision

have possess

wish desire, purpose

caused derive their origin from

a painting a representation

place station

plenty of sufficient

time period

felt endured

hope confidence

had experienced

Frankenstein, revision, p. 2

stay remain

took away extinguish

talked conversed

hot inflamed

smallness minuteness

end extinction

inside within

tired fatigued

die perish

leave out omit

add to augment

poverty penury

mind understanding

ghost-story taleof superstition

about on a par of nearly equal interest and utility

we were all equal neither of us possessed the slightest pre- eminence over the other

do not wish to hate you will not be tempted to et myself in opposition to thee

how my disposition and habits the alteration were altered perceptible in my disposition and habits

The list indicates that Percy is chiefly responsible for most of the inflated rhetoric in the text.

Now, under the category of changes which do not serve the text:

1. On several occasions Percy actually distorted the meaning of the text. He was not always sensitive to the complexity of character created by the author. He tended, for instance, to see the creature as more monstrous and less human than did Mary. When Frankenstein destroyed the female creature, and Mary had the creature withdraw "with a howl of devilish despair," Percy added "and revenge," thus blunting our sympathy for the forever forsaken creature and destroying the author's more perceptive understanding of the monster. when Mary wished to stress the creature's identification with Frankenstein by assigning the word "wretch" to them both within four lines, Percy changed the second wretch to "devil"," thus implying that the creature is more reprehensible than Frankenstein. And, finally, it was Percy Shelley who introduced the oft-quoted description of the monster as "an abortion," a term he again applied to the creature in his unpublished review of Frankenstein.

2. Percy's revisions, and his unpublished review of the novel, consistently reveal that he read Victor Frankenstein sympathetically. As his review of the novel concludes, Frankenstein was not a perpetrator but only "the victim" of evil. Throughout the original text, Mary Shelley stressed Frankenstein's capacity of self-deception, while Percy, sometimes as blind as Frankenstein himself, softened or eliminated his errors. When Mary described Frankenstein's mingled dread and relief, on the eve of his departure to England, at the thought that at least he would lure the monster away from his family and friends, Percy disastrously persuaded her to introduce into Frankenstein's meditation the possibility "of the reverse," of the creature's staying behind in Geneva. He thus undercut her otherwise consistent portrayal of Frankenstein as an egotist who perceives only his own feelings and dangers. Mary's original idea, that Frankenstein would inevitably assume that the creature would follow him, powerfully prefigures Frankenstein's later assumption that the creature would be with him alone on his wedding night.

3. Percy imposed his own favorite philosophical, political, and poetic theories on a text which either contradicted them or to which they were irrelevant. for instance, Mary throughout assumes the existence of a sacred animating principle, call it Nature or Life of God, which Frankenstein usurps at his peril. during Frankenstein's final pursuit of his creature across the polar wastes, at times inspired not so much by vengeance as by the conviction that it was "a task enjoined by heaven," Percy tried to undermine this notion of a functioning "heaven" by adding his own atheistic concept of a universe created and controlled by pure Power or energy, "as the mechanical impulse of some power of which I was unconscious." Percy also managed at times to sidestep the issues at hand with lengthy digressions that illustrated, for one, his revolutionary hostility to hierarchical institutions (the lengthy discussion of the differences between the treatment of servants in France or England as opposed to Switzerland, where the condition of servitude uniquely "does not include the idea of ignorance, and a sacrifice of the dignity of the human being."). His dislike of the legal system led him to add a rather exaggerated image of judges as "executioners, their hands yet reeking with the blood of innocence," to Elizabeth's denunciation of the court that convicted Justine.

Despite Mary Shelley's belief in the existence of a material reality determined by the laws of nature, Percy's idealist concept of the poetic imagination as a creative participation in the universal mind that is reality invaded the text. Percy struck out the rather trite description of Elizabeth's amusements as "drawing and music" and added this:

I delighted in investigating the facts relative to the actual world; she busied herself in following the aerial creations of the poets. The world was to me a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.

The last line is of course an echo of the concluding question of his "Mont Blanc," composed in July, 1816:

And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,

If to the human mind's imaginings

Silence and solitude were vacancy?

4. Finally, at least one of Percy Shelley's revisions carries significant interpretive weight in the novel. He introduced all the references to Victor Frankenstein as the "author" of the creature. Critics who have not considered this revision have claimed that the identification of Frankenstein as an author highlights Mary Shelley's anxiety of authorship. but since it is Percy rather than Mary who sees Frankenstein as an "author," these reference actually work more to associate Frankenstein with the already published author Percy Shelley than with the unpublished Mary shelley. Perhaps because he felt an intuitive sympathy for victor Frankenstein and his goals, Percy Shelley here inadvertently sharpened his wife's identification of him with her protagonist.

Frankenstein, reading materials and significance

Rousseau's Emile (S. read in 1816) Rousseau claimed that "God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil." He blamed the moral failings of children specifically on the absence of a mothers love. Without mothering, without an early experience of a loving education, Rousseau states that "a man left to himself from birth would be more of a monster than the rest."

Rousseau, Second Discourse. The notion of the natural man as a creature no different from the animals, responding unconsciously to the needs of his flesh and the changing condition of his environment.

Rousseau, The Social Contract. natural man lacks language, the capacity to think rationally, companionship and affections that flow from it, a moral consciousness. However, shelley does not endorses Rousseau's view that the simple gratification of human passions will lead to virtuous behavior.

shelley's problem with Rousseau: R. made it clear that the movement away from the state of nature into the condition of civilization entails a loss of freedom, a frustration of desire, and enclosure within the prison house of language or what Lacan has called the symbolic order. civilization produces as much discontent as content. In place of the natural man's instinctive harmony with his surroundings, society substitutes a system of conflicting economic interest and a struggle for individual mastery, an aggressive competition restrained by but not limited from R.'s favored constitutional democracy. for once the creature has left the state of nature and learned the language and laws of society, he has gained a self-consciousness that he can never lo0se, the consciousness of his own isolation:

I learned that the possessions most esteemed by your fellow creature were, high and unsullied descent united with riches. . .but. . .I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endowed with a figure hideously deformed and loathesome . . .. When I looked around, I saw and heard none like me . . .I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflection inflicted upon me; I tried to dispel the, but sorrow only increased with knowledge. Oh, that I had for ever remained in my native wood, nor know or felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst, and heat!

David Hartley. Developed associationism: early sensitive experience determine adult behavior.

John Locke. 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding. (S. read in 1816). also Some thoughts Concerning Education (1693). moral development of the monster closely parallels the paradigm that Harley laid out and follows the theories of Locks. The creature first experiences purely physical and undifferentiated sensations of light, darkness, heat, cold, hunger, pain and pleasure; this is the earliest period of infancy when "no distinct ideas occupied my mind; all was confused." Gradually, the creature learns to distinguish his sensations and thus his "mind received every day additional idea." At the same time he learns the causes of his feelings of pain or pleasure and how to produced the effects he desire by obtaining clothing, shelter, food and fire. creatures's education proceed by way of examples. Locke says

Of all the ways whereby children are to be instructed, and their manners formed, the plainest, easiest, and most efficacious, is to set before their eyes the examples of those things that you would have them do or avoid . . . Virtues and vices can by no words be so plainly set before their understandings as the actions of other men will show them

For example, the De Laceys. (referential theory of language).

Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Romans learns the nature of heroism and public virtue and civic justice.

Volney's Ruins, or A Survey of the Revolutions of Empires creature learns the contrasting nature of political corruption and the causes of the decline of civilizations;

Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner (S. heard C. read it aloud at her home in 1806) S. powerfully evokes the creature's psychic response to the conviction that he is destined to be forever an outcast, as alone as the Ancient Mariner on his wide, wide sea_-a horrifying spectacle that had haunted Mary Shelley's imagination since she heard Coleridge recite the poem in 1806.

Milton, Paradise Lost, obvious reference to the monster as a fallen angel, as satanic, etc. also the origins of human good and evil and the roles of the sexes;

Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, he learns the range of human emotions, from domestic love to suicidal despair, as well as the rhetoric in which to articulate not only ideas but feelings.

Alphonse Frankenstein's reading, Victor devoured Cornelius agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus, books which encouraged, not an awareness of human folly and injustice, but rather a hubristic desire for human omnipotence, for the gaining of the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life.

Frankenstein and Science

Francis Bacon, "I am come in very truth leading to you Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave." Identified the pursuit of modern science with the practice of sexual politics. The aggressive, virile male scientist legitimately captures and enslaves a fertile but passive female nature.

Theme she illustrates the potential evils of scientific hubris and at the same time challenged the cultural biases inherent in any conception of science and the scientific method that rested on a gendered definition of nature as female.

Shelley is no scientist, her description of F.'s laboratory is vague, but she had a thorough understanding of the most prevalent scientific principles of the day.

Two types of scientific research: (1) one which attempts to describe accurately the functionings of the physical universe and (2) that which attempts to control or change the universe through human intervention. Implicitly she celebrate the former, which she associate most closely with the work of Erasmus Darwin, while she calls attention to the dangers inherent in the latter, found the work of Davy and Galvani.

Victor's chemistry teacher M. Waldman observes that " a man would make but a very sorry chemist, if he attended to that department of human knowledge alone" and therefor advises Victor "to apply to every branch of natural philosophy, including mathematics." This theory is based on Humphry Davy's famous introductory lecture to a course in chemistry given at the newly founded Royal Institution in 1802, probably what Mary read on Monday October 12, 1816, journal entry notes "read the introduction to Sir H. Davy's "Chemistry; write." Description of Waldman's course is probably based on Davy's Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812) which Shelley orders in that year. this may be what Mary refers to on journal entries from October, 29, 30 and Nov. 3 and 4 when she notes that she "read Davy's Chemistry" with shelley and then alone. also provided the content and rhetoric of Waldman's final panegyric on modern chemistry, the panegyric that directly inspired Victor Frankenstein's subsequent research. Waldman concludes:

the ancient teachers of this science. . .promised impossibilities, and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pour over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and shew how she works in her hiding places. They ascend into the heaven; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. they have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.

In his pamphlets, after detailing the necessity of chemical knowledge to all the operation of common life, Davy paints an idealistic portrait of the contemporary chemist, who is informed by a science that

has given to him an acquaintance with the different relations of the parts of the external world; and more than that, it has bestowed upon him powers which may be almost called creative; which have enabled him to modify and change the beings surrounding him, and by his experiments to interrogate nature with power, not simply as a scholar, passive and seeking only to understand her operations, but rather as a master, active with his own instruments.

Davy's sketch of the master scientist:

For who would not be ambitious of becoming acquainted with the most profound secrets of nature; of ascertaining her hidden operations; and of exhibiting to men that system of knowledge which related so intimately to their own physical and moral constitution?

but Davy also comments skeptically on the field of chemical physiology, Victors field:

if the connection of chemistry with physiology has given rise to some visionary and seductive theories, yet even this circumstance has been useful to the public mind in exciting it by doubt, and in leading it to new investigations. A reproach, to a certain degree just, has been thrown upon those doctrines known by the name of the chemical physiology; for in the applications of them speculative philosophers have been guided rather by the analogies of words than of facts. Instead of slowly endeavoring to life up the veil concealing the wonderful phenomena of living nature; fully of ardent imaginations, they have vainly and presumptiously attempted to tear it asunder.

Erasmus Darwin, provide the contrast to Davy. Shelley acknowledged the impact of Darwin's work on his wife's novel when he began the Preface to the 1818 edition with the assertion that "the event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence."

Darwin, famous for work on evolution and the growth of plants. Victor is a direct opponent of Darwin's teachings. See The Botanic Garden (1789) zoonomia, or the laws of organic life (1793) Phytologia (1800), The Temple of Nature (1803).

18th c. rega4rded the universe as a perfect, static world created by divine fiat at a single moment in time. this universe, metaphorically represented as a Great Chain of Being, manifested myriad and minute gradations between species, but these relationships were regarded as fixed and permanent, incapable of change. As Linnaeus, the great 18th century classifier of all known plan life, insisted in his System Naturae (1735) "Nullae specia novae" no new species can come into existence in a divinely ordered, perfect world. But by the end of the eighteenth century, under pressure from Herschel's new discoveries in astronomy, Cuvier's paleontological researches, William Smith's studies of fossil stratification, Sprengel's work on botanical cross-breeding and fertilizations, and observations made with the increasingly powerful microscope, together with a more diffuse Leibnizian "natural theology" that emphasized the study of nature's varied interactions with human populations, the orthodox Linnaean concept of an immutable physical universe had begun to weaken.

Darwin speculate that evolutionary improvement is the direct result of sexual selection: the strongest male wins the female, ex. stags.

relative to Frankenstein Darwin's most significant evolutionary concept was that of the hierarchy of reproduction. Over and over, Darwin insisted that sexual reproduction is at a higher evolutionary level than hermaphroditic or solitary paternal propagation. As he comments in Temple:

The microscopic productions of spontaneous vitality, and the next most inferior kinds of vegetables and animals, propagate by solitary generation only; as the buds and bulbs raised immediately from the seeds, the Lycoperdon tuber, with probably many other fungi, and the polypus, volvox, and taenia. Those of the next order propagate both by solitary and sexual reproduction, as those buds and bulbs which produced flowers as well as other buds or bulbs; and the aphis and probably man other insects. Whence it appears, that man of those vegetable4s and animals, which are produced by solitary generation, gradually become more perfect, and at length produce a sexual progeny.

a third order of organic nature consists of hermaphrodite vegetables and animals, as in those flowers which have anthers and stigmas in the same corol; and in many insects, as leeches, snails, and worms; and perhaps all those reptiles which have no bones. . .

Concept of the superiority of sexual reproduction over paternal propagation was so important to D. that it forced him to revise radically his concept of reproduction in his third, corrected edition of Zoonomia (1801). Earlier, D. had argued that male plants produce the seed or embryon, while female plants provide only nourishment so he concluded that "the mother does not contribute to the formations of the living ens in normal generatio0n, but is necessary only for supplying its nutriment in oxigenation" Then attributed all monstrous birth to the female, saying that deformities result from either excessive or insufficient nourishment in the egg or uterus. But by 1801, Darwin's observations of both animal and vegetable hybrids had convinced him that both male and female seeds contribute to the innate characteristics of the species.

but what is more interesting is that while D. no longer attributed monstrous births to uterine deficiencies of excess, he continues to hold the male imagination at the moment of conception responsible for determining both the sex of the child and its outstanding traits:

I conclude, that the act of generation cannot exist without being accompanied with ideas, and that a man must have at this time either a general idea of his own male form, or of the forms of his male organs' or of an idea of the female form, or of her organs, and that this marks the sex. and the peculiar resemblance of the child to either parent.

the impact of the female imaginations on the seed in utero is less intense, argued Darwin, because its impact lasts for a longer period of time and is therefore more diffuse. it follows that Darwin, in 1801, attribute the bulk of monstrous births to the male imagination, a point of obvious relevance to Frankenstein.

Also important in Darwin "the economy of vegetation." Phytologia:

organic matters, which. . .will by their slow solution in or near the surface of the earth supply the nutritive sap-juice to vegetables. Hence all kinds of animal and vegetable substances, which will undergo a digestive process, or spontaneous solution, as the flesh, fat, skin, and bones of animals; wither their secretions of bile, saliva, mucus; and their excretions of urine and ordure; and also the fruit, mean, oil, leaves, wood of vegetable, when properly decomposed on or beneath the soil, supply the most nutritive food to plants.

Also, heretically, says that decomposing bodies ought to be available tp growing plants.

Frankenstein (1) wants to originate a new life-form quickly, by chemical means, not over the span that is naturally organic:

Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.

In process, he becomes the solitary paternal propagation and reverse the evolutionary ladder described by D.

Male imagination at the time is also unhealthy:

Every night I was oppressed by a slow fever, and I became nervous to a most painful degree. . .my voice became broken, my trembling hands almost refused to accomplish their task; I became as timid as a love-sick girl, and alternate tremor and passionate ardor took the place of wholesome sensation and regulated ambition.

Darwin observes that nature moves "from simpler things to more compound" Frankenstein further increased the monstrousness of his creation by making a form that is both larger and more simple than a normal human being. As he acknowledges to Walton"

As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature; that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionably large.

Thus, Victor becomes a parodic perpetrator of the orthodox creationist theory. On the one hand, he denies the unique power of God to create organic life. At the same time he confirms the capacity of a single creator to originate a new species. By playing God, victor has simultaneously upheld the creationist theory and parodies it by creating only a monster. In both ways, he has blasphemed against the natural order of things. he has moved down rather than up the evolutionary ladder--he has constructed his creature not only out of dead human organs collected from charnel houses and dissecting rooms, but also out of animal organs and tissue removed from "the slaughter house." and he has denied the natural model of human reproduction through sexual procreation.

the result: a triple failure of the imagination. (1) by not imaginatively identifying with his creation, F. fails to give his child the parental support he owes to it. thereby condemns his creature to becomes what other behold, a monster. (2) by imagining that the male can produce a higher form of evolutionary species by lateral propagation than by sexual procreation, Frankenstein defines his own imagination as profoundly anti-evolutionary and thus anti-progressive. (3) in assuming that he can create a perfect species by chemical means, F. defies a central tenet of Romantic poetic ideology: that the creative imagination must work spontaneously, unconsciously, and above all organically creating forms that are themselves organic heterocosoms.

And in trying to create a human being as god created Adam, out of earth and water, all at once, victor robs nature of something more than fertilizer. "On a dreary night in November. . . with an anxiety that almost amounted to agony" V infuses "A spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay" at his feet. At that moment V. became the modern Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods to give to mankind and thus overthrowing the established, sacred order of both earth and heaven. At that moment he transgressed against nature.

Feminist viewpoint: from F.'s scientific blasphemies, we begin to realize that, from a feminist viewpoint, F. is a book about what happens when a man tries to have a baby without a woman. Thus, the novel is profoundly concerned with natural as opposed to unnatural modes of production and reproduction. It evokes for the first time in Western literature the most powerfully felt anxieties of pregnancy. Male writer necessarily avoided this topic, female writers thought the subject improper if not taboo. Two dreams link Mary's personal life with the novel: first, the dream after Clara's death, that the baby was not really dead, and she brought it back to life. Dream after ghost stories, relayed in 1818 introduction: pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together and felt the terror as the hideous corpse he had reanimated with a "spark of life" stood beside his bed, "looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes." Also, the novel reflects V.'s total failure at parenting. The making of the creature takes place through winter spring and summer, thus following a birth time line. He never thinks about the creatures existence because he is so wrapped up in this egotistical enterprise. Note the last statement to Walton: Statement is a tissue of self-deception and rationalization. He never considers whether the creature's "malignity" might have been prevented, as the creature himself repeatedly insists, by loving care in infancy. He never asks whether he was in any way responsible for the creature's development. He relies on a Benthamite utilitarian ethical calculus, the greatest god for the greatest number, without first demonstrating that the creature could not have benefitted from the companionship of a female, and without proving that the female creature would have been more malignant than the male. and it never occurs to him that he might have created a female incapable of reproduction. Instead he assumes that the two creatures would share his egotistical desire to produce offspring who would bless and revere them. From the moment of the creature's birth, Frankenstein has rejected it as "demoniacal" and heaped abused upon it. F. represents a classic case of a battering parent who produces a battered child who in turn becomes a battering parent: the creature's first murder victim, we must remember, is a small child whom he wished to adopt.

F.'s bad parenting is constantly contrast to example of two loving fathers: Alphonse Frankenstein and Father De Lacey. Both create the ideal of the 18th century, a nuclear family organized around the principle of personal autonomy and bound together by strong affective ties. shelley adds to this a gender egalitarianism: both parent are equally devoted to their children, both boys and girls are expected to receive an education.

Tradition of Gothic novel as female domain is secured by Mary Shelley. male authored contenders, whether Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Beckford's Vathek, Lewis's The Monk, Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, Bram Stoker'd Dracula--Mary's is the most disturbing. Women writers have been drawn to the Gothic novel because its conventions permit them to explore one of the most deeply repressed experiences in patriarchal culture, female sexual desire. Ann Radcliffe, charlotte Dacre, and Sophia Lee typically used the medieval ruined castle or abbey as a metaphor for the female body, penetrated by a sexually attractive villain. These novel's conclusion, where the heroine is narrowly saved from seduction or death by a chaste knight whom she then marries, enable the female reader to have her cake and eat it too, to participate imaginatively in an intensely erotic seduction but to wake "warm in the virgin morn, no weeping Magdalen."

Promethean Politics: novel is a critique of the primary Promethean poets, Byron and Percy and of the entire Romantic ideology as she understood it. Thus, F.'s failure to mother his child has both political and aesthetic ramifications. Neglectful father is the archetype of the irresponsible political leader who puts his own interests ahead of citizens'. In his desire to father a new race, F. puts himself in the place of God and participates in the mythopoeic vision that inspired the first generation of Romantic poets and thinkers. William Blake insisted that the human form could become divine through the exercise of mercy, pity, love, and imagination; Coleridge had stated that human perception or the primary imagination is an "echo of the Infinite I Am;" Wordsworth argued that the "higher minds" of poets are "truly from the Deity;" while both Godwin and his disciple Percy proclaimed that man was perfectible. In their view, the right use of reason and imagination could annihilate not only social injustice and human evil but even though participation in symbolic thinking or what Blake called the "divine analogy," the consciousness of human finitude and death itself. Thus Victor can be identified with the radical desire that energized some of the best known English Romantic poems, the desire to elevate human beings into living gods.

Allusion to Prometheus had two sources Prometheus plasticator and Prometheus pyphoros. First version through Ovid's Metamorphoses (S. read in 1815) where Prometheus created man from clay. Second version, P. is the fire-stealer, the god who defied Jupiter's tyrannical oppression of humanity by giving fire to man and was then punished by having his liver eaten by vultures until he divulged his secret foreknowledge of Jupiter's downfall. By 3rd century a.d., these two versions had fused. Blake used Prometheus in the creations of his spokeswoman Oothoon; see Plate 6 of "Visions of the Daughters of Albion," while C."s Ancient Mariner echoes Prometheus both in his transgression of an established moral order and in his perpetual suffering that he may teach mankind to be both sadder and wiser. Goethe in his verse drama P. portrayed P. as the self portrait of the artist liberated from serving dull, idle gods and who rejoices instead in his own creative powers. Shelley specifically associated her P. with the poets she knew personally. During the summer when she began writing F. Byron composed "Prometheus," celebrating the god's defiance of Jupiter emphasizing Prometheus' unyielding will, noble suffering, and concern for mankind. Shelley copied this poem and carried it to Byron's published when she returned to England in August 1816. Byron's P. persona appeared again in Manfred, which Shelley read soon after its publication on June 16, 1817. Manfred's Faustian thirst for unbounded experience, knowledge, and freedom leads him to steal the secrets of nature. Manfred's defiance of Ahrimanes and all other deities, proclaims byron's personal belief in the ultimate creative power and integrity of the human imagination. Percy had already announced his desire to compose an epic rebuttal to Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound when he reread the play 1816, although he did not begin writing PU until Sept 1818, after F. was published. F is also partially modeled on Percy, a linguist who studies Albertus Magnus, Paracelsus, Pliny and Buffon, fascinated by alchemy and chemistry. Victor goes to Ingolstadt, further associating him with Percy's radical politics, expressed in Queen Mab (1813) "Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte" (1816), and Laon and Cynthna (1817). Ingolstadt was famous as the home of the Illuminati, secret revolutionary society founded in 1776 by Ingolstadt's Professor of Law Adam Weishaupt, advocating the perfection of mankind through the overthrow of established religious and political institutions. P. Shelley had eagerly endorsed Weishaupt's goals: namely. "to secure to merit its just rewards; to the weak support, to the wicked the fetters they deserve; and to man his dignity" by freeing all men from the slavery imposed by "society, governments, the sciences, and false religion"

More important, victor F. embodies certain elements of Percy's temperament and character that troubled Mary. An intellectual hubris or belief in the supreme importance of mental abstractions that led him to be insensitive to the feelings of those who did not share his ideas and enthusiasm. He lived in a world of abstract ideas; his actions were primarily motivated by theoretical principles, the quest for perfect beauty, love, freedom goodness. while Mary agreed with these goals, she perceived in him the tendency to use them as a mask for an emotional narcissism, an unwillingness to confront the origins of his own desires or the impact of his demands on those most dependent upon him. Remember that he pressures Mary to form a liaison with Thomas Hogg, was indifferent to the death of Mary first child on March 7, 1815, and insistence on Clair's continuing presence in his household despite Mary's state opposition. This alerted Mary to a strain of selfishness and egotism that too often rendered him an insensitive husband and uncaring, irresponsible parent.

Clerval is the altar ego: F recognizes "the image of instruction. . . with a refined mind, passionate love of natural beauty, a fascination with languages and literature, and books of chivalry and romance and wrote fairy tales, plays, and verse. Archetype for the romantic poet, with a mind "replete with ideas, imagination, fanciful and magnificent, which formed a world, whose existence depended on the life of its creator". F's eulogy of Clerval identifies him with both Leigh Hunt and Wordsworth: a heroic ideal: an imaginative man who is capable of deep and abiding love and who takes responsibility for those dependent upon him. Clerval embarks on a journey of discovery to the land of knowledge, but also immediately delays that voyage to nurse his sick friend back to health. He thus combines intellectual curiosity with a capacity for nurturing others. Unlike Percy, Clerval does not openly defy his provincial father's injunctions. Instead, he used his powers of persuasion to convince his affectionate father to let him attend university. Clerval's death leaves F, the worst of Percy, to prevail. When F. realizes that Walton is making notes on his story, he wants to see them, so has final authority over Walton as well (page ).

Now, talk about Fire, F. finds a fire, delighted by its warmth, then learns of its pain; learns to cook from it, brings gift of firewood to the deLaceys, then burns down their house after they reject him. shelley thus denies the romantic dream of fusing the contraries of fire and ice, life and death, in a triumph of the divine poetic imagination. Despite Kubla Khan's "miracle of rare device, / A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice," despite Walton's image of a tropical paradise at the North Pole where "snow and frost are banished," Mary Shelley's Mariner discovers only mutinous betrayal and destruction at the North Pole while her creature sees only death in the coming together of snow and fire. the romantic attempt to marry opposites, to unite the mortal and the immortal in a transcendental dialectics, to create the human form divine, is seen by Mary as pure fantasy, no more real than Walton's dream.

and a dangerous fantasy, behind which hid a rampant egoism, note shelley and Godwin's withdrawal from the family. Mary shelley perceived that the Romantic ideology, grounded as it is on a never-ending, perhaps never successful, effort to marry the finite and the infinite through the agency of the poetic imagination too frequently entailed a sublime indifference to the progeny of that marriage. Even before Percy in his Defense of Poetry dismissed the composed poem as a "fading coal" of its originary inspiration, Mary understood that the romantic affirmation of the creative process over its finite products could justify a profound moral irresponsibility on the part of the poet.

A romantic ideology that presented its own poems as self-consuming artifacts within a never-ending dialectical process, that valued the creative act above the created product, and that allowed the poet to attack the past in the name of an unrealizable future, was not in Mary Shelley's eyes a moral ideology. In other words, you've got to live it, not just talk about it.

Larger political issues: P. story has embed in it an affirmation of revolution, of rebellion against established social order. For the romantics, the figure of Prometheus connoted a radical democratic system, recognition of the equal rights and freedoms of all individual, defiance of the existing monarchy. Shelley's modern Prometheus embraces the political principles of Locke Rousseau, and Godwin. The creatures" Jacobin characteristics make him a symbol of the French Revolution itself. Originating in the democratic vision of liberty, equality, and fraternity disseminated by the idealistic and benevolent Girondists (Condorect, Mirabeau, Lafayette, Talleyrand) the Revolution failed to find the parental guidance, control, and nurturance it required to develop into a rational and benevolent state. Unable to accommodate their historical resentments toward the aristocracy and the clergy, the Girondists could not create a state which recognized the right and freedoms of all it citizens or find a legitimate place in the revolutionary social order for the dispossessed aristocrats and clergy. Unable to reconcile the old with the new, the Girondists unleashed a political movement that, spurned by the King and his ministers, resorted to brute force to attain its ends, climaxing in the violence of the September massacres and the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Victor's creature is like the french nation, abandoned by its parents, spurned by the monarchy, until it is driven into an uncontrollable rage--manifested in the leadership of Marat, St. Just, Robespierre--and the Terrors. See both Edmund Burke and Barruel for tropes of the revolution as a gigantic monster.

Dating of plot: F is narrated in a series of letters written by Walton to his sister Margaret Walton Savile (note initials) First letter is date Dec. 11, 17--/ :ast os dated Se[t/ 12. 17--. Exactly nine months enwomb the telling of F's history , thus both a literary pregnancy come to full term. Moreover, these nine months correspond with her third pregnancy, conceived and carried during the actual writing of Frankenstein: her daughter Clara Everina, was born three days after Mary Shelley's own birthday, on Sept. 2, 1917. The calendar year in which Walton is writing. The July 31, 17--; is the day the creature first appears before Walton. later we learn that the creature read a copy of Volney's Ruins, not published until 1791 and in English in 1795 The only year in the last decade of the 18th century when July 31 falls on a Monday is 1797, the year mary was born. The novel's final entry is dated two days after Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin's death. Victor's death, Monster's suicide and her mother's death from puerperal fever can all be seen as the consequences of the same creation, the birth of Mary Godwin the author.