Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus (Long Essay)

The full title of Mary Shelley’s famous novel is Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus. What follows is a close reading showing that not only is the title character a modern equivalent of the ancient Greek god, but the novel as a whole is a modern equivalent to the ancient Greek myth. As far as I know, this is an original argument. It's also a demonstration of how "subtexts" work.

A subtext is another text “through” which a primary text is meant to be read, and with reference to which it draws its significance. It provides a kind of harmony, consonant or dissonant, to the melody of the text. Thus the way the text departs from the subtext can be as significant as the way it follows it. For example, another subtext for Frankenstein is Milton’s Paradise Lost. When the Monster says to Dr. Frankenstein, “Evil be thou my good,” the reader is meant to recognize the words as Satan’s, and think of the Monster as a great but fallen being in everlasting and self-destructive rebellion against his creator. On the other hand, when he tells Frankenstein about the first time he looked at his reflection in the pond, saying, “I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster I am,” the reader is meant to recognize the contrast to the scene in Milton’s epic in which Eve first sees her own reflection and marvels at how beautiful she is.

Shelley uses the Prometheus myth as a subtext for her retelling of it, both in obvious and subtle ways: in language, in imagery, in symbolism, in plot, in characterization, and in meaning. Here is the relevant section of the Prometheus myth—which is actually part of a much longer myth cycle—from Robert Graves’ book The Greek Myths:

"[Prometheus, who had formed mankind out of clay, was the wisest of the Titans,] and Athene, at whose birth from Zeus’s head he had assisted, taught him architecture, astronomy, mathematics, navigation, medicine, metallurgy, and other useful arts, which he passed on to mankind. But Zeus, who had decided to extirpate the whole race of man, and spared them only at Prometheus’s urgent plea, grew angry at their increasing powers and talents . . . [and withheld] fire from mankind. Prometheus at once went to Athene, with a plea for a backstairs admittance to Olympus, and this she granted. On his arrival, he lighted a torch at the fiery chariot of the Sun and presently broke from it a fragment of glowing charcoal, which he thrust into the pithy hollow of a giant fennel-stalk. Then, extinguishing his torch, he stole away undiscovered, and give fire to mankind. Zeus swore revenge. He ordered Hephaestus to make a clay woman, and the four Winds to breathe life into her, and all the goddesses of Olympus to adorn her. This woman, Pandora, the most beautiful ever created . . . opened a box, which Prometheus had warned Epimetheus to keep closed, and in which he had been at pains to imprison all the Spites that might plague mankind: such as Old Age, Labor, Sickness, Insanity, Vice, and Passion. Out these flew in a cloud . . . [and] attacked the race of mortals. Delusive Hope, however, whom Prometheus had also shut in the box, discouraged them by her lies from a general suicide. . . . Zeus had Prometheus chained naked to a pillar [in most versions, a cliff] in the Caucasian mountains, where a greedy vulture [in some versions, an eagle] tore at his liver all day, year in, year out; and there was no end to the pain, because every night (during which Prometheus was exposed to cruel frost and cold) his liver grew whole again" (Graves 144-145).

Shelley’s novel uses what is called interpolated narration—it nests narrative within narrative like a Russian doll. Moving from the outside inward, we have Shelley herself, the novelist, giving voice to Robert Walton, who is writing to his sister; Walton quotes Frankenstein; Frankenstein in turn reproduces the speech of the Monster; and the Monster at one point tells us the story of the De Lacey family. Debora and I thought it made sense to try to follow the same pattern in our presentation, and since she’s covered Shelley, I’ll start with Walton.

Shamelessly borrowing from the title of an animated television series, I would characterize Walton as a “Young Frankenstein,” a man similar in mold to the protagonist, but smaller in stature. He has two main functions. The first is to give us a third-person take on Frankenstein, to tell us things about him that Frankenstein wouldn’t tell us about himself, such as his appearance and the manner of his death. His second, more important function, is to give Frankenstein—and probably Shelley—someone to whom to moralize.

Like Frankenstein, Walton aspires to greatness, glory, even immortality. He wants, somehow, to boldly go where no man has gone before. Realizing, however, that he lacks the power of artistic creation, he turns to discovery. “I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man. These are my enticements, and they are sufficient to conquer all fear of danger or death.” He is goal-driven, single-minded, even obsessive. He seeks knowledge at any cost, and is willing to sacrifice his own life—and more disturbingly, the lives of others, in this case his crew—to achieve his aim. Using metaphors similar to Frankenstein’s, he describes that aim as “the dominion I should acquire and transmit over the elemental foes of our race.” For these reasons, we should suspect that he may be deceiving himself about his true motives when he writes to Margaret that “you cannot contest the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind to the last generation.”

Walton and Frankenstein are thus kindred Promethean spirits, and Frankenstein of course recognizes this. “When I reflect,” Frankenstein warns, “that you are pursuing the same course, exposing yourself to the same dangers which have rendered me what I am, I imagine that you may deduce an apt moral from my tale. . . . Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.” Despite the hermeneutical problem that Frankenstein is not a moral exemplar and therefore may be an unreliable moralizer, I’m going to venture that this is the message Shelley wants to communicate to us as readers. Subtlety does not appear to be her primary aim in this novel. Notice, though, that the acquirement of knowledge is dangerous but not necessarily wicked or forbidden, and that the man without it may be happier—ignorance is bliss—but not necessarily better off. Shelley is not against knowledge, science, or technology per se, but against a certain kind of attitude.

Walton is only a minor character. Most of the novel, by far, is in the voice of Frankenstein himself, and it is this level of narrative that the Prometheus myth is most present. First of all, however, if Frankenstein is the modern “Prometheus,” how is it modern? The critic George Levine explains:

"[Frankenstein is a] secular myth, with no metaphysical machinery, no gods: the creation is from mortal bodies with the assistance of electricity, not spirit; and the deaths are not pursued beyond the grave. . . . Its modernity lies the transformation of fantasy and traditional Christian and pagan myths into unremitting secularity, into the myth of mankind as it must work within the limits of the visible, physical world" (Levine 6-7).

Many scholars believe that mythology is the precursor to science, as it plays the same function in society: explaining why things are the way they are. In the shift from the ancient to the modern era, the gods have been replaced by “natural forces”—cereal, for example, now grows by photosynthesis rather than by the touch of Ceres—and personalistic explanations have been replaced by impersonal deterministic ones. So Shelley ingeniously transposes the myth into a modern key by having physics and psychology do the work that Zeus and Athena did in the original.

Now, how is Frankenstein like Prometheus? First of all, he’s an extraordinary human being. Even his first name, Victor, means “conqueror” or “champion”—and this is only half ironic. Walton marvels at his intelligence and remarks, “What a glorious creature must he have been in the days of his prosperity when he is thus noble and godlike in ruin! He seems to feel his own worth and the greatness of his fall.” One thing that the critics, at least the ones I’ve read, neglect to point out is that the novel has nearly all the conventions of a Greek tragedy, with Frankenstein cast as the tragic hero. In Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, the protagonist, chained to a rock in the wilderness, recounts to the chorus and the audience the story of how he got there. In Frankenstein, the protagonist, confined to a bed on a ship in the Arctic, recounts to Walton the story of how he got there. Both start in medias res, and in both, considering that the past is told in flashback, the actual time elapsed is rather short. Traditionally, the tragic hero is a great being whose hubris and moral blindness are fated to lead him to overreach himself and ultimately come crashing down, providing everyone else with a sobering lesson. As I will argue, both Prometheus and Frankenstein fit this role. It is also interesting that even though Frankenstein is thoroughly secular in mindset, he uses the pagan rhetoric of fate to tell his story. His first disillusionment with science, he says, “was a strong effort of the spirit of good; but it was ineffectual. Destiny was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter and terrible destruction.”

Second, Frankenstein is like Prometheus in his passion for and possession of knowledge. The latter learns a range of “useful arts” from Athena, the goddess of wisdom. The former studies “every branch of natural philosophy, including mathematics,” under Professor Waldman. Yet he is no connoisseur who delights in learning for its own sake. He realizes that knowledge is power. So it is only after Waldman promises that the modern scientist has “new and almost unlimited powers” and can “perform miracles” that Frankenstein becomes interested. Whereas his sister Elizabeth, who represents the feminine approach, “contemplated with a serious and satisfied spirit the magnificent appearance of things,” he says, “I delighted in investigating their causes. The world was to me a secret which I desired to divine.” His metaphors of discovery involve violence, domination, and control. Consider: “I pursued nature to her hiding places.” And later, “The untaught peasant beheld the elements around him, and was acquainted with their practical uses. The most learned philosopher knew little more. He had partially unveiled the face of Nature, but her immortal lineaments were still a wonder and a mystery. . . . But here were books, and here were men who had penetrated deeper and knew more.” Pursuing, unveiling, and penetrating a feminine object—intentionally or not, his language even suggests rape! One could say that he wants carnal knowledge of Nature.

Again like Prometheus, Frankenstein tells himself that he seeks this knowledge for the good of mankind. But we can see that mankind being benefited is not as important to him as his own status as benefactor. His hubris here is overwhelming:

"So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein [this is the first mention of his name in the novel]—more, more, will I achieve: treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation. . . . What glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!"

And even greater than a discover and preserver is a creator:

"No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. 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. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs."

Prometheus creates man out of clay; Frankenstein creates a man out of dead body parts. Interestingly, the more human Frankenstein’s creation becomes, the less human, i.e. the less of a natural and social being, he himself becomes. “[M]y eyes were insensible to the charms of nature,” he recalls. “And the same feelings which made me neglect the scenes around me caused me also to forget those friends who were so many miles absent, and whom I had not seen for so long a time. . . . I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health.” As the Monster grows, Frankenstein wastes away, and (jumping ahead a bit) when the creature finally gains consciousness, the creator promptly loses it.

In addition to their wide range of knowledge, the Promethei both possess a powerful secret. The ancient Prometheus hides a spark of Olympian fire inside a fennel-stalk and delivers it to mankind. This part of the myth is highly symbolic, because for some ancient cultures the ability to use fire is the answer to Dr. Bieber’s question, the essence or distinguishing mark of humanity. (And in Disney’s version of The Jungle Book, King Louie of the apes sings to Mowgli, “Give me the power / of man’s red flower / so I can be like you!”) The modern Prometheus has solved the mystery of how to turn a spark of the modern fire, electricity, into the “spark of life,” the “animating principle.”

Though we don’t have time now to explore it in detail, it’s extremely interesting to trace the image of fire throughout the novel. The critic Anne Mellor concisely discusses some of its key occurrences:

"The creature raised from the dead by Victor Frankenstein’s stolen “spark,” after having gradually learned to distinguish between differing sensations and ideas, encounters a fire left by some wandering beggars. His first reaction to Prometheus’ gift is intense delight at its warmth; his second reaction, after having thrust his hand into the live embers, is intense pain. His judgment, “How strange, I thought, that the same cause should produce such opposite effects!”, focuses the moral dilemma of the novel: was the cause that Frankenstein served, the creation of life from death, good or evil or both? The creature’s use of fire thus becomes emblematic. Initially, the creature tries to achieve a reunion with both the natural and the human order by domesticating fire. He learns to tame his fire to his own purposes, using it to provide warmth, light during the night, and heat for cooking his raw nuts and roots. More important, he attempts to ingratiate himself with the De Lacey family by bringing them love-gifts of firewood. But finally, this “tamed” fire and what it represents—the possibility of including the creature around the family hearth or within the circle of civilization—is refused by the De Laceys. . . . Fire now becomes the agency of destruction. The creature, learning that the De Laceys will never return to their cottage and filled with “feelings of revenge and hatred,” burns down the only home he has ever known. . . . Fire, with its forked tongue, is now the instrument of Satan. As such, it recurs in the last moments of the novel, when the creature promises Walton (perhaps falsely) that he shall “consume to ashes this miserable frame” in his funeral pyre at the North Pole" (Mellor 1988:78-79).

Prometheus oversteps his rightful boundaries by flouting Zeus. Frankenstein doesn’t, because there aren’t any gods in Shelley’s novel, at least not as active characters. But he does describe his actions in religious language, as profanation of the sacred. Before bringing the Monster to life, he expresses a purely irreligious attitude: “Darkness had no effect upon my fancy; and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life.” But afterwards, his “prophetic soul” and despises his “unnatural” activities, his “unhallowed arts,” and his “thrice-accursed hands” and “profane fingers” that “disturbed” what they should have left alone.

In Greek, Prometheus’s name means “forethinker.” Despite his great learning, he lacks wise judgment. In twice deceiving Zeus he shows great strategy and cunning, but he does not think about the consequences. Frankenstein, too, is able to put into action the awesome task of creating a living being. But as soon as it is finished, he does not know what to do with it. He just runs away from it. He remembers, “I traversed the streets, without any clear conception of where I was, or what I was doing.” Furthermore, Mellor points out that “throughout his experiment, Frankenstein never considers the possibility that his creature might not wish the existence he is about to receive. On the contrary, he blithely assumes that the creature will ‘bless’ him and be filled with ‘gratitude.’ . . . He never once considers how such a giant will survive among normal human beings. Nor does he carefully contemplate the features of the creature he is making.” (Mellor 1988:5)

Pandora’s name is synonymous with vicious curiosity. By ignoring the divine warning and opening the box, she inadvertently but irrevocably unleashes a horde of evils upon mankind. Though he doesn’t mention her name, Frankenstein clearly thinks in similar terms of his own decision to create the Monster. “Alas! I had turned loose into the world a depraved wretch, whose delight was in carnage and misery; had he not murdered my brother? . . . I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind, and endowed with the will and power to effect purposes of horror . . . the living monument of presumption and rash ignorance which I had let loose upon the world.” There may also be a parallel between Pandora and the Monster’s bride: Frankenstein doesn’t finish creating her, aborts her in fact, because he believes she will be a Pandora: “she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate, and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness. . . . [F]uture 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.” Here he actually does consider the consequences, but it’s arguable that he miscalculates. Had he finished creating her, he might have appeased the monster and averted tragedy.

Clearly not impressed by Prometheus’ audacity, Zeus has the unfortunate Titan chained to a high, cold, and lonely mountainside, where a giant eagle daily pecks out his liver, which grows back every night. The secularity and the realism of Shelley’s novel make such a fate impossible for Frankenstein, yet all the same torments are there for him, translated from external to internal, from visceral to psychological. Frankenstein first encounters the Monster, and with him the consequences of his fatal decision, on top of a very high mountain. Listen to the language here:

"The immense mountains and precipices … spoke of a power mighty as Omnipotence—and I ceased to fear, or to bend before any being less almighty than that which had created and ruled the elements, here displayed in their most terrific guise … [T]he mighty Alps, whose white and shining pyramids and domes towered above all, [struck me] as belonging to another earth, the habitations of another race of beings."

These high, inhospitable, inaccessible mountains, their peaks shrouded in mist, with lightning playing across them, strongly echo Mount Olympus, the home of the Greek gods. It is on this mountain that judgment first comes to Frankenstein. The parallels to the Caucasus Mountains, where Prometheus is enchained, are the small, lonely, barren rock of an island in the Atlantic where Frankenstein works on the Monster’s bride, the actual prison he finds himself in afterward, and ultimately the frozen wastes of the Arctic where he endlessly pursues the Monster.

It is also during this meeting with the Monster that Frankenstein is put in bondage. This bondage, however, is psychological. He places himself under oath to the Monster and thereafter finds that he feels like a “slave.” He can’t go where he likes or do what he likes because of his onerous obligations. He can’t banish the guilt of his deed, the terror of his creation, or the dread of his duty from his mind. “For an instant,” he says, “I dared to shake off my chains, and look around me with a free and lofty spirit; but the iron had eaten into my flesh, and I sank again, trembling and hopeless, into my miserable self.” Ironically, even the secret which he so jealously guarded before is now a burden he longs to get off his chest but cannot.

For the rest of the novel Frankenstein is isolated, sometimes spatially and always morally, from mankind. While on the island, he says “Company was irksome to me,” because of the foulness of his work. But when he’s in society, he cannot enter into it because of his guilt. “I abhorred the face of man,” he says. “Oh, not abhorred! … But I felt that I had not right to share their intercourse.” In his sufferings, he tells us, “solitude was my only consolation—deep, dark, deathlike solitude.” And worst of all, the Monster punishes him by consuming his loved ones. “Know that, one by one, my friends were snatched away; I was left desolate.” In the Arctic his only company is his own desire for revenge.

Since there are no gods in Shelley’s retelling of the myth, the cast is smaller. That’s why the Monster plays several parts: creature, Zeus, and bird. When the Monster has finished his speech, Frankenstein recalls, “I saw him descend the mountain with greater speed than the flight of an eagle.” Like Prometheus’s eagle, Frankenstein’s Monster relentlessly eats away at his soul. And what makes this unending suffering possible for both of them is, ironically, their immortality. Prometheus cannot die because he is a god, and his liver grows back every night. Frankenstein is not literally immortal, but he seems to have a much stronger constitution than the average man. He complains, “Of what materials was I made, that I could thus resist so many shocks, which, like the turning of the wheel, continually renewed the torture? But I was doomed to live.” He now sees immortality not as a blessing but as a curse.

So far I’ve focused exclusively on the Greek subtext of the novel. But one of the things that makes it brilliant is the way that Shelley weaves together several different subtexts. Together with the language of Promethean punishment are the biblical metaphors of hell. When he sees the Monster for the first time, Frankenstein says, “I gnashed my teeth, my eyes became inflamed.” At another point he says, “I … felt the never-dying worm alive in my bosom.” And one especially remarkable use of this language takes place when Frankenstein is returning home and approaches the Alps. “I saw the lightnings playing on the summit of Mont Blanc. . . . [V]ivid flashes of lightning dazzled my eyes, illuminating the lake, making it appear like a vast sheet of fire; then for an instant everything seemed of pitchy darkness, until the eye recovered itself from the preceding flash.” Shelley manages to combine two contradictory biblical images, the darkness and the lake of fire! But on the biblical sources of the novel, others have written.